Wednesday, February 17, 1999
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Wednesday, February 17, 1999 |
The Atlanta metro region continues to rank among the nation's worst violators of federal air quality standards for ground-level ozone. A monitoring station in Fayetteville confirmed that Fayette County had the worst ozone levels in the 13-county "non-attainment" region several times last summer. During summertime "ozone alerts," persons with respiratory ailments sometimes wind up in emergency rooms, and others suffer a range of breathing difficulties. Cars and trucks are responsible for more than 50 percent of the pollutants that form ozone, according to analysts. According to proponents of tougher air quality rules, vehicular congestion is making the region's daily commute intolerable. In a region that lacks a design to curtail urban sprawl, Atlanta commuters now drive more miles daily than those in any other American metropolitan area. Metro Atlanta drivers rack up more than 100 million miles each day, more than the distance from Earth to the sun. If the daily commute were distributed evenly, every man, woman, and tot in the Atlanta region would drive 34 miles a day. And those figures are expected to rise to 38 miles per capita and 150 million miles per day, if the trend continues.
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