Google's Car Arrives in Barcelona to Measure Air Quality

[Authors: Cathryn Tonne, Associate Research Professor at ISGlobal, and Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, Director of the Urban Planning, Environment and Health Initiative of ISGlobal, with contributions of Guille López, member of Eixample Respira platform, and Natalia Ortega, Project Manager at ISGlobal.]

After driving through London, Dublin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Basel the AirView car arrives in Barcelona to measure the city’s air quality. The car was donated by Google to Utrecht University, coordinator of the European EXPANSE project, of which ISGlobal is a partner. EXPANSE aims to promote health in urban settings by studying the combined effect of health damaging and health promoting exposures which individuals in urban environments experience over the course of their lives.

After driving through London, Dublin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Basel the AirView car arrives in Barcelona to measure the city’s air quality

Air pollution is a key environmental exposure damaging to health that we can measure more accurately through repeated trips around the city with the AirView car and the measuring devices it has onboard. The AirView car is equipped to measure several traffic-related air pollutants including nitrogen dioxide, ultrafine particles (UFP) and black carbon (BC).

Air pollution is causing the premature death of around 1,000 citizens each year in Barcelona. While this association is well described, estimates of the number of deaths are based on modelled air pollution using data from a relatively small number of measurements across the city. The maps do not include UFP, which we know are particularly harmful. These maps don’t fully capture the variation across the city in pollution levels, which depend on the traffic volume nearby and the specific characteristics of the street, for example, building heights alongside the street influence how quickly air pollution from traffic moves away from the street and whether it builds up in “street canyons”.

Air pollution is causing the premature death of around 1,000 citizens each year in Barcelona. While this association is well described, estimates of the number of deaths are based on modelled air pollution using data from a relatively small number of measurements across the city

The present project will produce high resolution data by building a hyper-local map, by driving the AirView car along all types of roads: from Calle Aragó, the great highway in the city, to quiet residential streets. This map will give us an idea of the spatial distribution of the different pollutants, two of which (UFP and BC) are not routinely detected by air quality monitoring stations in Barcelona.

Even though the evidence linking air pollution to health impacts is conclusive, we still do not have regulations for UFP and BC limits in the European Union. UFP are particles of nanoscale size (less than 0.1 microns in diameter) capable of penetrating deep into the lungs and bloodstream, and increasing the risk of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. UFP have been shown to worsen asthma and induce cough. BC, another measure of particles directly emitted from sources like diesel vehicles, has been associated with respiratory and cardiovascular disease, cancer and negative birth outcomes. The lack of high temporal and spatial resolution measurements from both particle metrics makes it challenging to assess their health effects in epidemiological studies.

The AirView Car Grasps What the Human Eye Cannot

It is essential that we get high resolution maps for air pollution, specifically for harmful particles that are not regulated yet to find out more, where are the hotspots of air pollution in the city. Air pollution levels can vary substantially over short distances (a few meters) and measuring the levels and variability of air pollution at high resolution will allow us to better target air pollution reduction measures and prevent harm.

The collected data will be open source and available for citizens: they can be used to inform healthier routes for walking or cycling and streets where we need to reduce car use

Initiatives like this allow us to make air pollution visible when measuring it and raise awareness about this serious problem of vital importance. From the neighborhood platform Eixample Respira, they are expectant in terms of results, while concerned that our streets, where we live and travel daily, cannot protect our health and guarantee the residents wellbeing.