On a drizzly Friday night, Rosana Zapata was mapping out a changing neighborhood.
Using Sharpie and pencil, the 18-year-old sketched her world on printer paper: a street intersection, a small parking lot, a lit-up sign for fried chicken. “I have a lot of memories there,” Zapata told a small group of young artists seated at school desks, who had each drawn their own favorite neighborhood spots.
These treasured locations stand against an increasingly difficult-to-ignore backdrop: truck traffic, driven partly by an e-commerce boom.
In the last decade, Red Hook – a Brooklyn neighborhood whose waterfront faces the upper New York harbor – has undergone cataclysmic flooding from Hurricane Sandy as well as years of construction in the neighborhood’s large public housing complex, the Red Hook Houses. Now, residents face a sudden buildup of last-mile warehouse facilities.
Since late 2021, Amazon has opened two facilities in the neighborhood, and it’s set to open a third later this year. Together, the three structures will comprise more than 800,000 sq feet of warehousing space and parking, with one facility’s 90ft walls casting shadows across a community garden.
Each new operation sends more vehicles down Red Hook’s narrow streets. Zapata worries about the increase of trucks and vans, especially when they roll by the school her younger brother attends. “That’s very dangerous,” she said. “Kids play around; kids are gonna be kids. We don’t want anyone to get hurt.” And she has noticed an uptick in traffic at the intersection she drew – where Wolcott and Dwight streets meet, right by the public library.
“Red Hook can be like a second family – even a first family,” she said. “But this community is changing a lot. It’s very, very hectic – it’s just too much sometimes.”
Residents worry that the warehouses threaten the safety of pedestrians and cyclists, and the health of their neighbors – but a lack of data has made it harder to advocate for more local control over warehouse openings. (Federal, state and local governments don’t regularly collect information on air quality or traffic when e-commerce facilities open, the way they often monitor other industrial sites like power plants or factories.)
Red Hook residents have now taken matters into their own hands. In a first-ever collaboration, members of the community installed traffic, air-quality and sound sensors purchased by Consumer Reports, and are now gathering data throughout the neighborhood. Consumer Reports teamed up with the Guardian to analyze the first several months of data.
Our measurements do not show precisely how much the new facilities have affected Red Hook, since the sensors were installed after they opened. However, seven months of initial data shows a neighborhood under stress:
A traffic sensor on Red Hook’s main street counts nearly 1,000 trucks and vans on an average weekday. The street is lined with shops and restaurants, and regularly gets backed up with semis and double-parked vans.
An air-quality sensor next to the Red Hook Houses, the neighborhood’s large public housing complex, measured 16 days in the last seven months with levels of particulate pollution the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says can be harmful for sensitive groups such as people with asthma. Red Hook has disproportionately high asthma rates.
A sound meter charts noises that are twice as loud as background levels every three minutes during daytime hours, and four times as loud every 30 minutes, on average.
More warehouses are on their way to Red Hook. Several planned facilities, including one that is larger than a million square feet, could bring more than 1,300 additional trucks to the neighborhood every weekday.
This problem could get much worse.
As the new facilities begin operating, the sensors should help residents document the increasing environmental impacts. But neighborhood groups are already preparing to deploy the data to advocate for new rules on how e-commerce facilities are developed throughout 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 their presence known daily.
“It seems to operate like clockwork,” said Scott Pfaffman, an artist who owns the building that houses the Record Shop, a vinyl store on Van Brunt that is a part of the sensor network.
On the store’s roof sits a vehicle counter, while a sound meter roosts in a tree out front. A pair of laser sensors suspended over the shop’s door chart air pollution from trucks and other sources that can damage respiratory health, especially among children and elderly people.
On an average weekday, the traffic sensor at the store counts 61 trucks and vans an hour in the period between 10am and noon, or about one each minute. The vehicle counter can tell the difference between a car and a van, a cyclist and a pedestrian – but it can’t visually identify which vans are branded with Amazon, FedEx or other delivery logos. Still, stand outside the store, and it’s clear that many of the vans in the morning rush are Amazon vehicles; they rumble up Van Brunt Street in packs of a dozen or more. Sometimes, residents stop on the sidewalk to record videos of the long lines of Amazon vans.
A second sensor – placed atop an upholstery store a half mile away – found even higher rates of truck and van traffic. This sensor typically sees about 105 trucks and vans an hour pass by between 10am and noon. On particularly busy days, it can be more than 140 trucks an hour.
[Read more about our methodology below.]
On several occasions, this sensor counted more than 1,200 trucks and vans over the course of a day – and that’s probably an undercount, because the sensors can miss vehicles when it’s dark outside.
That’s a high volume of delivery traffic for Van Brunt Street, said Brian Ketcham, who worked as a transportation engineer for New York City before consulting for neighborhood and environmental groups. “For a narrow two-way street with parking, yeah, that’s a lot of trucks and vans,” Ketcham said.
Data analyzed by the Guardian and Consumer Reports is in line with general trends across New York City. Delivery traffic in the city is booming, with the number of daily deliveries climbing from 1.8m in 2019 to 2.25m in 2023, according to an estimate from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Locals say a crush of trucks and vans now clog the neighborhood’s streets, jostling for space with buses, cars, pedestrians, bikes and scooters.
The trucks and vans that deliver these packages also contribute to disruptive street noise. Every three minutes during the day since Consumer Reports and the Guardian began gathering sound data in January, there’s a sound that’s twice as loud as background noise levels.
Mary Dudine, the owner of a wine and spirits shop on Van Brunt Street, said she’s bothered by the beeping of trucks reversing over and over as they try to make tight right-angle turns.
“That noise is there specifically to warn and alarm us,” Dudine said. “If every place I turn, all I hear is something saying ‘Watch out! Watch out! Watch out!’, what am I supposed to do? It’s just everywhere.”
Dudine said she can hear large semis hitting potholes two blocks away from her shop. Passing trucks regularly rattle the bottles on her shelves.
When warehouses open in a residential neighborhood, the increase in the number of vehicles on the streets sends ripple effects throughout the community. “It’s a real problem putting warehouses into residential communities,” said Ketcham. “It breaks up the roads faster. Noise is higher. It slows down traffic for passenger cars.”
More distribution centers are on the way, threatening to bring over a thousand more delivery trucks to Red Hook every weekday.
Amazon’s third Red Hook warehouse will add an estimated 344 truck trips and 1,224 car trips every weekday, according to a 2020 traffic study commissioned by the company that built the warehouse.
This warehouse is scheduled to open in September, according to officials at a neighboring school who spoke to Amazon. Amazon spokesperson Simone Griffin would not confirm a timeline to Consumer Reports and the Guardian but said the facility “remains in our plans”.
In a statement, Griffin said: “We always work hard to be a good neighbor, and take into account what it might mean for a community if we locate a building there,” but added that the company is aware of traffic issues and works with the community and local policymakers on such issues “when it makes sense to do so”.
Just a few blocks away, another proposed waterfront logistics complex includes an 80ft-tall warehouse, already under construction, and another 200ft-tall warehouse. It’s not yet clear who will operate them; developers will lease out the facilities once construction is completed. This compound and the Amazon warehouse due to open later this year together could generate more than 1,350 additional truck trips every weekday, according to the same formula used in the traffic study cited above.
Worse air quality, greater health risk
Air pollution in Red Hook regularly rises to levels the EPA categorizes as concerning for people who are particularly sensitive to particulate pollution, according to air-quality monitors set up by community members working with Consumer Reports and the Guardian.
Between September 2022 and April 2023, an air-quality monitor on residential Lorraine Street right across from the Red Hook Houses measured 16 days with particulate pollution levels above the level the EPA considers potentially harmful for sensitive groups. At the upholstery store and the Record Shop – which is located across the street from a public school playground – sensors each counted 14 days with potentially harmful pollution levels.
Although the sensors can’t draw a direct connection between delivery traffic and elevated pollution, these particulate levels will only worsen if truck and van traffic increases.
Amazon and other last-mile warehouses in Red Hook are opening shop against a backdrop of environmental hazards and concerning health outcomes. “This neighborhood already has toxic parts that have impacted health over the past few decades,” said Tevina Willis, community organizing manager at Red Hook Initiative, a longtime neighborhood non-profit. For example, the city closed a large park complex next to the Red Hook Houses in 2015 because the EPA found dangerous contaminants such as lead in the soil. Half of the 16 fields in the complex are still closed today.
In the two census tracts that contain 80% of Red Hook’s residents, asthma-related emergency room visits were higher than the average rate for Brooklyn and New York City, according to a 2018 report from Red Hook Initiative. And the 11231 zip code containing Red Hook has higher levels of asthma-related emergency room visits than any of the surrounding zip codes, according to data from the New York state department of health gathered between 2018 and 2020. (This is the most recent data available.)
“To put more things in here that are going to impact that – that’s what has residents concerned,” Willis said.
Increasing delivery traffic will only add to the pollution burden in Red Hook. Microscopic particles from heavy vehicle emissions can settle deep in a person’s lungs, elevating their risk of asthma, heart disease, cancer, late-onset depression and dementia. Elderly people, children and people with existing respiratory conditions are particularly vulnerable.
And the burden of that pollution isn’t evenly distributed, according to a study from True Initiative, a British emissions-focused research group. On average, people of color in New York are exposed to 15% more particulate emissions than white residents. Despite these large exposure gaps, there’s a worrying lack of hyperlocal air quality data across the US, experts say. Citizen science efforts – in which residents monitor air, water and other conditions themselves – can help close the gap. “Some of our most polluted communities in the US are severely under-monitored by traditional air-quality monitoring efforts,” said Dan Westervelt, a scientist at Columbia University studying air pollution. “Neighborhood-scale data leveraging consumer-grade air sensors is critical for addressing latent air-quality challenges.”
Red Hook, for example, is a blind spot in New York City: none of the roughly 100 sensors in the city-run community air survey program are in the neighborhood.
“What the city is collecting is inadequate,” Alexa Avilés, the New York city councilmember whose district includes Red Hook, told Consumer Reports and the Guardian. “And so community members and civic groups have decided to take that into their own hands.” She said the city needed to pick up the slack – but e-commerce companies like Amazon should be partly responsible for monitoring air quality near their facilities, too.
To cut down on emissions, Amazon says it plans to deploy 100,000 electric delivery vans nationwide by 2030. As of now, more than 3,000 of them are on the road, Amazon tells Consumer Reports, but none of them are in Red Hook.
Amazon isn’t the only delivery giant moving toward electric vehicles. FedEx, which is building a large last-mile facility right next door to Red Hook in Sunset Park, says its entire delivery fleet will be electric by 2040. UPS – which in 2018 bought and later razed a huge waterfront parcel in Red Hook that has remained empty ever since – has not publicly set a target date for converting its entire delivery fleet to zero-emissions vehicles, but it has committed to buying 10,000 electric vehicles.
Electrifying delivery vans will cut down on a large part of particulate emissions, but it won’t eliminate them. Electric vehicles still generate non-exhaust particulate pollution such as brake, tire and road dust – especially heavier delivery vans. For this reason and other safety concerns, city advocates and officials are pushing for alternatives that would decrease the number of trucks and vans on the road altogether, such as cargo bikes. In a small pilot program, Amazon is now making some Red Hook-area deliveries by cargo bike. Elsewhere in the city, UPS, FedEx, DHL and two other logistics companies also make deliveries by bike.
Air quality near a new breed of warehouse
Zapata is one of the tens of thousands of Brooklynites living with asthma. “I know many people with asthma also,” she said. “I don’t want to be breathing in air that could possibly give me diseases or affect my body. And I don’t want the kids to have any issues or have asthma because of the trucks.”
Zapata is part of the Red Hook Art Project, in which she and a small cohort of young adults are leading workshops designed to get neighbors thinking about what’s changing in Red Hook, and how they might respond. They’re now using sensor data to prepare for conversations with city and state representatives.
Several organizations are gathering similar data in Red Hook, including the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, which has installed several traffic-counting sensors. A partnership between the City University of New York and the local non-profits Red Hook Initiative and Pioneer Works has installed several air-quality monitors.
In Red Hook, two-thirds of the land is zoned for manufacturing, allowing last-mile facilities to pop up unchecked. In these areas, warehouse developers don’t have to ask New York City for permission or solicit input from neighbors before building – they don’t generally need to do traffic studies, or get special applications.
These zoning rules date back to 1961, a time when a warehouse typically meant a moderate-sized building where goods would be stored for extended periods, generating little traffic.
City officials and local advocates are pushing to change this rule, because it lumps together warehouses used for long-term storage with vast complexes that create round-the-clock delivery traffic. They argue that this new breed of facility should be treated much differently from the old, and should require buy-in from neighbors before moving in.
In February, Councilmember Avilés and other city officials promoted a package of eight city proposals and a state bill aimed at curbing harms from last-mile facilities. The proposals would, among other things, require warehouse operators in the city to get a special permit before opening up shop, and submit estimates of how the facilities will affect traffic and air quality. The proposals would also redraw the city’s network of truck routes.
Some New York state officials have announced support for reforms to zoning laws. In January, the New York state attorney general, Letitia James, wrote a letter warning the city that its policy to allow warehouses to be built without review or permit could potentially violate federal civil rights law, because it’s allowing last-mile facilities to cluster in neighborhoods of color. The letter cited coverage from Consumer Reports and the Guardian on Red Hook’s warehouse crunch, and urged the city to require warehouse operators to apply for special permits.
The uneven distribution of delivery facilities is a nationwide problem, as our previous reporting reveals. In 2021, Consumer Reports and the Guardian found that more than two-thirds of Amazon warehouses were in neighborhoods with a disproportionately high number of people of color and that 57% were in disproportionately low-income neighborhoods.
Under the Biden administration, the EPA has increased its focus on the disproportionate impact of freight and transportation pollution on communities of color and low-income neighborhoods. It has issued more stringent emissions standards for heavy-duty trucks, and consults with state and local governments on air-quality monitoring. But while some advocacy groups have called on the EPA to hold warehouse operators accountable for pollution resulting from their deliveries, the agency says that’s up to state governments and local agencies.
A bill currently in front of the New York state legislature called the Clean Deliveries Act could make New York the first state to do so, if it passes.
Sensors sited in three key locations in Red Hook gather several types of data that together help chart the impact of e-commerce delivery traffic: they count trucks and vans, detect particulate pollution and monitor sound levels.
The vehicle counts come from camera-based sensors mounted on two rooftops and one volunteer’s balcony. The devices are made by a Brooklyn-based company called Numina, and are designed to detect pedestrians, cyclists and different types of vehicles as they pass through the sensors’ field of view. Consumer Reports purchased the instruments, which take several images a second, use imaging software to categorize the vehicles in the images and then immediately delete the images to preserve the privacy of passersby. We only considered trucks and vans, which Numina counts as a single category.
Pollution data comes from a network of three Purple Air monitors. These are inexpensive sensors that use lasers to measure the concentration of PM2.5, which are airborne microscopic particles. Consumer Reports purchased these air-quality monitors, which were installed at the same three locations as the traffic counters. The data from our monitors, plus several others installed by community groups in Red Hook, is publicly available at map.purpleair.com. To improve the accuracy of the monitors, we applied a correction algorithm developed by Dan Westervelt, a Columbia University scientist who uses Purple Air monitors to study traffic pollution in New York City.
We converted the air-quality readings from 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 the air outside is safe to breathe.
The sensor we used to chart sound levels was developed by Convergence Instruments, a Canadian firm. The sound monitor picks up loudness in decibels, but doesn’t record or store any audio. Consumer Reports purchased one sound monitor, which is installed at the Record Shop.
Consumer Reports and the Guardian worked with Matías Kalwill, an artist and technologist with a studio in Red Hook, to engage with community members to combine and process the data. Kalwill helped develop relationships with sensor hosts and led the installations - which often required custom mounting hardware, electric wiring and wireless data access. He, Juan Chimienti and Juan Manuel Durand, two freelance software developers, built a data pipeline to gather the data streams from the sensors in all three locations, clean them up and apply the necessary corrections, and make them available to Consumer Reports and the Guardian for reporting.
Historical air-quality, traffic count and sound level data are available to view on catmap.fm, a website Kalwill, Chimienti and Durand developed for community use.
