Google Street View helps Copenhagen fight air pollution
One thing will increasingly become a problem for urban planners of the future: air pollution. In many places, fine dust particles are increasing in cities and on busy roads, while measuring stations can only measure local values. Copenhagen now wants to tackle this problem with Google.
Because in order to measure fine dust values at different points in the city, you no longer have to set up measuring stations; mobile measurements can also be carried out. Google drives its Street View vehicles through the metropolis every day, so retrofitting these cars could be the solution.
That’s why Google, Utrecht University and Aarhus University joined forces and equipped one of the company’s vehicles with additional measuring devices. The cars then drove through the city and recorded readings from many neighborhoods. The result: Although air pollution has generally decreased in the metropolis, certain traffic arteries are dirtier than ever before.
It measured three times the amount of ultrafine particles and nitrogen dioxide and five times the amount of carbon compared to other quarters. The initiative is part of Google’s “Air View” project, which began in 2015 and is already collecting data in cities such as Oakland, Houston, London and Amsterdam. Over the past six years, 100 million measurements have been made.
These are available free of charge in Google’s “Environmental Insights Explorer” (EIE) and are intended to help plan the cities of tomorrow. For the first time, ultrafine particles can also be recorded, these are smaller than 100 nanometers and are usually not part of EU statistics.
Own opinion:
Google shows to what extent you can collect and process important data with little effort. Air values are likely to become increasingly relevant in the future, new legal regulations and basic rights require the lowest possible concentrations of various air components. Now all that is left to do is to take the resulting measures.
Via The Next Web
