Traffic controlled by Air Quality - Organic City

Increased urbanisation puts pressure on city infrastructures. In traffic this infers increased congestion detriment to health and to the more general liveability of the city. 

As a City, Copenhagen has a strong will to find news ways to management the increased urbanisation in order to provide citizens with a high quality of life. Smart city solutions hold potentials to restructure the management of the city with digital solutions rather than cumbersome and expensive physical investments. However, many of these solutions have no or little track record, and needs testing – by the civil services operating the new solutions and by the citizens living in them. 

Our motivation to apply to this call is a genuine interest in building new solutions to our citizens that provide them higher quality of life. The ability to try and test solutions with agility and citizens’ feedback holds a promise to shortcut and to accelerate the transition of the city to the future.

The aim of this project is therefore twofold; 1) to build capacity to swiftly conduct experiments in the settings where solutions have to be implemented, 2) to generate new knowledge about the relation of traffic management to air quality. Combined the project aims to establish proofs of value of smart city solutions in traffic to health and related public expenses and to the ability to implement new city workflows of prototyping and testing.

Previous Organicity participants have already focused on the topics of air quality and traffic:
AirPublic through high-resolution, real-time and low cost spatial maps of air pollution in London through small sensors in an effort to produce data that can enable informed decision making related to the problem.

While the use of real-time data in both instances is intriguing we are of the opinion that such data is only needed for a limited time and not forever. We believe that the gathering of real-time data through a reasonable time period can provide enough information to still make changes possible if that information is integrated into the planning and management aspect of a city.

Thus, we propose a project for improving the air pollution of a city through changes in traffic management through a limited time period of real-time data gathering.

The project design monitor two stretches of roads of similar design and with consistent traffic flows. Sensors placed at intersections will monitor air quality (NOx, CO, CO2, PM10 and PM2.5). Traffic lights would then be optimized for better health possibilities by altering the traffic flow and registering differences.