Socio-economic Disparities in Exposure to Urban Restaurant Emissions Are Larger Than for Traffic

Restaurants and vehicles are important urban sources of particulate matter (PM). Due to the ubiquitous presence of these sources within cities, large variabilities in PM concentrations occur in source-rich environments (e.g. downtown), especially during times of peak activity such as meal times and rush hour. Due to intracity variations in factors such as racial-ethnic composition and economic status, we hypothesized that certain socio-economic groups living closer to sources are exposed to higher PM concentrations. To test this hypothesis, we coupled mobile PM measurements with census data in two midsize US cities: Oakland, CA, and Pittsburgh, PA. A novel aspect of our study is that our measurements are performed at a high (block-level) spatial resolution, which enables us to assess the direct relationship between PM concentrations and socio-economic metrics across different neighborhoods of these two cities. We find that restaurants cause long-term average PM enhancements of 0.1 to 0.3 µg m−3 over length scales between 50 and 450 m. We also find that this PM pollution from restaurants is unevenly distributed amongst different socio-economic groups. On average, areas near restaurant emissions have about 1.5× people of color (African American, Hispanic, Asian, etc), 2.5× poverty, and 0.8× household income, compared to areas far from restaurant emissions. Our findings imply that there are socio-economic disparities in long-term exposure to PM emissions from restaurants. Further, these socio-economic groups also frequently experience acutely high levels of cooking PM (tens to hundreds of µg m−3 in mass concentrations) and co-emitted pollutants. While there are large variations in socio-economic metrics with respect to restaurant proximity, we find that these metrics are spatially invariant with respect to highway proximity. Thus, any socio-economic disparities in exposure to highway emissions are, at most, mild, and certainly small compared to disparities in exposure to restaurant emissions.