Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonfarnon | Hacker News Reader

It's not surprising that minorities would be exposed to more traffic given the proportion that live in urban areas, but that doesn't rule out that the poorest in the country (minorities and whites) are not the most exposed. I guess my basic question is, are the poorest people still living in city centers? In my city the central, densest areas became some of the wealthiest, the quieter outlying areas the poorest.

View on HN

> …that doesn't rule out that the poorest in the country (minorities and whites) are not the most exposed.

Setting aside race, to me it seems like "economically disadvantaged populations share a disproportionate burden of traffic-related air pollution exposure" makes this pretty clear. <shrug>

It's not 1950, everyone on this site has a 1+ GFLOP machine so there's no need to squash a bunch of independent variables down to one dimension or as you call it "set aside race." Unless you're not a hacker, that is.

Even into the 1960s wealthy black people were prevented from buying and living in the 'good' parts of even northern US cities.

Care to enlighten us as to the second paragraph? I only found some misc stuff, nothing appearing to be systemic or enshrined in law. In fact I see laws against such things being enforced more than lamented in searches.

Why do you assume that fine particulate is at the highest in city centers? It's often higher than average, but the highest is frequently outside of the city center, where highways have been constructed through pre-existing, poorer neighborhoods. The South Bronx is the famous example of this[1].

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/04/new-york-sou...

In Seattle, in the densest parts of the city are glass towers that certainly have filtered HVAC, and the poorest parts of the city are relatively low-density areas near the port (particulates from diesel trucks and ships), the cement plant, the nucor steel plant, the highly polluted duwamish river, and boeing field.

Density doesn't equal exposure.

> I guess my basic question is, are the poorest people still living in city centers?

I suppose that there likely are small numbers of people living far outside of cities and away from traffic, like up in the mountains of Appalachia or living off the grid in tents or in communes deep in forests, who are poorer than people you'd typically find in urban areas, but it's still the poor in the US who are dealing with the worst of the harms traffic causes compared to the better off/wealthy. They're also the least able to mitigate those harms or deal with the fallout caused by them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com