Drivers who keep their windows down are exposed to 80 percent more air pollution
You can smell car exhaust even when there's not many cars on the road; if it's bad enough you can virtually taste it. Sitting at the lights is the worst. All that shit going into your lungs. And I don't even live in India or Vietnam, where the air pollution is unbelievably bad (literally - I did not truly get how bad it is in Delhi until I went there, even having seen photos) and people are just living in it, day in and day out.<p>In 5-10 years one of the things that will be recognized as a marker of privilege will be breathing clean air. We're going to see a diaspora out of the city and into the countryside... for the people who can afford to do that (and where the countryside offers clean air)<p>Air pollution is arguably the biggest health crisis in the world, and it has been a problem for decades. We're only just realising it, and it's still taking too long. It's taken decades to get climate change into people's minds, but right now today air pollution is having much bigger effects.