UCLA Environmental Report Card Gets An Incomplete
Important Insights Fail to Focus on Port Impacts, or Local Solutions
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor

     The UCLA Institute of the Environment (IOE) released its seventh annual Southern California Environmental Report Card in late October, with a clear message from IOE Executive Director Mary Nichols.
     “This year, one inescapable conclusion emerges from the studies. As a region, we have yet to come to grips with the immense impacts our transportation system is having on the environment and public health,” Nichols wrote in her introduction.
     “Beyond its immediate objectives, the Report Card sends a message about what is important and what should be measured,” Nichols explained. And she noted transportation impacts involving each of the report’s four sections—traffic, air pollutant exposure, stormwater runoff and illegal dumping in Indian country.
     In the section on traffic, urban planners Paul Ong and Randall Crane refute two popular misconceptions—that Los Angeles is exceptionally low-density in its development patterns, with exceptionally long commute times. Comparing New York, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles, they find housing densities of 3,200, 620, 270, and 810 per square mile respectively; and average commute times of 39, 31, 29 and 29 minutes respectively. Our use of mass transit is half of Chicago’s, but our carpooling is somewhat greater, and we’re better than Houston on both measures. “The reputation of Los Angeles as having extreme low-density sprawl is an urban myth,” write Ong and Crane.
     Yet, we’re still not in very good shape. Our number of unhealthy air quality days is 88—down dramatically from 137 days in 1993, but still four times the number of New York’s, more than five times Chiacago’s and 35 days more than Houston, which briefly eclipsed Los Angeles for the dubious title of the nation’s most unhealthy air.
     “Congestion costs Americans an estimated $70 billion in 2001, from lost time and extra fuel consumption,” they write. “Both air pollution and congestion are classic cases of market failures that create social cost for others, often known formally as externalities.” Such externalities are especially pronounced around the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which received no special notice in the Report Card, despite the fact that their projected four-fold growth from 2002 to 2025 posses an enormous challenge for the goal of reducing traffic problems and externalized costs.
     In a second section, environmental health scientist Arthur Winer reports on remarkable breakthroughs in measuring air pollutants by monitoring individuals’ micro-environments—the air immediately around them—on a continuous basis throughout the day. A detailed graph showed dramatic peaks of pollution exposure during a school bus trip related to specific pollution sources. The report presented a list of low-cost and no-cost measures that can dramatically reduce individual exposure, even without reducing overall pollution levels.
     Similar studies hold obvious promise for protecting the environmental health of longshore workers, truck drivers and port community members, but again, UCLA takes no special notice of port activities.
     When the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) recently released its Harboring Pollution report, NRDC staff scientist Diane Bailey said the message for environmental activists was clear: “We need to pay more attention to the ports.”
     Maybe next year UCLA will get the message.