Air quality is getting worse everywhere thanks to wildfires and the like, but my point was that you don’t look at a city like NYC or Boston and see an orange haze from the smog and leaded gasoline emissions anymore.
The biggest issues with cities largely come down to cars, and having grown up in a summer beach hotspot, I can tell you that it can be just as bad out in the countryside. From noise pollution to emissions to traffic, you can largely thank cars for all of it. Road noise is actually one of the loudest things in a city. In places that have limited access to cars, you can immediately tell the difference.
I live about sixty miles east, and a mile above, Los Angeles. There’s a few spots on the road to my house that have a direct line of sight to the DTLA skyscrapers. Which I can actually see approximately 5 days a year, when specific wind conditions blow away all the smog.
The sky’s certainly less brown than it used to be, but it’s still brown.
That’s fair, but my understanding is that Los Angeles is an extreme case rather than a representative example of a typical American city, in part because of its unfortunate location in a valley and in part because of its sprawl. The fact that pollution is particularly hard to control there is why California is legally uniquely able to apply for its own set of automobile pollution regulations that are stricter than the rest of the country.
Los Angeles is an extreme case, but air pollution remains an urban problem. Emissions have been reduced, not eliminated.
It can still be a problem without being so visible as to limit your vision to less than a city block while the infirm non-hyperbolically suffocate to death.
Smog hasn’t been a problem in US cities since like the 60s…
Bad air quality still exists. Sorry I’m just not used to that quality of air. My bad?
Air quality is getting worse everywhere thanks to wildfires and the like, but my point was that you don’t look at a city like NYC or Boston and see an orange haze from the smog and leaded gasoline emissions anymore.
The biggest issues with cities largely come down to cars, and having grown up in a summer beach hotspot, I can tell you that it can be just as bad out in the countryside. From noise pollution to emissions to traffic, you can largely thank cars for all of it. Road noise is actually one of the loudest things in a city. In places that have limited access to cars, you can immediately tell the difference.
I live about sixty miles east, and a mile above, Los Angeles. There’s a few spots on the road to my house that have a direct line of sight to the DTLA skyscrapers. Which I can actually see approximately 5 days a year, when specific wind conditions blow away all the smog.
The sky’s certainly less brown than it used to be, but it’s still brown.
That’s fair, but my understanding is that Los Angeles is an extreme case rather than a representative example of a typical American city, in part because of its unfortunate location in a valley and in part because of its sprawl. The fact that pollution is particularly hard to control there is why California is legally uniquely able to apply for its own set of automobile pollution regulations that are stricter than the rest of the country.
Los Angeles is an extreme case, but air pollution remains an urban problem. Emissions have been reduced, not eliminated.
It can still be a problem without being so visible as to limit your vision to less than a city block while the infirm non-hyperbolically suffocate to death.
More like the '90s and the Montreal protocol, but yeah. It ain’t what it was. Now it’s wildfire smoke from Canada!