TRAFAIR – Understanding Traffic Flow to improve Air Quality

The Trafair project brings together 10 partners from two European countries (Italy and Spain) to develop innovative and sustainable services that combine air quality, weather conditions and traffic flow data to produce new information for the benefit of citizens and decision makers.

REASONS

Air pollution causes 400,000 deaths annually, making it the leading environmental cause of premature death in Europe. The main sources of air pollution in Europe include road traffic, domestic heating and industrial combustion. Today, the situation is particularly critical in some European Member States. In February 2017, the European Commission warned five countries, including Spain and Italy, of continuing air pollution violations. These countries are failing to address the repeated violations of air pollution limits for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) whose most emissions come from road traffic. The European Commission has urged these Member States to take action to ensure good air quality and safeguard public health. In this context, public administrations and citizens suffer from the lack of complete and fast tools to estimate the level of pollution on an urban scale deriving from the different conditions of traffic flows that would allow to optimize control strategies and increase awareness of the quality of the air.

AIMS

TRAFAIR raises awareness among citizens and public administrations on the quality of the air in an urban environment and on the pollution caused by traffic.
The project aims to monitor air quality using low-cost sensors in 6 cities and producing forecast air quality maps thanks to simulation models.
The two main objectives of the project are:

1. urban air quality monitoring via sensors in 6 European cities: Saragozza (600.000 abitanti), Firenze (382.000), Modena (185.000), Livorno (160.000), Santiago de Compostela (95.000) e Pisa (90.000);
2. make predictions on urban air quality thanks to simulation models based on weather forecasts and traffic flows.

Monitoring air quality means building a network of low-cost sensors spread throughout the city to monitor pollution levels in areas not covered by legal air quality stations.