i did a little bit of research on the pollution in windsor and while the city gets a bad reputation in canada from being right across the river from the industry in detroit, the reality is that all of the industrial decline in detroit has reduced the problem to being roughly comparable to toronto.

the idea that windsor has awful air pollution is an out of date notion; nowadays, the fact is that the air quality in windsor is usually comparable to the air quality in the gta, which is not particularly bad in global terms.

the other problem in windsor is that the transportation corridor over the bridge - which is famously the busiest border region in north america - goes right through the city. so, if you're heading to the us, you come off the 401 (the big highway that runs from windsor/detroit, through toronto, and into montreal) and go on to a regular city street for a few kilometres, before you go over the bridge and on to the interstate. the result is trucks idling at streetlights, international traffic stuck in traffic jams, etc. and, if you walk through the area, you can see the smog on the road. they're building a new bridge that should both route the traffic out of the city and prevent it from idling, so that should take another dent out of it.

when i walk down the street, i don't usually get the stench of car fumes - i get the stench of burning tobacco and, more frequently, the smell of burning marijuana. these are different smells. i think the bulk of the actual problem is not coming from cars but from smokers. it's a mix, certainly, but it might be useful for these weather monitoring stations to start measuring second-hand smoke in addition to particulate matter and ozone and nitrogen and sulphur...

the real reason i'm reacting poorly to the air in windsor is less that it's particularly dirty and more that i grew up in ottawa, where the air is unusually clean. that's maybe warped logic, granted. but, short of moving back to ottawa, which i should point out is also growing very rapidly, there might not be a lot i can do about it.