The Alarming Impact Busy Roads Have on Cognitive Development

When we think of the social costs of driving, we tend to focus first on all the money and work productivity lost to traffic congestion, and second on all the lives lost to car crashes. But there are significant developmental impacts that occur as a result of the air pollution that accumulates along roadways, too. These can be harder to identify and quantify, but as a new study of Barcelona school children shows, they're every bit as alarming.

The work comes from a big research team led by Jordi Sunyer from the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology in Barcelona. Sunyer and collaborators tracked the developmental progress of more than 2,700 kids age 7 to 10 attending 39 schools in the city. Some of the schools had low levels of traffic-related pollutants nearby, while others had high levels—shown in the map below: