Team: Aloha Climate Detectives III

Spain 14 years old   3 / 0

Traffic and Environmental Pollution during Rush Hours

The effect of traffic during rush hours on the air quality of the school environment.

During the rush hours of students arriving and leaving the school we have demonstrated in a previous project that there are signs of increased air pollution in our school environment. During our initial project we also surveyed parents about their traffic use and particularly if they were open to changing their driving habits in order to reduce environmental hazard. Since the initial project there have been traffic calming measures in place but we have noticed that the number of cars (anecdotally) does not seem to have reduced and we now have at least 3 rush hours morning arrival, 4 pm after school departure and 5pm after extracurricular activities departure. We have also had complaints of noise pollution during these times. We wish to investigate this problem further and suggest ways in which parents/carers/teachers can contribute to reducing air pollution and modifying their driving habits.

Air pollution

We will be monitoring a variety of environmental perameters including carbon dioxide, oxygen, temperature, humidity and particulates in the air. Readings will be taken during rush hours and other times during the day. At the same time we will be doing traffic counts during rush hours and other times to compare and contrast the data and attempt to correlate the measurments with the density of traffic. We also intend to complete traffic surveys before and after the data collection so we can pass on our findings to our community and possibly affect the behaviour of drivers.

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