Helen Pearce, a PhD researcher at the University of Birmingham’s School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, led the study. She says: “A lot of guidelines and policy on air quality management are based on hourly time snapshots and on the average amount of traffic on a typical day of the year. The difficulty is that traffic can vary an enormous amount within that time window and along individual roads, so in order to make decisions that really work ‘on the ground’, we need to be able to access and make use of this finer-grained detail.”