While standing on a hill, overlooking a residential neighborhood cradled by the 280 freeway and the large, busy thoroughfares of Alemany Boulevard, Mission Street, and San Jose Avenue, one of the first things you notice is the traffic. In particular, the fast-moving trucks and buses that generate a constant flow of traffic along the neighborhood’s residential streets that serve as routes to these large traffic corridors. What are the community health impacts of this heavy traffic?

PODER (People Organizing to Demand Environmental & Economic Rights) and community members are concerned that residents in this Excelsior community are being disproportionately exposed to traffic-related exposures including air pollution, and are suffering the health consequences. PODER has been engaged in a community-based effort to reduce pollution sources and long-term health risks faced by residents of this Excelsior neighborhood in southeastern San Francisco.

To better understand the issue, PODER collaborated with researchers in the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s (SFPDH) Program on Health, Equity and Sustainability and at UC Berkeley School of Public Health (UCB) to develop a community-based health impact assessment of traffic and the transportation system in this neighborhood. The project has involved partnerships with community residents, PODER youth and adult leaders, and the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA). Undergraduate students participating in a UC Berkeley Environmental Justice Class also connected with the project, and contributed numerous hours to help understand the impacts of transportation decisions on the community.

Key needs initially identified for the project were to develop community knowledge regarding the environmental health challenges faced by the neighborhood as well as potential community vulnerabilities (e.g., age, poverty, language barriers, health care access), and to involve community members in identifying practical solutions that could lead to community change to address those issues. Our project draws on community members’ expertise and experiences in their local environment, as well as the scientific knowledge and research tools of the city’s public health department and a local university.

Our collaborative retrospective health impact assessment focuses on the local transportation system – including a freeway and heavy traffic corridors running through the neighborhood – and its health impacts on current residents through air pollution, noise exposures, and pedestrian hazards. To assess both current and historical conditions related to the neighborhood’s population and health-related conditions, we have used:

Door-to-door community surveys

Traffic counts

Community photography

Oral histories

Outdoor air quality and noise modeling

Outdoor air quality and noise exposure assessment

Pedestrian environmental quality evaluation

Historical document review

Publicly available data from numerous sources including hospitalization data, U.S. Census data, and traffic-related injury data

Results

 

The Key Findings from our health impact assessment have been summarized, and additional details of this project may be accessed using the links in the menu bar the left.

Findings from this project are published in the American Journal of Public Health and Race, Poverty & the Environment:

Wier M, Sciammas C, Seto E, Bhatia R, Rivard T. 2009. Health, Traffic, and Environmental Justice. Collaborative Research and Community Action in San Francisco, California. American Journal of Public Health 99(S3):S499-S504. DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2008.148916

Sciammas C, Rivard T, Wier M, Seto E, Bhatia R. 2008. Traffic Causes Death and Disease in San Francisco Neighborhood. Race, Poverty & the Environment 15(2):77-78.