Community Design and Air Quality
Urban air pollution has myriad sources that range from highly localized to regional and national, and even international. Characteristics of the built environment, particularly with regard to roadways and traffic exposure, have critical implications for a
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uction Hudson School in west Long Beach, California, had been open for years before one of the country’s largest railroads built a nearby intermodal rail facility in 1986. Now, trucks carry containers five miles north from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to the rail facility, passing right by the school’s playground; the health of the children may be adversely affected by the trucks’ emissions (Plate 3). Community volunteers from the local asthma coalition have counted five hundred trucks an hour passing by the school. Not surprisingly, air monitoring near the school shows high levels of pollutants, including some of the highest levels of elemental carbon, an indicator of diesel emissions, measured in the region. The California Air Resources Board has A.L. Dannenberg et al. (eds.), Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-being, and Sustainability, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-036-1_4, © Island Press 2011
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THE IMPACT OF COMMUNITY DESIGN ON HEALTH
studied eighteen rail yards in the state and found this one to have the third highest level of estimated diesel emissions, coming from locomotives, trucks, and yard equipment. As the rail facility proposes to double its capacity, the local air quality management district has installed air filters in the school to provide some protection to the kindergarten through eighth-grade students— at least while they are indoors. Meanwhile the school nurse reports that children store their asthma medication in her office and ask to be excused from outdoor activities when the pollution seems bad. Demanding that emissions be reduced is difficult because control over locomotives rests with federal authorities, not local regulators. The expansion project is controversial, but the railroad is promising to reduce emissions—if it is allowed to expand [example contributed by Andrea M. Hricko, MPH].
The conditions at Hudson School are one example of the consequences of the global movement of goods. Another consequence of global goods movement is the pollution that comes from ships, which are not regulated sources, as their emissions contaminate the air around ports. The school example also shows how alteration of a built environment can have health consequences for people nearby, such as schoolchildren with asthma. Air pollution in cities has long been known to harm the health of urban dwellers. Cities bring together large, concentrated populations, transportation infrastructure, industries, and power plants and other sources of heat and energy. The density of combustion sources in urban environments produces pollution that is often visible, and pollutant levels in many places were high enough in the past to have posed a clear public health threat. For example, the London fog of 1952 caused thousands of excess deaths (Bell and Davis 2001) (see Box 4.1 and Figure 4.1). This and other disasters during the twentieth century motivated research, including epidemiological studies, on the health effects of air pollution and the development of evidence-based approaches to
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