Roads being a huge factor also plays into socioeconomic factors though, at least in some places. Take New York City for example, where the off-ramps for highways were purposefully planned to let traffic out in larger numbers in impoverished areas to keep the noise and pollution minimal for the more affluent burrows.

Same. I hail from a particularly polluted (compared to the rest of the EU) country, so PM2.5 over 80µg/m3 during the entire heating season, NOx constantly above 50µg/m3 in cities due to old diesels with anti-pollution devices turned off or removed entirely and the overall effect is said to be a 3-6 years shorter life expectancy.

It checks out compared to countries without these issues, so 15 years to me sounds exaggerated, especially if we're talking about areas close to each other.

Such a huge shortening normally involves heavy metal pollution of the drinking water and soil.

Yeah, I mean, how do they identify the causal effect here? It's obviously not easy, because polluted areas are also poor areas, and poor people live in poor areas (and have other problems).

It would be nice if the article had mentioned this issue. A metastudy of lots of bad correlational studies is just garbage in garbage out. So, did they address the issue?

There are ways round it, by the way. As a recent review said:

"it is unclear why federal ISAs that are the input into all regulatory analyses tend not to incorporate the emerging body of evidence on the effects of air pollution on health outcomes from the economics literature despite the additional rigor imposed by the emphasis on causal inference."

https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/resource/15...

From a quick google search I'm guessing this study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11097628/

That sounds incredibly obvious on the face of it though ?

Having the study at hand is nice of course, but environnemental factors being alleviated through money and discriminatory policies is rampant enough I don't get the surprise.

People using high quality water filters or straight buy clean water tanks in areas where tap water is bad, getting better indoor air filtering, blocking construction of pollution sources to move them further away (near poorer areas) in the county, redlining/manipulateing zoning rules to make it systematic etc.

It's a old as humans.

London has one-way wind?

This is simply not true, at least if you consider all of Europe.

I don't believe this, show me your stats. The poorest region is Bulgaria, with life expectancy of 75. Just looking at the American Congress (which isn't even composed of the richest people), few people there die at mere 75 years of age.

Also, here in the EU, life expectancy varies a lot. Interestingly, not-so-rich countries such as Italy and Spain win over richer Austria, Germany and Denmark by a year or so.

...in one single cohort-based study that only looked at around 10K deaths between the United States and 16 European countries, not the EU or all of Europe.

Life expectancy in the EU varies a lot by country. Someone born in Sweden has a life expectancy over ten years longer than someone born in Latvia.

That one study feels like a paper that was engineered to make headlines and social media sound bites, not to be an accurate look at the entire population.