Why do poor school kids have to clean up rich commuters’ pollution?

The fundamental injustice of pollution from urban freeways

Item:  In the past two years, Portland Public Schools has spent nearly $12.5 million of its scarce funds to clean up the air at Harriet Tubman Middle School. Tubman School faces a further increase in air pollution from the proposal of the Oregon Department of Transportation to spend a half billion dollars to widen the portion of Interstate 5 that runs right by the school. And in fact, while DeLong’s point about “a veritable flamethrower”  seems like hyperbole, that’s pretty much exactly what the Oregon Department of Transportation is doing here:  Having already polluted the air near Tubman, it is doubling down on its earlier transgression–in part because of the moral hazard:  coping with the pollution isn’t it’s problem–it’s neatly shifted all of the costs of pollution to others–in this case the students and Portland Public Schools.

Source: cityobservatory.org