Traffic Eco-Sensitivity

Ensuring and even improving traffic flow and personal mobility with the lowest possible environmental impact can be defined as superior traffic planning and management objectives. The related activities can be differentiated into three major categories.

Traffic Planning
Traffic Planning targets at determining structural measures for optimising traffic in a city or district. Examples are mostly capacity- and infrastructure-related but can also be the implementation of low-emission or zero-emission zones, traffic bans, or intermodal planning.

Traffic planning goes hand in hand with clean air planning.

Eco-sensitivity in traffic planning

To plan and engineer traffic in an eco-sensitive way, historical environmental data are required to reveal hotspots and air pollution patterns. Contextualised insights from the correlation of traffic, weather, and air quality data are the basis for a thorough understanding of the complex situation. Direct integration of the air quality insights into the traffic planning tools – either as data packages or directly by APIs – supports a discontinuity-free usage of the data.

More about Traffic Planning here
Traffic Management
The operational management of traffic applies dynamic measures to avoid or mitigate critical traffic situations and optimises traffic flow within the given infrastructure in real-time. Typical examples are dynamic changes in speed limits, short-term traffic bans, dynamic traffic light control, or changes in route guidance using variable message signs.

Eco-sensitivity in traffic management

Direct access to real-time or even predicted air quality data is crucial for proactive management of traffic eco-sensitivity. Historical air quality data are used to develop and verify scenarios.

Hawa Dawa supports the integration of air quality insights and predictions into the traffic management systems of all major ITS systems providers (intelligent transportation systems) by APIs and ensures a discontinuity-free usage of the data.

More about Traffic Management here
Services for Traffic Participants
Services for individual traffic participants strive to recommend an optimised route balancing traffic and environmental issues:
1. Eco-routing / eco-navigation focuses on reducing the emissions which result from an individual trip.
2. Exposure routing reduces the exposure of the individual traffic participant (i.e. commuters) and helps to avoid health issues.
Eco-sensitivity in routing

Depending on the specific application, historical and real-time data as well as forecasts need to be in place for these kinds of services. Alert services telling users when a certain limit value is likely to be exceeded, are often requested.

More information:

For more information about ways to implement eco-routing or exposure routing deploying our API please contact us.