>Where I live, on the S coast, 7 mins walk from the beach, you'd think we were blessed with "bracing sea air". Well that is the impression but apparently there's still a high instance of asthma, dur to chemical pollutants crossing the Channel from France.

Even here, most of the summer you don't get the best air (and I'm also just 15 minutes from the ocean... 15 minutes drive, that is). You can see the violet dome above the city when you fly out of it. I think a significant part of it comes from the airplanes (not only a civil airport, but also the naval base), then the spread of the city (the main street is the boardwalk area, the business center is some 6 miles west, the administrative center some 10 miles south of it) which means that almost nothing is nearby - you have to drive and drive. Everybody must drive. And there's even some industry.

>LA's lack of public transport was lampooned in "... Roger Rabbit", in the days when there was a burgeoning trolley-bus (street car?) system, and Bob Hoskins commented that LA had the best public xport system in the world. All that was sacrificed for the car in a typical 50s/60s lamentable lack of foresight into the sheer numbers in the future.

I wonder what was behind that story. I've found some conspiracy mentioned (Ford, GoodYear and the Big Oil Sisters being bent on dismantling the public transportation and selling cars, gas and tyres instead), supposedly happening just in the time when the rabbit was framed, but of course... it's a big web, and you can find almost anything on it, except what you once found. Too hard to find again.