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Transportation Equity Cooperative Research Program

An Approach for Identifying Environmental Justice Communities at Risk to


Mobile-Source Related Air Pollution

By

Timothy J. Buckley, Ph.D.


The Ohio State University
College of Public Health
Division of Environmental Health Sciences
A333C Starling Loving Hall
320 W. 10th Avenue
Columbus, Ohio 43210-1240

And

Timothy C. Matisziw, Ph.D.


The Ohio State University
Center for Urban and Regional Analysis
0126 Derby Hall
154 N. Oval Mall
Columbus, Ohio 43210-1361

Contributor

Glenn Robinson, MA. MM., Project PI


Baltimore Region Environmental Justice in Transportation Project
School of Engineering and Institute for Urban Research
Morgan State University
1700 East Cold Spring Lane
Baltimore, MD 21251

February 22, 2008

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Background and Rationale.

Traffic-related air pollution has been implicated as a serious public health threat by a
growing and increasingly convincing body of epidemiologic literature, which has linked
traffic pollutant exposure with non-specific mortality (Friedman et al. 2001), cancer
(Pearson et al. 2000; Knox 2005), and a variety of cardiovascular (Bigert et al. 2003) and
respiratory effects (Friedman et al. 2001; Brunekreef et al. 1997; Wjst et al. 1993; Weiland
et al. 1994). In addition, risks from this exposure are disproportionately borne by racial
minority and socio-economically disadvantaged subpopulations (Green et al. 2004;
Apelberg et al. 2005; Gunier et al. 2003). While the adverse health consequences,
epidemiology, and social disparities are already compelling, it is clear that further
elucidation is necessary of the magnitude, chemical composition, and variability of
human exposure, and source-to-effect mechanisms. Community exposure to a complex
array of traffic-related pollutants is determined by vehicle volume, as well as varied
emissions characteristics of vehicles, such as differing tailpipe emissions, heat soak, tire
and brake wear, and road dust re-suspension. This underlying variability in emissions
drives highly dynamic concentrations of traffic-related pollutants, which are further
modified by meteorology, source proximity, and human time-activity patterns.

Automobiles and trucks are a major source of air pollution including such toxins and
irritants as carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx), volatile organic compounds
(VOCs), particulate matter, and particle-bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
(PAHs). In the urban environment, high-density traffic is brought in close proximity to
densely populated communities. This is particularly true in some older East Coast cities
like Baltimore where row-house neighborhoods are within a couple of meters of heavily
traveled urban corridors.

Environmental justice is a term used to describe the movement concerned with


inequities in the distribution of adverse environmental and health consequences of
industrial activities and environmental policies (U.S.EPA 2004a). The movement grew
from early observations that a seemingly unequal burden of pollution fell on
disenfranchised and disadvantaged communities, often characterized by lower incomes
and high proportions of minorities (Brown 1995). With the issuance of Presidential
Executive Order 12898 in 1994, achieving “environmental justice” was integrated into
the missions of all federal agencies (Clinton 1994). The U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) defines environmental justice to mean that “no group of people,
including a racial, ethnic, or a socioeconomic group” should be disproportionately
affected by “industrial, municipal, and commercial operations or the execution of
federal, state, local, and tribal programs and policies” (U.S.EPA 2004a).

There is ample evidence that minority and low-income communities bear a


disproportionate burden of exposure to many environmental contaminants (Brown
1995; Institute of Medicine 1999), including air pollution (Samet et al. 2001; Schweitzer
and Valenzuela 2004). Because nationwide ambient monitoring data are available for
the criteria air pollutants (carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, particulate
matter, and sulfur dioxide), we have some means for assessing exposure and risk in
disadvantaged and minority communities. However, considerably less is known about

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the distribution of exposure to and risk from the wide range of hazardous air pollutants
(HAPs or “air toxics”) identified by Congress in the Clean Air Act Amendments (1990),
because nationwide ambient monitoring is not possible due to the sheer number of
pollutants and their diverse chemical properties (Caldwell et al. 1998; Morello-Frosch et
al. 2000; Woodruff et al. 1998).

A recent analysis of modeled national estimates suggests that ambient concentrations of


HAPs exceed benchmark risk levels for cancer and non-cancer endpoints in many areas
of the country (Caldwell et al. 1998; Woodruff et al. 1998; Woodruff et al. 2000).
Furthermore, several recent studies have documented a disproportionate burden of air
toxics exposure and/or risk falling on minority and low-income populations. These
studies have included varying sources of exposure, including high traffic density (Green
et al. 2004; Gunier et al. 2003), location of Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) and other
treatment, storage, and disposal facilities (Morello-Frosch et al. 2002; Pastor et al. 2001;
Perlin et al. 2001), and modeled estimates from EPA’s CEP (Lopez 2002; Morello-Frosch
et al. 2002).

Given the compelling evidence of a health threat that is exacerbated by environmental


injustice, we have developed a strategy for identifying communities at risk using
available public data. The identification of such communities is a necessary first step to
empower communities, design epidemiological studies to further elucidate the threat,
and implement intervention studies to address the threat.

Assessing Transportation-Related Health Risk in Baltimore, Maryland

As discussed earlier, the impact of transportation on public health is a growing concern


in many metropolitan areas world-wide. Here we focus on Baltimore, Maryland a major
metropolitan area in the United States to illustrate how existing information can be used
in identifying communities at risk. Baltimore is typical of many old large east coast
cities with a housing stock that is dominated by row homes built in close proximity to
busy urban arterial roadways. In this section we describe existing relevant data and
their analysis for the purpose of identifying communities at risk from transportation-
related air pollution. Using these existing data, we have developed a risk index to
identify communities at risk due both to socio-economic status and proximity to traffic
emissions.

Data

Central to identifying communities at risk is the acquisition and analysis of data sources
that can be used to derive indicators known to influence community exposure to
transportation activities. Several such indicators include proximity of residential
locations to transportation infrastructure (and related activity) as well as some measure
of socio-economic status. Increased proximity to transportation activity is thought to
increase health risk posed by transportation while decreased socio economic status is
thought to increase risk of health impacts to effected populations. Several types of
geographic information are required for calculation of these risk indicators. First, one
must account for the location of residential locations as well as how they are to be

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represented in the analysis. Residential locations can be represented as either the sites of
individual buildings (provided the availability of this data) or as some aggregation of
residential locations such as a zip code area, census block group or a transportation
analysis zone (TAZ). In this application, a geographic information system (GIS)
database containing building footprints for all areas within the city of Baltimore was
obtained from (2000). To compliment the building footprints, another GIS dataset
detailing the location, extent, and land use for land parcels in the city was also obtained
from (2000). Second, geospatial information on the location and usage of transportation
infrastructure is needed. In this case, the regional planning transportation network from
(2005) was used to facilitate this task. This planning network was developed to model
and assign transportation activity between TAZs in the region and as such, various
types of inter-TAZ traffic for the year 2005 had been already assigned to road segments
in the network. That is, the volume of cars and trucks using each road segment in the
network had already been estimated and attributed to each segment by (2005). Finally,
socio-economic information (e.g., race, median income, education, etc.) on the study
area’s population must be known to characterize socio-economic status. Here, year 2000
median income for each U.S. Census block group was used as a proxy for socio-
economic status. Block group data was selected since it is the smallest spatial unit for
which census tabulations of household income data are available.

Methodology

Two indicator variables are used to characterize community health risk due to traffic
exposure: 1) proximity and 2) socio-economic status. One way of assessing proximity to
traffic is to compute the total vehicle miles (# vehicles on road segment*length of road
segment) within a threshold distance (e.g., 300 feet) of a residential structure or within a
tabulation area (e.g., TAZ). As discussed earlier, socio-economic status can be
represented in a variety of ways (e.g., median household income). Thus, using these
two basic indicators of health risk associated with traffic exposure, a simple index (RIi)
can be computed representing the level of risk associated with each residence or a
tabulation area i.

RI i  TVMTi  SES i (1)

Where,

i = unit of analysis (e.g., building or tabulation area)


RIi = Risk index for unit i
TVMTi = Total Vehicle Miles Traveled (# of vehicles * length of road segment) within
some proximity threshold of unit i
SESi = Socio-economic status for unit i

Obviously, an issue with this index is that both variables are of a ratio nature, thus it is
necessary to convert them to ordinal measurements to facilitate their integration and
comparison. One way to accomplish this is to consider the range associated with each
variable and split the range into bins of equal intervals. Thus, both TVMT and SES
variables can be split into 10 intervals of equal size indexed 1 through 10, such that a

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value of 1 indicates the least risk and a value of 10 indicates the greatest level of risk.
For example, those residences with the lowest levels of TVMT would be assigned a
value of 1 while those with the highest TVMT would be assigned a value of 10.
Similarly, those residences with the highest levels of SES would be assigned a value of 1
while those with the lowest SES would be assigned a value of 10. Therefore, computing
RIi using the transformed ordinal variables results in a RIi with values ranging between
2 (lowest TVMT and highest income) and 20 (highest TVMT and lowest income).

TransCAD, a GIS specifically oriented toward the analysis of transportation data was
used to facilitate analyses of the datasets discussed above to compute the components of
the risk index. Although TransCAD is primarily oriented toward transportation
analysis, it is also well suited as a general purpose GIS and, hence, has proven useful in
addressing broad and diverse research questions such as those involved in deriving
meaningful discoveries related to traffic, health, and environmental justice.

First, TransCAD was used to derive a variable indicating proximity to transportation


activity. Proximity for each residential building is defined here as all transportation
activity falling within 200 feet of the building. Proximity to transportation was derived
using the following GIS methodology:
a. Select buildings falling within city parcels denoted as residential.
b. Calculate vehicle miles traveled (VMT) for each road segment in the
transportation network. Here, VMT relates to daily vehicle (cars and trucks)
use of a road segment.
c. Generate a 200 foot buffer for each residential building polygon.
d. Overlay buffer polygons with transportation network to compute the total
VMT (TVMT) falling within 200 feet of each residential building.
Again, it should be noted that while residential buildings were used in this analysis,
larger spatial units of analysis could also be used as well. For instance, one could use
TAZs and compute an overlay with the transportation planning network as is done
above with each building and compute total VMT for each TAZ.

Next, TransCAD was used to attribute each residential building in the building footprint
dataset with the median income of the census block group the building falls within.
This measure of socio-economic status was integrated with the building data by first
attributing each residential building polygon with the median income of the census
block group in which the building’s centroid is located.

Results

The environmental justice risk modeling was applied to four Baltimore communities
(Cherry Hill, Federal Hill, Kirk Avenue, and Highway to Nowhere) to exemplify it as a
tool as a part of the Baltimore Region Environmental Justice in Transportation Project
(BREJTP).

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Figure 1. Risk index applied to Cherry Hill.

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Figure 2. Risk index applied to Federal Hill.

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Figure 3. Risk index applied to Kirk Ave.

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Figure 4. Risk Index applied to "Hightway to Nowhere.

These maps identify building-level “hot spots” within communities where it would be
reasonable to hypothesize that individuals are at risk due to the combined influence of
low SES and proximity to high levels of traffic. This index is effective in differentiating
neighborhoods that are both socio-economically disadvantaged and in close proximity to
busy roadways. As would be expected, it can be observed that the highest index values
are associated with homes in close proximity to highways and busy urban arterials
(Figure 4), however, this influence and risk can be offset by blocks with high income
(Figure 2).

We recognize that SES and roadway proximity are not independent. The scatter plot in
Figure 5 illustrates the relationship between median income and proximity to
transportation activity for households in Baltimore. As hypothesized, the plotted
relationship between these two variables does appear to indicate a general trend whereby
traffic exposure is decreasing with increasing income.

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Figure 5. Scatter plot of vehicle miles within 200 feet of Baltimore residences in relation to median
household income

Now that TVMT and SES have been generated for each building, the ratio data can be
converted to ordinal measurements and the risk index RIi for each building can then be
computed. Figure 6 shows a scatterplot of the relationship between the new ordinal
measurements of median household income and proximity to transportation activity. In
this case, smaller values for income represent groups of households with higher median
income levels. Smaller vehicle mile values indicate households with lower proximity to
transportation activity. Thus, those households in higher vehicle mile intervals and in
higher median income intervals are those at greatest risk for transportation related
health impacts.

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Figure 6 Scatter plot of ordinal transformation of transportation and socio economic
status indicators for Baltimore households

Discussion
Although there is strong evidence that proximity to heavily trafficked roadways
and SES conspire to place communities at risk for health threats that range from
cardiovascular disease to cancer, research is needed to fully elucidate the nature of the
risk and develop strategies mitigation. The current analysis provides a strategy for
identifying communities at risk. This strategy relies on publicly available data
combined using a GIS platform that accommodates assessment of both community-level
traffic and demographics. Using this platform, we developed a risk index that accounts
for factors known to place communities at risk including level of traffic, roadway
proximity, and SES. The identification of such communities using this approach is a
necessary first step to fully evaluating the risk and developing strategies for mitigating
that risk. Furthermore, this analysis tool can be used to empower communities.

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