Excuse me for smoking!

[Gumball]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13467728

New York is introducing an outdoor smoking ban. But could the UK and other countries follow suit, asks Tom de Castella.

It is a city heralded for attracting incomers from around the world, but New York has just become less hospitable to one group - smokers.

Under measures approved by local authorities, swathes of outdoor public places including beaches, municipal parks and even Times Square have become tobacco-free.

And with smoking legislations, as with so much else, where New York leads, the rest of the world can find itself following.

Over here in the UK we already have a 'nanny state', but a ban on smoking OUTDOORS seems to be pushing things too far. This just isn't cricket!

 

[Doc Manhattan]

There was a good op-ed (that of course I cannot find) written by an anti-smoking advocacy doctor (scientist? Someone official) that said, in effect, the parks smoking ban would have no health benefit for park-goers--there's no data showing the harm of casual, outdoor sidestream smoke.

In fact, he went on, it might actually cause more of a health problem, as smoking visitors to the park would congregate outside park entrances, which would concentrate smoke in the one place all visitors are most likely to pass through.

The other thing--and this is me speaking, not the op-ed writer--is that most NYC parks are not an idyllic, (relatively) unbroken greenspace like Central Park. They're either block-size asphalt playgrounds or land reclaimed as parkspace because it wasn't worth developing. The nicest of them are places too hilly to build, but mostly, it's odd parcels or long strips by the water, nearly all of which now have four lanes of highway traffic as a neighbor. If they wanted to ban smoking on the meadows or ball fields in Central Park, I could understand, if only to mitigate the discarded filters. But don't tell me anyone's health is improved because I can't smoke in a park bounded by the East River and the FDR.