Santa Cruz participates in California Clean Air Day

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (KION) California is home to seven of the most ozone-polluted cities. On Wednesday, many across the state took the pledge to join in on California's 4th Clean Air Day. It's a day where people are encouraged to help improve air quality.

“Transit is safe, it's affordable and it's critical to meeting our climate and air quality goals,” mentioned Brian Sheridan, Development and Engagement Director at the Coalition for Clean Air.

Clean Air Day is a perfect opportunity to ditch your car, share a ride, hop on that bike, or take a walk to reduce that carbon footprint.

“Things that you can do to improve air quality have that very important core benefit of fighting climate change,” said Sheridan.

This is the fourth year, and to celebrate Clean Air Day, Santa Cruz METRO went green by offering free fares to the community to encourage people to use public transportation. This also gave Santa Cruz Metro a chance to introduce four new electronic buses, just released this year.

“Two are dedicated in Watsonville with that free fare program. And we, we have our charging station for electric vehicles in Santa Cruz, and we're just testing all the different routes with our two remaining busses kind of on different county routes," Danielle Glagola, Santa Cruz METRO Marketing, Communications & Customer Service Director.

Santa Cruz METRO was joined by a number of agencies across California. This is the second year they have participated in the event, and it all sparked after last year's CZU Lightning Complex Fire.

“The fires really hit the Santa Cruz Mountains hard, and we started talking around that time if we could do a planting initiative or what we could do to get the community involved,” said Glagola.

The 2020 Central Coast fires, along with current major wildfires across the state have been a wake-up call to another environmental concern, climate change. And all that smoke from those wildfires travels great distances impacting our neighbors down the road.

“That air is going somewhere. In a lot of cases, it could be going to Salinas. It could be, you know, moving out to the Central Valley places where, you know, valleys, where there's this air pollution, gets trapped,” Sheridan.

California Clean Air Day is a step forward in the right direction when it comes to the state's air pollution. Santa Cruz METRO plans to participate next year. If you want to participate you can take the Clean Air Day Pledge and start planning now.