We all know that London’s air is dirty and polluted.
But did you know that if we have more than 35 “bad air days” in a year we get whacked with a £300m fine? So how are we doing?
Put this on your own web site - see below.
Darren Johnson explains why we are in this mess here and here. The Mayor’s own health impact claims that in 2008 alone there were an equivalent of over 4,000 premature deaths in London due to air pollution.
Where does this figure come from?
The monitoring box on Marylebone Road
Across London, a network of boxes monitor the level of pollution that we breathe in. There are limits on the amount of pollution allowed, which were agreed over a decade ago by our government and all the others in the Europe Union. Many of the boxes around London regularly measure pollution exceeding that amount. The UK gets fined an estimated £300m by the European Commission if any one station measures unsafe pollution levels for more than 35 days in the year.
Kings College London have set-up a web site to let you explore these boxes, called Air Quality Monitoring Stations.
We’ve taken the data from one box in particular – it sits on Marylebone Road just south of Regents Park, and it exceeds the safe limits a lot. It’s probably the station that is going to tip us over the edge.
But it’s not just busy roads like Marylebone that suffer from really bad air days. Monitoring stations across the capital pick up dangerous levels of pollution throughout the year.
This widget was built using the excellent ScraperWiki tools, and the map is from OpenStreetMap (shared under the Creative Commons attribution share-alike license).
Put this on your web site
If you have a blog with a wizard for embedding images you can add the smog-o-meter using this image URL – http://www.jennyforlondon.org/pollution_badge.php
Or you can copy in this code into your page:
<img src="http://www.jennyforlondon.org/pollution_badge.php">
<br/><a href="http://www.jennyforlondon.org/smogometer">London's smog-o-meter</a>