Mobile Air Quality Assessment Using Public Transportation: A Community-Focused Study in the Capital Region

The monitoring of air quality plays a crucial role in establishment of concentrations of air pollutants over space and time in relation to human health, urban planning, and environmental conservation. This research offers a new strategy of monitoring the air quality in the Capital Region of New York State utilizing public transit buses as air quality moving sampling platforms. To assess the level of pollutants, a Capital District Transportation Authority (CDTA) bus network was used across the urban, suburban, and rural areas thus filling a research gap where public transit has most of the time been disregarded as a mobile monitoring platform. The study was conducted in seven county’s of New York’s capital region: Schenectady, urban Troy, suburban Slingerlands and Glenmont, industrial Cohoes, rural Schodack and Cross gates Mall. Cities including Schenectady and Troy present information on pollution in congested, developed regions appreciated more for their industrial value as compared to less-urban areas such as Slingerlands and Glenmont. Cohoes, with its blend of industrial, commercial, and natural landscapes, and Schodack, a predominantly rural area, together demonstrate that both densely and sparsely populated regions can exhibit unexpected pollution trends, challenging the assumption that urban density alone drives high exposure levels. Moreover, Cross gates Mall, an area of commercial traffic density that attracted dense vehicular and pedestrian traffic, provided insights into emissions from densely travelled zones. In order to assess the ambient air quality and pollution hotspots the study uses relatively low- cost sensors and monitors such as Observ Air, Duet Sensors, P-Trak, and Q-Trak technologies. To measure black carbon (BC), particulate matter (PM₂.₅), ultra-fine particles (UFP), carbon dioxide (CO₂) and carbon monoxide (CO) respectively. The study was conducted in the Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 to understand the seasonal variation in air quality across different routes. In addition to the time variation, other key factors like heating emissions and increased vegetation in spring were also assessed. This temporal approach offers a better perspective of pollutant behavior and exposure within various kinds of weather and community structures. The results of this study are comparable with other existing literature and seeks to contribute to the trends in air quality by identifying spatial and seasonal variability in the Capital Region. Therefore, by using public transportation as the mobile monitoring unit, the project argues the prospect of a real-time, cost-efficient, eco-friendly, and easily expandable air quality monitoring initiative. Therefore, the findings have important implications for public health, environmental justice, and urban and transportation planning and policies, and provide important information that could be used by various policymakers, authorities, and citizens to design specific and effective pollution reduction interventions and to enhance the environmental conditions in various urban areas.