> “Our findings emphasise that exercise remains beneficial even in polluted environments,” lead researcher Professor Po-Wen Ku said in a statement. [...] “We don’t want to discourage people from exercising outdoors,” said Co-author Professor Paola Zaninotto.
The health effects of exercise outdoors are combined from two effects:
- Positive effects due to exercise. These start out strong but level off after a while.
- Negative effects due to pollution. These increase almost linearly with time spent outside.
One might ask, is there an amount of daily exercise at which the negative effects overpower the positive ones? Yes, in a handful of cities around the world, after a few hours of exercise, the pollution makes additional outdoors exercise actually harmful.
But almost everywhere a marginal minute of exercise provides a positive effect on health regardless of time already spent exercising, and there is nowhere in the world where something like an hour of exercise a day is a net negative. Get out there. Pick an active means of commuting (cycling, running, walking, skiing, rollerblading, skateboarding, unicycling) and don't worry so much about pollution unless you live in one of those single-digit cities which I forget where they are, but probably concentrated in Asia.
(I feel bad about typing this out without linking to the source. I'm looking for it in my notes!)
Like I totally agree with encouraging exercise most places, but let’s be careful to not understate the risks of pollution. The paper states that above 35μg/m^3 of PM2.5 pollution, the protective benefits of exercise were “non-significant” against the increased risk of cancer, and they stopped measuring at 50μg/m^3. It’s reasonable to assume that above 50, it’s a net negative to exercise outdoors.
There are lots of places in the world that exceed 35μg/m^3 PM2.5, and quite a few that exceed 50μg/m^3 PM2.5 regularly - the entire SF Bay Area is over 35 right now. Los Angeles and San Diego are both above 50 right now, as are huge swaths of Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia... it’s a bit more than just a few handful of cities. Exercising near wildfires can be quite unhealthy too. There are places in the world where exercising outdoors is harmful to your health, but most of that is self-regulating.
The other thing to note from the paper is that even the range of 0 to 10 μg/m^3 of PM2.5 causes a 30% decrease in the benefits of exercise. That’s a pretty big reduction of benefits from exercise for the EPA’s “Good” category of air. It’s still a net positive, so you should still exercise, but just a little pollution has pretty big measurable negative effects.
Active commuting is great, you get exercise, and help reduce pollution at the same time. Even if exercise in polluted areas is beneficial, we also definitely need to keep raising awareness and improving air quality, for the time spent not exercising, for people with athsma and heart disease, for the people who can’t and/or don’t exercise. We should worry about it a little, while we exercise. ;)
There have been days in California where just walking around outside for 15 minutes without an N95 on made me lightheaded. And that wasn’t even the worst of it with the Bladerunner skies - we all had N95s by then. Stay inside if it’s over 150 AQI.
I remember an interview with the producthead of Google Earth (the desktop client), she said when photographing all the streets, the cars also checked for air pollution:
She mentioned a capital in Europe, where the amount of particles under certain sizes differed by 10x from one crossing to the next.
The measurement may very well be accurate but statements like that should set off massive red flags and not be taken at face value. A factor of ten difference for something that just kinda diffuses through the air doesn't "just exist". You don't get gradients like that "naturally" for the most part. It's the result of something. Maybe there's a source something is upwind of and something else is downwind of. Maybe there's conditions causing it to concentrate. Or it varies 10x day to day, but on an average basis it equals out. Etc. Etc.
Doesn't it really depend? Like I recall Oxford Street in London at one point was notoriously bad because it was a bottleneck for a lot of slow moving traffic so that one length of road was especially bad. 10x bad I don't know... But it's not hard to imagine some of the quieter roads filtering off like Berwick St or Dean St would be considerably better
Slow moving traffic at one intersection and free flowing traffic at another could easily account for a 10x ratio of particulate pollution, especially in European capitals where diesels are prevalent.
But a 10x ratio on the same road is also plausible if the Google car is following a large truck on one pass and then driving by itself on the second.
Especially the small particles in large cities are mostly caused by Biodiesel fuels - at least from my anecdotal experience.
I have a Phillips air purifier which includes a sensor for particles - whenever Diesel cars drove by the particles spiked and it went full throttle for a while if I had my window open.
I wish more people paid attention to air quality. I'm a delivery driver and air quality has a noticeable effect on my energy levels throughout the day and also my mood. Slightly rainy days are probably my favorite days to work because no one is outside digging up roads and kicking up tire dust with leaf blowers and the rain seems to clean the air a bit.
As a motorcycle rider, it's always very noticeable. The stale air from the helmet coupled with the shit shit air from outside makes me very sleepy and you can develop a sore throat in a few hours
If you have ever been to a city that has banned fossil fuels then you can absolutely tell the difference, to most of the overpopulated European cities that I have visited. It’s astonishing how peaceful and comfortable it is to run or even stroll when every breath is just 100% refreshing; you feel 10 pounds lighter. Meanwhile the blackened filter of our home HVAC needs replacement again… and allergies.
Which cities are you referring to? Some cities have policies that discourage gas and diesel cars, and plans to outlaw them by 2030, but I'm not aware of any that have banned them outright yet.
Maybe you mean this, but does "fossil fuel" really mean Diesel engines? Those were very awful to breathe around and were widespread in European cities as we all know.
Sadly, fossil fuel (pollution) has been marketed as a masculine culture thing now. In the free (=individualistic) West, I expect it to stick around for at least another 50 years.
I expect less than 10. Once you drive an EV, every big noisy diesel feels impotent and gutless. Kind of like a small yappy dog that’s all bark and no bite. There’s just nothing like the zero-lag gut-punching acceleration of an EV.
The industry is trying their best to fight against it. The EU is currently planning to ban new ICE cars from 2035, but the conservative German government & car lobbyists are trying to get them to drop those plans... That, combined with high tariffs for cheap asian EVs will probably artificially keep us on ICEs for a while longer.
Unfortunately it's not really up to us plebs, it's up to the rich and powerful, who have every incentive in the world to continue fossil fuel use.
Trump has outright said he's pro fossil fuels and his policy choice shows it. If there was a proposal to ban or limit EVs in the US, I would not at all be surprised. These people do not care about you or me or all, just their pocket linings.
Before people freak out about their morning run, I’m very hard pressed to find 25 PM2.5 on this map of the US. (Note these numbers are AQI, you have to zoom into the bad AQI numbers and look at their PM2.5). Albeit it’s a Saturday morning, not rush hour.
Please note that air quality in an area varies dramatically over time. You are looking at a current snapshot with maps like that. The map linked below has his more historical data and I can see several _weeks_ this past year in my area (which currently has very good air quality) where the PM 2.5 weekly average exceeded 25ug/m^3.
Localized phenomena like a neighbor starting a fire, up to the activity of nearby factories and power plants, up to national and global phenomena like wildfires and weather patterns, all have dramatic effects. Looking at an air quality map once and determining that you don’t have to think about air quality because you’re in the US is a mistake.
Exercise outdoors is a wonderful thing, obviously, but there are some days, even in the US, where you might think twice or even consider shifting your exercise to a different (less-polluted) time of the day.
> Localized phenomena like a neighbor starting a fire,
Summer evenings at home in my small Ohio village are often a health hazard, a polluted nightmare driven by the perverse compulsive ignition of so-called 'recreational' yard fires by pyromaniac neighbors.
If it is an Ozone Action day and/or a Heat Advisory day, it is near certain that one or more of the Don't Tread On Me jamokes who live nearby will come out of their houses at sunset, pile a bunch of garbage into a 55-gallon drum or a circle of rocks, sprinkle with accelerant, toss a match and back away. Eyes glazed, they'll watch for a minute, then go back inside, sometimes coming back out every ten minutes or so to refuel the fire, other times letting it blaze until the original pile is down to embers. In any case, there is a new plume of local smoke to add to the day's irritants.
It is a startling phenom to observe, let alone endure. The behavior is made all the more crazy, imho, by the presence of children. These are parents, asserting their rights to burn, and teaching their children to Live Free Or Die. It seems to me to be driven by a rebelliousness, part of the anti-woke wave, country-fried counter-culture, as in "I got your global warming right here, pard".
It's like, listening to country music stations and realizing how many (most!) contemporary and historical Country songs are themed around alcohol-worship.
But I digress.
I apologise. I was triggered by the mention of 'localized phenomena' and the horrified realization that so many of my fellow citizens are self-destructive cray-cray.
I’m not familiar with Ohio village, but I grew up in unincorporated county land in the Texas boonies. My dad had a burn barrel, and would dump oil into the ground “putting it back from where it came”. Even as a kid, nothing about it felt right. Just that experience alone gives no doubt to service members working the burn pits qualifying for disability
To be fair at one point in time people were actually told to dispose of used oil by dumping it into some stony ground. I live in a rural area in the north and most people have burn barrels but 99.9% of people exclusively burn cardboard and paper.
If only you could see it. In the big cities the air quality has improved, however, I am not sure if it really has, or if we are now just burning hydrocarbons more efficiently so that the particle sizes have become invisible.
Put it this way, although cars are allegedly better than they were, fuel consumption hasn't dropped considerably. The cars are more numerous than ever, and, although there are EVs, there are still more ICE cars than there were in the good old days when petrol came with lead in it.
I am not sure that most people in urban areas even know what good air tastes and smells like. I take a canal path through lush countryside, far from any cars for most of the way. This canal has an aqueduct (or is it a viaduct?) over a motorway and the contrast is incredible. You go from basically smelling flowers to air pollution and back to clean air again quite quickly, so the filth is totally noticeable. Note the cars on the motorway are going at speed, so they should be working efficiently (until a few decades ago 56 mph was what engines were optimised for regarding efficiency in the UK).
If just living in a major city then you don't get this instant switch from bad to good air. So you just don't notice it. If you could see the filth, you would prefer a swimming pool that was pissed in, it is that toxic.
If you do have to live in a city, my top tip is to find out if there are any meteorologists in town. If there are, buy a house next to where they are living. Anecdotal, however, I used to work with meteorologists and they would always live to the West of the city centre, to get cleaner air than those living in the east of the city, or further downwind.
Again anecdotal, however, due to the canal and motorway experience described above, in post-industrial countries such as the UK, it is definitely the vehicles rather than any other source. Given the choice of microparticles that just get in your blood or clumps of big particles that you can eventually cough up and spit out, I would much prefer the latter. My hunch is that the legislation to improve vehicle emissions has optimised the exhaust for nanoparticles. Please prove me wrong!
Sure thing, here's a report from the Greater London Authority tracking the history of air quality in the city since the "Great Smog" event 1952, which caused an estimated 4000 deaths.
The main takeaway is that yes, urban air quality (including fine particulate matter) has improved massively over time, but most of it had little to do with road traffic, as for decades it wasn't a significant contributor to the overall mix. The important change was the move away from burning solid fuels like coal for household heating and in power stations within cities, to using gas and electricity with larger, out-of-town power stations.
As other sources have declined, road traffic has indeed become the largest contribution to urban air pollution, but even here there has been progress. Fine particulate emissions have continued to decline as car manufacturers have adapted to more stringent regulation (cheating scandals notwithstanding). A bigger problem now is higher non-exhaust emissions caused by larger and heavier vehicles. This is something else that will need to be solved via regulation. Other policies like Low Traffic Neighbourhoods can also help to restrict the worst pollution to major roads and away from where most people live.
Urban air quality is never going to be as good as that in the countryside, but it's not true to believe that no progress has been made, and that it's simply been a switch in the type of pollution.
> I am not sure that most people in urban areas even know what good air tastes and smells like.
I run air filters in my apartment throughout winter months, which tend to be the worst in terms of air quality here.
When I go outside in the morning I can really smell the stuff in the air, for a brief moment, until I get used to it. But you definitely notice the difference!
> Anecdotal, however, I used to work with meteorologists and they would always live to the West of the city centre, to get cleaner air than those living in the east of the city, or further downwind.
The industrial-revolution era mill owners were very aware of this too. Posh area of Manchester is to the south (westerly winds;) Leeds to the north (mix of northerly and westerly winds I believe).
Also, anecdotally, smaller towns and villages can have poor air quality too due to log burners. They're an absolute pain. You can tell when an area has become gentrified when shiny new chimneys start popping up or a log burner shop opens up!
Lots of particles cars emit are from tires and break pads. I think someone was measuring that but I don’t have sources but most likely I read that somewhere in the comments of HN.
One good thing about electric vehicles is that regenerative breaking effectively eradicates brake pad use and pollution. Only tire dust remains significant.
If we could incentivize small, lightweight electric vehicles over the current trend of large (heavy) luxury vehicles, there would be a lot of benefits. I’d like a trend towards “easy and safe motorcycle” instead of our current “living room that moves itself.”
Hiking in the hills / mountains is one of the healthiest sports there is, unless you already have messed up legs. Or other mountain sports, but at least those I do have additional risks of injury or death that most folks would find unacceptable.
Not everybody has easy access to mountains, but then we all forge our paths through life and at least at certain points of life we have some wiggle room to choose where to spend the rest of it. Polluted big cities may (or may not) bring more wealth but there is a cost.
I look from my balcony on a large forest which is natural reserve, begins right in front of us. On the other side of the village there is a 15km band of vineyards on steep hills. I go up and end up in wild hills fully covered in pine forests and actually OK for winter sports (planning to do skitour there tomorrow morning). I go the other side and its 100km wide lake with crystal clear water, highly swimmable in summer. Highway is few km away, 100m lower.
Coming to city makes me realize the various not OK smells I didn't sense when I was living there. Not regretting the move (but sure as hell hoping some part of work will remain WFH so its not just kids reaping benefits of living on a more healthy and overall better place)
I am hoping by the end of the decade smartphones start having pm2.5 and co2 sensors built-in
and then next decade smartwatches
Once EVERYONE starts seeing air-quality on their phones every hour of the day everywhere they are, they will start to care and then eventually, maybe do something about the politics to improve air-quality
Imagine the game-changer if air-quality was in the next iPhone
They already make sensors that can go on a keyring so inside a phone is not implausible within a few years
I doubt it, maybe in rich countries where the air is already pretty good. There are enough places out there (mine included) where you can see and feel air pollution without using any sensors: limited visibility on the order of a few dozen meters, smell of burning coal and rubber tires in the air, windows blackened by soot. Everybody knows how terrible the air is, talks about it daily, and can't actually do anything about it.
I've been advocating for closed windows and increased use of air purifiers and FFP3/N99 respirators, and had some limited success among people I know. People are often easily convinced once they see the state of their filter or respirator after a few days of use.
Yeah it’d be cool if the phones had sensors. Everyone can see local AQI already though; weather app has AQI, and you can tap on it for a local region map, as well as a table of pollutant details.
the "local AQI" is usually from a single government sensor for 100 mile radius which is useless as pollution is highly localized (think neighbor idiots burning leaves all day)
also doesn't tell you indoor air quality which where you sleep REALLY matters if the co2 is sky high
best third party AQI network is PurpleAIR but even with them certain cities have few or none
US doesn't even have mandatory air-quality sensors at airports, which it should because that's where most of the other weather measurements are coming from on most apps, even if you are 30-50 miles away
> the “local AQI” is usually from a single government sensor for 100 mile radius
What’s your source on this? IPhone’s AQI report says it’s from Breezometer, which links to Google’s Enterprise AQI offerings, which claim 500m resolution and multiple sources (“over 70 local indexes”). I don’t know but would speculate that Purple Air might be one of the licensed sources.
Even if measurement was perfect, people would have incentive to ignore it. Who wants to be told they can't do something, based on some claim that it might be bad for them in the very long term? People still smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol despite those being known to be bad for decades.
Air pollution, like numerous other things like water quality and medical care, is too big to be made into a individual decision.
Almost all of the problem is PM2.5 but its not the only pollution problem. For PM2.5 a simple N95/FFP2 mask will drop the particles you breath in to basically zero and remove the health consequences of them and as we saw in 2020-2021 you can happily run in them they don't restrict breathing much at all. You do not have to put up with the damage from polluted air alongside the exercise.
Respirators can't do anything about volatile components that have low boiling points: sulfur and nitrogen oxides, hundreds of often carcinogenic aromatic hydrocarbons released by burning any organic matter. If you wear a good FFP3 respirator in heavily polluted air, it's very noticeable that it doesn't filter out everything — the smell gets through. And it's a specific smell, reminds me of walking through charred ruins of a building that has burned down 5-10 years ago and never rebuilt.
I had a notable experience at a church sometime during COVID, where I was wearing an N95 mask. The church’s incense could be smelt partially through the mask, and the scent that made it through was much worse than the combined scent that you normally smell.
And all the while, nothing is done to get old 2-stroke mopeds of the road in Europe. It’s such a low hanging fruit to get those hyper polluters out of cities but in an individualistic society, personal cult status seems more important than common health.
The problem is that they are not cost competitive at the time of sales and the type of people who buy those are not exactly the smartest when it comes to total cost of ownership calculation.
Over time an electric version would be much cheaper (a few hundred kilometers depending on electricity price) but it's also not as convenient/capable/performant so it's a not exactly an easy sell to the target customer.
I do agree that they are highly annoying but the reality is that they are still in use because there is no real equivalency in the electric world.
I look at the PM2.5 data for my city every day, and at this point (Nov) in the winter season, the only acceptable time to exercise is between 2PM-4PM after vertical mixing kicked in. Outside that duration, particulates are elevated after morning rush our, after evening rush hour, or during overnight inversion trapping evening rush hour + wood burning smoke until the next morning rush hour.
This is one the main reasons why I would prefer working remote, it is hard to utilize this time well (for exercise) if you are in the office.
At least with PM you can wear a mask, although I am still searching for the best one that works during intense exercise.
Also wanted to point out
"Trump EPA moves to abandon rule that sets tough standards for deadly soot pollution"
Thanks, that's one of the masks I use! Unlike the GVS SPM587 it has a quick release thing so you can get to your hydration for water and microplastics :/
It sounds terrible . What will happend in the future?! The research doesn't differentiate between seasons , and every one knows how polluted the air is in the winter when everyone is heating their home and apartament.
I believe poor air quality in developing countries stems mostly from lack of technology. Cooking and heating with wood (or dung), no filters on power plants, old cars etc.
Nuclear power is a good option, wind and solar are usable for charging batteries - either EV batteries or storage banks which can be used to charge EV batteries. The problem with wind and solar is that there is no long-term storage solution as of yet but single-day storage is already achievable. Once enough nuclear capacity has been built up I foresee wind turbines disappearing from the landscape since they are cumbersome bird-killing eyesores. Solar power is there to stay since buildings need roofing anyway and we'll soon be at a point where the price difference between 'passive' roof cladding and PV 'panels' is close to negligible so it makes sense to install PV roof cladding and get some power for free, especially in places where air conditioning is popular.
Power plants are usually not placed inside cities. Less gasoline cars inside cities will definitely improve the local situation, not just limited to CO2.
EVs generate far, far less brake pad dust, most of their braking is regeneration via the motors.
Tires get more efficient every year, dust has reduced as the companies compete to make them last longer, and we're finally seeing the tire industry respond to pressure to reduce toxic runoff. Michelin's been removing phenols, for instance: https://resicare.michelin.com/news/michelin-resicare-resin-1...
One more reason to look to an electrically heated future. Where I live the air becomes unpleasant in winter as some neighbours heat their homes by burning what i can only assume are old tires and horse carcasses.
oh, it's illegal where I live. But some people pretty clearly ignore that. Enforcement doesn't seem to be a thing. I think this is one of those laws that falls into the category of things that we just have to rely on people's good will to carry out. Like small-time littering and not cleaning up after your dog, some people just don't seem to care.
FWIW, I think - based on not feeling my throat close up most of the time - that the number of people who do this is small.
I remember as a kid visiting the home of a relative who had an old oven for wood/coal heating, even though the primary heating was now a gas (natural gas not gasoline) heater.
The old oven remained though, and was used as a self-emptying trash can. When it filled up, a fire was lit to empty it. I don't remember what the sorting rules were (I assume "does it burn well and not smell up the apartment too badly when lighting it") and how common plastic packaging was back then, but I'm sure that the emissions coming out from the chimney were not a concern.
I want to pull two quotes from the article.
> “Our findings emphasise that exercise remains beneficial even in polluted environments,” lead researcher Professor Po-Wen Ku said in a statement. [...] “We don’t want to discourage people from exercising outdoors,” said Co-author Professor Paola Zaninotto.
The health effects of exercise outdoors are combined from two effects:
- Positive effects due to exercise. These start out strong but level off after a while.
- Negative effects due to pollution. These increase almost linearly with time spent outside.
One might ask, is there an amount of daily exercise at which the negative effects overpower the positive ones? Yes, in a handful of cities around the world, after a few hours of exercise, the pollution makes additional outdoors exercise actually harmful.
But almost everywhere a marginal minute of exercise provides a positive effect on health regardless of time already spent exercising, and there is nowhere in the world where something like an hour of exercise a day is a net negative. Get out there. Pick an active means of commuting (cycling, running, walking, skiing, rollerblading, skateboarding, unicycling) and don't worry so much about pollution unless you live in one of those single-digit cities which I forget where they are, but probably concentrated in Asia.
(I feel bad about typing this out without linking to the source. I'm looking for it in my notes!)
Like I totally agree with encouraging exercise most places, but let’s be careful to not understate the risks of pollution. The paper states that above 35μg/m^3 of PM2.5 pollution, the protective benefits of exercise were “non-significant” against the increased risk of cancer, and they stopped measuring at 50μg/m^3. It’s reasonable to assume that above 50, it’s a net negative to exercise outdoors.
There are lots of places in the world that exceed 35μg/m^3 PM2.5, and quite a few that exceed 50μg/m^3 PM2.5 regularly - the entire SF Bay Area is over 35 right now. Los Angeles and San Diego are both above 50 right now, as are huge swaths of Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia... it’s a bit more than just a few handful of cities. Exercising near wildfires can be quite unhealthy too. There are places in the world where exercising outdoors is harmful to your health, but most of that is self-regulating.
The other thing to note from the paper is that even the range of 0 to 10 μg/m^3 of PM2.5 causes a 30% decrease in the benefits of exercise. That’s a pretty big reduction of benefits from exercise for the EPA’s “Good” category of air. It’s still a net positive, so you should still exercise, but just a little pollution has pretty big measurable negative effects.
Active commuting is great, you get exercise, and help reduce pollution at the same time. Even if exercise in polluted areas is beneficial, we also definitely need to keep raising awareness and improving air quality, for the time spent not exercising, for people with athsma and heart disease, for the people who can’t and/or don’t exercise. We should worry about it a little, while we exercise. ;)
There have been days in California where just walking around outside for 15 minutes without an N95 on made me lightheaded. And that wasn’t even the worst of it with the Bladerunner skies - we all had N95s by then. Stay inside if it’s over 150 AQI.
I remember an interview with the producthead of Google Earth (the desktop client), she said when photographing all the streets, the cars also checked for air pollution: She mentioned a capital in Europe, where the amount of particles under certain sizes differed by 10x from one crossing to the next.
The measurement may very well be accurate but statements like that should set off massive red flags and not be taken at face value. A factor of ten difference for something that just kinda diffuses through the air doesn't "just exist". You don't get gradients like that "naturally" for the most part. It's the result of something. Maybe there's a source something is upwind of and something else is downwind of. Maybe there's conditions causing it to concentrate. Or it varies 10x day to day, but on an average basis it equals out. Etc. Etc.
Doesn't it really depend? Like I recall Oxford Street in London at one point was notoriously bad because it was a bottleneck for a lot of slow moving traffic so that one length of road was especially bad. 10x bad I don't know... But it's not hard to imagine some of the quieter roads filtering off like Berwick St or Dean St would be considerably better
Slow moving traffic at one intersection and free flowing traffic at another could easily account for a 10x ratio of particulate pollution, especially in European capitals where diesels are prevalent.
But a 10x ratio on the same road is also plausible if the Google car is following a large truck on one pass and then driving by itself on the second.
Especially the small particles in large cities are mostly caused by Biodiesel fuels - at least from my anecdotal experience.
I have a Phillips air purifier which includes a sensor for particles - whenever Diesel cars drove by the particles spiked and it went full throttle for a while if I had my window open.
Surely it wasn't because the Google car was driving behind an ancient diesel with a blown catalytic converter...
I wish more people paid attention to air quality. I'm a delivery driver and air quality has a noticeable effect on my energy levels throughout the day and also my mood. Slightly rainy days are probably my favorite days to work because no one is outside digging up roads and kicking up tire dust with leaf blowers and the rain seems to clean the air a bit.
As a motorcycle rider, it's always very noticeable. The stale air from the helmet coupled with the shit shit air from outside makes me very sleepy and you can develop a sore throat in a few hours
You might want to lookup hypercapnia clinical signs to look for. Lile sweating, increase heart rate etc. (Source: resident)
If you have ever been to a city that has banned fossil fuels then you can absolutely tell the difference, to most of the overpopulated European cities that I have visited. It’s astonishing how peaceful and comfortable it is to run or even stroll when every breath is just 100% refreshing; you feel 10 pounds lighter. Meanwhile the blackened filter of our home HVAC needs replacement again… and allergies.
Which cities are you referring to? Some cities have policies that discourage gas and diesel cars, and plans to outlaw them by 2030, but I'm not aware of any that have banned them outright yet.
Zermatt (Switzerland) is one
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermatt#Transport
This is a more fun / less clinical read: https://www.motortrend.com/news/swiss-town-went-straight-hor...
Maybe you mean this, but does "fossil fuel" really mean Diesel engines? Those were very awful to breathe around and were widespread in European cities as we all know.
Sadly, fossil fuel (pollution) has been marketed as a masculine culture thing now. In the free (=individualistic) West, I expect it to stick around for at least another 50 years.
I expect less than 10. Once you drive an EV, every big noisy diesel feels impotent and gutless. Kind of like a small yappy dog that’s all bark and no bite. There’s just nothing like the zero-lag gut-punching acceleration of an EV.
The industry is trying their best to fight against it. The EU is currently planning to ban new ICE cars from 2035, but the conservative German government & car lobbyists are trying to get them to drop those plans... That, combined with high tariffs for cheap asian EVs will probably artificially keep us on ICEs for a while longer.
Like many other "masculine culture" things, the propaganda sold to men about what's masculine doesn't necessarily have a connection to reality.
Unfortunately it's not really up to us plebs, it's up to the rich and powerful, who have every incentive in the world to continue fossil fuel use.
Trump has outright said he's pro fossil fuels and his policy choice shows it. If there was a proposal to ban or limit EVs in the US, I would not at all be surprised. These people do not care about you or me or all, just their pocket linings.
Before people freak out about their morning run, I’m very hard pressed to find 25 PM2.5 on this map of the US. (Note these numbers are AQI, you have to zoom into the bad AQI numbers and look at their PM2.5). Albeit it’s a Saturday morning, not rush hour.
China and India look rough though.
https://www.iqair.com/us/air-quality-map
Please note that air quality in an area varies dramatically over time. You are looking at a current snapshot with maps like that. The map linked below has his more historical data and I can see several _weeks_ this past year in my area (which currently has very good air quality) where the PM 2.5 weekly average exceeded 25ug/m^3.
https://map.purpleair.com/air-quality-raw-pm25
Localized phenomena like a neighbor starting a fire, up to the activity of nearby factories and power plants, up to national and global phenomena like wildfires and weather patterns, all have dramatic effects. Looking at an air quality map once and determining that you don’t have to think about air quality because you’re in the US is a mistake.
Exercise outdoors is a wonderful thing, obviously, but there are some days, even in the US, where you might think twice or even consider shifting your exercise to a different (less-polluted) time of the day.
> Localized phenomena like a neighbor starting a fire,
Summer evenings at home in my small Ohio village are often a health hazard, a polluted nightmare driven by the perverse compulsive ignition of so-called 'recreational' yard fires by pyromaniac neighbors.
If it is an Ozone Action day and/or a Heat Advisory day, it is near certain that one or more of the Don't Tread On Me jamokes who live nearby will come out of their houses at sunset, pile a bunch of garbage into a 55-gallon drum or a circle of rocks, sprinkle with accelerant, toss a match and back away. Eyes glazed, they'll watch for a minute, then go back inside, sometimes coming back out every ten minutes or so to refuel the fire, other times letting it blaze until the original pile is down to embers. In any case, there is a new plume of local smoke to add to the day's irritants.
It is a startling phenom to observe, let alone endure. The behavior is made all the more crazy, imho, by the presence of children. These are parents, asserting their rights to burn, and teaching their children to Live Free Or Die. It seems to me to be driven by a rebelliousness, part of the anti-woke wave, country-fried counter-culture, as in "I got your global warming right here, pard".
It's like, listening to country music stations and realizing how many (most!) contemporary and historical Country songs are themed around alcohol-worship.
But I digress.
I apologise. I was triggered by the mention of 'localized phenomena' and the horrified realization that so many of my fellow citizens are self-destructive cray-cray.
I’m not familiar with Ohio village, but I grew up in unincorporated county land in the Texas boonies. My dad had a burn barrel, and would dump oil into the ground “putting it back from where it came”. Even as a kid, nothing about it felt right. Just that experience alone gives no doubt to service members working the burn pits qualifying for disability
To be fair at one point in time people were actually told to dispose of used oil by dumping it into some stony ground. I live in a rural area in the north and most people have burn barrels but 99.9% of people exclusively burn cardboard and paper.
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If only you could see it. In the big cities the air quality has improved, however, I am not sure if it really has, or if we are now just burning hydrocarbons more efficiently so that the particle sizes have become invisible.
Put it this way, although cars are allegedly better than they were, fuel consumption hasn't dropped considerably. The cars are more numerous than ever, and, although there are EVs, there are still more ICE cars than there were in the good old days when petrol came with lead in it.
I am not sure that most people in urban areas even know what good air tastes and smells like. I take a canal path through lush countryside, far from any cars for most of the way. This canal has an aqueduct (or is it a viaduct?) over a motorway and the contrast is incredible. You go from basically smelling flowers to air pollution and back to clean air again quite quickly, so the filth is totally noticeable. Note the cars on the motorway are going at speed, so they should be working efficiently (until a few decades ago 56 mph was what engines were optimised for regarding efficiency in the UK).
If just living in a major city then you don't get this instant switch from bad to good air. So you just don't notice it. If you could see the filth, you would prefer a swimming pool that was pissed in, it is that toxic.
If you do have to live in a city, my top tip is to find out if there are any meteorologists in town. If there are, buy a house next to where they are living. Anecdotal, however, I used to work with meteorologists and they would always live to the West of the city centre, to get cleaner air than those living in the east of the city, or further downwind.
Again anecdotal, however, due to the canal and motorway experience described above, in post-industrial countries such as the UK, it is definitely the vehicles rather than any other source. Given the choice of microparticles that just get in your blood or clumps of big particles that you can eventually cough up and spit out, I would much prefer the latter. My hunch is that the legislation to improve vehicle emissions has optimised the exhaust for nanoparticles. Please prove me wrong!
For urban areas the risk of air pollution is another reason for cities to have congestion pricing to support public transportation.
Sure thing, here's a report from the Greater London Authority tracking the history of air quality in the city since the "Great Smog" event 1952, which caused an estimated 4000 deaths.
https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/environment-...
The main takeaway is that yes, urban air quality (including fine particulate matter) has improved massively over time, but most of it had little to do with road traffic, as for decades it wasn't a significant contributor to the overall mix. The important change was the move away from burning solid fuels like coal for household heating and in power stations within cities, to using gas and electricity with larger, out-of-town power stations.
As other sources have declined, road traffic has indeed become the largest contribution to urban air pollution, but even here there has been progress. Fine particulate emissions have continued to decline as car manufacturers have adapted to more stringent regulation (cheating scandals notwithstanding). A bigger problem now is higher non-exhaust emissions caused by larger and heavier vehicles. This is something else that will need to be solved via regulation. Other policies like Low Traffic Neighbourhoods can also help to restrict the worst pollution to major roads and away from where most people live.
Urban air quality is never going to be as good as that in the countryside, but it's not true to believe that no progress has been made, and that it's simply been a switch in the type of pollution.
> I am not sure that most people in urban areas even know what good air tastes and smells like.
I run air filters in my apartment throughout winter months, which tend to be the worst in terms of air quality here.
When I go outside in the morning I can really smell the stuff in the air, for a brief moment, until I get used to it. But you definitely notice the difference!
> Anecdotal, however, I used to work with meteorologists and they would always live to the West of the city centre, to get cleaner air than those living in the east of the city, or further downwind.
The industrial-revolution era mill owners were very aware of this too. Posh area of Manchester is to the south (westerly winds;) Leeds to the north (mix of northerly and westerly winds I believe).
Also, anecdotally, smaller towns and villages can have poor air quality too due to log burners. They're an absolute pain. You can tell when an area has become gentrified when shiny new chimneys start popping up or a log burner shop opens up!
Exhaust fumes were easy to optimize.
Lots of particles cars emit are from tires and break pads. I think someone was measuring that but I don’t have sources but most likely I read that somewhere in the comments of HN.
One good thing about electric vehicles is that regenerative breaking effectively eradicates brake pad use and pollution. Only tire dust remains significant.
If we could incentivize small, lightweight electric vehicles over the current trend of large (heavy) luxury vehicles, there would be a lot of benefits. I’d like a trend towards “easy and safe motorcycle” instead of our current “living room that moves itself.”
Hiking in the hills / mountains is one of the healthiest sports there is, unless you already have messed up legs. Or other mountain sports, but at least those I do have additional risks of injury or death that most folks would find unacceptable.
Not everybody has easy access to mountains, but then we all forge our paths through life and at least at certain points of life we have some wiggle room to choose where to spend the rest of it. Polluted big cities may (or may not) bring more wealth but there is a cost.
I look from my balcony on a large forest which is natural reserve, begins right in front of us. On the other side of the village there is a 15km band of vineyards on steep hills. I go up and end up in wild hills fully covered in pine forests and actually OK for winter sports (planning to do skitour there tomorrow morning). I go the other side and its 100km wide lake with crystal clear water, highly swimmable in summer. Highway is few km away, 100m lower.
Coming to city makes me realize the various not OK smells I didn't sense when I was living there. Not regretting the move (but sure as hell hoping some part of work will remain WFH so its not just kids reaping benefits of living on a more healthy and overall better place)
I am hoping by the end of the decade smartphones start having pm2.5 and co2 sensors built-in
and then next decade smartwatches
Once EVERYONE starts seeing air-quality on their phones every hour of the day everywhere they are, they will start to care and then eventually, maybe do something about the politics to improve air-quality
Imagine the game-changer if air-quality was in the next iPhone
They already make sensors that can go on a keyring so inside a phone is not implausible within a few years
I doubt it, maybe in rich countries where the air is already pretty good. There are enough places out there (mine included) where you can see and feel air pollution without using any sensors: limited visibility on the order of a few dozen meters, smell of burning coal and rubber tires in the air, windows blackened by soot. Everybody knows how terrible the air is, talks about it daily, and can't actually do anything about it.
I've been advocating for closed windows and increased use of air purifiers and FFP3/N99 respirators, and had some limited success among people I know. People are often easily convinced once they see the state of their filter or respirator after a few days of use.
Yeah it’d be cool if the phones had sensors. Everyone can see local AQI already though; weather app has AQI, and you can tap on it for a local region map, as well as a table of pollutant details.
the "local AQI" is usually from a single government sensor for 100 mile radius which is useless as pollution is highly localized (think neighbor idiots burning leaves all day)
also doesn't tell you indoor air quality which where you sleep REALLY matters if the co2 is sky high
best third party AQI network is PurpleAIR but even with them certain cities have few or none
https://map.purpleair.com/air-quality-standards-us-epa-aqi
airgradient barely has any in some US states
https://www.airgradient.com/map/
US doesn't even have mandatory air-quality sensors at airports, which it should because that's where most of the other weather measurements are coming from on most apps, even if you are 30-50 miles away
> the “local AQI” is usually from a single government sensor for 100 mile radius
What’s your source on this? IPhone’s AQI report says it’s from Breezometer, which links to Google’s Enterprise AQI offerings, which claim 500m resolution and multiple sources (“over 70 local indexes”). I don’t know but would speculate that Purple Air might be one of the licensed sources.
https://mapsplatform.google.com/maps-products/air-quality/
Even if measurement was perfect, people would have incentive to ignore it. Who wants to be told they can't do something, based on some claim that it might be bad for them in the very long term? People still smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol despite those being known to be bad for decades.
Air pollution, like numerous other things like water quality and medical care, is too big to be made into a individual decision.
There’s no need really, you can already download air quality data from dedicated sensor towers.
Almost all of the problem is PM2.5 but its not the only pollution problem. For PM2.5 a simple N95/FFP2 mask will drop the particles you breath in to basically zero and remove the health consequences of them and as we saw in 2020-2021 you can happily run in them they don't restrict breathing much at all. You do not have to put up with the damage from polluted air alongside the exercise.
Respirators can't do anything about volatile components that have low boiling points: sulfur and nitrogen oxides, hundreds of often carcinogenic aromatic hydrocarbons released by burning any organic matter. If you wear a good FFP3 respirator in heavily polluted air, it's very noticeable that it doesn't filter out everything — the smell gets through. And it's a specific smell, reminds me of walking through charred ruins of a building that has burned down 5-10 years ago and never rebuilt.
I had a notable experience at a church sometime during COVID, where I was wearing an N95 mask. The church’s incense could be smelt partially through the mask, and the scent that made it through was much worse than the combined scent that you normally smell.
And all the while, nothing is done to get old 2-stroke mopeds of the road in Europe. It’s such a low hanging fruit to get those hyper polluters out of cities but in an individualistic society, personal cult status seems more important than common health.
These seemed like the obvious EV conversion target to me before cars for Europe. Why have these not been converted to EV?
The problem is that they are not cost competitive at the time of sales and the type of people who buy those are not exactly the smartest when it comes to total cost of ownership calculation. Over time an electric version would be much cheaper (a few hundred kilometers depending on electricity price) but it's also not as convenient/capable/performant so it's a not exactly an easy sell to the target customer.
I do agree that they are highly annoying but the reality is that they are still in use because there is no real equivalency in the electric world.
They have, but individuals value nostalgia more than practicality.
I look at the PM2.5 data for my city every day, and at this point (Nov) in the winter season, the only acceptable time to exercise is between 2PM-4PM after vertical mixing kicked in. Outside that duration, particulates are elevated after morning rush our, after evening rush hour, or during overnight inversion trapping evening rush hour + wood burning smoke until the next morning rush hour.
This is one the main reasons why I would prefer working remote, it is hard to utilize this time well (for exercise) if you are in the office.
At least with PM you can wear a mask, although I am still searching for the best one that works during intense exercise.
Also wanted to point out "Trump EPA moves to abandon rule that sets tough standards for deadly soot pollution"
https://apnews.com/article/epa-soot-air-pollution-trump-zeld...
> I am still searching for the best one that works during intense exercis
Try a professional mask, like 3M 7500 with 2138 filters.
Thanks, that's one of the masks I use! Unlike the GVS SPM587 it has a quick release thing so you can get to your hydration for water and microplastics :/
air pollution, light pollution, noise pollution, toxins and poisons, random falsehoods in your mind
facts that read as curse to be found on an amuelet dug up in some near(ish) future iteration of whatever the,, it is,, that we are doing right now
Cities have mostly only gotten cleaner with time. This is way, way, way down the list of things that I'm worried about killing me.
Aside: OP are these stories just re-rigged versions of other source articles out there?
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/nov/air-pollution-may-reduce... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46084057)
https://www.euronews.com/health/2025/11/28/air-pollution-may...
It sounds terrible . What will happend in the future?! The research doesn't differentiate between seasons , and every one knows how polluted the air is in the winter when everyone is heating their home and apartament.
In the future electric cars and heat pumps will improve the situation.
When everyone on this planet want to live like the average European or American heat pumps and EVs won't save you from pollution
To my knowledge air quality in Europe and the US is better than in many places where people aspire to live like the average European or American.
Yes, because they're manufacturing all the shit we consume, that's my point.
I believe poor air quality in developing countries stems mostly from lack of technology. Cooking and heating with wood (or dung), no filters on power plants, old cars etc.
And how the electricity will be made? Without any CO2 for sure! (or not... yet)
CO2 isn’t particulate matter. But more importantly, larger percentages of our electricity is being made without burning things.
Nuclear power is a good option, wind and solar are usable for charging batteries - either EV batteries or storage banks which can be used to charge EV batteries. The problem with wind and solar is that there is no long-term storage solution as of yet but single-day storage is already achievable. Once enough nuclear capacity has been built up I foresee wind turbines disappearing from the landscape since they are cumbersome bird-killing eyesores. Solar power is there to stay since buildings need roofing anyway and we'll soon be at a point where the price difference between 'passive' roof cladding and PV 'panels' is close to negligible so it makes sense to install PV roof cladding and get some power for free, especially in places where air conditioning is popular.
Power plants are usually not placed inside cities. Less gasoline cars inside cities will definitely improve the local situation, not just limited to CO2.
What does CO2 emissions of electric power plants have with air quality in cities ?
You still have break pads and tires particles floating around.
EVs generate far, far less brake pad dust, most of their braking is regeneration via the motors.
Tires get more efficient every year, dust has reduced as the companies compete to make them last longer, and we're finally seeing the tire industry respond to pressure to reduce toxic runoff. Michelin's been removing phenols, for instance: https://resicare.michelin.com/news/michelin-resicare-resin-1...
I specifically said „improve“ not „eliminate air pollution completely“.
One more reason to look to an electrically heated future. Where I live the air becomes unpleasant in winter as some neighbours heat their homes by burning what i can only assume are old tires and horse carcasses.
Burning clean dry wood in a modern well maintained wood stove is surprisingly efficient and relatively clean (+ renewable)
Of course if you burn trash none of that matters, but it's already illegal in pretty much any advanced societies.
oh, it's illegal where I live. But some people pretty clearly ignore that. Enforcement doesn't seem to be a thing. I think this is one of those laws that falls into the category of things that we just have to rely on people's good will to carry out. Like small-time littering and not cleaning up after your dog, some people just don't seem to care.
FWIW, I think - based on not feeling my throat close up most of the time - that the number of people who do this is small.
I remember as a kid visiting the home of a relative who had an old oven for wood/coal heating, even though the primary heating was now a gas (natural gas not gasoline) heater.
The old oven remained though, and was used as a self-emptying trash can. When it filled up, a fire was lit to empty it. I don't remember what the sorting rules were (I assume "does it burn well and not smell up the apartment too badly when lighting it") and how common plastic packaging was back then, but I'm sure that the emissions coming out from the chimney were not a concern.
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