This work presents an interdisciplinary assessment that looks in-depth the tracking of air quality in urban environments. This kind of application is well suited to be approached with the paradigm of wireless sensor networks in their overall variations. Therefore a robust and diverse set of solutions have been developed following the technology capa- bilities advance. The proposed experiment takes advantage of Vehicle Sensor Networks (VSN) by embedding sensor nodes to public transportation, addressing this study case with bus lines within such a way that the mobiles spread the sampling activity through a large number of different places visited during the route. Simultaneously, it alleviates restrictions of power management, packaging dimensions (size and weight), and overall maintenance issues. We perform environmental modeling based on real data considering a temporal and spatial multivariate behavior on observed phenomena. Finally, evalu- ating the system-level performance and operational constraints through an event-based simulation.