Every year, each vehicle driven in Ottawa costs the health-care system an average of $310 in premature deaths, according to Carleton University researchers.

And they say it's a conservative estimate at best.

Amir Hakami is an environmental engineering professor at Carleton University. He and a PhD student co-authored the study. (Kristy Nease/CBC)

PhD student Amanda Pappin and environmental engineering professor Amir Hakami co-authored the study, which is set to be published in the Environmental Health Perspectives journal.

They came up with a system to measure the cost of air pollution on human health.

Individual vehicles have an annual health impact ranging anywhere from $200 to nearly $800, depending on where they are, Hakami told Ottawa Morning's Robyn Bresnahan on Wednesday.

"The interesting finding is that that number is very variable. It changes very much from location to location. So the same pollutant, depending on where it is released, could have a vastly different impact on our health," Hakami said.

"She [Pappin] basically linked atmospheric models with epidemiological models," Hakami said.

In other words, the study tracks how pollution moves in a certain place and what it does to the human body once it's been breathed in and calculates the cost it has.

In Montreal, the average vehicle has a health cost of just under $800 per year. That's partly because the population density is much higher than Ottawa, meaning people come into more contact with more vehicles in the city.

In Ottawa, the study shows that a 10-per-cent reduction in emissions would save about $40,000 in health costs per day. That's about $16 million per year.

"I think what this research does is probably more for decision-makers … in the policy development process because it gives them information that they really didn't have before," Hakami said. "So hopefully they're able to … make decisions that are more science-based."