M3.5 Transportation

My parents have always commuted from our home in South San Francisco into San Francisco to do our daily errands - school, work, and leisure. San Francisco itself is a very public transportation friendly city, having multiple service lines to take you from corner to corner throughout the city.  My grandma's house was by the ocean, so we would get direct smog from bonfires on the beach which would linger into our bedrooms, which we would immediately shut. Mixed with the bonfire, we would also smell heavy nicotine smoke from the people near the beach. We were never allowed to open our windows during a certain time because it would open a huge stink of bonfire ash and cigarette tar. A law was eventually passed that would only allow bonfires to happen in non-residential areas, which I vaguely remember into my teenage years (because I used to start going to them, ironically). The air quality significantly changed as I remembered my grandma would start opening her windows later at night and leaving them open after she cooked in the kitchen. \

In my own residence in South San Francisco, our family house was on the corner of airplane paths, which I would routinely see flying over our house every other hour. I would anticipate to hear the airplanes' loud engine roars and occasionally feel the vibration of the windows shake our house as they drove overhead. Looking back on this now,  I decided to look further on how this could/ could have affected my health:

This article by Reuters, Is living under a flight path bad for the heart?, suggests living under a flight path could cause heart attacks with the increased exposure to aircraft noise.
Although this study was conducted in Switzerland, there should be more information available implicating health issues / risks of living in specific areas. That could potentially create a clause that the health department can track between the residents who choose to live in these hazardous areas in correlation to reduced health care.

We have a lot of parks in San Mateo County, but rarely is it ever quiet in the neighborhoods between the car traffic and airplanes.