As almost every car on the road is powered by fossil fuels, vehicles give off air pollution as they drive. With the increasing mobility demands for passengers and freight, the level of air pollution also increases. Transportation activities are a dominant factor behind the emission of most pollutants and thus we cannot neglect their impacts on the environment.
In the article Dismantling Transportation Apartheid: The Quest for Equity, the authors (Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres) state that some transportation activities have unintentional consequences of imposing different environmental and health burdens on most of citizens, especially minority and low-income communities. It is important to note that analyzing and addressing environmental problem may assist decision makers in determining the distributional effects of transportation. (Page 16 ) Robert D. Bullard also mentions in Anatomy of Sprawl that another harmful by-product of air pollution is increased asthma and other respiratory illness. Atlanta had 580 hospital admissions and 1740 emergency rooms linked to bad air. (Page 7) For this reason, transportation pollution and health problems are closely interrelated.
In fact, millions of tons of gases each year are released into the atmosphere from the transportation industry. Such gases have detrimental effects to the human health and are associated with lung cancer, heart disease, respiratory illness and premature death. Long-term exposure to pollution from traffic may be significant a threat for premature death as traffic crashes and obesity. In California alone, pollution is a factor in an estimated 8800 premature deaths a year<1>. This is really an alarming statistic because it reveals the fact that although symptoms of these diseases are not able to be manifest in the short period of time, ignoring and underestimating the severity of harmful gases not only increase the opportunities of getting chronicle disease but also allow the traffic pollution to become worse without any remedy. The health risks are exacerbated by transportation patterns that often embed heavy traffic in poor and predominantly minority neighborhoods. The American Lung Association has found that 61.3 percent of African American children, 67.7 percent of Asia American children, and 69.2 percent of Latino children live in areas that exceed air-quality standards for ozone, compared with 50.8 percent of white children<2>. People in these areas are just too passive because they cannot get involved in transportation decision. For long and sustainable development, government should find a way to alleviate gas emission and equally distribute the negative impacts of transit system.
Another problem is traffic noise. In 2009, Tukwila residents rallied against light-rail noise. Lots of loud spots include the south Tukwila curve at Highway 518, track switches in Rainier Valley and intersections along Seattle's Martin Luther King Jr. Way South, where train bells or clanging alarms annoy some neighbors. The agency has received 60 to 70 noise complaints, as well as 100 petition signatures from people in the Duwamish area<3>. It is reported that there is a striking contribution of noise to premature deaths from accidents and disease. Excessive exposure to traffic noise may account for three per cent of deaths in strokes and heart attacks. Furthermore, the daily life of people near light-rail track is heavily disturbed and lots of thing cannot be normally processed under the annoying effect of noise.
Figure 1: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/zoom/html/2009451555.html
Despite the direct health effects mentioned above, there are some indirect health effects related to the transportation. People without reliable and affordable ways to get around are cut off from jobs, social connection and services. Access to transportation and to resources for healthy living is linked.
I think whether people can get a good job with high wages is one of important determinations of health. Poverty and poor health are inseparable. However, as residence and working places moved further apart, people without ability to drive and access to public transport always have the difficulty in getting the satisfied jobs. This makes commuting to work unpredictable and more expensive. 33 percent of poor African Americans and 25 percent of poor Latinos lack automobile access, compared with 12.1 percent of poor whites<4>. Low-wage households (earning $20000 to ￥35000) living far from employment centers spend 37 percent of their incomes on transportation. In neighborhoods well served by public transportation, families only spend an average of nine percent<5>. How can we expect poor people to get nutritious foods and medical care to sustain health if they have to spend a large amount of money on transportation which already eat into other necessities?
Finally, I must state that transportation system should seriously consider environmental quality, health and equitable access in order to create cleaner and healthier world.
Work cited
<1> http://www.arb.ca.gov/research/health/fs/pm_ozone-fs.pdf
<2> http://www.lungusa.org/site/pp.asp?c=dvLUK9O0E&b=44567
<3> Sound Transit calls light-rail noise a public-health problem
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009938600_trainnoise25m.html
<4> Program on housing and urban policy (Steven Raphael & Alan Berube )
http://urbanpolicy.berkeley.edu/pdf/raphael.pdf
<5> A heavy load: The combined housing and transportation burdens of working families
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