Using a traffic tool in San Francisco city planning

What is the problem?

The San Francisco Planning Department needed a way to decide when to refer project sponsors or developers to the San Francisco Department of Public Health. The health department assesses the risk associated with exposure to roadway-related air pollutants, such as ozone, particulate matter, and nitrogen dioxide. These air pollutants can be triggers for asthma.

What did Tracking do?

The California Environmental Health Tracking Program developed a traffic tool that the Planning Department used as a screening instrument. The tool helped the Planning Department determine how close high-traffic roads were to a proposed project development. When residential or other sensitive uses such as a community space are proposed for sites within 500 feet of roads that more than 100,000 cars travel on daily, the Planning Department is required to perform a risk assessment to fully understand the potential effects of the project before approving it.

Improved public health

Local stakeholders used the California Tracking Program's traffic tool to identify and prevent potentially harmful environmental risks in city planning.

Improving community access to useful information

What is the problem?

Variations in health status most frequently occur at the community level, but health information often is available only at the county level. The challenge is how to use existing data to increase the public's knowledge about how the environment affects their community's health, without compromising individual privacy. The affected communities should be able to gain access to this information.

What did Tracking do?

The California Tracking Network used special analytic and mapping techniques to locate areas in Alameda County with:

• high rates of preterm birth.
• high rates of full term births with low birth weight.
• a range of asthma indicators.

The staff explored possible relationships between these outcomes and environmental hazards. The project demonstrated how the California Tracking Network can identify elevated rates of community health outcomes while maintaining individual confidentiality. The California Tracking Network also identified disparities in rates by race and ethnicity, income, and geography.

Improved public health

The California Tracking Program partnered with the Urban Strategies Council and several other organizations in a community collaborative called InfoAlameda-County (www.infoalamedacounty.org). The collaboration aimed to make these data available publicly and to provide technical assistance to promote equity and empowerment for low-income neighborhoods and communities of color in Alameda County. The information generated by the tracking network was incorporated into the InfoAlamedaCounty.org interactive mapping Web site so that community residents could continue to access the data even after the project ended.