A recent traffic study revealed that altering the geometry of an intersection can reduce total pollutant emissions by over 50%! This is a fantastic finding which we hope will entice more traffic engineers and municipalities to closely evaluate the appropriate designs of their intersections. This is important as this can have a significant impact on the local air pollution and in turn the health of people living there especially if implemented on a larger scale. So, traffic intersection design truly matters, and not just because of the safety or optimal traffic throughput.
We are proud of the research paper “The Role of Intersection Geometry in Urban Air Pollution Management” which found this out using precise trajectory traffic data gathered with DataFromSky. You can learn more about this research by Ammar Šarić and his co-authors here.
We care about this topic very deeply and we are working on a method that would be able to directly estimate traffic emissions using only video analytics from cameras across the city in the MARTEV project which is currently underway. You can learn more about our research.