Google Street View maps air pollution to reveal a city’s dirtiest roads – and make your commute healthier

NOT content with just mapping our streets, Google is now monitoring toxic gases.

Google's Street View cars have been fitted with sensors to build up a map of toxic hotspots in a bid to clear the air.

The air quality project, started in 2015, has already driven 14,000 miles around the US with a prototype map revealing how it'd look online.

The colour scheme of red, orange and yellow is carried over from Google's traffic service.

While zooming in reveals where measurements are highest with information tags identifying why that's the case.

Nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide and carbon black emitted by cars and trucks are all measured by the Street View car.

It's the latest advancement of the Street View car that first started mapping our roads in 2007.

Results so far reveal how junctions and crossroads are exposed to levels of harmful gases five to eight times higher than nearby streets.

And Google hopes the findings will help future town planners improve road layouts to minimise pollution.

A Google statement read: "With nearly 3 million measurements and 14,000 miles captured in the course of a year, this is one of the largest air quality datasets ever published, and demonstrates the potential of  neighborhood-level air quality mapping.

"This map makes the invisible, visible, so that we can breathe better and live healthier.

"It helps us understand how clean (or not clean) our air is, so that we can make changes to improve it."

There's no indication of when the technology might be rolled out in the UK.

Currently the UK relies on government-run, fixed position air quality monitoring stations but in the first quarter of this year, 26 of these sites breached EU pollution limits - the highest in a decade.

The new government faces pressure to hit targets soon with threats of a diesel scrappage scheme still looming.