On a rainy Friday night, Rosana Zapata mapped out a neighborhood in transformation. Using a marker and pencil, this 18-year-old drew her world on printer paper: a crossroads, a small parking lot, an illuminated fried chicken sign. “I have a lot of memories from there,” she Zapata told a small group of young artists seated at desks, each of whom had drawn her favorite places in her neighborhood.
These treasured places are facing a backdrop that is increasingly difficult to ignore: truck traffic, facilitated by the rise of e-commerce.
For the past decade, Red Hook, the Brooklyn neighborhood whose shoreline overlooks Upper New York Harbor, has suffered catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Sandy, as well as years of construction on the city’s vast public housing complex. neighborhood. Now, residents are facing a sudden backlog of “last mile” warehouses. [última etapa antes del reparto].
Since late 2021, Amazon has opened two facilities in the neighborhood and plans to open a third later this year. Together, the three structures will encompass more than 800,000 square feet of storage and parking space, with the 90-foot-high walls of one of the facilities casting shadows over a community garden.
Each new operation sends more vehicles into the narrow streets of Red Hook. Zapata is concerned about the increase in trucks and vans, especially when they drive past the school his little brother attends. “It’s very dangerous,” he says. “The children play there; children will always be children. We don’t want anyone to get hurt.” And she’s noticed an increase in traffic at the intersection she drew: where Wolcott and Dwight streets meet, right next to the public library.
“Red Hook is like a second family, even a first family,” he says. “But this community is changing a lot. She is very, very agitated, sometimes it is too much.
Residents are concerned that the warehouses endanger the safety of pedestrians and cyclists and the health of their neighbors, but a lack of information has made it difficult to advocate for greater local control over warehouse openings. (Federal, state, and local governments do not regularly collect air quality or vehicle traffic information when e-commerce facilities open, as they often do with other industrial zones such as power plants or factories.)
Red Hook residents have taken action on the matter. In an unprecedented collaboration, community members installed traffic, air quality and sound sensors purchased by Consumer Reports, and are now collecting data from across the neighborhood. Consumer Reports has collaborated with The Guardian to analyze the first months of information.
Our measurements do not accurately show how much the new facility has affected Red Hook, as the sensors were installed after it opened. However, seven months of initial data shows a neighborhood in tension:
– A traffic sensor on Main Street in Red Hook counts nearly 1,000 trucks and vans on an average business day. The street is lined with shops and restaurants, and is often filled with double-parked trucks and vans.
– An air quality sensor located next to Red Hook Houses, the neighborhood’s large public housing complex, measured 16 days in the past seven months with particulate pollution levels that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says, they can be detrimental to sensitive groups such as people with asthma. Red Hook has disproportionately high asthma rates.
– A sound meter registers noise twice as loud as ambient levels every three minutes during the day and four times as loud every 30 minutes, on average.
– More wineries are on their way to Red Hook. Several of the planned facilities, including one of more than one million square feet, could bring more than 1,300 additional trucks to the neighborhood every day of the week.
This problem could get much worse.
When the new facility comes online, the sensors will help residents document the growing impact. But neighborhood groups are already preparing to use the data in advocacy for new rules on how e-commerce facilities are developed across the city and state.
Thousands of trucks and vans
On Van Brunt Street, a narrow two-lane street lined with parked cars, shops, and restaurants, trucks and vans make an appearance every day.
“They seem to work like clockwork,” says Scott Pfaffman, an artist who owns the building that houses the Record Shop, a record store on Van Brunt Street that is part of the sensor network.
On the roof of the store is a vehicle counter, while a sound meter perches on a tree in front. A pair of laser counters suspended above the store’s doorway record air pollution from trucks and other sources that can harm respiratory health, especially among children and the elderly.
On a typical business day, the store’s traffic sensor counts 61 trucks and vans per hour in the period between 10 am and noon; that is, approximately one per minute. The vehicle counter can distinguish between a car and a van, a bicyclist and a pedestrian, but it cannot visually identify which vans bear the logos of Amazon, FedEx, or other delivery companies. However, if we stand outside the store, it’s clear that many of the vans driving down Van Brunt Street at morning rush hour are Amazon vehicles. Residents sometimes stand on the sidewalk to record video of the long lines of Amazon vans.
A second sensor, placed above an upholstery store half a mile away, detected even higher truck and van traffic. This sensor typically sees about 105 trucks and vans pass by per hour between 10am and noon. On the busiest days, that figure can exceed 140 trucks per hour.
At various times, this sensor counted more than 1,200 trucks and vans over the course of a day, and this is likely an underestimate, because the sensors can miss vehicles when it’s dark.
That’s a high volume of delivery traffic for Van Brunt Street, says Brian Ketcham, who worked as a transportation engineer for New York City before working as a consultant to neighborhood and environmental groups. “For a narrow two-way street with parking, yes, that’s a lot of trucks and vans,” says Ketcham.
The data analyzed by The Guardian and Consumer Reports is consistent with general New York trends. Delivery traffic in the city is skyrocketing, with daily deliveries rising from 1.8 million in 2019 to 2.25 million in 2023, according to an estimate from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Neighbors say the streets are now packed with trucks and vans fighting for space with buses, pedestrians, bicycles, and skateboards.
The trucks and vans that deliver these packages also contribute to annoying noise from the street. Since Consumer Reports and The Guardian began collecting sound data in January, a sound is heard every three minutes that doubles the noise levels in the environment.
Mary Dudine, who owns a wine and liquor store on Van Brunt Street, says she is annoyed by the beeping of trucks backing up over and over as they try to make sharp right-angle turns.
“That noise is there specifically to warn us and alarm us,” says Dudine. “Yeah, every place I turn, all I hear is something that says, ‘Watch out! Careful! Careful! What am I supposed to do? It’s everywhere.”
Dudine can hear the big semi-trucks pounding into potholes two blocks from his store. The passing trucks frequently rumble the bottles on their shelves.
When warehouses are installed in a residential neighborhood, the increase in vehicles on the street causes a domino effect throughout the community. “It’s a real problem to put large warehouses in residential areas,” says Ketcham. “This causes the roads to break down faster. The noise is higher. The speed of circulation of passenger cars is reduced.
More distribution centers are on the way, threatening to bring more than a thousand delivery trucks to Red Hook every day of the week.
Amazon’s third warehouse in Red Hook will add about 344 truck trips and 1,224 car trips each business day, according to a 2020 traffic study commissioned by the company that built the warehouse.
The warehouse is scheduled to open in September, according to officials from a neighboring school who spoke to Amazon. Amazon spokeswoman Simone Griffin declined to confirm the dates to Consumer Reports and The Guardian, but she said the installation “remains in our plans.”
In a statement, Griffin said, “We always strive to be a good neighbor, and we keep in mind what it could mean to a community if we locate a building there,” but added that the company is aware of traffic issues and is working with the community and local legislators on these issues “when it makes sense to do so”.
A few blocks away, another proposed oceanfront logistics complex includes an 80-foot-tall warehouse, already under construction, and another 200-foot one. It is not yet clear who will manage them; the developers will lease the facility once construction is complete. This complex and the Amazon warehouse that will open later this year could generate more than 1,350 additional truck trips each weekday, based on the same formula used in the aforementioned traffic study.
Worse air quality, greater health risk
Air pollution in Red Hook regularly rises to levels the Environmental Protection Agency considers concerning for people who are especially sensitive to particle pollution, according to air quality monitors installed by community members in collaboration with Consumer Reports and The Guardian.
Between September 2022 and April 2023, an air quality monitor located on residential Lorraine Street, directly opposite the large Red Hook social housing complex, measured 16 days with particle pollution levels above the level that the EPA considered potentially harmful to sensitive groups. At the upholstery store and the Record Shop, which is across the street from a public school playground, sensors counted 14 days each in that area.
Although sensors cannot establish a direct relationship between delivery traffic and high pollution, these particulate levels will only worsen if truck and van traffic increases.
Amazon and other Red Hook last-mile stores are opening their doors against a backdrop of environmental hazards and worrisome health consequences. “This neighborhood already has toxic waste that has affected health for decades,” says Tevina Willis, community organizing manager for the Red Hook Initiative, a nonprofit organization that has long worked in the neighborhood. For example, the city closed a large park complex next to Red Hook Houses in 2015 because the EPA found dangerous contaminants like lead in the soil. Half of the resort’s 16 parks remain closed to this day.
In the two census tracts containing 80% of Red Hook residents, asthma-related emergency room visits were higher than the rate for Brooklyn and New York City, according to a 2018 report by Red Hook Initiative. And the 11231 ZIP code that encompasses Red Hook has higher levels of asthma-related emergency room visits than any of the surrounding ZIP codes, according to data the New York State Department of Health collected between 2018 and 2020. (These are the most recent data available.)
“Putting more things in here that are going to make the problem worse is what worries residents,” Willis says.
Increased delivery traffic will only add to Red Hook’s pollution load. Microscopic particles from heavy vehicle exhaust can settle in the lungs and increase the risk of asthma, heart attack, cancer, late-life depression and dementia. Children, the elderly, and people with respiratory conditions are especially vulnerable.
And the burden of that pollution is not evenly distributed, according to a study by the TRUE Initiative, a British research group focused on polluting emissions: Blacks in New York are exposed to 15% more particulate emissions than blacks. white residents, on average. Despite these large differences in exposure, experts say there is a troubling lack of local data on air quality in the United States. Citizen science efforts, in which residents themselves control the air, water, and other conditions, can help bridge the gap. “Some of the most polluted communities in the United States are poorly monitored by traditional air quality monitoring systems,” says Dan Westervelt, a Columbia University scientist who studies air pollution. “Neighborhood-scale data from consuming air sensors is critical to addressing latent air quality issues.”
Red Hook, for example, is a blind spot in New York City: none of the city’s Community Air Survey program’s 100 or so sensors are in the neighborhood.
“What the city is collecting is inadequate,” New York City Councilwoman Alexa Aviles, whose district includes Red Hook, told Consumer Reports and The Guardian. “And that’s why community members and civic groups have decided to take action on the matter.” Aviles said the city has to take the reins, but e-commerce companies like Amazon should also be partly responsible for monitoring air quality near their facilities.
To reduce polluting emissions, Amazon plans to roll out the use of 100,000 electric delivery vans across the country by 2030. Currently, more than 3,000 of these vans are already on the road, Amazon tells Consumer Reports, but none of them They’re in Red Hook.
Amazon isn’t the only delivery giant moving toward electric vehicles. FedEx, which is building a large, state-of-the-art delivery facility just off Red Hook in Sunset Park, says its entire delivery fleet will be electric by 2040. UPS, which in 2018 bought and later tore down a huge waterfront lot in Red Hook, which has sat vacant ever since, has not publicly set a target date for converting its entire delivery fleet to zero-emission vehicles, but has committed to buying 10,000 electric vehicles.
Electrifying delivery vans will reduce much of their particulate emissions, but it won’t eliminate them. Electric vehicles continue to generate non-exhaust particulate pollutants such as brake dust, tire dust and road dust, especially from heavier delivery vans. For this reason and other safety concerns, city advocates and officials are pushing for alternatives that reduce the number of trucks and vans on the road, such as cargo bikes. In a small pilot program, Amazon is making some deliveries in the Red Hook area by cargo bike. Elsewhere in the city, UPS, FedEx, DHL and two other logistics companies also deliver by bike.
A 21st century winery
Zapata is one of tens of thousands of Brooklynites with asthma. “I know a lot of people with asthma, too,” she says. “I don’t want to breathe air that could make me sick or affect my body. And I don’t want kids to have problems or asthma because of the trucks.”
Zapata is part of the Red Hook Art Project, where she and a small group of young people lead workshops designed to get residents to reflect on what is changing in Red Hook and how they might take action. Now they are using the information from the sensors to prepare for meetings with city and state officials.
Several organizations are collecting similar data in Red Hook, including the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, which has installed various sensors to count vehicular traffic. A partnership between the City University of New York and local nonprofit organizations Red Hook Initiative and Pioneer Works has installed several air quality monitors.
In Red Hook, two-thirds of the land is devoted to manufacturing, allowing last-mile facilities to spring up unchecked. In these areas, warehouse developers do not have to seek permission from New York City or seek input from neighbors before building; they generally do not need to do traffic surveys or obtain special requests.
These zoning regulations date back to 1961, a time when a warehouse used to mean a moderately sized building where merchandise was stored for long periods, generating little traffic.
City officials and local advocates are pushing to change this rule, as it lumps together long-term storage centers with large complexes that generate around-the-clock delivery traffic. They argue that this new type of facility should be treated very differently from old facilities and that approval from residents should be required before installation.
In February, Councilwoman Avilés and other city officials promoted a package of eight city proposals and a state bill aimed at curbing the damage caused by last-mile facilities. Among other things, the proposals would require city storekeepers to obtain special permission before opening their doors and to submit estimates on the impact of their facilities on traffic and air quality. The city’s truck route network would also be redesigned.
Some New York State officials have announced their support for the zoning law reforms. In January, New York Attorney General Letitia James wrote a letter warning the city that its policy of allowing warehouse construction without review or permit could violate federal civil rights law because it is allowing last-mile facilities are clustered in neighborhoods of color. The letter cited Consumer Reports and Guardian coverage of the Red Hook warehouse crisis, and urged the city to require warehouse operators to apply for special permits.
The uneven distribution of delivery facilities is a national problem, as our previous report reveals. In 2021, Consumer Reports and The Guardian found that more than two-thirds of Amazon’s warehouses were in neighborhoods with disproportionately high numbers of people of color, and that 57% were in disproportionately low-income neighborhoods.
During the Joe Biden administration, the EPA has focused more on the disproportionate impact of freight transportation pollution on communities of color and low-income neighborhoods. It has set stricter emissions standards for heavy trucks and consults with state and local governments on air quality control. But while some advocacy groups have called on the EPA to hold warehouse operators responsible for contamination resulting from their deliveries, the agency says that’s up to state governments and local agencies.
A bill currently pending in the New York State Legislature, called the Clean Deliveries Act, could make New York the first state to adopt this measure, if it passes.
Methodology
Sensors located at three key locations in Red Hook collect several types of information that together help map the impact of e-commerce delivery traffic: they count trucks and vans, detect particle pollution, and record noise levels.
The vehicle count comes from camera sensors installed on two roofs and on a volunteer’s balcony. The devices are made by a Brooklyn company called Numina, and are designed to detect pedestrians, cyclists and various types of vehicles as they pass through the sensors’ field of view. Consumer Reports acquired the instruments, which take several images per second, use a computer vision program to classify the vehicles in the images, and then immediately black out the images to preserve the privacy of pedestrians. We only took into account trucks and vans that Numina counts as a single category.
Pollution data comes from a network of three Purple Air monitors. These are cheap sensors that use lasers to measure the concentration of PM2.5, which are microscopic particles suspended in the air. CR purchased these air quality monitors, which were installed in the same three locations as the traffic counters. Information from our monitors, as well as others installed by community groups in Red Hook, are publicly available at map.purpleair.com. To improve the accuracy of the monitors, we applied a correction algorithm developed by Dr. Dan Westervelt, a Columbia University scientist who uses Purple Air monitors to study traffic pollution in New York City.
We convert air quality readings of PM2.5 concentration into an easy-to-read Air Quality Index, or AQI. The Environmental Protection Agency developed the AQI system to help people understand when it is safe to breathe outside air.
The sensor we use to record sound levels was developed by Convergence Instruments, a Canadian company. The sound monitor records the volume in decibels, but does not record or store any audio. Consumer Reports purchased a sound monitor, which is installed at the Record Shop.
CR and The Guardian worked with Matías Kalwill, an artist and technologist with a studio in Red Hook, to help community members combine and process the information. Kalwill helped build relationships with the people who have the sensors installed and managed the installations, which often required custom mounting kits, electrical wiring, and wireless data access. He, Juan Chimienti and Juan Manuel Durand, two independent software developers, built a data pipeline to collect the information streams from the sensors in the three locations, clean them up and apply the necessary corrections, and make them available to CR and The Guardian. for reporting.
Historical air quality data, recall Traffic amount and noise level can be found on catmap.fm, a website created by Kalwill, Chimienti and Durand for community use.
Editor’s Note: The environmental sensors in this project were purchased with support from the Energy Foundation, a philanthropic organization working for a clean and equitable energy future.
This article has been produced by Consumer Reports and The Guardian as part of a broader investigation into e-commerce stores.
Consumer Reports has no financial relationship with the advertisers on this site. Consumer Reports is an independent, nonprofit organization that works with consumers to create a fair, safe, and healthy world. CR does not endorse products or services and does not accept advertising. Copyright © 2023, Consumer Reports, Inc.