New Delhi Car Ban Yields Trove of Pollution Data

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By Scientific American

New Delhi may be the world’s most polluted city, but it’s making an effort to relinquish that title. With pollution from particulate matter at potentially lethal levels early last December, city officials took a drastic step: they announced that they would temporarily restrict the use of private vehicles by allowing owners to drive only on alternate days, based on the sequence of their number plates.

The initial results of that 15-day trial, which began on January 1, are now in. Although traffic actually increased in the first week of the ban, the levels of PM2.5 — parti­culate matter measuring less than 2.5 micrometres across—fell by roughly 10%. That is a victory not just for New Delhi officials, but also for the scientists who sprang into action to collect the data necessary to determine whether the test had achieved its goal.

“This experiment with ‘live research’ has been really quite exciting,” says Santosh Harish, assistant director of the India centre of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC-India). EPIC-India and the New Delhi-based Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), an independent think tank, used video monitors around the city to document the types and numbers of vehicles on the roads. The groups had less than a month to collect baseline data before the driving restrictions began.

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