Evaluation of City-Scale Disparities in PM_2.5 Exposure Using Hyper-Localized Taxi-Based Mobile Monitoring

Abstract

Efforts have been directed to pollution control of fine particles (PM 2.5 ) because exposure to PM 2.5 could result in adverse health effects. However, PM 2.5 exposure disparities persisted even with largely declined concentrations. Here, we applied taxi-based measurements to characterize hyper-localized PM 2.5 exposures (30 m resolution) in Xi'an in December 2019 and July 2020. A big data set was derived from the taxi-based measurements (∼6 × 10 6 hourly PM 2.5 ) and was used to evaluate the performance of existing regulatory measurements in urban and rural regions. Results from regulatory measurements tend to alleviate PM 2.5 exposure disparities compared with taxi-based measurements. The taxi-based measurements reported higher population-weighted average (PWA) exposure in December 2019 (90 μg/m 3 ) and July 2020 (27 μg/ m 3 ) compared to regulatory measurements (76 and 24 μg/m 3 in December and July, respectively) with a wider range of relative disparities. Results indicate that the urban region would be overrepresented by regulatory measurements, where regulatory measurements reported that 60.0−84.7% of inhabitants were exposed to PM 2.5 higher than PWA, while taxi-based ones reported a smaller portion (22.6−35.2%). Significant seasonal variability in PM 2.5 exposure levels was found by taxi-based measurements but not regulatory measurements. The results highlight the need for providing complementary measurements (e.g., low-cost) for exposure assessment because the rural regions could be disproportionately exposed and overlooked by existing regulatory measurements.