Stuck in traffic on Broadway near City Hall — like any other car in lower Manhattan on a hot August morning — is an ordinary-looking bright blue and white Toyota Prius.

That is, until it pulls up and you see the words “I measure air quality” written on the driver’s side door.

The car is sucking in air through clear plastic tubes that run through the rear window and into a little mobile laboratory arranged neatly like catalog luggage in the trunk.

For the next year, more than 20 of these labs on wheels will be deployed in a pilot program run by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The fleet is part of a statewide campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions locally and improve urban air quality in accordance with state climate laws, which require enhanced air monitoring.

“Right now, we measure temperature, black carbon, carbon dioxide, humidity, pressure, ozone, nitrous oxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, fine particulate matter…,” said the car’s driver Ramses Diaz, listing some of the pollutants and metrics they record as he cruises through downtown. The vehicle can quantify about 20 different emissions.

Target areas include Manhattan, the Bronx, Albany and Buffalo/Niagara. Within a year, people living in these places will be able to go online and find their homes and workplaces, and see what kind of air they are breathing when they walk out the door. While regulations on heating oil and other pollutants have led to markedly cleaner air in cities than in decades past, environmental leaders say there’s much work yet to be done.

“There are holdouts — areas of extreme pollution,” said Basil Seggos, the DEC commissioner. “Really the purpose of going down to the street level is to find out what people are breathing on the street, in their homes, in their backyards, and then use that data ultimately to drive better decision-making.”

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