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I wonder how important the raw amount of emissions is. Density should decrease at a cubic rate of distance, so being close to a small source of emissions might be worse than being somewhat far from a heavier source.

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See for yourself.

Propublica plotted a "cancer map" of elevated cancer risks, and you can see how it drops off as you go away from certain points.

https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/

Interesting. One question totally non-sequiter to the toxicity conversation, but why do people that use maps orient the image in a direction other than North being up so that they have to add a label to the image indicating the direction of North?

For local navigation (e.g. your phone screen, laying a map on a table, etc) it's generally considered best practice to orient the map so that North is North. For abstract purposes North is up is the standard. I can't think of a good reason to do otherwise unless you're trying to illustrate a point specifically about local navigation (e.g. orienting a map so that the headwaters of a navigable river are at the top).

It's pretty hard to separate correlation from causation. There's way more sources of carcinogens than just car generated pollution. And lots of them will tend to correlate with poverty/working class which will tend to correlate with living next to highways.

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