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ISSN 2070-7401 (Print), ISSN 2411-0280 (Online)
Sovremennye problemy distantsionnogo zondirovaniya Zemli iz kosmosa
CURRENT PROBLEMS IN REMOTE SENSING OF THE EARTH FROM SPACE

  

Sovremennye problemy distantsionnogo zondirovaniya Zemli iz kosmosa, 2025, V. 22, No. 6, pp. 392-399

Prospects of long-term satellite-based assessment of urban traffic: A case study of megacities of Kazakhstan

A.G. Terekhov 1, 2 , R.I. Mukhamediev 3 , Ye.S. Vitulyova 3 
1 Institute of Information and Computational Technologies, Almaty, Kazakhstan
2 RSE Kazhydromet, Almaty, Kazakhstan
3 K.I. Satbayev Kazakh National Research University, Almaty, Kazakhstan
Accepted: 05.11.2025
DOI: 10.21046/2070-7401-2025-22-6-392-399
In recent years, Kazakhstan has seen significant development of various ground-based urban video traffic monitoring systems. However, in the tasks of estimating the parameters of long-term trends in urban street congestion, due to the availability of deep archives, satellite information remains virtually without alternative. The paper considers the information potential of the open archive of satellite imagery of sub-meter spatial resolution of Google Earth service with a depth of about 25 years. City automotive transport is considered one of the main sources of pollution in urbanized areas. Long-term quantitative information on automobile traffic flows is of considerable interest for understanding the current environmental condition and assessing its prospects. For ten test sites in three megacities of Kazakhstan (Almaty, Astana, Shymkent), long-term monitoring of traffic flow parameters was carried out. With the help of expert recognition, the number of vehicles in the test area was recorded. Then two parameters were calculated: the number of vehicles per kilometer of the lane and the number of vehicles per square kilometer of the roadway. Average multi-year dynamics of urban traffic flows were evaluated for the period 2011–2024. In Almaty, the average annual change in the surveyed sections of road infrastructure was +0.376 vehicles per kilometer of lane and +61.69 vehicles per square kilometer of road surface; in Astana, –0.187 and –10.18, respectively; in Shymkent, +0.558 and +194.00, respectively. Thus, satellite quantitative estimates of trends in changes in the density of automobile traffic flows in Kazakhstan’s megacities, obtained on the basis of the open Google Earth service, can serve as a source of information for analyzing and predicting the ecological state of air basins of large cities in Kazakhstan. This approach can be useful for low-budget and pilot environmental studies of the urban environment.
Keywords: remote sensing, sub-meter satellite images, multi-year satellite monitoring, urban road transportation, urban infrastructure, urban traffic flows
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