Air pollution and motor vehicle collisions in New York city

Abstract

Road traffic accidents are a pervasive feature of everyday life, killing 36,500 people, injuring 4.5 million and, overall, generating costs to the American society of $340 billion in 2019. Understanding the underlying factors can improve the design of prevention strategies. We use all road traffic collisions in New York City between 2013 and 2021 (N = 1,269,600) and match each individual collision to the nearest weather and air pollution station. Our study uses highly disaggregated data using an hourly frequency of collisions at a fine spatial level incorporating various air pollutants and weather factors. We employ an instrumental variable approach using temperature inversions to provide exogenous variation in air pollution addressing endogeneity and measurement error concerns. We find that higher concentrations of carbon monoxide (CO) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) increase the number of collisions but leave the severity (persons injured or killed) unaffected. Part of this can be explained by the effect of air pollutants on aggressive behavior: CO (p < .05) and SO2 (p < .01) increase the number of collisions caused by aggressive driving. Interestingly, this channel is only present in male drivers. Our results provide additional evidence that air pollution not only adversely affects health, but also has “non-health” related effects which are costly for the society.