Columbus Avenue Cafe | PHOTO: Street Air
Fri. April 20, 2018, 11:47am
by Nathan Falstreau
@NFalstreau
The American Planning Association holds a national competition where more than a dozen teams vie for an award that recognizes outstanding grassroots efforts in planning and leadership.
This year, three San Francisco high school students won the Gold 2018 National Planning Achievement Award for a Grassroots Initiative for their project, titled Street Air , and a subsequent documentary, Columbus Discovers Air Pollution.
“It is an honor for us to be acknowledged by such a prestigious organization as the APA," said student Charlie Millenbah. “We also want to encourage other students to work on local issues they are curious about. They would probably be surprised by how much there is to learn and how they can also help their community.”
While the competition is open to anyone with an interest, "it's not very common for students to submit entries," said Wendy Shabay, jury vice chair for the competition via telephone.
The grassroots project—led by students Zelda Zivny, Milo Wetherall and Millenbah of North Beach—began as an effort to determine what impact increased traffic on Columbus Avenue would have on pedestrians, cyclists and people dining al fresco along the corridor.
"We were wondering how bad it could be for us," said Millenbah via telephone, referring to a parklet outside Caffe Greco at 423 Columbus Ave.
Parklet outside Caffe Greco. | PHOTO: GOOGLE
The students studied how air pollution is measured and its possible human impacts before acquiring monitoring devices to measure carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and carbon dioxide, along with 2.5 and 10 micron particle levels.
The team also looked at issues like relative humidity, temperature and wind direction and speed. According to the group, they were able to purchase the equipment with donated funds.
The research concluded that increased levels of particulates were found due to exhaust emitted from vehicles, especially from semi trucks, said Millenbah. Reducing the number allowed on Columbus Avenue or re-routing them elsewhere is one possible solution, he added.
Additionally, idling tour busses are also a contributor, and the students suggested that the vehicles be regularly checked for particulate emissions. "Overall, we can't stop them from parking along the street," said Millenbah. "Our main goal is to reduce their exhaust."
Shabay said the student's project stood out from other entries. "They chose the issue of street pollution, which would typically be a rather mundane topic to cover, but they put a lot of creativity into it."
The students studied how air pollution is measured and its possible human impacts before acquiring monitoring devices to measure carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and carbon dioxide, along with 2.5 and 10 micron particle levels.
The team also looked at issues like relative humidity, temperature and wind direction and speed. According to the group, they were able to purchase the equipment with donated funds.
The research concluded that increased levels of particulates were found due to exhaust emitted from vehicles, especially from semi trucks, said Millenbah. Reducing the number allowed on Columbus Avenue or re-routing them elsewhere is one possible solution, he added.
Additionally, idling tour busses are also a contributor, and the students suggested that the vehicles be regularly checked for particulate emissions. "Overall, we can't stop them from parking along the street," said Millenbah. "Our main goal is to reduce their exhaust."
Shabay said the student's project stood out from other entries. "They chose the issue of street pollution, which would typically be a rather mundane topic to cover, but they put a lot of creativity into it."
Columbus Avenue. | PHOTO: JAN ARNE PETERSEN/FLICKR
"These students have a stake in their communities, and it's important to get people involved at a young age and understand some of the issues that we deal with in implementing planning and covering a serious issue," Shabay added.
The city's Planning Department has also taken note of the project. “We’re all excited about Zelda, Milo, and Charlie’s work!" said department spokesperson Gina Simi via email.
"Not only did they set out to research the connection between traffic pollution and street use, but they also created a set of actionable recommendations that would improve the health of their community and the health of their peers."
Next, the team plans to look at how air quality affects employees working in nearby cafés, furthering the experiments to "change policy for the greater good," Millenbah said.
"I also want to stress that there is nothing wrong with eating on Columbus Avenue," he said. "It's just not ideal. It's not in top condition."
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Film As Catalyst for Innovation in Urban Planning
SEPT. 5, 2017
NEW AMERICA
This is our final blog in a series written by speakers at #RiseLocal.
This week's story is by Fay Darmawi, Founder of the SF Urban Film Festival.
Local innovation creates more resilient communities. In an era of rapid change, the resiliency of our communities to battle climate change, income inequality, and threats to democracy is contingent on creative problem solving.
I founded the SF Urban Film Fest (SFUFF) 4 years ago to serve as a catalyst for local innovation and creative problem solving in urban planning. What makes SFUFF a unique civic engagement platform is our focus on using film, a medium that is easy to comprehend and circulate. Film combines visuals, story structure, and music to make urban planning issues and methods relatable and memorable. Often urban planning discussions rely on abstract communication tools such as maps, charts and graphs. But the most effective urban planners have always encouraged collaboration between city dwellers and government as well as the use of engagement strategies and tools that speak to all.
Making urban planning more accessible to the general population is important as we enter an uncertain future and need to reach audiences far and wide to gather the best and most creative ideas to stay resilient. A recent example of SFUFF’s catalytic role was the screening of a short film by the StreetAir team composed of three teen-aged citizen scientists turned filmmakers.
SFUFF was not the first to screen the StreetAir grainy short film. Even with uneven audio and images jiggling from a hand-held camera, it’s thesis was compelling: why is Columbus Avenue a thoroughfare for trucks and buses when clearly it’s a one of San Francisco’s most popular gathering places for people? The short film entitled “Columbus Discovers Air Pollution“ had already won an award at a small environmental themed film festival. The award was well deserved as the film showed the tenacity and creativity of the young citizen scientists as they set off to prove the health risks of pitting cherished human scale public spaces against the pollution of constant vehicular traffic in their beloved North Beach neighborhood. The StreetAir team knew they had developed a way to understand and mitigate human health risks in their neighborhood, complete with data and a video to tell their story. The question was how were they going to get access to city staff who could help them realize the changes they wanted to make?
What made the SFUFF screening of the StreetAir film unique was the opportunity for the young people who created StreetAir to develop an action plan offering potential solutions to the problem identified in the film. Following the screening of their short film, the StreetAir team sat on a panel with a professional planner from the City of San Francisco Planning Department, Robin Abad. The StreetAir team - Zelda Zivny, Charlie Millenbah and Milo Wetherall - confronted Robin with a question of why the city could allow the pollution to harm their friends and family. Robin explained that the 4-lane Columbus Avenue serves as an important diagonal route for commuters from Marin County and the northwest parts of the city heading to the Financial District. The StreetAir team countered that Columbus Avenue is lined with historic sidewalk cafes teeming with tourists and residents alike, and the StreetAir air pollution devices detecting unhealthy particulate levels from the constant stream of traffic. Furthermore, they added that the city could mitigate these effects if they regulated the placement of motorcycles away from parklets, synchronized traffic lights so cars would not idle, and reduced or eliminated truck traffic on Columbus Avenue. Robin gave them the bad news, “in the past, these concepts haven’t found strong support from local businesses and tourist operators.” But then he added, “the best way to make change is for locals to agree to make those changes – so sharing your work and ideas with local neighborhood organizations and institutions is one of the best ways to start shifting opinions.” That advice was what the StreetAir team needed – a plan going forward using film as a community organizing tool to distribute their data findings and implement change from the ground up.
The StreetAir team was recently awarded the State of California American Planning Association (APA) Award of Merit and plans to produce a few more 3-5 minute videos on ideas for improving Columbus Avenue to educate the neighborhood and push for change. SFUFF’s dream is to become an incubator for innovative approaches to problem solving in urban planning where projects that include film like StreetAir are born, developed, distributed, and ultimately implemented to make cities better for everyone.
It is this combination - visual storytelling with panel discussions with experts – that creates SFUFF’s secret sauce. While most film festivals focus on the process of filmmaking, SFUFF leverages film as a tool to solve the most pressing issues facing cities today. It is our hope that filmmaking can be a catalyst for civic change. We invite you to join us at the 4th annual SF Urban Film Fest, November 13-19, 2017 and get inspired to create the change you’ve been waiting for in your own community.
https://www.newamerica.org/ca/blogs/film-catalyst-innovation-urban-planning/
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Popular
NATIONAL PLANNING ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FOR A GRASSROOTS INITIATIVE — GOLD
Street Air
San Francisco, California
Columbus Avenue in downtown San Francisco is home to heavy vehicle traffic as well as many restaurants and cafes with outdoor seating areas. When three high school students noticed that a new city parklet on Columbus Avenue had put an eating area out into the street closer to traffic, they wondered: "Is it safe?" That question led to their study of the street's design and air pollution levels — a project they called Street Air.
For one year, the teens — Zelda Zivny, Milo Wetherall and Charlie Millenbah — studied traffic patterns and measured air quality on Columbus Avenue using calibrated air monitors. They conveyed their findings in a short documentary film, Columbus Discovers Air Pollution, and shared their general design recommendations for outdoor eating areas. The teens have expanded their research to study the effects of street-level pollution on nearby restaurant interiors and staff.
The film has drawn widespread attention, including from the San Francisco Planning Department, which invited the students to do community outreach for a redesign initiative for Columbus Avenue. The teens have participated in Q&A sessions at film festivals, and received awards from APA's California Chapter and APA's Northern California Chapter. The groundbreaking research highlights pollution as an urban planning issue and shows how pollution-free outdoor dining areas can be designed for better health and safety.
https://www.planning.org/awards/2018/achievement/
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Popular Science
ENVIRONMENT Air pollution might be the new leadScientists now think it might put young brains at risk.
By Nicole Wetsman April 5, 2018
The parallel isn't perfect, but studies suggest air pollution might have similar developmental effects.
Sometimes air pollution is easy to see. It billows off the top of smoke stacks, and out the tailpipes of cars zooming down the highway. Misty smog hangs in the air in cities like Delhi, Beijing, and Los Angeles, fracturing sunlight into a muted haze.
Most of the time, though, dirty air just looks like air. About 92 percent of the world’s population, and more than half the people in the United States, live in areas with unhealthy air quality. The World Health Organization calls air pollution the world’s “largest single environmental health risk,” and it leads to the premature deaths of millions annually. It’s a major public health problem for reasons you might expect: breathing in dirty air isn’t good for your lungs, and the the connection between the lungs and the cardiovascular system means it puts pressure on your heart, too.
But it’s increasingly clear that the effects of air pollution aren’t constrained to body parts below the shoulders—they can hurt the brain in a whole host of ways, many of which researchers are still trying to understand. One major area of interest? The way exposure to polluted air can affect the cognitive development of babies and children. Researchers aren’t shocked to find that an environmental toxin could harm young brains, because they’ve seen it happen before.
“To me, air pollution is kind of the next lead, in a way,” says Deborah Cory-Slechta, a professor of environmental medicine at the University of Rochester.
Lead was everywhere throughout the start of the 20th century, readily used to make vacuums and paint and included as an ingredient in gasoline. It was known to be toxic, and concern over its health effects spurred fights for regulation, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that researchers linked even low levels of lead exposure to an increased risk for cognitive and behavioral problems in children—just as scientists are starting to do for air pollution now.
The parallel isn’t exact, but like lead, air pollution also disproportionately affects low income and minority communities. Like lead, air pollution is easy to put into the environment, and much harder to take out. “The more I do in this area, the bigger the problem seems to me,” Cory-Slechta says.
Pollution on the brainCory-Slechta actually started out studying the effects of lead exposure, and she was skeptical when she first heard air pollution might pose similar dangers. But when a research group at her university, which was studying air pollution and lung development, asked if she was interested in taking a look at the brains of the mice used in their studies, she figured she might as well take a look.
She was shocked to find evidence of inflammation and damage in pretty much every area of the mouse brains. “And this was a full two months after the exposure to air pollution had ended,” Cory-Slechta says.
Living in areas with high air pollution has been linked to poorer memory, attention and vocabulary; to below-average performance on intelligence tests; and to delinquent behavior. Air pollution has also been implicated in developmental disorders ranging from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder to autism spectrum disorders.
Animal studies, where researchers can more strictly control the pollution exposure, back up the results from those human reports. They show that air pollution causes changes in behavior in rodents, and changes in their brains, like imbalances in the levels of certain molecules, hyperactivity in brain regions, and damage to neurons—many of which correspond to the way neurodevelopmental diseases look in these animals. The widespread inflammation seen in mouse brains after air pollution exposure, like Cory-Slechta observed in her initial studies, can damage neurons, and, during development, prevent the brain from organizing itself properly.
Although the research isn’t far enough along to draw an explicit, causative link between air pollution and developmental changes in humans, there’s a strong association between the two, strengthened by the accompanying research on animals. “We have a pretty good correspondence between the epidemiology studies in humans and the animal studies,” Cory-Slechta says.
The particles in the air get into the body and into the brain through a few different pathways: they can pass through the lungs and into the bloodstream, where they can travel up to the brain directly, or cause changes in the body’s immune response that trigger damaging inflammation. There’s also only a thin barrier between the nasal cavity and the brain, and tiny particles of air pollution can pass directly through.
Still, there’s a lot we don’t know about the mechanisms behind the effects of air pollution. It’s a slurry of different types of particles, of different sizes and from different sources. Some of the largest are about a tenth of the width of a human hair—big, on a microscopic scale, but still small enough to travel into the lungs. Others, known as ultrafine particles, are on the nanoscale. Pollution is made of nitrogen dioxide and ozone, and it might also have microscopic pieces of metals like zinc, tin, or even lead. The composition can change neighborhood to neighborhood, block to block, and hour to hour.
“The toxicity is different depending on the particular soup that you’re in,” says Rosalind Wright, who studies environmental medicine and public health at Mount Sinai.
One of the main challenges faced by air pollution researchers, then, is untangling the types of particles that could be the most dangerous from those that might be more benign. “Any step in that direction, looking at some components versus others, is going to be valuable,” Wright says.
We also don’t know much about the windows during development when the effects of air pollution might have the greatest impact. Maternal exposure to air pollution can affect fetal development, for example, and exposure during infancy and the first few years of life can harm children as well. But it’s not clear when the most damage actually occurs. Then there’s the question of dosage. Air pollution shifts around, and exposure can spike when people enter different environments—like driving through a tunnel on the highway. The difference between that type of extreme, temporary exposure, and long term, ambient exposure, are still muddled, as well.
The Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program, run through the National Institutes of Health, will hopefully produce new, robust data to help answer those questions, Wright says. The program aims to enroll 50,000 children and track, among other things, neurodevelopment and environmental exposures. “That initiative will take a big step forward in this area,” she says. “Hopefully, it will drive policy in the long run.”
Preventing damage. One thing we do know about air pollution is that there’s more of it in low income communities and in communities of color. Racial and ethnic minority children in the United States are more likely to attend schools in highly polluted areas, and across the world, low income areas have higher concentrations of air pollutants.
Racial and ethnic minority children, and children in low-income areas, may also be more strongly affected by the air pollution that they’re exposed to. That’s because dealing with social stressors, like food insecurity or institutionalized racism, might compound the effects of environmental stressors like air pollution on their neurological and cognitive development.
“Studies show that if you don’t have stress concurrently with air pollution, you won’t necessarily see strong effects,” Wright says. That means, she says, that tackling some of those social problems might be one way to mitigate the harmful effects of toxic air. “It’d be interventions short of saying, change the air.”
The same patterns hold true for lead exposure—which disproportionately affects minority and low income communities, and is exacerbated by stress. Similarly, an enriched, non-stressful environment, can protect against lead-driven damage.
Unlike lead, though, knocking out the root of the problem isn’t as simple as removing one ingredient from paint and gasoline (which is complicated enough, and the United States is still struggling to keep up).
The problem with air pollution, Wright says, is that it’s so ubiquitous. Air quality is improving across the United States, even while in poor cities around the world, pollution levels are going up. But we still don’t know how low pollution actually needs to be to stave off developmental effects, Wright says. “Even at the cutoff levels where we have regulations on the quality of air, it can still be toxic.”
The United States, under the Clean Air Act, also only measures certain types of particles found in air pollution—the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, does not have standards for the levels of ultrafine particles, which may have their own unique host of health effects. Improvement on only the measures that we can see, Cory-Slechta says, doesn’t necessarily mean we’re making progress on all types of air pollution.
What’s more, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has taken steps to weaken or remove existing regulations around air pollution over the past year. Pruitt is also restructuring the way that the EPA uses scientific evidence to form policy—the agency will no longer consider research that was done with confidential data. A significant body of air pollution research uses medical records (which remain confidential under ethical guidelines) including studies on childhood development. That decision would help justify any EPA decisions to ease regulations on emissions from chemical plants or factories, and they would be able to disregard evidence showing that it harms kids.
Lead research bumped up against similar challenges from various industries that used the metal in their products, who fought against regulations and attempted to cast doubt on the scientific research.
Despite the challenges, the path forward in the fight against air pollution is made easier by the precedent set by lead.
“The struggle over lead was the poster child for these issues, and it broke down some barrier,” Cory-Slechta says. “At that point in time, early on, there was study after study just to try and get people to believe that lead exposure was associated with changes in IQ.” It’s common knowledge today, but when the research was ratcheting up in the 1990s, people were reluctant to acknowledge that it was a neurotoxin, she says
.
“A lot of those fights got fought over lead,” Cory-Slechta says. “Now, when you say that there are behavioral effects of air pollution, no one questions it. So we’re able to move faster, and we’re a lot further along.”
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