
Why do poor school kids have to clean up rich commuters’ pollution? - oftenwrong
http://cityobservatory.org/why-do-poor-school-kids-have-to-clean-up-rich-commuters-pollution/
======
endorphone
Passenger cars create a negligible amount of particulate pollution, and are
certainly not the cause of the air quality issues encountered here. Transport
trucks, in contrast, create a lot of air pollution (both greenhouse gas and
particulate), but the story isn't as interesting when the villain are the
goods and products that everyone consumes.

~~~
tompagenet2
This doesn't seem to be true: see pages 83 and 84 of the link below,
suggesting around 20% of UK PM2.5 emissions come from road transport - this is
not negligible.

[https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/69635/pb13837-aqeg-
fine-particle-matter-20121220.pdf)

~~~
endorphone
That isn't refuting my statement. Road transport includes all vehicles on the
road, and my statement is that trucks are _by far_ the largest source of
particulate matter on the road. The standards on trucks (and buses) are
exponentially worse than passenger vehicles -- justified by the notion that
they're doing something more worthwhile -- and many horribly polluting older
models are grandfathered in. The average age of a passenger car on the road is
much, much newer than the average age of a transport truck.

[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.est.8b01914](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.est.8b01914)

The crux of that is that particulate pollution had a low correlation with
passenger car volume, and a high correlation with trucks. Indeed, they found
low utilization trucking routes had worse pollution than the busiest highway
in North America (which would have been much more pronounced if the latter
didn't also have significant truck volume).

Though it is worth noting that there are a number of worse sources of
particulate pollution. Wood burning fires, for instance, or home gardening
equipment with virtually no pollution control.

~~~
chrisseaton
> The standards on trucks (and buses) are exponentially worse than passenger
> vehicles

How can one group be 'exponentially worse' than just one other group? How can
you see an exponential relationship between two data points? That doesn't make
any sense. You'd need to be looking at a relationship between at least three
data points to say it was exponential.

~~~
MR4D
Exponentially is often used to mean "10 times more". So if one date point is
10 times higher than a second data point, than the wording would hold
colloquially.

~~~
chrisseaton
Are you confusing with 'an order of magnitude'? Exponential is a rate of
change, so you simply can't determine it on two data points. Order of
magnitude is the relative change itself, so you can determine between two data
points.

~~~
oarsinsync
You are literally correct, and literally could not be more wrong (and I'm
deliberately using both the correct and colloquial - but depressingly also
dictionary defined - definition of the word 'literally' there).

Language evolves, and not always for the best.

------
joemaller1
There's reason to doubt freeway traffic is the primary source of pollution at
Tubman Middle School. Just across the freeway from the school is a non-trivial
amount of industrial activity including:

* A Calportland cement facility (2500 ft mi)

* A Union Pacific rail yard (4000 ft)

* Tyree Oil, a small petroleum distributor (1200 ft)

* What looks like a power transfer station (2000 ft)

* At least two glass-makers and a ceramics studio (<1000 ft)

* A sheet metal fabricator and neon sign manufacturer (1100-1400 ft)

This article appears to have originated with a Bike Portland (and No More
Freeways) campaign against freeway expansion and for decongestion pricing.

~~~
zanny
Why would you build a school in what sounds to be an industrial zone?

~~~
brewdad
Cheap land. My district built a high school in an industrial zone at the
northern edge of town across a freeway from the rest of the community. When
you think about it, it makes sense. It's a warehouse for kids surrounded by
warehouses.

------
JasonFruit
Why are we assuming the commuters are rich? The person who is coaxing their
ancient Pinto to carry them to their job at the paint store is just as much a
commuter as the executive taking a phone meeting in his BMW. And everyone in
the area pays taxes to support the school; it's not just the students and
their parents. It seems like an equitable, if roundabout, way of paying for an
air filter system for the school.

~~~
cmiles74
From the article:

"Peak hour, drive alone commuters from Clark County, Washington have average
household incomes of $82,500; and 75 percent of them are white, non-Hispanic.
More than two-thirds of Tubman students are people of color; and half the
student body is poor enough to qualify for free or reduced price meals."

~~~
kbutler
This lacks several points from being conclusive:

\- it describes only "peak hour, drive alone commuters" without apportioning
the fraction of total pollution caused by that group.

\- How much does evening peak rush-hour pollution affect school-day air
quality? (morning peak would probably have a direct effect)

\- by dealing with averages, it obscures the distribution - it could be that
the majority of the pollution is caused by lower-income commuters driving
older vehicles, but Tesla-driving higher income commuters drive up the average
income

\- it assumes that the money paid for the pollution somehow belongs to the
students, when it is apportioned from the tax dollars paid that fund the
school district budget. Maybe those dollars already come from the high-income
commuters.

\- it brings in race purely to add to the emotional content of the narrative

If you disagree, please describe why you find this narrative rationally
compelling.

------
keeganjw
Why are DOTs still trying to widen highways? There examples after examples
that show this doesn't speed up travel times and traffic will suck just as
much as before they widened the highway. If we were smart, we'd put that money
into public transportation. Portland is a big enough city to support a world
class public transit system. Many US cities are, we just choose not too.
Portland has an urban population of 1.8 million. Stockholm has only 1.5
million and yet they seem more than capable of funding full subway, bus, and
commuter rail systems. Why the fuck can't we? This would do wonders for air
quality. And come on, commuters can pay for the air filtration and they
should.

~~~
yikes_burger
stockholm is 2x as dense as portland. and portland has funneled billions of
taxpayer money into public transportation.

taxpayers have been footing the bill: Oregon is the third highest taxed state
in the country and portland is a high tax city. and property taxes are set to
increase again this year, after last years increase. this is on top of
congestion pricing, increases in vehicle registration costs, and gas taxes.

~~~
keeganjw
Stockholm's core is definitely denser but the population is still there in
Portland if the routes were built right. And you're right, Oregon and Portland
already do have high taxes. They couldn't fund this themselves. No city does.
The federal government would need to provide a lot of funding. In Portland and
all around the country. But I just wish the conversation in the US would
change. Bold public transportation projects are almost immediate shut down as
being unrealistic. It doesn't have to be this way. Nobody talks about the cost
and feasibility of highways and roads or the enormous costs of car ownership.
We just all default to that and don't question it. Cars are the default,
everything is expensive and unrealistic.

~~~
yikes_burger
ok, you concede that taxes are high at both the local and state level, and
your solution is to raise them on everyone, at the federal level? why should
the good folks in Hawaii, Texas, Ohio, etc., foot the bill for your shitty
transit that no one uses (look up the ridership stats)?

public transit gets shutdown not because it's unrealistic--anything is
feasible if you throw enough money at it--but precisely because it's a massive
waste of taxpayer money.

California just learned the hard way, but at least Newsom had the balls to
call-it-quits on the idiotic high speed rail project. well at least you'll be
able to go from Merced to Bakersfield or whatever it is. how many billions
were spent on that again?

~~~
keeganjw
People in big prosperous states should absolutely pay for infrastructure in
other states and they already do. States like California, Texas, and New York
pay far more in federal taxes than they receive back in funding. They pay for
roads in Iowa and social security checks in Vermont. It's because they are not
islands but part of a nation. Sure they might have to pay "more" but it's
because if it were not for the nation as a whole, that prosperity wouldn't be
there to begin with. If you take this argument down to an individual level,
why should we even pay taxes if we'd all be "better off" not paying taxes?
It's because we'd all have far less wealth to tax if we didn't have the roads,
schools, healthcare, and yes, public transportation that they fund.

Public transit just isn't a waste of money by just about any measurement. The
travel and density it enables produces far more economic value than the cost
of construction. By international standards, the high speed rail in California
is quite expensive and they should be working on ways to bring that cost in
line with other countries. But at the end of the day, California would be
better off with high speed rail in the long term. Take New York City. They
would be far less wealthy if they didn't have a subway system. You would need
far more roads, cars, and infrastructure to support that population if it
weren't for the subways. Everyone there would be poorer for it. By that same
token, cities like LA and San Fransisco could be far wealthier if they had
public transit that matched their population and density. Creating far more
wealth and taxes dollars that can be used to subsidize those roads in Iowa or
social security checks in Vermont, benefiting everyone.

------
eumenides1
MOVE THE SCHOOL.

Everything sucks, there is serious injustice, and no foresight to building the
highway.

Portland still needs the highway and the school. So just use the highway's
powers to make room for a school.

If you don't have foresight, then at least make things right.

~~~
rootusrootus
Yes, this is the answer. Moving the interstate is a non-starter. And even if
there were political will to do so, the costs would be dramatically higher
than just building a new school farther away.

------
sct202
People who commute from that county in Washington to work in Portland have to
pay Oregon state income tax. Income tax makes up the bulk of Oregon's state
budget which partially funds their K-12 system :
[https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_state_budget_and_finances](https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_state_budget_and_finances)
. So the commuters are technically paying for some of the costs, maybe not
enough?

------
3rdgender
"Why is the school district paying for the pollution controls? Why aren’t the
120,000 vehicles that drive past the school every day paying for it?"

Don't drivers pay taxes, which also go to the school district - so actually,
the vehicle drivers ARE paying for it?

Not that I want to justify the situation. But the spin seems wrong.

Also, in a twist, the kid's family may only be able to afford living in the
school's district because pollution makes it unattractive to live in.

~~~
cmiles74
Everyone's take-away is different, but I find the general argument that the
cost of driving is hugely under-priced to be compelling. In my opinion this
piece hits on a good example: the overall cost wasn't really appreciated when
the highway was built and the department of transportation seems to be trying
to ignore the cost even today.

~~~
mortenjorck
I too find the argument compelling that driving is under-priced, but I'm
always leery of any reasoning that stops there, as the next step usually seems
to be "well, we need to correct the price," which is only a good solution in a
vacuum.

As the Macron government in France learned the hard way, underpricing one mode
of transport for decades has a profound effect on multiple other markets, and
suddenly trying to correct it has a very real human cost. When driving is
underpriced, public transport can't compete, and investment in it wanes.
Meanwhile, residential development adapts to automotive transport with sprawl.

And so a significant part of the population has no fallback if they become
priced out of driving. A good policy solution must take the transportation,
housing, and labor markets into consideration when pricing in the
externalities of driving.

------
TBurette
I didn't know about the Coase Theorem. The link between property right,
transaction cost and externalities is not obvious and interesting.

We could imagine many tech examples similar to the school and highway :

\- An ISP provides a connection with poor delay/jitter and it creates problem
for software developers (Skype, multiplayer games,...) --> should the ISP
compensate the developers or the developers pay the ISP to fix the problem?

\- A developer is selling created a program that degrades the performance of
another program if they are both run simultaneously. Who should pay who to
compensate/fix the problem?

~~~
mediumdeviation
Coase Theorem doesn’t say _how_ you should divide up property rights - that’s
a normative statement that’s outside the scope of economics - but rather that
as long as _any_ property rights are assigned, regardless of which way the
assignment goes, the outcome will be economically efficient.

Also it assumes transaction costs are negligible, ie in the example in the
article, the negotiations between the railway and the farmer can be done
cheaply and quickly. This is somewhat like assuming a frictionless plane in
physics.

------
harmful_stereo
I've often thought one of the only ways we would ever reclaim green space from
development would be some kind of silent spring creeping moral nimbyism around
highways. If only we could scare people and governments into putting an
exclusion zone around highways, for every additional bit of setback distance
the effect could be huge. Like the environmental boon that the korean dmz
became, or Chernobyl. Ideally bears and caribou would one day have mental maps
of the interstate, and forest land could have its transport system restored.

~~~
d4rti
This decreases density further, making greater travel distances.

------
johnisgood
I agree, polluters should compensate at the very least financially. It is sad
that it was even allowed to be built right next to a school.

------
JTbane
Driving should be more expensive in the US, full stop.

Many like to attack higher gas taxes as 'regressive', but they are fair. The
more pollution you create, the more you pay.

~~~
alistairSH
There are also partial fixes to the regressive nature of auto fuel taxes.
Credits for low income residents are a simple "fix" (not arguing it's the best
approach, just one way to make the tax less regressive).

Or, we can increase (re-implement?) the "gas guzzler" tax. Anything that gets
<20mpg (or whatever value) pays an extra annual tax. Removes actual
consumption from the scheme, but still provides an incentive to buy fuel-
efficient vehicles.

------
dsfyu404ed
Aren't paying for externalities like these like this exactly why we pay taxes
to state government? Why is the school paying for it's own air filtration?
This sounds like a problem of ineffective government, not highways and
pollution. It's the state's job to use tax money to smooth out these kind of
issues in a roughly equitable manner.

------
hopler
In defense of Coase, the "flaw" is part of the theorem and discussion in the
original paper, and Coase himself wrote extensively about the problem of using
his conclusion while ignoring his assumptions.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem)

------
kbutler
You can actually see purple-air monitors at the school:

[https://www.purpleair.com/map?#15.8/45.538164/-122.667271](https://www.purpleair.com/map?#15.8/45.538164/-122.667271)

Note that the black-circled spots are monitors inside the building.

Here's the report with details of the monitoring equipment and the
recommendations.

[http://opb-imgserve-production.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaw...](http://opb-
imgserve-production.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/original/tubman_-
_psu_htmsreport_phase1_outdoor_monitoring_final_1530825287922.pdf)

------
astura
I have two takeaways:

1) Traveling by private automobile has huge negative externalities.

2) Highways are usually built in economically depressed areas.

------
harias
Off-topic: Meanwhile Delhi has no plans to do anything about their problem.
People don't even wear masks. Air pollution readings are in the red for the
majority of the year. Live readings -
[https://aqicn.org/city/delhi/](https://aqicn.org/city/delhi/)

~~~
wil421
My coworker went there last year. When the factories were on he couldn’t see
the hotel adjacent to his. When they were shut down it was almost crystal
clear with blue sky. Reminded me of a distopian SciFi movie like Bladerunner
or Johnny Pneumonic.

------
nvahalik
Unless the commuters are coming from out of state, wouldn't the people driving
(being residents) be paying the taxes which would pay for this anyway?

I get that it is coming out of the budget of the school, but ultimately the
taxpayers _are_ paying for it, albeit in a round-about kind of way.

~~~
NegativeLatency
Many commuters are coming from out of state, as noted in the article it’s
people commuting from Washington state into the portland area

~~~
rootusrootus
They pay taxes if they work here.

------
NoblePublius
How about we take all the school’s money, give it to the parents, and let them
decide to which school to send their children?

~~~
yboris
Simply stop funding schools based on _local_ taxes, fund all schools equally
based on federal and state taxes. Many problems solved.

~~~
kemiller
Oregon and California are already run this way. It sucks. Creates more
problems than it solves.

------
ratling
Angry at the wrong people. The freeway users are just trying to get to work.

------
weyland108
Has anyone considered moving the school by 1 mile away from freeway?

------
tha_nose
"Students attending schools located near and downwind from busy highways had
lower rates of academic performance, higher absenteeism and higher rates of
disciplinary problems than those attending less polluted schools."

Is it because of the pollution or because kids who live near highways come
from poorer socio-economic environments? Kids who grow up in poor rural areas
nowhere near cars also have performance and behavioral problems.

Also, some of the top schools in the NYC metro area are situated near highways
or high traffic areas. Why aren't these kids affected as negatively? Could it
be many of them come from higher socio-economic situations?

Finally, isn't it a bit disingenous to say poor kids pay for it when they
don't pay taxes. Also, the article claims these kids receive free lunches, so
most likely they parents don't make enough money to pay much in taxes. So the
"wealthy" who pay taxes are already paying for the poor kids, their school and
their air filtration system are already paying taxes to clean up the
pollution. So they already paid, what more do they have to pay for?

Ideally, it would be great if every kid had a school in a middle of prisinte
woods without any pollution, but then people would complain about the
destruction of pristine nature.

~~~
adam-a
The study they link to claims to account for this by tracking the same
students between different schools. They also track different schools which
are the same distances from a highway but suffer different pollution because
of wind patterns. It would have been quite easy for you to click that link and
read the abstract.

------
jankotek
I really hate direction american politics (and hacker news to some extend) is
going lately.

There is a problem with car pollution. That is pretty common and has well
known solutions.

But this article has zero numbers, zero solutions. It hijacks the problem and
weaponizes it into hate and "class struggle". I read similar stuff in
communist news-papers 30 years ago.

------
microcolonel
> _Why do poor school kids have to clean up rich commuters’ pollution?_

They don't have to, they aren't going to, and they wouldn't if given the
choice.

------
slifin
TIL if I pay taxes it's ok for me to poison kids going to school

------
erentz
Schools (and lots of things) shouldn’t be built next to freeways. It appears
[1] this school was created in the 1980s long after that freeway existed. It
was closed in 2012. Then reopened last year. Perhaps the whole school should
be moved (there’s nearby vacant blocks that could accommodate a new school).

[1] This is based on very brief search so may be incorrect. Actually this is
odd the article shows a picture of the school being their before the freeway.
Was that the school then or was that a building repurposed into the school?
This is where I got the 80s thing from:
[https://expo.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/08/c7c3d773398362...](https://expo.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/08/c7c3d773398362/daunting-
but-dreamtof-new-port.html)

~~~
rootusrootus
The school was there first, but they have added another building since the
freeway was built. That may be where the confusion comes from.

~~~
erentz
This article says it opened in 1982 as well [1]. And quoting from the original
article “...that prompted Tubman’s creation in the 1980s, ...until..advocates
got their way and Tubman was built, the school district bussed thousands of
black children out of their own neighborhoods rather than provide them a
school of their own.”

I’m trying to find out what it was before it became Harriet Tubman school but
not finding anything.

(It doesn’t matter who was there first because we shouldn’t have a school
there now. The problem should be corrected and moving the school is the only
way. Air filters do not let kids play outside.)

[1] [https://www.wweek.com/news/2018/07/04/a-middle-school-
prized...](https://www.wweek.com/news/2018/07/04/a-middle-school-prized-by-
portlands-black-community-would-see-its-poor-air-quality-worsen-with-a-rose-
quarter-highway-expansion/)

