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Comment by SingAlong | Hacker News Reader

I just got back from Delhi. I started coughing as soon as I landed in the airport 4 days ago. The air is almost unbreatheable.

However, the working-class people I've come across don't seem to be worried about it from a health perspective (or they don't show it off). Infact my friend's wedding had a lot of crackers. Life as usual for them.

For a comparison, here's what Red Fort looks like at 4pm, 05-NOV-2016 (my pic is about 30hrs older than this comment): https://twitter.com/HashNuke/status/795380966109810688

And this is what it is supposed to look like: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wheresmichi/433396865/

View on HN

In fact most of South Asian cities are in same dire state.

I was in Kathmandu in April and you can hardly breathe not because of smoke but mostly because of dust (as construction for road and water supply is going for a while.)

I lived in India and been to Mumbai many times. Man, the whole city stinks.

In 1995 I went to downtown LA. The air looked like your picture of the Red Fort. In LA at the time I could not see more than 2/3 of a mile. The air burned the back of my throath when breathing.

I've never been to the US. Wow, that is 2 decades ago. Does LA still have such issues? If not, how did they improve the air quality?

https://www.marketplace.org/2014/07/14/sustainability/we-use...

> It took decades. Los Angeles had its first real smog attack during World War II, a smog strong enough that some people suspected a Japanese chemical attack. But it wasn’t until 1975 that the U.S. required new cars to have catalytic converters, “the key piece of technology that allowed everything to change,” according to Mary Nichols, chairman of California’s Air Resources Board.

Were 'catalytic converters' technology a known solution at the time? I wonder if there is a known solution to the smog problem faced by Indian and Chinese cities. Or is the solution yet to be discovered.

It feels like (after having lived there) these cities have crossed the threshold for number of people/cars/houses/offices per unit area and the way forward is to force expansion of cities - - reduce number of high rises that can be built - reduce number of cars that can be produced or sold - force/incentivize offices and industries to move out of these big cities - large, safe and economical state owned public transport

The solution was actually legislation and regulation of the auto industry. The legislature in California and (to some extent) the US realized that particulate pollution and smog were major problems in cities, so they passed laws requiring automakers to install equipment that controls emissions. The OBD and OBD II systems, electronic fuel injection, the catalytic converter, and various other systems are a result of that legislative push.

If they had left it up to the individual, as India has, we would experience similar air quality.

I should add that California has tighter emissions standards than the federal government, and some vehicles will be sold with special emissions control equipment in California. For example, I had a GMC C1500 truck, which shipped with an optional Air Injection Reactor if you bought it in California.

In fact my lawn mower has 2 models... California and everywhere else.

Some of it is money. Installiing California emission equipment to all vehicles would cut pollution a lot... But if it raised vehicle cost by 50%, no one could afford it. I think we know how to fix it, but no one wants to start taking cars away from people or raising the prices 50%.

I attended elementary school in California in the late 70s/early 80s. We would have smog alerts when the air quality was so bad we couldn't go outside during recess.

California has been working on this since the late 60s. They were the first state to require better emissions controls on cars, they have tightened regulations on businesses and industries that would normally negatively contribute, and the push the problems of dirty power generation into other states.

yes. it's still terrible all the time. don't ever come to visit or live here. especially not the west side.

p.s. it's also overcrowded, and there's no public transit. did i mention the food is terrible?

Yes the food is terrible besides the amazing Mexican food, amazing Asian food, Sushi and hamburgers. Check.

all of that is better in the bay area. don't ever come to LA if you want good food.

Can I ask why if you dislike LA so much you choose to be there?

you new to the internet, buddy?

And it's full of vacuous entertainment industry people and their hangers-on. Nobody knows how to read books. Only advantage is being able to turn right on red. Sammy Glick, Day of the Locust, Helter Skelter, gag me with a spoon, Arnold Schwarzenegger, earthquakes, wildfires, riots. Bad food. Best to stay far away.

LA has good days and bad days. Ozone in L.A regularly exceeds federal standards. Air quality advisories throughout the year are not uncommon.

This has some relevant statistics from the South Coast Air Quality Management District which is larger larger than just LA County but includes it:

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-summer-smog-2016...

It's an uphill battle. There are more hybrid vehicles on the road these days and California has pretty stringent emissions requirements, the Dept. of Motor Vehicles requires you to have a smog check every two years on your car. However the population of L.A has been booming for over a decade now and despite investment in mass transit it hasn't put much any appreciable dent in automobile traffic.

Current PM 2.5 level in LA is 74. Current level in Delhi is 500+. The scale is just not comparable. I lived in LA for 3+ years in the 2000s. I just returned to Delhi and the air quality is way, way worse than I have ever experienced, anywhere.

> In 1995 I went to downtown LA. The air looked like your picture of the Red Fort. In LA at the time I could not see more than 2/3 of a mile.

Delhi and LA have similar problems in that they are both at the foothills of a mountain range (in Delhi it's the Aravali mountains). This makes it much more difficult for the pollution to dissipate once it's there, because the mountains obstruct wind and airflow. LA has been making efforts for decades to reduce emissions, but the payoff has been incredibly slow for this reason.

Of course, Delhi is a much larger and densely populated city - the Delhi metro area has almost the same population as the entire state of Texas - and it's also nowhere near as wealthy as LA. All three of those factors make it much harder to address pollution directly and much slower for the benefits to actually start manifesting.

Salt Lake City, UT has this same problem. We deal with winter 'inversions', where if it doesn't snow, we get really bad air.

http://www.ci.slc.ut.us/winter-inversions-what-are-they-and-...

I remember visiting Olot, in Catalonia, and thinking the mountains must trap pollution in the valley. It certainly looked striking:

http://mjhoy.com/images/barca/10122014-P1200997.jpg

>" the Delhi metro area has almost the same population as the entire state of Texas" This is not correct:

Texas ~ 27 million

Delhi - 18.6 million

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Texas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delhi

Delhi metro area had a population close to 22mn according to 2011 census (from the same link you posted). Texas population of 27mn is a 2014 estimate.

There is NO census data that supports the Delhi metro being 22 million people!

Here is the link to the official Indian census data:

http://www.census2011.co.in/census/city/49-delhi.html

which states:

"As per provisional reports of Census India, population of Delhi in 2011 is 11,034,555; of which male and female are 5,882,117 and 5,152,438 respectively. Although Delhi city has population of 11,034,555; its urban / metropolitan population is 16,349,831 of which 8,750,834 are males and 7,598,997 are females."

That is not 22 million or 25 million, it is 16.3 million!

The population of Texas is an order of magnitude more in population. So yeah the OP was wrong.

Please substantiate your claim of otherwise with actual data.

Source:

http://www.census2011.co.in/census/city/49-delhi.html

> Delhi NCR, with the inclusion of Gurgaon, Faridabad, Noida and Ghaziabad becomes the No.1 Urban Agglomeration with a population of 21,753,486 [...]

http://pibmumbai.gov.in/scripts/detail.asp?releaseId=E2011IS...

1) "Metro area" usually refers to city and nearby suburbs, and

2) "It is the most expansive city in India—about 1,484 square kilometres (573 sq mi). It has a population of about 25 million, making it the second most populous city after Mumbai and most populous urban agglomeration in India and 3rd largest urban area[7] in the world"

source: Third sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delhi

Why is it that when people cite a link to support their point, they can't even manage to read it properly?

Your link says 21.8 millions for Delhi metro (as your quote specifies it). A figure that is dated from 2011. At that time, according to your other link, Texas was somewhere around 25.6 millions.

So, Delhi metro population was about 85% of Texas. Given the comparative growths, this percentage has probably raised a bit during the last 5 years. Overall "almost" looks to me as a correct approximation.

From the link:

"According to the 2011 census of India, the population of Delhi is 16,753,235."

There is no source for the figure of "Delhi metro area" so not really very scientific is it? 2011 was the last year for which there was census data.

There's indeed a source for Delhi metro. It's in the Wikipedia article you cited.

The latter is how I remember it at dusk two years ago ween I visited it. Wow.

I hope you enjoyed the place as much as I did even with the pollution!

I think most there don't really understand the health hazard or how bad it is for them because it's all they know. Put them in Kansas City for a week and send them back and I promise you'll see some people freaking out heh.

In comparison, I took the pic at 4pm :( Not dusk yet.

In my poor design vocabulary, I pointed out at the Sun, and joked to my designer friends that one of them put a vector mask on the Sun.

I couldn't go around much after the friend's wedding. I wanted to do a 6am jog at Rajpath and India Gate. But a friend joked that it was pointless to look at "India Gate as a silhouette". At about 1pm when going to Humayun's tomb, I passed by Rajpath and realized it wasn't a joke. I was scared to venture out anymore after a day of roaming. I hope to visit again sometime.

>> I think most there don't really understand the health hazard or how bad it is for them because it's all they know.

Its not just that. Even if people are aware of health hazards, they think they can make exceptions for themselves because one person isn't gonna make things worse.

I lived first half of my life in relatively cleaner Himalayan regions, and when I moved to Delhi, I was almost always sneezing. I already was miserable living there, and now its worse. :(

Many of my Indian friends are posting their air-quality readings on Facebook as a sort of macabre competition. The rest of the year isn't nearly this bad, and conditions have gotten much worse in recent years. I think many Indians are well-aware of the problem.

But by the same token, residents of Los Angeles don't sit around and worry about their air quality either and it's not like they don't know anything else, the city has no shortage of transplants.

So no nobody is going to "freak out"

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