Spring
has arrived, and Somerville residents living near I-93, McGrath
Highway, and Mystic Avenue wake up each morning to hear the
birds…coughing. Our fair city is unusually burdened by the major
roadways that pass through it and their impacts on our health.

Many
observers have speculated that these impacts account for why we have
the highest rate per square mile of excessive heart disease and lung
cancer deaths among Massachusetts' 351 cities and towns. Yet, we smoke
less and have no industrial air pollution sources.

Now, a $2.5
million study called the Community Assessment of Freeway Exposure and
Health (CAFEH) will attempt to determine whether, and how much, roadway
pollution is affecting Somerville residents. Tufts University
researchers will collect air samples in neighborhoods near I-93. They
will randomly select neighborhood residents, extensively interview
them, collect blood samples to identify inflammatory markers, and
follow them for five years.

Concerns about highway pollution are
not new to Somervillians, nor have we been naïve. Almost 40 years ago,
East Somerville residents formed Somerville Citizens for Adequate
Transportation to oppose I-93 cutting through the heart of their
neighborhood, and then to persuade the Commonwealth to build below the
surrounding grade.

State officials refused on both counts.
They did promise to build a barrier between the expressway and the
neighborhood, and to plant trees along it. They did neither.

At
the time, Governor John Volpe's administration commissioned a study to
forecast I-93's air quality impacts in Somerville. Researchers found
that it would create air pollution as much as ten times higher than
federally allowable limits. The study was never made public.

What
the researchers did not know was that tiny particles produced by
vehicles are much deadlier and much more local in their impact than the
pollutants that were studied. There are as many as 1.6 million fine and
ultrafine particles in every cubic inch of vehicle exhaust. When
inhaled, most are retained deep in the lungs or passed into the
bloodstream and transmitted to the heart and brain.

In the years
since I-93's construction, over 2,000 scientific papers have studied
particles and their health impacts. Among their findings are that
people living within 100 meters (325 feet) of a major highway have a
death rate from lung cancer, heart attacks, and other cardiopulmonary
diseases that is 95% higher than that of the national population.

Because
younger kids have developing organs, a higher metabolism, and
proportionately more air sacs in their lungs, they absorb twice the
particles that adults do. Those who live near highways tend to develop
only 80% of their lung capacity or less.

The Mystic View Task
Force in the late 1990s took up the work begun by Somerville Citizens
for Adequate Transportation. They not only objected to squandering
substantial tax- and job-creation opportunities on the development of
big-box stores. They were also concerned about the impacts of the
enormous traffic increases created by those stores on neighbors' health
and wellbeing.

Instead of protecting citizens' interests, city
government violated its own laws to favor developers. Mystic View
brought a series of successful lawsuits. One outcome of the resulting
settlement agreement was a development plan that reduced projected
vehicle trips from 100,000 to 50,000 per day, a reduction equal to the
I-93 capacity increase created by the big dig.

Another of the
settlement's outcomes was Federal Real Estate Investment Trust's
commitment to fund a $50,000 study to measure the amount and location
in Somerville of the deadly particles produced by I-93. It found very
high levels of ultrafines close to the expressway and especially
downwind, which is usually on the Ten Hills side.

The Tufts
research, funded by the National Institutes of Health, will now study
what impacts those particle concentrations are having on neighbors'
health. The Somerville Transportation Equity Partnership (STEP), along
with community groups from Chinatown and South Boston, collaborated in
writing and submitting the study's funding application, and they will
help to oversee its execution.

STEP President Ellin Reisner
explains that their intent is not just to measure the amount and kind
of pollutants in Somerville air, but to determine pollutants' impacts
on neighbors' health. Everyone on the eastern side of the city knows
someone who has suffered from asthma, emphysema, heart disease, or lung
cancer. But we need to know how common this is and whether it can be
explained by factors such as preexisting conditions and other sources
of exposure to pollutants.

The research team does not want to
alarm people about conditions that have already existed for decades.
Instead, they want to develop solid evidence that can be a basis for
policy makers' and ordinary citizens' efforts to improve health
conditions.

There is little point in worrying about what we
cannot control. But working together to identify and undertake actions
that can really make a difference will increase the wellbeing of us all.