Boston has made a concerted effort to kick its nasty habit of smoking cigarettes. The Boston Parks and Recreation Department has disallowed smoking on city-run property and local pharmaceutical giant CVS has pledged to cease the sale of cigarettes. New science from Down Under, though, is poised to take Boston’s sentiments even further, changing the way we interact with cigarettes for the better.
Dr. Amber Pearson of the University of Otago in Wellington, New Zealand and her team have successfully mapped the spots that smokers most frequent in downtown Wellington. Employing the use of cartographic techniques previously used for landscape ecology and archeology, Dr. Pearson and company were able to chart the street areas where the most smokers could be seen by the wisps of smoke they exhale.
According to BMC Public Health, where the study was published, “The findings of this and similar research could ultimately support the expansion of smoke-free public spaces.” Essentially, using Dr. Pearson’s mapping technology, lawmakers will likely become more apt and better equipped to weighing the pros and cons between all-out smoking bans and designated smoke-free areas.
The motivation behind the entire study is to further examine the health consequences of smoking and second-hand smoke, and the well-known detrimental agents within them.
“Smoke-free outdoor areas help smokers to quit, help those who have quit to stick with it and reduce the normalisation of smoking for children and youth,” said Associate Professor George Thomson, co-author of the study. “They also reduce litter, water pollution and cleaning costs for local authorities and ratepayers.”
To accurately record their findings, the team observed 14 outdoor areas of bars and cafes throughout downtown Wellington, but also accounted for visual exposure to smoking at all of the locales. They found that 16 percent of people who enjoyed the outdoor space in these areas smoked.
As written in the study, “Visibility analyses indicated that estimated visible smoking was highest in the evenings (7-8 p.m.), where the average values across Wednesday and Friday ranged from zero up to 92 visible smokers.”
Smoking, as it turns out, was found to be more prevalent at the end of the week compared with midweek in the evening.
Continued the study, “Maps indicate that streets with high levels of retail shops and hospitality areas had high values of estimated visible smokers.”
By mapping their results, researchers are able to locate specific areas where smokers are more likely to puff and, subsequently, places they ought not to do so. This could bode well for cities like Boston that are ramping up efforts to curtail smoking while protecting nearby spectators from second-hand smoke.
Of course, New Zealand data isn’t seamlessly applicable to a city like Boston. People in various cities adopt different habits, exhibit different personalities and adhere to different norms. But the positive consequences could be had by all cities who consider alternate methods to quelling smoking.
What do you think, Boston? Would city officials be more successful in their crusades against smoking if they made an effort to explore smoke-free spaces as opposed to enacting citywide smoking bans?
