Abstract. Rapid urbanization in China has led to heavy traffic flows in street networks within cities, especially in eastern China, the economically developed region. This has increased the risk of exposure to vehicle-related pollutants. To evaluate the impact of vehicle emissions and provide an on-road emission inventory with higher spatial–temporal resolution for street-network air quality models, in this study, we developed the Real-time On-road Emission (ROE v1.0) model to calculate street-scale on-road hot emissions by using real-time big data for traffic provided by the Gaode map navigation application. This Python-based model obtains street-scale traffic data from the map application programming interface (API), which are open-access and updated every minute for each road segment. The results of application of the model to Guangzhou, one of the three major cities in China, showed on-road vehicle emissions of carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxide (NOx), hydrocarbons (HC), PM10, and PM2.5 to be 35.22 × 104 Mg/a, 12.05 × 104 Mg/a, 4.10 × 104 Mg/a, 0.49 × 104 Mg/a, and 0.55 × 104 Mg/a, respectively. The spatial distribution reveals that the emission hotspots are located in some highway-intensive area and suburban town centers. Emission contributions show that the dominant contributors are light-duty vehicles (LDVs) and heavy-duty vehicles in urban areas and LDVs and heavy-duty trucks in suburban areas, indicating that the traffic control policies regarding duty trucks in urban areas are effective. In this study, the Model of Urban Network of Intersecting Canyons and Highways (MUNICH) was applied to investigate the impact of traffic volume change on street-scale photochemistry in the urban area by using the on-road emission results from the ROE model. The modeling results indicate that the daytime NOx concentrations on national holidays are 26.5 % and 9.1 % lower than those on normal weekdays and normal weekends, respectively. Conversely, the national holiday O3 concentrations exceed normal weekday and normal weekend amounts by 13.9 % and 10.6 %, respectively, owing to changes in the ratio of emission of VOCs and NOx. Thus, not only the on-road emission, but other emissions should be controlled in order to improve the air quality in Guangzhou. More significantly, the newly developed ROE model may provide promising and effective methodologies for analyzing real-time street-level traffic emissions and high-resolution air quality assessment for more typical cities or urban districts.