Air quality adjusted routing for cyclists and pedestrians

Abstract

Air quality adjusted routing can provide health benefits for users and encourage users to use more environmental friendly vehicles. This is particularly true for urban areas with varying zones for different air quality levels. We use PM10 total emission data from the state of Berlin, Germany. This data provides the amount of PM10 pollution for a 1x1km grid for Berlin as it represents a major indicator for air pollution. The data is available in Soldner Berlin format (EPSG:3068). As routing software we use the Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) with map data for Berlin from OpenStreetMaps (OSM) available at geofabrik.de. Our approach uses the possibility of OSRM to access a PostGIS database from a transportation mode profile. The evaluation compares our approach with a baseline approach which assumes the same speed for all roads. Compared to the baseline approach, the routes calculated with our approach tend to avoid the city center as much as possible, but are still acceptably short (for long distances about 22% longer than the shortest path).