Ad: Hammersmith & Fulham’s Award Winning Traffic Congestion and Pollution Reduction Scheme

Partnering with air quality experts Vortex gave the council a detailed view of air pollution which led to targeted environmental action.

Located in the southwest of London, with over 185,000 residents and several major corporations headquartered in the borough, The London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham (LBHF) is committed to improving air quality for residents through positive sustainability changes, making effective decisions in the right locations and measuring success with accurate data collected from hyper-local, low cost, air quality sensors with street-level accuracy.

LBHF became the first borough to declare a climate emergency in July 2020, pledging to resolve an air pollution and traffic congestion problem and addressing the 80% of congestion attributed to vehicles originating outside the Borough.

The Solution

Vortex provided a low-cost air quality monitoring solution that enabled the deployment of a dense network of hyper-local air quality sensors to provide real time air quality data to the council. The sensors are all SIM

card free and connected wirelessly through a mesh network that’s driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning configurations. Implementing this technology allows the system to identify and execute calibrations and updates remotely, reducing LBHF’s on-site resource costs.

Vortex’s off the shelf solution provided:

*Air Quality Monitoring within the council’s budget requirements  Street-Level data accuracy of Air Pollution

 *Unprecedented Coverage – World’s densest deployment  Detailed analysis of their entire constituency

*Public access to data on their neighbourhood  

*Lifetime warranty

 How to know where to act?

Problems caused by high traffic volumes became the largest contributors of air pollution in the borough, compounded by regular use of streets as a thoroughfare for vehicles originating outside the borough. The council wanted a method to measure the results and prove the effectiveness of the restriction zones to residents. Traditional air quality solutions available to Hammersmith & Fulham would not be sufficient in measuring air quality variations at the required frequency and density.

LBHF needed spatial and temporal information with sufficient granularity to measure air quality changes at a per-road level, to review traffic interventions and prove their success in reducing pollution with an easy to deploy, affordable and detailed analysis of air quality per street.

Accurate Data for better informed decisions.

VTX Air has identified high pollution transmission points that were previously unknown. As a result, LBHF’s award winning Traffic Congestion and Pollution Reduction Scheme has reduced carbon emissions by 1 tonne a day and improved air quality by 50% for residents.

Using the technology, the public have been able to see their air quality through a publicly available portal to better understand the impact that the Scheme is having on their health. The key benefit for LBHF was identifying where the pollution is originating and understanding the sources of pollution that are generated inside the borough.

LBHF’s installation will further its dense concentration and become the largest scale air quality monitoring network in Europe with a total of 500 sensors deployed before the end of the year.

Image: Christian Wiediger