Innovation projects in air quality improvement
HEAVEN stands for a Healthier Environment through the Abatement of Vehicle Emissions and Noise and is a RTD project of the Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme. This project lasted for a period of three years (2000-2003) and addressed a common environmental problem: increasing traffic levels in large urban areas.
Main goal
HEAVEN's main goal was to strengthen urban environment and transport management, based on better access to air and noise pollution information. It also improved co-operation among key environment, transport and health actors, and increased the transparency of city governments through better citizen access to environmental information.
80 km per hour
The HEAVEN collaboration consisted of the cities of Berlin, Paris, Prague, Leicester, Rome and Rotterdam. In the Netherlands the project team involved members from local authorities, a national research institute a private traffic consultant and the DCMR EPA. An off-line traffic air pollution analysis tool was developed but the main feature of the project is a website showing the hourly concentrations of traffic related air pollutants. Every hour a new air quality assessment is made based on real time traffic data and meteorological information. The results (in dutch) can be seen at www.luchtkwaliteit.rotterdam.nl. Research by TNO and the DCMR in the framework of this project has also led to a successful abatement measure: traffic homogenisation at 80 km per hour was demonstrated to reduce emissions considerably.
General project results can be found at: http://heaven.rec.org
