Lol it cut a hour and 15 min off my commute.

For those of you on the right coast..That photo is the Harbor Freeway in LA looking north from just south of downtown.  Normally that is solid cars for around 20 hours of the day.  That is why I moved north.  It might be the busiest freeway in the country except normally, the cars do not move!

HudginJ3 wrote:

Well the air looks a lot cleaner than it did in the early 70's. It still looks smoggy though. Im not sure Im convinced that the smog is caused by cars. Hmmmmm. give it a couple more weeks.

I grew up in LA in the 50's, before there were pollution controls.  On a good day you could see about a quarter mile.  The air was greenish-yellowish-brown.  Your eyes burned. Your lungs burned.  It hurt to breathe.  You could feel it on your skin.  Asthma was a major cause of death.

With the advent of auto pollution controls, that plummeted.  I could even see the mountains to the north 30 miles away.  You might argue that there was correlation without causation, but I bet you cannot find and alternative answer.

LA is surrounded on 3 sides by 10,000 ft mountains, and the prevailing wind is from the ocean to the west.  LA is also famous for its inversion layer that holds the air in below around 1,000 Ft.  All that exhaust just sits there in the basin.  Like sitting in your car in the garage with the door closed.  There are multimillion cars there with their exhaust collecting and staying in the basin. Like sitting in your car in the garage with the door closed.

Yes,, LA smog was, and still is, plagued with smog,  but now it is orders of magnitude lower.  And oxides of nitrogen are almost gone.

Bearing Bob along with some others live just north of LA in the San Jauquin Valley, which has its own smog problem.  Maybe one of them would care to add to this.

 

Last edited by lowercasesteve (3/29/2020 10:38 PM)

Bearing Bob wrote:

Ya, as much as I hate to admit it, it's my belief that some government rules has made a positive impact on cleaner air. What it did to the price of transportation is another show. I do believe that  the engines of recent times have reduced smog a bunch. While the government's 80's attempt at smog devices on engines resulted in crappy performance, I'm amazed at how new cars can cleanly produce big power.

The San Joaquin Valley huge, bigger than some states, about 50 miles wide by 450 miles long. Bakersfield is at the southern end and surrounded on three sides by big mountains. With the northwest prevailing winds, smog from as far away as northern California comes to a stop at the southern end. Our average wind here is ~7 mph, and without heavy winds the smog has nowhere to go.

Probably pre Y2K it would be a rare day you could see the mountains which are 30 miles away on all 3 sides. Nowadays they are seen nearly daily.

That's my TKO style answer. 

No it wasn't....not even close

josh-kebob wrote:

Bearing Bob wrote:

Ya, as much as I hate to admit it, it's my belief that some government rules has made a positive impact on cleaner air. What it did to the price of transportation is another show. I do believe that the engines of recent times have reduced smog a bunch. While the government's 80's attempt at smog devices on engines resulted in crappy performance, I'm amazed at how new cars can cleanly produce big power.

The San Joaquin Valley huge, bigger than some states, about 50 miles wide by 450 miles long. Bakersfield is at the southern end and surrounded on three sides by big mountains. With the northwest prevailing winds, smog from as far away as northern California comes to a stop at the southern end. Our average wind here is ~7 mph, and without heavy winds the smog has nowhere to go.

Probably pre Y2K it would be a rare day you could see the mountains which are 30 miles away on all 3 sides. Nowadays they are seen nearly daily.

That's my TKO style answer.

No it wasn't....not even close

Nonsense, doing quite well young padawan. 
 

RV6 wrote:

TKO, I thought you had left us. BB2's post was about the longest I have ever seen him write. Didn't know he had it in him. 
 

I got a really good laugh from this Gary.  Maybe because it came on the heels of a similar text message from my brother, who had failed to reply to my text to him, and was explaining his no reply:



I dunno, maybe the social distancing is affecting me.