memes

Air quality is getting worse everywhere thanks to wildfires and the like, but my point was that you don't look at a city like NYC or Boston and see an orange haze from the smog and leaded gasoline emissions anymore.

The biggest issues with cities largely come down to cars, and having grown up in a summer beach hotspot, I can tell you that it can be just as bad out in the countryside. From noise pollution to emissions to traffic, you can largely thank cars for all of it. Road noise is actually one of the loudest things in a city. In places that have limited access to cars, you can immediately tell the difference.

That's fair, but my understanding is that Los Angeles is an extreme case rather than a representative example of a typical American city, in part because of its unfortunate location in a valley and in part because of its sprawl. The fact that pollution is particularly hard to control there is why California is legally uniquely able to apply for its own set of automobile pollution regulations that are stricter than the rest of the country.