The article quotes Mayor Garcetti as saying that "improving air-filtration, building design and tailpipe emissions" may be better than zoning restrictions.
The article is properly scathing about the building of apartments with balconies and sliding doors not more than 100 feet from very busy freeways. But, it does not follow up on Garcetti's point: we need to be more aggressive in curtailing vehicle pollution. That's the root cause, after all.
As their particulate graphs point out, vehicle pollution has an 80/20 quality. A few vehicles cause a disproportionate amount of pollution - they cause the spikes in the graphs. This is also evident from driving around. You can clearly smell, and see, when you are following a badly tuned truck, or almost any 1970s and earlier car.
In Germany, we did exactly what you suggest and banned all the old and badly tuned cars in the inner cities, with significant success ("Umweltplakette").
> banned all the old and badly tuned cars in the inner cities, with significant success
Too bad a recent study found that diesel cars (PKW) are much more polluting than previously thought (article in German). [0] They're even worse for emissions than modern trucks (LKW), at least in Europe.
We traded a very well known pollution source (old and/or badly tuned cars) for a new and previously unknown pollution source (diesel cars).
I do honestly think this is the beginning of the end for diesel cars. VW scandal aside, they're just more harmful than previously thought.
For me personally I'm excited for electric cars to reduce noise pollution in the city. You don't realize how loud normal cars are until you've ridden in an electric car, like a Tesla. It's night and day.
Nitpick: PKW (Personenkraftwagen) does not mean Diesel car; it's any street legal car capable of transporting up to nine people under its own power (regardless of power source).
Unfortunately (in this case) the US seems to have a much greater sense of individual right rather than collective right.
My right, and that of my family, friends, and community, to clean and pollution free air seems to be less important than someone else's individual right to drive the vehicle of their choosing and maintain it as their means allow. I know some States have emissions testing etc but that is not universal across the US.
I assume the assumption has always been that the market will slowly correct the issue and the fleet will change accordingly. But CAFE laws are of course a politicized issue.
>IIRC emissions testing is similar to building codes in that you are only tested against the year the car was manufactured in most cases.
As I understand it older cars have higher allowable emissions, but the state has lowered those limits over the years.
>So a 1970 car will still pollute as much as a 1970 car.
In CA you are not required to get emissions testing for any car older than the 1975 model year. It used to be any car older than 30 years, but in 2005 they decided to leave it at 1975.
To the larger point, yes, older cars can be registered with emissions levels consistant with a well-maintained car from that year. Though the net effect of the rules is to take more older cars off the road, since much of the time when you fail emissions testing it's cheaper to replace the car than to fix it.
Part of that has to do with systemic defects in (our) culture in the US.
* We don't have /good/, /usable/, public transit that can replace vehicle use (outside of some high-density urban cores).
* We don't encourage sufficient building of housing /near jobs/ to reduce the need for commuting long distances.
* We don't encourage the building of family capacity housing in those same areas. (Again, to increase competition, decrease rent and increase more civilly minded communities in those areas.)
* The tax code and civic involvement that exist favor NIMBY, instead of targeting the future potential of an area (a corrective tax would be based on the /potential value/ of given land and what could be built on it, rather than it's current use).
People in LA love wood-burning fireplaces, too, but building codes have been making them harder and harder to put in. Same kind of thing should apply here. Maybe clever design could mitigate the loss.
Even if that was done, wouldn't these areas be disproportionately less healthy due to particulates in the air from tires incrementally tearing up the freeway, which ends up in the air?
Yes. Probably you need some of both approaches (construction regulation/redesign within X feet of freeways + tailpipe standards). I think the emissions are more important, because it's the root cause, and the article has the emphasis the other way around.
Related: the Princeton study that concluded that reducing congestion near toll booths lowered birth defects for nearby residents
> We find that reductions in traffic
congestion generated by E-ZPass reduced the incidence of prematurity and low birth weight
among mothers within 2km of a toll plaza by 6.7-9.1% and 8.5-11.3% respectively, with larger
effects for African-Americans, smokers, and those very close to toll plazas.
An acquaintance of mine is a realtor and he noticed a seemingly higher incidents of sickness associated with people living close the highway. He believes he sold more houses around the highway where one spouse got sick and died from cancer, and the surviving one was selling the residence than in other parts of town.
Will electric cars change the health issues related to living near freeways? I know we are a long way away from replacing most of the vehicles with electric.
As a cyclist my primary concern is diesel trucks with scant emissions controls belching particulate and other combustion byproducts. I see little movement to get these off the road.
For anyone else curious, I googled it and it looks like a delete-pipe, (aka muffler delete, cat delete) is basicly a muffler/catalytic converter bypass device. Some do it for performance, some for the noise, some explicitly to "piss off tree-hugging liberals".
Oh yeah, we get plenty of them out here in the rural parts. Friggin stupid.
We've got a little '81 tractor that's a 3-cyc 1.4L diesel and if the wind blows the wrong way you definitely don't want to inhale too deeply. I'd love to convert it to Tier IV but there just aren't kits made for it.
I've seen one person riding with something that looked like a gas mask. It appeared to have a "bane" like square filter near the mouth. Not just a simple N95 mask.
It's a point I don't think I've ever seen made, for some reason.
In a stylized argument, someone hypes electric cars as eliminating the pollution that comes from gas cars. Then someone points out that the pollution isn't eliminated, it's just moved away from the process of running the car into the process of generating electricity.
But regardless of whether there's less or more pollution after switching to electric cars, it seems like a big win for all the pollution to be off at the power plant instead of hanging over LA.
> Will electric cars change the health issues related to living near freeways?
Electric cars don't emit chemicals, or the atmospheric fine particles born from the condensation "sticky" hydrocarbon chemicals from the car exhaust fumes.
But the fine particles originating from the wear of tires, road surface and brakes will still remain with electric cars. (The utilization of the electric motor in braking could reduce the fine particles originating from brake pad wear, though.)
True, but those risks can be isolated to an area 100 miles away from a major population mass. With fuel burning cars, the risks can't be shuffled outside of the city and the larger your city, the worse it gets.
Yes, some is still coming from coal but the energy mix is changing.
Coal is now more expensive than natural gas, which is why the coal mines are now shutting down.
In addition, even natural gas is going to have to fight the renewable energy sources as the costs will continue to go down for them.
So I'd rather have the system's efficiencies improve in a few places instead of the tens of millions of cars that would have to be changed in the long run.
Yes, electric cars eliminate the vast majority of the concerns mentioned. (Zero tailpipe emissions, significantly less brake pad emissions, significantly less noise, etc).
Brake regeneration is a large part of the braking force for many EVs when the brake pedal is pressed, so the brake pads in some EV cars are actually smaller than their gas siblings.
Brake regeneration also avoids using the brake pedal altogether in many cases because an EV slows down significantly when the gas pedal is released.
With electric power, smaller brake pads, and less need to use them, I'm surprised the article believes there is only a 1% reduction in overall particle pollution for EV's vs. gas cars.
Plus, a typical EV is a small and modern 0-2 year old car compared to the gas vehicles out there, such as a 7-year-old, inefficient, v8 engine SUV.
This small reduction of particle pollution was the result of a very old study. At that time, there was no brake regeneration and the car was very heavy. I guess there is no recent study because the result would be obvious.
"Electric-powered vehicles, of course, have no exhaust emissions. However, because they’re 24 percent heavier on average, the study found that EVs shed more particulate matter from tires and brakes, and also kick up more particulate matter from road surfaces."
If the brake pads are smaller and aren't required to slow down in many cases, the EV should win, especially when the average EV on the street is likely similar in weight compared to an average non-EV vehicle.
As far as kicking up existing particulate matter, EV's shouldn't be penalized for kicking up dust on the road which came from others cars, which are almost entirely non-EV cars and 18-wheelers.
I bet there are other more significant factors to derive impact on pollution from EVs than brake dust, such as the source of electricity used to charge them.
I'll try to look at the study later to see how the 1% difference between road pollution between gas and EV vehicles was calculated.
> "However, because they’re 24 percent heavier on average, the study found that EVs shed more particulate"
That's a pretty misleading statistic too. EV's are 24% heaver than the average subcompact. But most people are already driving cars significantly heavier than the lightest subcompacts.
According to the EPA, the actual average personal vehicle weight was 3,977 pounds in 2012. That is heavier than most EV's -- it's heavier than any Chevy Bolt, Volt, or Nissan Leaf ever sold.
For example, a 2017 Volt is lighter than a similarly-priced 2017 Avalon, even though the Volt has a 18.4kWH battery in it, does 53 miles zero-emission electric, and gets an extra 15mpg when using gasoline.
It's so amazing how much shit people are (apparently) willing to eat (or maybe simply have no clue about due to lack of education due to lack of money).
I know of more than 1 study which has proven serious adverse health effects for people living near traffic axis. It's so obvious: constant noise keeps your stress level high 24 hours a day, and air pollution adds damage to the brain, lungs, cardiovascular system, etc.
Having lived in and now moved out of LA, I can't really think of anything that would make me want to go back. The air quality is an issue, as are the terrible commutes (which can only be avoided by living within a few miles of where you work — not easy when more than one person in the household works).
An LA real estate person once told me that San Fernando Valley prices for homes really close to (but south of) the 101 freeway are higher than prices of homes far from (but north of) the 101 freeway.
Prices seem to be driven less by smog and more by neighborhood quality. In the SF Valley, locations south of the 101 tend to have better schools, less crime, proximity to the hills and west side, etc. The 101 itself seems to serve as a barrier between good neighborhoods and less-good ones.
Perhaps something similar can be noted in San Francisco, again, around the 101 freeway, where it divides the Mission District from Potrero Hill. I mean, the wind is very often out of the west, blowing that smog up across Potrero Hill.
Cars are the real "American carnage". There were 40,000 deaths from traffic accidents in 2016. MIT estimates another 53,000 from traffic pollution[1]. That's more than 5 times as many as the number of homicides.
I'll be moving to LA soon for work.. Are there any areas anyone can recommend that have a lot of trees/plant life/parks? I also appreciate farmers markets and a health food store. I'd like to not be too far from e.g. Santa Monica or Northridge
If you don't mind commuting a little more, I would suggest Simi Valley. It's right over the hill from San Fernando/Northridge and has much less traffic.
Simi is also more family-oriented if that is the type of city you are looking for.
Venice, Marina Del Rey, Culver city areas are all not bad. Santa Monica is one of the most expensive areas in the country, though, so just be aware of that. Venice cheaper, but since it's LA, that's still gonna be up there in terms of rent/housing.
I can't give any more info, since I personally stick to downtown, hollywood, silver lake, and north hollywood (in other words, far away from the west side).
I appreciate your reply! I'll mostly be working in Santa Monica but perhaps at times on Northridge.. I'd like to pay <= 1800 for my own house-ish dwelling (i.e. prefer not an apartment)
It's possible to get something around that price that's close to Northridge, but you are looking at an hour commute each way to Santa Monica—the 405 is bumper-to-bumper all the way.
I would suggest looking for an apartment in West LA or Mar Vista instead, but that's going to be a 1-bedroom apartment.
Good luck! My email is in my profile if you have any more questions.
The article is properly scathing about the building of apartments with balconies and sliding doors not more than 100 feet from very busy freeways. But, it does not follow up on Garcetti's point: we need to be more aggressive in curtailing vehicle pollution. That's the root cause, after all.
As their particulate graphs point out, vehicle pollution has an 80/20 quality. A few vehicles cause a disproportionate amount of pollution - they cause the spikes in the graphs. This is also evident from driving around. You can clearly smell, and see, when you are following a badly tuned truck, or almost any 1970s and earlier car.