Google's Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE)
Posted by Clean Fuels Intern on Feb. 16, 2023 / Subscribe 0
Written by Elizabeth Linehan
Google's Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE) has recently released transport, energy and emissions data for communities across Louisiana. Data is available, upon approval, for up to 90 cities and parishes across the state. However, Baton Rouge and Louisiana’s state information has been made publicly viewable with the help of the planning department of Baton Rouge and East Baton Rouge Parish.
EIE has been designed with ICLEI and the Covenant of Mayors for the Climate, to support climate action at no cost to local governments. Tutorials and case studies can be found on the Google Earth Youtube channel.
Much of the transportation data is gathered through Google Maps users. The program uses aggregated location information from user trips to infer traffic, mode of travel, and total distances driven in a city. These are combined with an estimate of the types of vehicles and average fuel consumption of each mode.
The EIE tool allows local planners to:
- Measure and monitor community emissions from transport and building sources;
- Measure and monitor yearly mobility patterns across main modes of transport - motorized, active, and public transit;
- Identify strategies to reduce emissions, and simulate potential impacts of interventions being considered;
- Easily visualize data for communication with stakeholders;
- Additional pilots are currently being rolled out when and where available: e.g, mapping solar energy potential, air pollution, and tree coverage/heat islands.
Thanks to Google’s EIE team, Louisiana Clean Fuels was able to gain access to data sets from across our territory to learn about emissions data within parishes and cities. For example, we can see that across the state transportation emissions went down by 25% in 2020; it can be assumed that this was due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, in 2021, while the emissions bounced back they remained below those of 2019. This trend remains across all regions in Louisiana.
This tool also provides us with data about how many trips made into, within, and out of a region. LCF can use this data to compare needs within regions
From this data we can see that Alexandria sees about a quarter of the in-boundary traffic that Baton Rouge sees in a year. This can help local governments make more informed decisions about transportation and sustainable initiatives.
As more data and territories are added an even greater view of these territories will be available and used for a variety of projects.
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