Tuesday 26 August 2014

London coats, your lungs with NO2

I have in the past been a resident of the Big Smoke,
London. It is an exciting town. So exciting that
you forget that the air is killing you.

I lived in the East end, and not near any factories.
Still, I would go running in a green park, and
never near cars (I had learned that, but I see
folks every day running in traffic- I equate it
to smoking).

Still, I would find my health getting worse
after jogging and not better. I knew something
was wrong. I find that my nose gets irritated
in big cities too, like Athens. It just can't take
the exhaust stink. Well London doesn't stink
like that , but its air is still a soup.

I have chats with people who are interested
in the air pollution in London, and these people
are having an effect on the posh mayor Boris.
He has had his world rocked by the data. The
story changed overnight once even he could
not ignore the stats.

Still, these are not the pro-cyclist lobby. The
cyclists are still trying not to get killed. They
have no time to worry about smog, but they
are in the thick of it, with their lungs fully
open. They must be shortening their lives
with every day. Watch this:



This guy talks about his search for biking masks.
He is not a cycling freak. He realises the
damage to his lungs.
He claims that cars have air filters for the A/C so drivers are safe, plus he gives stats on the amount of air taken in during activity is 4 times as much as the sedentary driver. Cyclists are brave and/or crazy.

So, Oxford Street is the big toney shopping
area for the rich and the great unwashed,
cheek to cheek. I find myself getting butt-
checked by fat rich broads.

Apparently it's the worst most polluted
main street on the planet. It's worse than
Beijing where they wear masks.

Look for the Clean Air sign turning black.
You see that we have taken most industry
out of cities but since then, we have  let
the rich decide how to take debt and make
our cities in their image, without any concern
for the cockroach-like people that make
the city tick. Us.


checkit: The Guardian


Welcome to London – the most toxic town on the planet
Oxford Street's more polluted than Beijing and the sky's alive with cranes. Just what kind of city is Boris Johnson creating?

Zoe Williams
Tuesday 8 July 2014 18.55 BST
Emissions research from King's College London has found nitrogen dioxide concentrations on Oxford Street to be worse than they are anywhere else on Earth, in the history of air pollution. David Carslaw, who led the research, said: "To my knowledge this is the highest in the world in terms of both hourly and annual mean." That's higher than Beijing and Dhaka, higher than anywhere where face masks are the norm and the streets seem to throng with lost medics, and more than 11 times the EU limit.
A spokesman for the mayor of London called the figures "misleading", and said that the capital's air pollution was lower than that in many world cities. The fact is, there is too much stop-start traffic, too many tall buildings, too much nitrogen dioxide. But if you were more interested in winning a debate than you are in the air your fellow Londoners were breathing, you could see this as room for manoeuvre.
I met a consultant for Transport for London recently who was very keen on this art project: a clean white canvas, with "fresh air" painted in a light glue across the middle of it. You'd stick it up in Vauxhall Cross, in central London, and over time the "fresh air" would go completely black. I wasn't wild about the idea, on the grounds of urban morale. What are you going to do, as you watch your local canvas get darker and darker, and imagine what that is doing to your internal workings? How will that help?
And yet, arrested by these figures, although unsurprised by them – having cycled down Oxford Street often enough to have seen the diesel fumes shimmering in the sun – I think there probably are things we can do.
. We would have a 20mph speed limit across every conurbation, calming all traffic and reducing the braking and rapid acceleration that have made nitrogen dioxide levels as high as they are. We would consolidate loads on the outskirts of the capital, and drive them in only overnight. If we were serious, in other words, we would make a concerted effort to make all our cities liveable, and stop splitting hairs about which was really damaging our health, between doing no exercise and creating cities in which exercise was undoable.
Third, at some point, we're surely allowed to ask some deeper questions about what this picture tells us. If we have the most polluted main street on the planet, then it is likely that we are taking on characteristics of developing nations: rapid development and urbanisation with insufficient regard for people who live around it, who most probably won't ever benefit from it. In London, the skyline is alive with cranes: the financial services group Deloitte uses words such as "in full swing", but to me the cranes look more predatory than creative. I don't get the sense, when I see another tower of glass, that sometime soon it's going to look like a thriving, mixed community.
We've become so accustomed to the mantra that businesses and developers are king that we've ceased to even make the demand for some kind of equity between their interests and ours….