Rising Disease and Traffic in New York City

Traffic-congested New York City has staggering rates of asthma and higher cancer risk

As a first step toward understanding the potential threat in New York City, Environmental Defense Fund mapped a simple 500-foot risk zone around the city's most congested streets (see "Who's at Risk in New York?"). The second step was to look at the city's disease rates and risks, which underscore the impact of traffic-related pollutants.

The lifetime cancer risk due to diesel exhaust in both Bronx County and Queens County is over 900 times the acceptable EPA standard, while New York County's risk is over 3000 times that limit. Vehicle emissions contribute over 80 percent of the total cancer risk from hazardous air pollutants in New York City.

Staggering rates of asthma

Diesel emissions have been associated with asthma and its symptoms. New York's asthma statistics are staggering: An astounding 300,000 children and 700,000 adults living in New York City have been diagnosed with asthma. In 2000, New York City's children were twice as likely to be hospitalized for asthma as the average American child.

Since people with asthma are much more sensitive to air pollutants than people with healthy lungs, this means there are roughly a million New Yorkers who need special protection from noxious air.

Rising traffic levels in New York

Minimizing these health problems requires a two-pronged solution: managing traffic growth rates and cleaning up dirty vehicles. On the plus side, New Yorkers have relatively low rates of car ownership and benefit from an extensive public transportation system.

But because Manhattan is the only county in the country with more jobs than residents, many of those workers drive from or through the other boroughs, exacerbating existing traffic snarls throughout the city.

Since the 1920s, vehicle travel into Manhattan south of 60th Street (the Central Business District or CBD) has increased by an average of seven percent annually. If that trend continued for the next 25 years, it would mean one million vehicles per day entering the CBD. Given the already high level of congestion, that volume of traffic would be untenable.

Even under scenarios that include traffic management improvements:

• In the Bronx, vehicle miles traveled are expected to increase by almost ten percent, to ten million miles per day.
• In Queens, the average speed will drop to 13.8 miles per hour.

Currently, drivers in the New York region spend more than the equivalent of a full work week each year stuck in traffic. These increases in traffic and congestion require multifaceted actions to provide a healthy and livable New York for the 21st century.

Posted: 17-Sep-2008; Updated: 30-Oct-2008