Urban Air Quality Quotes

The Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board is established in 1946 in an effort to discover the cause of the brown cloud hanging over the city and decide how to combat and disperse it. In 1949, after intense lobbying from both the automobile and oil industries, and against the recommendations and position of the Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board, the public rail system, which at one time was the largest in the world, and still serves a majority of the city's population, is decommissioned and torn out. It is replaced by a small fleet of buses.

In Mexico City, Tehran, Kolkata, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the air is no longer safe to breathe. In some cities, the air is so polluted that breathing is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day.

Beijing residents joke that to get a free smoke all they have to do is open their windows!

Twenty-three stories up and all I could see out the windows was grey smog. They could call it the City of the Angels if they wanted to, but if there were angels out there, they had to be flying blind.

Children whose developing lungs are particularly vulnerable suffer the most from air pollution. For children, breathing the air in cities with the worst pollution, such as Beijing, Calcutta, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Tehran, is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

Like a tracer running through the veins of the city, networks of air quality sensors attached to bikes can help measure an individual's exposure to pollution and draw a dynamic map of the urban air on a human scale, as in the case of the Copenhagen Wheel developed by new startup Superpedestrian.

The Hellish and dismal cloud of...Coal...perpetually imminent over (London) ...that her inhabitants breathe nothing but impure and thick mist...corrupting the lungs and disordering the entire habit of their bodies; so the Catarrhs,...Cough, and Consumption, range more in this one City, than in the whole Earth besides.

I'm from Los Angeles... I don't trust any air I can't see.

I... wonder what it is in the New York air that enables me to sit up till all hours of the night in an atmosphere which in London would make a horse dizzy, but here merely clears the brain.

The smog was heavy, my eyes were weeping from it, the sun was hot, the air stank, a regular hell is L.A.

I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.