City Cyclists: Here's How Much Pollution You're Actually Inhaling (HBO)
Posted
July 28, 2018
Views
81,952
Likes
1,249
Comments
194
Engagement
1.76%
July 28, 2018
81,952
1,249
194
1.76%
Every word spoken in this episode is indexed. Type any phrase to jump straight to the moment it was said.
Type any word or phrase that may have been spoken. Click a result to seek the player to that exact moment.
Try a name, a topic, or a quoted line
See what was published immediately before and after this episode.
4:11Now PlayingAir pollution now causes more than 4 million deaths a year. And it might be having a surprising impact on one group in particular: the 86,000 New Yorkers who commute by bike every day.
Equipped with a spandex biometric shirt and a vest holding two air quality monitors — one measuring black carbon, the other PM 2.5 — VICE News set off on a day of bike riding over New York City’s bridges, down its greenways and through its crowded rush-hour streets, to find out one thing: how much air pollution cyclists are actually inhaling.
We wanted to see what it was like to participate in “Biking and Breathing,” a Columbia University research project that aims to understand how air pollution affects cyclists’ health. Because cyclists are, on average, inhaling more air — they’re also breathing in more air pollution. The Columbia study is trying to figure out just how much more.
For the past three years, the researchers have collected data from more than 90 commuting cyclists over a period of six days. They’re measuring both air pollution as well as how much air a cyclist inhales, allowing them to estimate how much pollution reaches a cyclists’ lungs. They call this the “potential inhaled dose.”
“What really matters for health is dose, and dose is a function of two things. Number one how much air pollution is in the air. And number two how much you are breathing,” says Darby Jack, an assistant professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University.
New York City has made big strides since the 1960s, when its air was among the dirtiest in the country. But air pollution is still a leading environmental threat to the health of those in urban areas. And even low amounts of exposure to air pollution can have negative effects.
In New York, researchers aren’t trying to change the number of people commuting by bike. They ultimately hope that their findings will be used to help inform city policies on how to develop bike lanes on routes with less pollution or further away from cars.
Subscribe to VICE News here
Check out VICE News for more
Follow VICE News here:
More videos from the VICE network
Sentinel Indexing in Progress
Metadata and chapters are available. Claim extraction for this episode is pending.
All video content is delivered via YouTube embedded players in accordance with the YouTube Terms of Service. Sentinel provides research tools that promote discovery and accountability across political media.
