Exploiting Vehicular Data for Exposure-Aware Pedestrian Routing

Vehicular traffic is one of the major sources of air pollution in urban settings, making it essential to clearly understand how much and where vehicle emissions impact residents. Recent approaches manage to yield pollution maps at the microscopic level by processing GPS trajectories of vehicles. That is achieved by applying mathematical models to estimate instantaneous emissions from GPS data, extending estimates to areas without data through missing data imputation, and further considering air dispersion factors. In this work, we leverage such inferred knowledge to implement an emission-aware pedestrian routing strategy and to study its impact on the reduction of exposure to vehicular pollutants and walking time. The study is realized through simulations of large masses of pedestrians over a medium-sized city in Italy, analyzing the interplay between the two factors - exposure versus walking time - in terms of time efficiency of paths and changes over existing habits both at a global and at an individual level. Experiments suggest that exposure-aware routing can yield a significant margin of improvement in health over most paths with minor effects on mobility, making it feasible and effective.