WestConnex: Using monitoring data to understand the impact of new road tunnels on local air quality
Major road tunnels are designed to meet consent conditions that minimize their impact on local air quality. But how can communities be assured they are meeting these conditions?
Road tunnels collect emissions from hundreds of vehicles and releases them at portals or ventilation stacks. Local residents might rightly be concerned about this concentration of emissions, especially near homes, schools or vulnerable people. But if designed and operated correctly, impacts can not only be minimal, but can actually deliver an improvement in local air quality by reducing and/or smoothing traffic.
But you won’t know unless you monitor it.
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Sydney has recently become the world’s most tunnelled city in terms of roads. The West Connex project features four new road tunnels in highly urbanized Inner West Sydney which opened in 2019, 2020, and two in 2023. In each case air quality monitoring was required by planning conditions for at least a year before and after opening.
The challenge was not only to describe how air quality had changed, but more crucially to understand what impact the tunnels might have had during a time of bushfires, COVID-19 restrictions, gradual changes in the vehicles driven by Sydneysiders, and the usual ebb and flow of the weather.
Dr Ian Longley of The Air Quality Collective is an expert in not just tunnel air quality, but also community engagement and science communication. He has acted as an Independent Expert for the Air Quality Community Consultative Committees established for each tunnel. His approach is based on listening to community concerns and analysing data to address community-driven questions, de-mystifying the science in the process.
Dr Longley has also been a member of the New South Wales Inter-Agency Air Quality in Tunnels Advisory Group since 2013. He is the author of several reports on the topic, including those linked below.
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