Confirmed: Air Quality Worse Inside Cars
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 10.20.05
Not long ago we wrote about the health impacts of cycling or walking alongside roads where cars and trucks spew all kinds of pollutants. The conclusion was that the air inside cars is actually worse than the air around cyclists and pedestrians on the side of the road. Umbra Fisk of Grist magazine said it best: "The nasties are densest at the middle of the traffic zone, and less intense on the edges." Well, Reuters carries confirmation of what we and Umbra said: "Robert Baker, president of the non-profit U.S. Indoor Air Quality Association, said American scientists have found the air inside cars to be more contaminated than the air outside, even in urban areas." But we were only partly right since we did not mention that the air-quality problem inside cars doesn't come from the outside only. Nasties are also coming from "That New Car Smell"; chemicals from car plastics, solvents, audio equipment and air fresheners are added to the toxic mix inside a car's cabin.
::ABC Health News, ::Umbra on the Health Impacts of Biking in Traffic, ::That New Car Smell is Toxic
It amazes me that this is not more well known, given that studies carried out in the nineties highlighted the fact that cabin air was more heavily polluted. The California Air Resources Board provided some figures for the study they did back in 1998. The difference in pollutants between ambient and in-cabin is fairly significant!
For awhile I used a dash powered negative ion generator in my car to help with allergy (during the growing season). While it helped a bit, there was a downside. Dirt from the inside air plated out on the interior window surfaces at a faster rate. Once I stopped using it, I got to paying more attentioin to the frequency with which I had to clean the inside of my windshield as a function of where and how much I drove. You notice the condensate from the glare it causes when evening approaches or when heading into the sun.
You may wonder why more plates out on the windshield than on the other windows: air passing over the windshield at a high speed and in sheet flow generates a static charge on the glass, just the way a wool sweater does when you slide across the car seat. That attracts interior particulates of the opposite charge.
I'd heard this before, but what i'm not sure about is if you end up breathing in more bad stuff cycling because you're breathing more.
Alas, most serious commuter cyclists don't ride on the edges of the road, at least not in urban traffic, they ride where everyone else does: in the middle of the lane. So, when I'm stopped in traffic, I'm usually sitting a few feet away from a lovely exhaust pipe right in front of me, and get a face (and lung) full of pollution.
True, but as people said in the previous post's comments, at least while cycling you are getting exercise.
I also think that since a cyclist is breathing open air, pollutants don't stay around quite as much as in a closed car cabin.
What I was curious about is are there any respirators that would filter these pollutants? (I'm not worried about looking strange and different wearign a respirator ; )
There was a study done comparing car vs bike commuters, on the same routes, in Washington D.C. some years ago, sorry I can not be more specific. The study compared, if I remember right, things like blood carbon monoxide levels to estimate exposure to traffic air pollution. The car drivers had a lot higher blood CO, even thought the bikers were breathing harder. The thought was that the bikers were higher and were not so much sucking the tailpipe of the car ahead of them, i.e., in the current terms, that the bikers, even riding in traffic, were more on the margin of the road. To the extent this is true you would expect this benefit not to extend so much to recumbent bikers.