Water

Transportation also has a huge impact on the quality of our water. Overflow from thing like roads, bridges, parking lots and other watertight surfaces can ruin drinking water and worsen the habitat quality. This  secondary source of pollution deposits road salt, dirt, fertilizers, pesticides, antifreeze, oil, rubber, metals, litter and other stuff into all different types of water ways. The contamination of our groundwater is also caused by huge underground gas tanks that leak. The worst is the gasoline additive MTBE which has been linked to  convulsions, kidney damage, and could cause cancer.  Also the need to bring millions of gallons of oil to fuel cars and other vehicles has many effects on our water. Ocean oil spills. Of course the huge example of this that happened just last year is the BP oil spill in The Gulf of Mexico.US Environmental Protection Agency

Planes trains and automobiles

Over 125 million people in America live in places with way too much air pollution.  The EPA blames the early deaths of over 64,000 people in America on air pollution every year.  Asthma, lung and heart disease are also made worse by air pollution. adding on to the negative impacts on health and the environment, air pollution in the form of smog and acid rain have been shown to kill  agricultural crops and harm buildings at a cost of between $2 and $3 billion per year.Cars and other vehicles are the biggest source of city air pollution, creating more than two-thirds of the carbon monoxide in the atmosphere, a third of the nitrogen oxides , and a quarter of the hydrocarbons in short the tings that cause smog.  Some emissions put out by cars and trucks are known to cause cancer, including toxic things like soot, arsenic, formaldehyde, and lead.  "In the 1996 National Toxics Inventory, EPA estimates that mobile sources such as cars, trucks, and buses release about 3 billion pounds of cancer-causing, hazardous air pollutants each year". http://www.epa.gov/

Trains effect on the environment

Trains are a lifeline to American society because they haul goods and people all across the country. I am looking at the cost of these behemoths taking trips daily, and when I say cost I don't mean monetary cost. I am looking for what impact these trains have on our environment. Most of what I have found about trains and the environment is the effect on air quality. Trains burn massive amounts of fossil fuels every day and this has a huge impact on our air quality, People are working on alternative fuels and train engines have gotten much more efficient over the past years but for now they cause a significant effect on our air."People in society definitely want the benefits that come with trains transporting goods and people but are they willing to sacrifice the quality of the air they breath in order to have it?"   file:///private/Network/Servers/BRHSFileserver.local/Volumes/data2/2011/asalucier/Desktop/Trains%20and%20the%20Environment.webloc
Also they are two other ways that trains can cause harmful effects on the environment. One is the noise pollution that they cause. People who have businesses near places that trains frequent often complain that the train makes people shy away from their stores. The other is laying new tracks, even though most train companies try to clear as little as possible they still destroy wildlife habitat in the process.