City's worst asthma zones sniffed out

BY JORDAN LITE

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Sunday, June 17th 2007, 4:00 AM

It's a typical evening rush hour on Canal St.: Cars and trucks plod their way to the Holland Tunnel as pedestrians on packed sidewalks dodge between them.

As the pedestrians pass a truck idling on the corner of Varick St., they catch a blast of pollution from its tailpipe, a dose so large it maxes out a machine used to measure the vehicle’s toxic emissions.

"It's dangerous for children to be breathing this," said Lorita Ko, 40, whose 7-year-old son, Keith, attends school in nearby Chinatown.

About one in five of the 300 children in his after-school program at Public School 124 have asthma, and Keith keeps an inhaler there in case he has an asthma attack.

As legislators debate Mayor Bloomberg's congestion-pricing plan, air-pollution samples collected by the Daily News across the city highlight another side of the debate: how the city's clogged streets impact New Yorkers' health.

Residential blocks on Staten Island had the cleanest air, while the Bronx and Brooklyn had the dirtiest, according to data collected by The News.

In all five boroughs, vehicle emissions were elevated in areas of congested traffic, often spiking with the passage of buses and trucks.

"That's really sad that people have to live with this pollution," said Mel Peffers, the air quality program manager at the Environmental Defense group, who assisted The News in measuring ultrafine particles. "It's so pervasive. We've got to clean that up."

The tiny particles produced during the fuel-combustion process in vehicles carry toxic chemicals. And because they can lodge deep in the lungs and pass into the bloodstream, they are of significant interest to scientists who have found increased risks of asthma and heart disease to anyone regularly within 500 to 1,500 feet of traffic.

"There's so much traffic," said Yvette Bonilla of the South Bronx, 51, who lives just blocks away from the Bruckner Expressway and has asthma. Her four grandchildren and their cousin also have asthma.
"Sometimes they tell me, 'Mommy, I can't breathe,'" Bonilla said of her grandkids.

Bonilla's 9-year-old grandson Roberto Reyes said vehicle emissions in the neighborhood can be so suffocating that, "I hold my breath until I get out of it."

The News collected air samples on Manida St., a tree-lined, residential block off the Bruckner. The air had 30,000 particles per cubic centimeter of air. There is no agreed-upon standard for safe levels of ultrafine particles.

The particle numbers jumped to 70,000 and got even higher along the entrance to the highway. They stayed elevated, in the 40,000-to-50,000 range, along commercial E. 163rd St.

Passing trucks drove the readings up to 120,000.

By comparison, the machine clocked as few as 12,000 particles per cubic centimeter of air on Fingerboard Road West on Staten Island and 18,000 in Central Park.

It maxed out at a spike of 500,000 during the evening rush hour near an idling truck on Canal and Varick Sts.

Asthma is influenced by many factors, not just pollution.

But the wide range in air pollution levels documented by The News shows "quite clearly that where there's traffic, there's a lot of particles," said Pat Kinney, an associate professor of environmental health at Columbia's Mailman School.

"Most people would agree that more ultrafine counts is worse than fewer," said George Thurston, an associate professor of environmental health at NYU Medical Center. "With air pollution . . . even at lower levels, you get some susceptible people. As you go to higher and higher levels, a bigger and bigger percentage of the population is affected."

After London instituted congestion pricing in 2003, vehicle emissions dropped by 12% to 20%, according to 2005 research.

And when Atlanta enacted temporary traffic restrictions during the 1996 Olympics, childhood asthma hospitalizations among Medicaid recipients fell by nearly 42%, a 2001 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed.

If the Legislature backs Bloomberg's congestion-pricing plan, New York could see similar effects by reducing traffic levels and increasing traffic speed, because idling vehicles can emit up to three times the level of pollutants as those that are moving, said Andy Darrell of the Environmental Defense group.

"If congestion pricing diminished pollution in some parts of New York but increased it in other parts of New York, that would be something one would have to look at carefully as a potential negative aspect," Kinney said. But "if it's equitable and everybody benefits, then that's good."

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