There will be mostly two kinds of response to this article.
(1) Cars and trucks are evil, get rid of them.
(2) Too bad, nothing we can do, get over it.
Neither is helpful. We're going to need lots of tires for a long time. Trains don't (and can't) go everywhere. Bikes can't carry everything, and any imaginable bike that could would have the exact same problem. Trucks of all kinds, and buses, are indispensable and need tires. The question is how to make the tires better. Fortunately-people are working on this.
What we need to do is not argue tires vs. no tires, but keep the pressure on these makers and others to continue developing less-harmful tires. And the best way to do that is with our wallets. If there's demand for less toxic and more sustainable tires, they're more likely to be made.
We also need to reduce the average weight of passenger vehicles, and reduce the need for vehicular travel to accomplish daily needs. That includes everything from urban design to WFH, but those efforts are largely orthogonal to the issue at hand.
> Neither is helpful. We're going to need lots of tires for a long time. Trains don't (and can't) go everywhere. Bikes can't carry everything, and any imaginable bike that could would have the exact same problem. Trucks of all kinds, and buses, are indispensable and need tires. The question is how to make the tires better. Fortunately-people are working on this.
As with many things, scale matters.
You are correct in saying that bikes can't carry everything, but a significant portion of vehicle trips are private car owners driving alone (whether for shopping, commuting, etc) and over shorter distances bikes can serve a very similar purpose. Likewise, while nobody is seriously suggesting replacing (say) long-haul trucking with bikes, mail carriers have made good use of cargo bikes for last-mile delivery within cities.
You are correct in saying that trains don't go everywhere, but they can go more places than they do now. (And in the US, they used to!)
The discussion shouldn't be a binary choice between "eliminate cars and trucks" and "do nothing" - there's room in between those two for reducing our reliance on motor vehicles. To the extent that the problem of tire dust (among other things) scales with the number of vehicles on the road, reducing the number of vehicles on the road will help to mitigate it.
And yes, we do also need to pressure tire manufacturers to develop less harmful tires. But I don't think the other concerns are as orthogonal to the issue at hand as you say they are.
Yeah because having some small passive argument is really going to change things?
Yes it’s fairly obvious we need them in some situations (you carry equipment on a farm).
But fixing the car problem is going to take proper activism and a greater push given it has such inertia and driving is so embedded. Not to mention corporate interests trying to preserve it.
It’s not that we can’t quickly transition, it’s that this isn’t dangerous enough to force a rapid change. If this was killing millions of people we could do something extreme like rapidly swap to dual use vehicles with road tires that can operate on rails. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_track
It’s worth remembering how quickly large scale shifts like using private cars and highway infrastructure happened in the first place. Core blocker for such change isn’t the inability to change infrastructure, its lack of urgency to change.
Tyres don’t last forever. With regulatory intervention in place, tyre manufacturers will bring products to market that lower or eliminate hazardous emissions. This problem could be solved in less than a decade.
Not without some major sacrifices. Rubber is about as benign as anything else that’s going to provide traction in a wide range of weather conditions on current roads. Steel wheels provide poor traction and lots of road noise, to get both grip and reasonable levels of durability you end up with some flexible solid that breaks apart into tiny bits that are hazardous to inhale.
You need to change something more fundamental than the tire design to make dramatic improvements.
How did that bike get to you? How did the food get to your grocery store before you rode there? (Hint: it's not trains and boats. Go watch the traffic on a highway some time and you'll be disabused of that notion.) How did all of the transport involved in your furniture's manufacture and final delivery occur? Even if we completely got rid of passenger cars, there would still be plenty of tires on the road and there would still be a need to make them more environmentally friendly. Your response is a non sequitur. I already said we need to reduce the need for vehicular travel to accomplish daily needs. What more do you want, that doesn't fall into the useless "get rid of them" bucket? And yes, I realize your comment might have been satire, but - as another commenter amply demonstrates - some people here say that kind of thing with no irony whatsoever.
P.S. for the aforementioned un-ironic picador: As I already said, we should address this problem in many ways. "Reduce trips" is one part of the equation, but doesn't eliminate the need to make the trips that remain more ecologically benign. Suggesting that this is "don't address the last 1%" is a total strawman, more insulting to people's intelligence than anything I've said and more injurious to the curious conversation that the guidelines recommend.
Food largely gets to grocery stores on trains and boats and then to peoples homes in private vehicles. The last mails delivery from distribution centers to retail is a tiny fraction of overall transit.
Saying we can eliminate 99% of pollution but that last 1% is hard therefore why bother isn’t a rebuttal, it’s just insulting the intelligence of your reader.
> some people here say that kind of thing with no irony whatsoever
Well, if that person appears, then this would be a good reply to them. Well, actually it'd be pretty heavy-handed and unconvincing, but still. You know.
(1) Cars and trucks are evil, get rid of them.
(2) Too bad, nothing we can do, get over it.
Neither is helpful. We're going to need lots of tires for a long time. Trains don't (and can't) go everywhere. Bikes can't carry everything, and any imaginable bike that could would have the exact same problem. Trucks of all kinds, and buses, are indispensable and need tires. The question is how to make the tires better. Fortunately-people are working on this.
Bridgestone: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/04/eco-friendly-tires-brid...
Goodyear: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/goodyear-unveils-90... (specifically using soybean oil in place of 6PPD)
What we need to do is not argue tires vs. no tires, but keep the pressure on these makers and others to continue developing less-harmful tires. And the best way to do that is with our wallets. If there's demand for less toxic and more sustainable tires, they're more likely to be made.
We also need to reduce the average weight of passenger vehicles, and reduce the need for vehicular travel to accomplish daily needs. That includes everything from urban design to WFH, but those efforts are largely orthogonal to the issue at hand.