Cities should publish street-level air-quality data before they publish a climate plan

Most city climate plans begin with a target. We think they should begin with a map.

Air pollution is not spread evenly. It concentrates along busy roads, near industry, in valleys and around bus stations, so a single monitoring station can hide the streets where people actually breathe the worst air. A plan written from one average number tends to promise improvements nobody can check.

Publishing street-level readings first does three things. It shows where the problem is, it gives residents a way to challenge the numbers, and it gives the city a baseline against which any later policy can be judged honestly.

The strongest objection is accuracy. Low-cost sensors are less precise than reference-grade monitors, and a noisy map can mislead. We think that is an argument for labelling readings with their uncertainty and calibrating them against reference stations, not for keeping the data private.

What would change our mind: evidence that publishing dense sensor data reliably causes confusion without improving decisions.