Skip to main content

Plume Labs and Bird capture air quality data

Plume Labs has partnered with Bird to obtain air pollution data in hard-to-reach areas in the French capital Paris.
By Ben Spencer April 6, 2020 Read time: 1 min
Not the Paris that the tourists usually see (© Jdanne | Dreamstime.com)

Plume says 25 Bird employees have been wearing its air pollution sensor Flow when travelling around the city to redistribute electric scooters over a two-week period. This process provides data on how air quality changes on different streets, the company adds. 

According to Plume, the 'Bird Watchers' covered nearly 1,500 miles and gathered 300,000 data points for the pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter.

Plume is now adding this data to its street by street maps of air quality for major cities, which use machine learning models to forecast how pollution will change on every street segment of a city. 

“This kind of information gathering is a big deal in Paris because, while we have an amazing street-by-street map that gets updated once every hour, Flow data gets updated every 60 seconds on top of next-level precision,” the company writes. 

The company claims this approach could also help cities and towns do not have the budget to maintain an air quality monitoring network.

Related Content

  • A more equitable approach to road charging: is the technology there yet?
    September 8, 2023
    Thinking around road user charging, distance-based payments, and even mileage rationing is ever-widening with new concepts and suggestions being aired and brought forward every other week. Yet, as Jorgen Petersen of Systra explains, there are already many solutions in place throughout the world which promote modal shift, reduce traffic and improve air quality…
  • Taking tolling towards new opportunities
    May 18, 2016
    Vinci’s André Broto presented his views on how the tolling industry could play an important role in helping authorities ease urban congestion, to delegates at the IBTTA conference. As director of foresight and strategy at Vinci Autoroutes, France, André Broto has been spending some time considering the future of tolling in his own country and worldwide. He presented his thoughts, which include a very different angle of the causes of, and solutions to, congestion at the IBTTA’s (International Bridge, Tunnel
  • PTV simulates York’s future
    August 26, 2021
    PTV’s predictive software modelling is helping one of England’s historic cities to improve traffic flow
  • Kerb your enthusiasm, warns Passport
    March 4, 2019
    Dynamic kerbside management is crucial if urban authorities are to address increasingly chaotic situations caused by the gig economy and mobility innovation, says Adam Warnes at Passport Demand for the kerbside is growing and changing and it’s no surprise when you consider the recent innovations within the mobility industry. For starters, there are new modes of transport, including ride-shares, electric vehicles (EVs), dockless cycles, last-mile consolidations and autonomous vehicles (AVs). Secondly, the