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

  • Hartford’s tailors winter maintenance on Esri’s GIS platform
    August 5, 2016
    The in-house winter maintenance and vehicle tracking system built by the Public Works Department in Hartford, Connecticut, coped with record snowfalls and cut costs too. When it comes to dealing with the effects of mother nature, transport agencies can find themselves in a lose-lose situation: criticised if the roads or rail lines are disrupted by snow, ice or floods for more than a few hours and lambasted for wasting money if the equipment and stockpiles put in place for a hard winter remain unused.
  • Esri maps cause and effect
    September 26, 2024
    The work of the Connecticut Transportation Safety Research Center means engineers can concentrate on developing more effective safety measures, rather than having to sort out raw crash data
  • Spin pledges £100,000 to mobility research
    December 3, 2020
    Initial focus is on safety and will include data from Vivacity Labs' AI and IoT sensors 
  • Fotech Solutions performs acoustic track
    July 14, 2020
    Harnessing distributed acoustic sensing technology across urbanised city transport networks can deliver real advantages for traffic flow, says Stuart Large of Fotech Solutions