Exploring Relationship Between Taxi Volume and Flue Gases’ Concentrations

Authors

Abstract

With the rapid increase in size and population of urban areas, it becomes important to understand urban environmental influencers so that better informed decisions can be made for more sustainable urban environments. Taxis represent one of the urban dynamics from which city planners can gain a better understanding of urban mobility as well as its relationship with other environmental elements. In this work, an analysis of the relationship between flue gases’ concentrations (represented by nitrogen dioxide) and taxi volume in Lisbon, Portugal was carried out from which a strong correlation between the two was observed. Based on four months of data, we found that the flue gases’ concentrations varied with taxi volume and in particular, taxi volume can be used to estimate the change in flue gases’ concentrations of the next hour.

Keywords

Urban mobility, taxi-GPS traces, flue gases’ concentrations, spatiotemporal analysis, time series analysis, linear regression.

Related Project

CityMotion (MITPortugal Program)

Conference

Third International Workshop on Pervasive Urban Applications (PURBA) in conjunction with ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, September 2013