Mitigating Diesel Truck Impacts in Environmental Justice Communities

This paper describes a series of sequentially implemented policies to mitigate local diesel truck impacts resulting from goods movement activity at two port facilities and simultaneously to improve traffic operations in the communities of Barrio Logan in San Diego, California, and Old Town in National City, California, both low-income communities of color. The paper provides the first comprehensive documentation of the unique process and solutions that emerged following the collaboration of all major stakeholders. Local impacts in Barrio Logan comprised air pollution, noise, and decreased pedestrian safety, while traffic operations in both communities were affected by congestion on the main freeway access, interchanges with insufficient capacity, and heavily mixed land uses both within and adjacent to the communities. These issues provided the impetus for the mitigation effort, the final implementation of which involved a permanent rerouting of all trucks weighing more than 5 tons to roads external to the community. Previous assessments of the project have described the extent to which mitigation strategies are expected to improve traffic operations or have assumed air quality improvements without carrying out an air quality analysis. A local-scale analysis of diesel particulate matter (DPM) emissions in Barrio Logan is given. The results show that while the mitigation did not result in improved regional air quality, it did significantly improve air quality in the primary affected corridor and resulted in a 99% reduction in DPM emissions and an 87% reduction in diesel truck vehicle miles traveled.