As we head into Winter Spare the Air season here in the Bay Area, particulate matter in the air from wood smoke, cars, and other motor vehicles quickly rises to unhealthy levels thanks to the cold, stagnate air that creates surface-based radiation inversions. If you’ve ever been to Salt Lake City in winter, you’ll be well acquainted with this phenomenon. When this happens, exercising outdoors can do more harm than good. To help us figure out where we should head to get our nature fix, if at all, AllTrails teamed up with BreezoMeter.
Next time you long into AllTrails as a Pro user, you will be able to choose the best routes for your hike, run, or bike ride by taking air quality into consideration. An easy to understand color-coded air pollution map is layered over the trail maps already core to the AllTrails platform. You now get a real-time air quality information as you search for routes.
Air quality is dynamic, changing throughout the day, and can be affected by traffic, weather, wind, fires, sand and dust storms and many other natural events. BreezoMeter’s algorithms take all of these into account to help users visualize which trails at any given time will be preferable. BreezoMeter provides data on 17 different pollutants and 3 different types of pollen as part of its analysis so AllTrails can provide users the ability to see the invisible while making the smartest decisions for their health.
As opposed to sites like Spare the Air that give you pollution level predictions for the day based on a large region, the BreezoMeter data used by AllTrails is hyper local and real-time. This is important in that a bike ride along the coast here in the Bay Area is probably way safer in terms of air quality than a ride through a valley and one in the early morning is probably better than late in the afternoon.
The air quality piece is a very cool new feature for AllTrails but sad that it is necessary. And I don’t see that going away anytime soon.