UBC TESTS MOBILE C02 MONITORING WITH HELP FROM car2go
TECHNOLOGY
A bird’s eye view is always a good thing, but when it comes to monitoring carbon dioxide emissions, knowing what’s going on at street level is just as important. That’s why UBC developed and tested new mobile CO2 monitoring technology. With support of the moovel lab and car2go, researchers attached monitors to Smart cars to prove that emissions monitoring technology was small enough to be mounted on just about any vehicle, even a bicycle. The technology provided street-scale monitoring of emissions as the vehicles moved around the city.
CALCULATING EMISSIONS
CO2 monitoring in cities is usually measured with sensors at fixed locations and therefore only give part of the picture of a city’s emissions. Monitoring at street level is an important companion to understanding how emissions are changing throughout the city and across different types of areas (commercial, industrial, residential). This allows them to calculate the emissions of the sampled areas and compare where the CO2 emissions are highest (e.g. in downtown and along arterial roads) and even where the emissions of an area are negative (e.g. where there are lots of trees).
MONITORING
The technology is useful because it can be easily mounted on any vehicle to provide real-time, accurate emissions monitoring across a metropolitan area. A city the size of Vancouver would need about 200 constantly moving vehicles, taxis, buses and bikes to get full coverage of the city. Better monitoring can help cities plan to reduce traffic in high-emission areas by boosting access to electric-powered public transportation.
PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE
Mobile monitoring can help cities test reduction strategies and understand their effectiveness. For example, it can help cities to assess how increasing greenspace – planting trees, for example – in urban areas is impacting their CO2 reduction efforts. Most CO2 measuring to date is based on fuel consumption, which provides little insight on when, where and how emissions vary. Mobile monitoring provides finegrained data that is crucial to planning effective policy.