Reducing Pedestrian Exposure to Air Pollution in Bristol

🌳 Environment

📍 Bristol, United Kingdom

About

Status:

✅ Finalized

Bristol, the largest city in South West England, is a port city on the River Avon with around 470,000 residents. Known for aerospace, creative media and a strong research base at the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England, the city has a long record of smart city experimentation. In 2015 it became the first UK city to win the European Green Capital Award, and it now prioritises clean air, sustainable mobility, climate action and open digital infrastructure.

🗓️ Start: 2016-07-01

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🗓️ End: 2019-06-30

Nitrogen dioxide levels in central Bristol regularly exceeded legal limits, and structural fixes such as a Clean Air Zone would take years. In the meantime, people walking through the city had no way to see which streets were cleaner and choose a route that lowered their own exposure.

Description of the Challenge

Context

Bristol is the largest city in South West England, with around 470,000 residents. Monitoring in the city centre showed nitrogen dioxide levels above the legal limit for several years, sometimes at double the limit, and the government directed the council to produce a plan to address it.

Specific problem

Structural remedies move slowly. Charging zones, vehicle upgrades and new road layouts take years to plan and deliver: the council submitted its Clean Air Zone plan in February 2019, but the zone did not start until November 2022. In the meantime, residents and visitors keep walking the same streets, even though pollution varies sharply between a main road and a nearby side street.

Current situation and gap

Air-quality data already exists. The city monitors pollution in the centre and publishes the readings openly. But the data does not reach people when they decide where to walk, and mobility and environmental data sit in separate systems, so route guidance can optimise for distance or time but not for exposure.

Expected Outcomes

Specific need

The city needs a way to combine air-quality and mobility data so that pedestrians can compare walking routes by pollution exposure, not just by distance, at the moment they plan a walk.

Expected outcome

– Walking routes ranked by nitrogen dioxide exposure for residents and visitors
– A practical way for people to lower their own exposure while long-term measures are delivered
– Air quality treated as a routing factor, in the same way mapping tools use traffic data
– Evidence that a shared city data platform can serve air-quality use cases

Space for Solutions and Experimentation

Central Bristol offers a ready experimentation space: openly published air-quality monitoring data, the Bristol is Open city-scale network with IoT and analytics infrastructure, and a council–university partnership able to test research projects in a real city setting.