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A friend of mine does research on air pollution from cars - the TL;DR is you should not live within a third of a mile of a highway. The falloff is pretty sharp,
by roughly 2mo ago
A friend of mine does research on air pollution from cars - the TL;DR is you should not live within a third of a mile of a highway. The falloff is pretty sharp, but you don't want to be in that zone.
- lazide 2mo agoNotably, most major cities have been building tons of housing (especially ‘affordable housing’) right next to highways, as it is the only areas that aren’t already built out with tons of high value houses. Surprise surprise.
- energy123 2mo agoIt's a dumping ground for poor people.
- tony69 2mo agoIt’s not like they do it on purpose rubbing hands
- weird-eye-issue 2mo agoHousing development happens at random?
- masklinn 2mo agoPlus the US literally built highways in the middle of poor neighbourhoods.
- alex0015 2mo agoDevelopers build apartments where they can make money from them, in other words where they can rent them for enough that they'll make back their investment. It's very expensive to build housing, so the only way to make the investment back and have low rental prices is to try to make the building costs as low as possible. A big part of those costs is the price of land.
- weird-eye-issue 2mo agoWhat's even the point of this comment?
- alex0015 2mo agoThe parent and thread seemed to be arguing that low cost housing was intentionally built in places that disadvantaged the people who lived there.
- lazide 2mo agoOr, the only places to build houses with reasonable costs are in areas that weren’t already built out with very expensive houses. Which will tend to be less desirable areas, by definition. One approach, of course, would be to also make existing houses less expensive/desirable. Notably, wealthy people tend to have the resources to fight efforts to do that.
- ben_w 2mo agoThe other approach is to expand what land is available to build on. I understand that in the UK, farmers consider it a lottery win if they get planning permission for some of their farmland to become housing. Despite what many in the UK think about it "being full", this is mostly an illusion from how cramped are the parts in which the houses are allowed to go; the country as a whole is mostly undeveloped. (There are of course other considerations, with "why did you build on a flood plain?" being one of the failure modes in the UK).
- lazide 2mo agoWell, letting people build houses right next to freeways and/or on things like earthquake faults or flood plains is what is being done here. Which is, uh, also a problem. Since those people are now at much higher risk, eh? Building on farmland has national security concerns (as countries are slowly realizing), as the country ends up dependent on foreign food imports after awhile. Can't grow food effectively when there is a subdivision there instead eh? In most high demand areas (which are the ones everyone is complaining about, generally), all the decent land (or even just 'normal' land) is already developed. Bonus - next time around, even the flood plain land might be 'too expensive' to develop on, and folks will only be able to afford houses at the dump, or in a swamp, or the like. Yay.
- afiori 2mo agoWoke activists love the word "systemic" for a reason. If a bunch of good people acting in good faith produce a result an evil mastermind would want does it matter if they are good? On many levels obviously yes, on some practical levels the system and the incentives still need to change.
- sasaf5 2mo agoWhat about the vicinity of large or uphill streets inside a city? I am curious how the data compares with highways.
- JayShower 2mo agoWhat about biking near a highway? E.g. in Chicago the lakeshore bike trail is next to a busy 8 lane highway
- theplumber 2mo agoI remember I’ve read somewhere that jogging is actually net harmful for health in the city due the air pollution.
- bcraven 2mo agohttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/10817787/How-chivalry-on-the-pavement-could-kill-you.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/10817787/How-ch... Generations of men have been taught that when walking with a woman on a pavement, they should always take the side closer to the road allowing her to keep further away from the traffic. But Dr Iarla Kilbane-Dawe claimed that Londoners should avoid walking too near the kerb because on busy streets, air pollution can be up to a third higher than on the inside of the pavement.
- goobatrooba 2mo agoSo in effect, if you want to be the chivalrous man (which no one forces you to be) you still should choose the roadside side of the pavement.
- marliechiller 2mo agoShame you cant remember the source. Ive long since wondered if its actually more deleterious for my health to cycle to work in London due to air quality. I came to the conclusion that youre damned if you do and damned if you dont in the end, as in London at least, many of the tube lines have particulates higher than is considered safe
- ben_w 2mo agoProbably depends on the tube line; one of them, can't remember which now as I left the country in 2018, left me with black snot on each use. Cycling wasn't that bad, but neither were the other lines.
- smcin 2mo agoDoesn't it depend on the mix of diesel/petrol/electric? In particular many cities ban or restrict diesel.
- danielheath 2mo agoTyre pollution is significant regardless of fuel source.
- vee-kay 2mo ago[dead]
- nerdsniper 2mo agoEV's have 100% reduction of NOx/tailpipe VOCs, 100% reduction in soot/tailpipe particulates, 70% reduction in brake pad dust (due to regenerative braking), in exchange for 25% increase in tire wear. Vehicles are capped at emissions of 3mg/mile of particulates and 30mg/mile of VOC's. Something like 1-2mg of tire material actually becomes airborne PM10 particles every mile (and only about 10% of that for PM2.5 particles). So, EV's really do a great job reducing emissions from 35mg/mile to <2mg/mile (PM10) or even <0.1mg/mile for PM2.5. A 95%-99.8% reduction in air pollution near highways would seem absolutely fantastic for me and my children! https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11636205/#:~:text=When%20excluding%20road%20wear%20and%20resuspension%2C%20mean,emissions%20of%206.5%20mg%2Fkm%2Fvehicle%20(median%206.1%20mg%2Fkm%2Fvehicle). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11636205/#:~:text=W...
- dotancohen 2mo ago> EV's have 100% reduction of NOx/tailpipe VOCs, 100% reduction in soot/tailpipe particulates, 70% reduction in brake pad dust (due to regenerative braking), in exchange for 25% increase in tire wear. I replaced the tires on my Tesla model 3 at 74,000 km and they still had tread above the indicator bars. I'm now at 140,000 km and the tires look great, the back ones look like they're only about halfway done. I might be an outlier but my previous Subaru needed tires every 50,000 to 60,000 km. Needless to say, the brake pads have never been touched and when I saw the left front one at around 110,000 to 120,000 to patch that tire, it looked like it was just installed. The regen braking almost completely eliminated the brake pad or rotor as a wear item.