Source · category
Traffic-related air pollution
Part of: Anthropogenic emissions
Also: TRAP, traffic pollution, traffic emissions, vehicle exhaust, near-road pollution
The mixture emitted by road vehicles — combustion particles, nitrogen oxides, and the dust raised from brakes, tyres and road surface. It is an outdoor source that becomes an indoor exposure through the building envelope, and for many urban dwellings it is the dominant one.
Where it comes from indoors
A dwelling beside a busy road has an exposure it did not create and cannot switch off, and the amount of it indoors is set by the envelope: how leaky the building is, whether the windows facing the road are opened, and whether incoming air is filtered.
The mixture has an indoor signature worth knowing. Nitrogen dioxide and ultrafine particles are the components that most clearly point to traffic rather than to something in the room, and both decay sharply with distance from the road, so exposure can differ substantially between two flats in the same building.
The practical tension is with ventilation. The advice that solves indoor sources — open the window — imports this one, and the resolution is mechanical supply with filtration rather than a choice between two bad options. Where a study measured only an outdoor concentration at the address, the caveat records that the exposure was estimated rather than measured indoors.
What the studies report
| Linked to | Effect | Population | Study design | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Particulate matter (PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀) | mean 216 | adult residents of Bamako in four occupational groups · commuting | personal exposure measurement study: residents of Bamako in four occupational groups (office workers, drivers, cooks, students) wore palm-sized optical PM2.5 sensors on the chest during daily activities, September 2020 to February 2021 | F-0124 Sidibe et al. Personal Exposure to Fine Particles (PM2.5) in Northwest Afr… (2022) | machine |
Each row is one Finding — a sentence as printed in one study, recorded with its page in the Coridum Knowledge Base. Follow the Finding number for the exact wording and the citation. Checked says who verified the row: machine means every automatic check passed and the surrounding text was read; person means someone read the sentence in the document. Rows are re-checked by a person over time. The studies are curated in the Coridum Knowledge Base; the reading of them together is a Claim, shown separately.
Cite this page
Coridum Research. Traffic-related air pollution. Coridum Knowledge G-0190, 16 September 2026. https://coridum.com/k/G-0190/