Athlone students bringing innovative project to Young Environmentalist Awards in Dublin

Students from Athlone Community College are preparing to showcase their innovative transport project at the ECO-UNESCO Young Environmentalist Awards.

The competition is being held in the RDS, Dublin, tomorrow (Tuesday).

Athlone Community College students Aditya Surendran, Tomas Piskorowski, and Abhinav Bhyrraju created the project, which looks at how cities and towns can improve transport systems to reduce pollution and traffic, and improve public health, without making journeys slower or less efficient.

For the project, entitled 'Pareto-Optimal Urban Transport with Environmental & Health Externalities', the students created a computer model that tested hundreds of different transport scenarios, including different levels of car use, public transport, cycling, and walking.

They then measured the impact each system had on traffic congestion, air pollution, physical activity, and carbon emissions.

Using a method called “Pareto optimisation”, the students identified which transport systems delivered the best overall balance.

"The real-world purpose of the project is to help identify transport policies that can reduce harmful air pollution exposure, improve commute reliability, and increase everyday physical activity, all of which affect real people’s health and quality of life," said Aditya Surendran, a representative of the Athlone Community College project team.

Discussing the team's findings, Aditya said: “Our findings show that car-dominated systems perform worst overall, particularly on emissions and congestion.

“While electric cars reduce tailpipe emissions, they do not solve congestion by themselves. If most trips are still made by car, people still lose time sitting in traffic.”

According to the group, the best results came from transport systems that reduce dependence on cars while improving public transport and encouraging walking and cycling.

“In our best-performing balanced systems, we observed approximate improvements of 30–35% reductions in CO₂ emissions, 25% reductions in pollution exposure, and over 20% increases in physical activity, with no loss in transport efficiency,” said Aditya.

The students have now expanded the project into a more advanced city-based simulator, beginning with Dublin.

The updated model can show how different areas and neighbourhoods are affected by transport policies, helping identify what they describe as the “winners and losers” of each approach.

They also improved the realism of the project by using real road network and public transport timetable data. The group says artificial intelligence (AI) is now being used to test larger numbers of transport combinations more efficiently.

ECO-UNESCO's Young Environmentalist Awards have been running since 1999, with the event focused finding on youth-led solutions to real-world environmental challenges.