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As a Los Angeleno, this one’s kind of personal to me. We just went through our second round of “Carmageddon.” A 10-mile span of the 405 freeway, the nation’s busiest, has been closed down twice in the space of a little over a year, to replace a bridge and widen the freeway to incorporate an extra lane. Because it’s Hollywood, this has accompanied mass panic and then relief when the construction work completed and the freeway span re-opened. But the real panic should come from a set of new scientific results about air quality.
The closing of that span of the 405 offered a nice controlled experiment about the effects of automobile use on air quality. And Suzanne Paulson, a researcher at UCLA, decided to measure the pollutants on Carmageddon I weekend, from last July, against a normal weekend. The results were incredible. Because so many people in the LA area just didn’t drive on Carmageddon weekend, fearing the congestion resulting from the closure of the freeway, lots less cars were on the road. And that had this impact:
Paulson and colleague Yifang Zhu measured pollutants in the air during Carmageddon last year and have recently released their pretty astounding findings. Air quality near the normally busy highway improved by 83 percent that day last July, relative to comparable weekends. Elsewhere in West Los Angeles, the improvement was equally dramatic. Air quality improved by 75 percent on that side of the city and in Santa Monica, and by 25 percent throughout the entire region, as a measure of the drop in ultrafine particulate matter associated with tailpipe emissions.
“We saw what we expected: you take motor vehicles away, the air gets really, really clean,” Paulson says, “which tells us that most of the pollution is from motor vehicles from one type or another in this area.”
The region-wide impact is really striking. I live on the Westside, which had the most dramatic impact because of wind patterns and its proximity to the 405. But removing all those cars from the road improved the air quality in a region stretching hundreds of square miles.
This offers a valuable perspective, stepping back from the day-to-day efforts to improve fuel economy or relax congestion. The message here is that cars that burn fossil fuel make our air disgusting. Particulate matter dropped just minutes after the road closure, and increased minutes after the re-opening. It’s all about cars and tailpipe emissions. Reduce the cars, or change the emissions from the cars on the road, and you completely change the air we breathe.
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” Reduce the cars,”
yes, and change to electric cars, powered by renewable energy.
I come from a place with clean air.
We have driven to Los Angeles a few times, coming from Las Vegas.
We were astounded by the acrid pink haze hovering for at least sixty miles, as we drove down into the city.
And, not being used to it, I had trouble with irritation of my eyes, and with breathing.
you can also see it in most view shots on t.v. the cloud of pink haze is clearly visible hanging over the city.
I don’t know how people stand it.
There was a similar larger effect when planes stopped flying after the twin towers attack.
I love my all electric car. I look forward to $20 a gallon gasoline.
“Reduce the cars, or change the emissions from the cars on the road, and you completely change the air we breathe”
Unless of course you are unfortunate enough to live next to or near someone who cooks their meals with charcoal and wood or heats their home with wood. The smoke particles generated when cooking a single hamburger outdoors under a propane or natural gas flame are equivalent to a diesel truck traveling 143 miles.
Every day in Los Angeles, which has the worst air quality in the country already, there are several thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of people who cook with charcoal and wood almost every day of the year, not to mention the zillions who heat their home with wood every year pumping toxic smoke pollution into their neighbors breathing air, and all this on top of roadside freeway emissions that we are all exposed to.
SCAQMD refuses to deal with these issues, because they are not a complaint driven pollution prevention bureaucracy. They hide behind “rule 402″.
Freedom does not apply to injuring others or putting others at risk needlessly. These pollution intense activities are inappropriate in an urban setting, especially LA, and if their emissions were eliminated “they would completely change the air we breathe”.
For a change, a WIN for the environment and the planet — !!
There’s been less air in our air, at any rate — and more of
that greasy cheeseburger smell in the air.
More and more we’re all facing long lines of traffic to get
anywhere and you have to keep your windows closed and the air
conditioning on in order to avoid the GASOLINE FUMES of the
cars stopped along with you.
We need Electric cars, solar batteries and Mass Transportation —
NATIONALIZE the oil industry –
STOP the oil wars –
NO OIL – NO WARS —
And let’s begin to acknowledge and give some real assistance
to 46 MILLION impoverished Americans who may be living in
their cars.