WeCount is an EU funded ‘citizen science’ project that empowers citizens to take a leading role in measuring road traffic and air pollution in their neighbourhoods.
Road traffic is at the core of a variety of societal problems ranging from road safety, air, noise, and light pollution, to public health risks, to the liveability of our communities. Obtaining reliable traffic counts is fundamental to understanding the complex relationships between these problems and road traffic, and to initiate policy changes that will address them.
Project Activities:
In the past local authorities have relied on high cost, spatially and temporally restricted traffic counting techniques. The WeCount project has the opportunity to change the way traffic data is produced and to greatly improve data available on traffic with the help of local citizens.
WeCount is a European wide project with participants from six cities: Dublin, Cardiff, Barcelona, Madrid, Leuven and Ljubljana. The Dublin project is led by University College Dublin’s Francesco Pilla.
Volunteer ‘citizen scientists’ from across the Dublin Region, including locals from Smart D8, Smart Sandyford, Smart Balbriggan and Smart Docklands, are taking part. They have been equipped with low cost, automated road traffic counting sensors which have been deployed in their communities. You can view the Dublin data here.
WeCount aims to support:
- Citizens: To empower citizens to use new technology such as sensors to collect data and evidence about their communities. This can enable citizens to shape and influence local policy decisions and initiatives, and also builds community knowledge on issues relating to our local environment.
- Research: To use the traffic data collected to produce scientific knowledge in the field of mobility and environmental pollution. And to work with communities to design potential solutions to tackle road transport challenges.
- Local Authorities: To share the traffic data with Local Authorities to help inform their transport planning and support data-driven decision-making.
By using citizen centric data collection it overcomes the existing technological and societal silos. It allows citizens to be thought leaders on a new perspective of road transport and the issues surrounding it by placing them into the decision making process.
Impact:
The WeCount project will have many positive impacts on Dublin such as;
- We will be able to quantify local road transport, produce scientific knowledge in the field of mobility and environment pollution, and co-design informed solutions to tackle a variety of road transport challenges.
- Reduce the cost of collecting traffic counting data (factor 3 to 5) and collecting data more efficiently leading to data being collected for road segments where currently no data is available.
- Empower citizens to develop evidence-led solutions for civic and environmental issues.
- Make citizen collected data relevant and “unignorable” for local policymakers as WeCount allows citizens to collect data in a systematic way so the data is actually useable.
If you would like more information on the project please visit WeCount’s Website.