Introduction:
Air Quality has become a topic of significant importance as cities continue to urbanize. While there are many cities that track air quality, it is still a difficult problem to understand its sources. Air quality is given such importance as it has severe impacts on health. As 80% percent of population lives in the cities, it is further more important to address this issue. Out of all the sources identified so far, vehicular emissions is one such source which is mentioned by many studies. The amount of vehicular emissions is dependent on the amount of vehicles, their types, and traffic conditions in a city. On its own estimating traffic mobility is important to cities to be able to better plan cities. Inferring emissions from this data could help New York City solve policy challenges related to air quality and transportation.
Data:
1. Traffic Volume Counts
We are using the Traffic Volume Counts data which is collected by the Department of Transportation (DOT) for the year 2012-13. The dataset has 5945 records and 31 columns. It has the segment ID which represents a road segment, date on which the data was recorded, direction which indicates the direction of the vehicles on that road segment going north or south bound and counts of vehicles by each hour. the following figure shows the dataset screenshot. The road segment id corresponds to the lion road segment ID in the Department of City Planning's LION base map file.