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.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Single system simplicity for smarter city transport
    February 23, 2017
    All encompassing, city-wide transport monitoring and control systems are beginning to make their way onto the market, as Colin Sowman hears. The futuristic vision of cities where everything is connected and operated with maximum efficiency by a gigantic computer remains a distant prospect but related sectors and services are beginning to coalesce: transport monitoring and control for instance.
  • Great (shared) mobility expectations
    December 19, 2024
    An invitation to attend Movmi's Shared Mobility Fall Masterclass changed the way Adam Hill looked at micromobility - in particular his own attitude to risk
  • “For a city to be loveable, the car has to be a guest”: EmpowerWISM winner Kari Anne Solfjeld Eid
    March 1, 2023
    Kari Anne Solfjeld Eid, founder of e-cargo bike subscription service Whee!, has won the Empower Women in Shared Mobility 2023 programme. She tells Adam Hill how to make cities loveable…
  • Vehicle manufacturers and local authorities seek satnav solutions
    December 5, 2013
    The increasing capability of satellite navigation is helping vehicle manufacturers and local authorities as well as individual drivers and fleets. In comparison to the physical ITS infrastructure in towns and cities and on motorways and highways, satellite navigation (satnav) systems have come a long way in a short time. Many (if not the majority) individual drivers and fleets use or have access to a satnav and now the vehicle manufacturers and even local authorities are beginning to utilise satnav derived