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Mexico City Plans Car-Driving Ban To Fight Air Pollution (csmonitor.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Mexico City plans to implement a car-driving ban from April 5 to June 30 in an effort to fight high air pollution levels. Under the city's new program, all privately owned cars must remain off streets one day per week as well as one additional Saturday per month. The initiative comes after the city issued a four-day air quality alert on March 14, after the city experienced air pollution at double the national acceptance level. "The definitive 'no circulation' program will align with the new rule for vehicular verification that will be presented soon," tweeted federal Environment Secretary Rafael Pacchiano. "In addition to the car ban, the commission is also working on medium-term solutions like improving public transport."
More cities should take a page from Buffalo New York's idea to reduce driving downtown. First, you take the world's most useless mass transit company and you populate it exclusively with degenerate idiots who don't know a schedule from the skid marks on their uniform. You then make it mandatory that they be constantly ever present as an impediment to traffic, yet always late picking up anyone at the designated bus stops by offsetting the actual bus pickup times from the published schedule by roughly fifteen minutes. Complement this with a train system that is a standalone joke all by itself: ( http://metro.nfta.com/Routes/p... ) That crooked line on the right side of page two is the entire transit line, it's less than ten miles total. Once you get downtown, you'll want to drop rotaries at every other intersection all of them bracketed by traffic lights and some of them with traffic lights actually inside them (I wish I was making that part up). Allow all commercial parking lots to collude and fix prices based on locally occurring events and make sure that every other street is a single lane one way only. Oh remember that transit company from before? We're going to allow them to hire a representative of these same parking companies as a C level employee because what the hell does "conflict of interest" really mean anyway? To top it all off, just in case some individual has the patience of a saint, you'll want to help yourself to a generous portion of government housing right in the middle of everything to make damn sure that the infrastructure is inadequate for the population for the population density. And to ensure a constant stream of harassment from cracked out bums at every corner, why not place two thirds of the cities methadone clinics right there next to your commercially viable property along the main traffic routes and within stumbling distance of everything that anyone might want to go to. This city needs a reset button.
It only penalizes poor people.
If the goal is to maximize the number of cars kept from operating, discriminating against the poor might be the most effective measure. Given Mexico's minimum wage of $5.00/day and the country's level of income inequality (ranked worst among OECD countries), poor people greatly outnumber the rest of the population.
FWIW, Quito sits at 2700m above sea level, and Mexico City at 2240 — Both cities are in valleys, and the suburbs rise quite higher than their "downtowns" (although Quito is a much smaller, steeper valley). As a comparison, Beijing is 43m above sea level. A completely different picture.
In Mexico City, foreigners that come to visit do feel (lightly) the lack of oxygen, even in our best days pollution-wise. It is clearly not as impressive as what I have experienced, say, in El Alto, Bolivia, at 4070m.
The problem with smog is not lower oxygen, but higher irritation due to the other components in our air. In very bad, very polluted days, eyes sting due to ozone and PM10 particles, and it's easy to develop coughing also due to PM10 and airborne sulphur compounds. Carbon monoxyde does not decrease oxygen, but it decreases our body's capability of fully using it.