Development of a Healthy Urban Route Planner for cyclists and pedestrians in Amsterdam

Cities are hotspots of air pollution and heat stress, resulting in nuisance, health risks, medication costs, reduced labour productivity and sick leave for citizens. Yet the air pollution and heat stress are spatially and temporally unevenly distributed over the city, depending on pollutant emissions, street design and atmospheric turbulent mixing and radiation. If accurately forecasted, this spatiotemporal variation offers pedestrians and bikers alternative routes to minimize their exposure. We develop a route planner for bicyclists and pedestrians for Amsterdam (NL), that proposes routes based on model simulations of weather and air quality. We use the WRF-Chem atmosphere and air quality model at unprecedented grid spacing of 100-m (Ronda et al, 2015), with an underlying urban canopy model and NOx and PM10 emissions. The traffic emissions are based on observed traffic intensities and emission factors. WRF-Chem runs will be issued daily for a lead time of 48 hours, resulting in forecast maps of temperature and pollutant concentrations that will be uniquely expressed in a metric that combines both threats. The route planner that we build, using the open source routing library pgRouting and the OpenStreetMap network.