Case Study: Bay Area Air Quality Management District achieves block‑level roadway emissions inventory to protect West Oakland health with Bentley (Streetlytics)

Improving Community Health through Detailed Emissions Modeling

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District faced stark neighborhood disparities in air pollution and health outcomes in West Oakland and needed highly localized roadway activity data to build a bottom-up emissions inventory under California’s AB617. To get the link-level counts, speeds, and roadway attributes required, the Air District worked with Bentley (acquiring Streetlytics data) to supply the detailed roadway telematics not available from other vendors.

Bentley delivered Streetlytics datasets—an accurate geospatial roadway network plus hourly/seasonal vehicle counts, speeds, and segment characteristics—enabling the Air District to produce a block-by-block emissions inventory (running exhaust, tire/brake wear, resuspended dust) that validated well against Caltrans counts. The Streetlytics-powered analysis produced exposure and cancer-risk maps highlighting hotspots (e.g., Third St 346 per million, West Prescott 272 per million), informed the West Oakland Action Plan and targeted mitigation strategies, and was expanded in 2020 to a nine-county Bay Area dataset; the plan aims for a reduction in cancer risk of 200 in a million by 2025 and 110 in a million by 2030.

Bay Area Air Quality Management District

Virginia Lau

Advanced Project Advisor of the Air District