Has anyone here ever lived near a freeway or even moderately busy road?
I made the mistake of renting next to the freeway. Noise was perfectly tolerable, but I could not use my back porch, because after just a few weeks, everything had a fine coating of black dust. I could not keep my windows open in the summer. I was certainly breathing this vile shit the entire time I lived there.
This doesn't surprise me in the least. Every time it rained you could see streaks of black sediment trails where rivulets would collect and concentrate it. It flowed completely unfiltered straight into the ocean. Poison.
The negative externalities around cars are incomprehensibly huge. And yet, we have more of them than ever, they are getting bigger and bigger, and they laugh in our face with "green leaf" or "PZEV" decals. It's demonic.
It's always this circular logic where "I need my car because the supermarket is an hour walk" but the supermarket is an hour walk because everyone drives.
It's mind boggling how much resources get poured in to cars and car infrastructure only to provide a slower, inefficient, more expensive, and toxic system. Feels like the next generation is seeing this now and things are slowly starting to change in some countries. Not sure how fast we can undo decades of damage and corporate brainwashing though.
> It's always this circular logic where "I need my car because the supermarket is an hour walk" but the supermarket is an hour walk because everyone drives.
If there’s no roads and vehicles, how does the food get to the supermarket?
You propose no alternative. You can't have cars if you have no roads. You can't have roads without cars, because you need to figure out how things are going to get to that supermarket.
Roads and streets existed before cars. Even then, that ignores that the same location can be traveled to through different means. Goods can be delivered to a store by a van even if most customers arrive on foot or by public transportation.
There are streets within north America which ban passenger vehicles but still allow trucks and vans for deliveries.
In the Netherlands many shops sit in pedestrianized areas. The local government sets specific times, mostly low-traffic hours such as between 07:00 and 11:00 to open the area to trucks and vans to resupply shops.
No one's saying "no roads or vehicles", op was pointing to the circular justification for the level of infrastructure built up for vehicles. This is a classic straw man.
That paradise is unsustainable without mechanized agriculture and industry and a way to transport people and goods to those work sites. People aren't going to give up the conveniences of modernity for higher principles when they can't afford to.
That's why so many people are cautious about "EVs to save us all", to put it mildly.
We are so focused on climate change and greenhouse gases that we do not see a lot of other issues and may exacerbate some of them in the process of decarbonisation.
This sentiment is just contrarianism, I think. I've lived in Los Angeles my whole life and the difference that clean air standards make is obvious. The black dust isn't just tire and brake dust. It's also soot and it used to be much much worse.
Nothing is a silver bullet but I'll be much happier when we're done with ICE noise and exhaust.
I really don't think it is. We're thrusting ourselves into just new problems. Yes, we move away from old problems that gas-powered cars have, but we move into new problems. For one, EVs perpetuate the idea of the car, which is perhaps the most dangerous part. Then, there's all sorts of new things like building out the infrastructure required for EVs and mining the new materials. For example, have you looked into the areas where lithium mining occurs? It is not a clean process and brings its own new problems, especially for the local people. You have foreign owned and operated companies move in and suck out manufactured value from the land, all the while polluting the local ecosystem. It's oil all over again.
It isn't contrarianism to point out that a solution is not the solution everyone thinks it is. Yes, we should probably switch to EVs, but we should be switching away from cars as a whole. But we're not. Cars are selling more than ever. It's not contrarianism to simply look at facts rather than hype.
Cars are selling, despite their high economic price, because they're incredibly useful.
Make competing modes of transit at least one of more useful at no more cost or no less utility but at a lower cost and people will switch incredibly quickly. That's a tall order, because the modern automobile is a wonder of transport speed, comfort, and convenience.
I'd only add "...because they're incredibly useful, AND government policy has consistently favoured such a mode of transport over all other alternatives". The amount spent by governments on maintaining road infrastructure dwarfs all other transport spending, the amount of land dedicated to parking and driving space is mindboggling, and of course the amount spent on ensuring the global oil industry has been able to reliably and safely deliver fuel to vehicles is beyond comprehension* (and almost certainly one of the reasons the transition to EVs will be slower than technology might otherwise allow - vested interests with billions to lose will do anything to keep their share of the spoils).
Not to mention the fact that we've yet to actually start truly paying for the long term environmental and health costs of allowing our cities to be so dominated by a single mode of transport.
*) it's estimated up to 20% of the US's defence budget is spent protecting oil supplies for a start, which effectively acts as a subsidy of around 70c a gallon.
You aren't wrong that government support of automotive transport is immense. But that government support comes from decades of popular electoral support for those policies from all across of the political spectrum. Why? Because cars give people more convenient and independent transportation then just about any other mode. And people push their politicians and representatives to support that kind of transportation.
If you want to undo the car centric culture and economy, you cannot just ignore the broad base of popular support it enjoys.
> Why? Because cars give people more convenient and independent transportation then just about any other mode.
This is kind of a chicken and egg problem.
The value of a car is proportional to the extent of the road network. There is no value (for most cars) in isolation.
The original push for government investment in car-friendly infrastructure and highways was from industrialists, technocrats, and military minds. It was top-down planning, not bottom-up. After those major infrastructure investments (and divestments from commuter rail), the car was an obvious choice. Everything after that was self-reinforcing: more cars -> more roads -> more cars -> more roads. Of course if you already own a car then it is a sunk cost and you will prefer the government spend more on car infrastructure to benefit you, further perpetuating the investment cycle.
If the initial circumstances had been different (maybe progress in electrification proceeded a little faster and oil refining a little slower) then public transit and urban planning might have developed differently and the car would not be as important as it is now (practically a necessity in most of the US).
Sure, there's an element of that. But the idea that government policy has been primarily driven by what would produce the "best" outcome as far as transport options go that the population actually want is a little naive. And of course what we all want is convenience and comfort for ourselves while not having to deal with the downsides (or impossibility) of providing it for everyone.
I'm happy to accept the reality that currently we have no form of alternative transport technology that offers the same comfort & convenience of the car - but I also believe we'd've been better off in the long run if public spending hadn't been so grotesquely skewed in favour of that particular option - other technologies would have had a better chance to come to the fore (e.g. why have e-bikes/e-scooters taken so long to become popular - there's no particular reason I know of they couldn't have been a big part of our transport network 20 or 30 years ago), we could have laid out our cities so we didn't need to travel such huge distances on a regular basis (vs, e.g. occasional long-distance travel between dense hubs where most facilities and services could be accessed via walking/cycling etc.), goods transportation could've been revolutionised by dedicated automated networks etc. etc. For me the most convincing argument that exists against the size (and reach) of government power that we've become accustomed to is that so many opportunities for a better balance of transportation options have been lost to a virtually single-minded focus by the powers-that-be over the last 70 or 80 years on private cars above all else.
But we also built our society to make the car more convenient. Can’t remember the ratio but the amount of parking space available per car is absolutely insane. That means a relatively cheap access to put your giant car almost anywhere you go. Most cities are built around that idea and that makes other form of transportations almost impractical.
So yes the car is convenient but we also built many things to make it more convenient. In places where subways/rapid transit are made more convenient, there’s of course less parking and less road space and naturally % of car ownership goes down
It’s a choice. It’s not naturally always based on the merit of the car.
Does "800 parking spots per car" pass the sniff test?
There's order of magnitude 1 car per US resident. Does it seem like there are 800 parking spots per US resident? A quarter of a trillion total parking spots?
I doubt my car parks in 800 unique places (including different street parking spots as unique) in a given year.
On the smaller end, call each space 16'x8'. That puts a little more than 2% of the entire land mass of the US as parking spaces (assuming I didn't get any of the exponents wrong).
That's originally the result of a deliberate domestic propaganda campaign, cf. "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM
If we did it once for cars we could do it again agin 'em.
> Because cars give people more convenient and independent transportation then just about any other mode.
In the US, this is true.
In most European cities, you can just walk instead, or take the metro or a tram.
It's really convenient to just walk to where you want to go, and when the grocery store is a 10 minute walk away, you don't need to fill a car with groceries. Just go more often.
Need to go further? Clean and safe public transportation is often more convenient than having to drive yourself.
I really like being able to read a book on my way to work rather than paying attention to the road and making sure i don't kill myself or someone else.
I’ve been looking at places for retirement where I can live car-free or at least very car-lite. There are very few places in the US where this will be possible in my lifetime. Absolutely, let’s more towards an EV future because that’s the best we’ll do in most people’s lifetimes but we can’t expect that change to fix what we’ve spent 100 years building. It needs to be seen as step one of many yet so many Americans are fighting against taking even that step.
Yes it's called NYC. Cars everywhere but you don't need one. Every neighborhood has everything you need. Subway taxis and Ubers and delivery for everything else.
Cars are only useful because America foolishly built and rebuilt around cars, instead of humans. There were even places that functioned perfectly fine with transit and walking, destroyed and replaced with infrastructure for cars.
If it can be demonstrated to most voters to be a mistake, presenting the full plan to undo and replace it with something better would be a good next step.
When was the plan for what we have now ever presented to voters?
Clearly it's not something that can be "undone" all in one go - but every day governments make decisions about what infrastructure to build/repair/extend, how much parking should be available and how much to charge for it, and how much to continue ensuring the current car-based economy is well supported/subsidized. If those decisions gradually moved towards "let's not assume cars are the be all and end all", we could still slowly unboil the frog as it were.
It never was. But as a voter, it's what outside my window right now and what I understand.
If you want to make wholesale changes quickly, you probably need the support of voters.
Nobody put 240V center-tapped, 60 Hz AC residential electricity to the voters either, but if you wanted to change it, you're probably going to need a strategy and a communications campaign to explain why and how.
US public transit is ruled by homeless and criminals. Constant stabbing, sexual assault, robbery, and stalking.
I will not take my kids on any transit where they might be assaulted by a naked homeless man. America will never have safe public transit because it lacks the will to handle the mentally ill and addicts.
If the city you live in has been entirely designed around private motor vehicles and lacks any decent transit network (LA being the obvious example), no amount of investment into helping the mentally ill and drug addicts is going to make transit an attractive option for more than a tiny percentage of the population.
Thankfully in Australia's biggest cities our public transport systems are generally clean and safe to use - but a) they're not always super reliable, despite some improvements in recent years b) they're often poorly interconnected, meaning I could potentially do 80% of the journey sitting in comfort on a train, but spend 3 times longer than it would take to drive trying to deal with getting to/from train stations and c) there are still huge areas of said cities that are fairly poorly served by trains, and buses will always be a second rate way of getting around. Oh and d) you can't carry v. large items or animals on most public transport (*). All solvable problems, some easier than others, but there's a distinct lack of real political will to do so.
(*) e.g. it'd be a 15 min train ride to take my dog to the beach from where I live, but she's not a service animal so wouldn't even be allowed on, despite taking up less space than a human.
(Ooh, I actually just looked it up - you are actually allowed to take dogs on trains here, though they're supposed to be muzzled. Never seen anyone do so though, and I'm quite sure they wouldn't be allowed on buses).
> because the modern automobile is a wonder of transport speed, comfort, and convenience.
It's also heavily subsidised and its cost does not include a signficant chunk of externalities.
Also, this has been discussed to death, but a large chunk of car usage can be replaced by other modes of transportation. However, that transition requires upfront infrastructural investment.
Sadly, arguments like yours ensure that investment won't happen. So, externalities will keep piling up, until the situation will get dire enough that 1. it can't be ignored anymore and 2. it's too late to meaningfully undo the damage.
For example if you google "why did Japan enter WW2" the summary answer is:
> "Faced with severe shortages of oil .. Japan decided to attack the United States and British forces in Asia and seize the resources of Southeast Asia."
and while we're on the subject, we didn't go to war with Iraq (either time) for oil. Iraq wanted to sell us oil, and Iraqi oil on the international market would have driven oil prices lower for us. The reasons lie elsewhere.
It's OK to be against the Iraq war or all war, but it's not OK (or at least accurate) to say it was so we could get their oil, pretty much the exact opposite.
energy is what replaces human labor and also makes things possible that human labor can't even provide. Our energy desires in the future will grow even higher. It's not a defect in human nature, it's a defect in the laws of thermodynamics.
Taking the bus is inconvenient, especially in Los Angeles. We do not have a great public transit system. However, it is far cheaper than car insurance. One bus ride is $1.75 these days, which is quite a bit--but it also includes transfers up to at least an hour after you get on. I usually get a ride to work, and I take the bus home daily, except on the rare occasion I manage to get a ride home with someone at work.
*I pay $0 in car insurance, gas, maintenance*. I pay $1.75 for the bus on most days, while others might have to pay $3.5/day; A day pass is $5 if you need to make a third trip during the day, or go backwards for shopping (taking the same line in the opposite direction doesn't count for a transfer)
If you spend a hundred years optimizing your infrastructure for one mode of transport while disregarding all others, it's not surprising that it's the most convenient, or indeed the only possible, mode of transport for a majority of people.
This is the wrong question: the right question is whether public transit is more subsidized per passenger-mile (or freight mile) than our road networks.
(Even more abstractly, it doesn’t matter whether or not public transit is highly subsidized, so long as the positive externalities of that subsidization are deemed worth it. You don’t get to the size and density (and corresponding economic output) of cities like NYC by allocating personal parking space for every resident.)
One application of (EV) cars is the robotaxi. Once this solution reaches critical mass, car ownership as we see it today will drop off.
If I can send my car out to be a robotaxi while I'm at work and/or :^) asleep, then how much do I care that MY specific vehicle return to bring ME home, when I could just use any other robotaxi available? So then I don't own a car at all and ownership elsewhere falls and the number of total cars drops to the number needed to handle only the maximum number of simultaneous rides.
Robotaxis don't have anything to do with and certainly aren't dependent upon EVs. I highly doubt robotaxis ever make it. And at that point, why not invest in other infrastructure. It's pointless to have big vehicles carrying one or two people.
Once cars start being designed for robotaxi use, it makes economic sense to be much smaller: most rides are one-passenger. (Though who knows what crazy outcomes you end up with under the regulators.)
EVs are usually designed for consumers convenience insofar as being able to travel a substantial distance between charges to accommodate a minority of actual use when user may need to travel further than the average commute inside the city. A company that operates a fleet of taxis can purchase a very large number of short jaunt single/dual passenger EV and a much smaller number of large vehicles and task the former with the majority of rides either charging frequently when unused or hot swapping batteries when theirs get low. Therefore weight and ergo tire dust might be decreased even more so than one might imagine from size alone due to the reduced battery needs.
One might also suppose that in exclusively urban environments it might make sense to provide harder tires designed to produce less dust and less aggressive driving than human drivers to the same end.
Most car trips today are single person and yet cars are enormous and getting bigger all the time. It's not the regulators, it's the consumers that want the crazy outcomes.
If we look at the economics of Uber and Uber Eats, we see that they have shifted to ride sharing and also delivery sharing. In that, it makes more sense to bundle up multiple people and deliveries into one. Doesn't that sound a whole lot like buses?
Uber has drivers. There's probably some reason to customize car design for taxis, I'm not sure, but that's a modest difference relative to no driver and the greater expected scale of supplanting most human driving in time.
Whether Uber has drivers or had automated drivers doesn't really matter. I think they show that there isn't much business in point-to-point "automated" car rides.
> It isn't contrarianism to point out that a solution is not the solution everyone thinks it is.
Literally nobody thinks that EV's will reduce microplastics. What are you even talking about?
EV's have the potential to dramatically reduce our reliance on gasoline. Current EV technology is far from perfect, but do you think people will just stop having personal transportation? Do you think it's better to keep using gasoline cars forever? So you agree that some kind of non-gasoline personal vehicle is likely to be dominant for some time as a method of personal transportation, unless you are just ignoring reality completely or think that people will magically change how they live in even more fundamental ways without incentives to do so, which is magical thinking. So EVs are inevitable, since there is no other credible alternative to gasoline personal vehicles that is even proposed, and EVs are starting to displace gas vehicles in significant numbers.
So keep shouting as much as you like about how we need to 'stop normalizing the idea of a car' but just realize that less than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 1% of the world will even bother to listen to it, and in the meantime we are likely to end up building several billion electric cars before another alternative comes around. If you want to change the world, develop the technology that makes it make sense to act the way you want people to act, because nothing else will persuade anybody.
> Literally nobody thinks that EV's will reduce microplastics. What are you even talking about?
Not that, for starters.
Is there data that proves inconclusively that electric vehicles AND the new infrastructure and mining and every other systematic thing that comes along with them and doesn't currently exist is actually (not just hopes and dreams) less impactful on the environment? Because as far as I can tell, your comment relies on that, and I haven't seen that data. I could care less about holding on to gas-guzzling cars. I would just like to understand things better before jumping headlong into a "solution" that may or may not be any better. And there are massive incentives for companies to jump into EVs, so there is a lot of conflict of interest with EVs. Can corporations and investors be trusted when they stand to make a fortune?
Again, my point is to reach an understanding. I do not currently understand why EVs are some bastion of hope when it comes to cars. The best data that I have seen does not account for disposal of batteries nor the mining, long term maintenance and upkeep and continual use of EVs, infrastructure, etc. when it comes to EVs. And if they are better, then where is the crossover point when all this is considered? Is it 10 years? 50 years?
And yes, I do think re-enforcing the car is not a good idea. You can think it's unrealistic, and sure, in the short term it probably is. But we shouldn't just throw our hands up and reach for a new "solution" that just brings new problems.
It is a fact that EVs are better for the environment and will be even more better once certain infrastructure is built out. There's no reason to shit on an improvement just because it's not a cure. The data is a quick search away if you're actually interested.
Well, I have looked, so if you don't mind pointing to data that addresses what I mentioned then that would be appreciated.
It is hard to find, but what I have found is that EVs cross over, in terms of emissions, around 6-24 months into ownership over ICE vehicles. This accounts for manufacturing to use. As far as I could tell, it does not take into account the new mining required, the new manufacturing centers, the new infrastructure, battery disposal, end of life scenarios, etc. Basically, what I've already said.
These are systems. Yes, in isolation EVs are better than ICEs. As you start to broaden the viewpoint, I think things get a loss less definitive such that the wins become a lot less impactful.
Being honest, I think the main reason that EVs have so much hype is that because people plan on making a lot of money from the lithium and other mines and selling the EVs.
Did you know the lithium in batteries is 95% recyclable? So even if lithium mining is dirty, the amount needed for 2 cars might actually be used in 8 or more cars over time. Hopefully we find something even better for batteries.
I'm not really sure what you mean. What information from what sources? What is dubious? I didn't quote anything and simply stated my understanding. I am not aware of the 6-24 month cross over point being so-called "FUD". I don't think I have read this report directly before, but I just found Volvo's 50 page report (https://www.volvocars.com/images/v/-/media/market-assets/int...). On page 6, it effectively confirms what I just stated. With wind power recharging batteries, EVs cross over ICE at 49,000km. With EU-28 mix at 77,000km. With standard global electricity mixed power sources at 110,000km. Given I've had my car since 2015 and barely have 50,000 miles on it, that means that I would need to drive an EV for at least ten years before it crosses over an ICE car for CO2 emissions, according to Volvo's data. Now, I realize that my driving mileage is probably well under average, but it is my personal usage. (Of course, the data has +/- components depending on various specifics, but the idea is there.)
So that effectively confirms (and is actually worse than) what I stated above. Everything else I am merely asking about because I haven't seen the data that says one way or the other. You and the other commenter claim there's the magic data out there if I "just search for it", while everything I've stated is just oil propaganda. It's just dumb that if you even ask for data regarding EVs, you get labeled an oil person, when such a claim, for myself, could not be further from the truth.
The Volvo report seems pretty good, so I guess I'll read it while missing out on your and the other commenters' magic data unless you decide to materialize it. Although, it goes without saying that Volvo stands to make money from this, so there is a conflict of interest for sure, at least for this particular report. But it seems relatively accurate to my read so far.
My unwillingness to spend an hour giving you sources to counter your nonsense "points" is only evidence of my disdain at your half worked out half baked thesis of "electric cars aren't as perfect as some people think". You aren't making any concrete claims and you aren't giving any concrete arguments, you are just vaguely saying electric cars are worse than some hypothetical person thinks they are, but you don't say what that person actually believes or what constitutes 'good'. Its just sloppy thinking with all the hallmarks of someone who has been consuming propoganda, your opinion about what the policy conclusion should be is extreme and is so much more strongly held than any other part of your thinking. You also present, with no support whatsoever, that everyone elses views are shaped by unnamed mining interests who want to sell raw materials for batteries (but you are completely unconcerned about the likely source of your own opinions, big oil interests who will lose 100% of their gasoline profits).
I don't know what point you are making with your CO2 numbers. Say the actual thing you think you are demonstrating. Are you saying electric cars won't reduce CO2 emissions? That the average person over estumates how much CO2 emissions will be reduced? Say that then? I have no idea what you are trying to say.
My advice is to sit and actually decide before you research it what constitutes "good" and "improvement" for this topic. Then go see if you can decide whether those things are delivered, potentially. Then write down a list of specific "problems" and try to verify, feom credible sources, if they are really significant problems. Otherwise no matter what is presented you will just keep saying "yea but" and bringing up new unrelated "facts". This is the sort of emotional argument used by talk radio charletans.
That means not just saying "infrastructure" as though that is an actual argument. Keep in mind any argument that could equally well be used against current technologies as well is not a valid argument against electric cars.
For example, in 1915 I could claim that adoption of gasoline cars is impossible because of a lack of infrastructure. You would have to build a gas station on every corner in the city! This is not a valid argument because they did easily build all those gas stations, as well as a vast network of pipelines to deliver fuel to them, millions of workers to sell the gas, hundreds of refineries, etc. So when you make vague claims about infrastructure, you need to state what infrastructure and why its not reasonable for it to be built, and in fact you have to show its not even possible for it to be built. The market for cars is vast, the amount of resources available is enormous.
> I don't know what point you are making with your CO2 numbers. Say the actual thing you think you are demonstrating. Are you saying electric cars won't reduce CO2 emissions? That the average person over estumates how much CO2 emissions will be reduced? Say that then? I have no idea what you are trying to say.
I don't know why you are claiming my data is FUD when I meed to explain this basic fact about EVs. It's also explained in the report I linked.
The point, which is very well known at this point, is that manufacturing EVs actually causes much higher emissions than ICE cars. In other words, at time of purchase, buying an EV is worse for the environment than buying an ICE car.
Since EVs are cleaner to drive but not manufacturer, it takes time for EVs to emit less emissions overall. That's what I have mentioned and the chart in page 6 mentions. It takes tens of thousands of miles of use for EVs to have less cumulative emissions than ICE cars.
So this is just one component that shows EVs are not strictly better. My overall point is that such estimations do not take into account the rest of the EV ecosystem which can only worsen the numbers for the EV case.
Given people usually buy new cars fairly frequently, it's very possible that EVs are a wash in terms of environmental impact and that it might take several decades, if ever, for them to actually be better. This is important to understand, to question, and to investigate.
> The point, which is very well known at this point, is that manufacturing EVs actually causes much higher emissions than ICE cars. In other words, at time of purchase, buying an EV is worse for the environment than buying an ICE car.
At the point of purchase, buying a reusable water bottle is worse for the environment than buying a disposable water bottle. This is not a complete argument.
> Since EVs are cleaner to drive but not manufacturer, it takes time for EVs to emit less emissions overall. That's what I have mentioned and the chart in page 6 mentions. It takes tens of thousands of miles of use for EVs to have less cumulative emissions than ICE cars.
Vehicles last about 12 years on the road (on average in the USA). Average miles per year is over 12,000. It seems like your argument implies that EVs very very easily save emissions over their life, and probably massively since they will pay for their own emissions 4 or 5 times over their life. This assumes that EVs don't have a longer life on the road than gas vehicles, but it is reasonable to think they could last longer.
> So this is just one component that shows EVs are not strictly better.
No, it absolutely does not show that. It shows that you can arbitrarily pick a moment in time where an individual EV is behind in terms of emissions, but that over the average life they are STRICTLY BETTER. If on average they are strictly better, then net they are strictly better (this is how averages work).
> Given people usually buy new cars fairly frequently, it's very possible that EVs are a wash in terms of environmental impact
This is a very stupid thing for you to say. You don't get to just make up nonsense and draw conclusions from it. This isn't something you get to just say 'people like buying cars, therefore they won't drive them enough to save emissions'. You have to look at data and extrapolate from the data, and the data says you are just being ridiculous. The data is very clear, and you aren't even remotely close to being correct. It's extremely easy to check this. You don't care though, because you want to try to get to the conclusion that EVs are bad, rather than try to figure it out.
Your problem with EVs is that they don’t eliminate the idea of cars? Let me guess, your problem with the Impossible Burger is that it doesn’t eliminate the idea of eating meat?
Entangling ideology with progress is a recipe for getting nothing at all. We see this consistently in climate activism and drug activism. If you try to use a crisis (say, global warming) as a wedge to force your ideology (say, austerity) on the public, you get zero progress on said crisis.
That's a disingenuous response. The idea of cars and car culture have significant negative externalities (the tire pollution in TFA/GP, shitty urban planning, classism/marginalization of people who can't own cars, and so on). Those externalities might be worth it, or they might not.
But that's not "entangling ideology with progress", that's just ... pointing out the drawbacks of a progressive initiative (EVs).
Put another way, the idea of a burger decoupled from the beef industry has few negative externalities. The idea of a car decoupled from fossil fuels does.
The car noise problem is partially solved (or improved) by EVs, actually. The tires used on EVs tend to be efficient (low rolling resistance), which translates to less noisy tires. Additionally, their body shape tends to aim towards very aerodynamic so they have less turbulence noise. If they didn't do this, their efficiency would be much worse so it essentially becomes a necessity.
It's pretty evident when you drive next to a large vehicle with knobby tires meant for off-roading (Jeeps seem to commonly have these). The tire noise is easily MUCH louder, even ignoring any engine noise.
The other thing, broadly, is road construction can lead to a huge difference in noise from highways. I'm sure you've experienced huge differences depending on the road surface.
I think it is marginally reduced, definitely not solved. It also depends on the tires a consumer puts on their EV once it leaves the factory, and anything about 50kmph is still very noisy.
I think that is good in one aspect though, road noise is the only warning you get that an EV is approaching, which in a PED/Cylcing friendly city is important.
EVs already need to make noise at 19mph or under in the US.
Personally, I'd prefer strongly if road noise were eliminated entirely. It'd lead to a better society broadly by reducing noise pollution. Ped/cyclist safety is better handled by other policies than "just make more noise" IMO.
I was in Shenzhen recently, walking around the shopping districts, and I was constantly feeling a sense of unusualness. Eventually I figured out that it was because that despite all these cars and scooters on the road, I felt like I was waking in a forest, as most of the sounds I hear are from people, and the cars and scooters are pretty much silent, since so many of them are electric.
You can hear the difference with your own ears. Even if a freeway sounds the same, it's obviously different when an EV rolls through the alley or shared driveway vs an ICE car.
Not to mention the jerks intentionally making noise with loud engine mods but I guess there's no getting rid of them.
I don't think they can unless the car is not moving. The point is: the dominating sound pollution from a car is from sources that are not removed in EVs.
Unless you're on the far corner, you're only living by one side of the road. Hearing ICE engines rev up to accelerate from a light is a non-trivial amount of noise.
> As required by the PSEA, (1) this rule proposes to establish FMVSS No.141, Minimum Sound Requirements for Hybrid and Electric Vehicles, which would require [quiet vehicles] to produce sounds meeting the requirements of this standard. This proposed standard applies to EVs and to those HVs that are capable of propulsion in any forward or reverse gear without the vehicle's ICE operating. The PSEA requires NHTSA to establish performance requirements for an alert sound that is recognizable as motor vehicle in operation that allows blind and other pedestrians to reasonably detect a nearby EV or HV operating below the crossover speed. The crossover speed is the speed at which tire noise, wind noise, and other factors eliminate the need for a separate alert sound.
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> This standard will ensure that blind, visually-impaired, and other pedestrians are able to detect and recognize nearby hybrid and electric vehicles by requiring that hybrid and electric vehicles emit sound that pedestrians will be able to hear in a range of ambient environments and contain acoustic signal content that pedestrians will recognize as being emitted from a vehicle. The proposed standard establishes minimum sound requirements for hybrid and electric vehicles when operating under 30 kilometers per hour (km/h) (18 mph), when the vehicle's starting system is activated but the vehicle is stationary, and when the vehicle is operating in reverse.
I would think having a vehicle be entirely electric must allow more options in terms of car body shape and even tyre shape/material that could possible reduce noise (and particulate) pollution even further. And certainly if we could reduce the vehicle weight (I gather the current generation of EVs typically weigh 25%+ more than their ICE equivalents - and cars have generally been getting heavier over the last couple of decades anyway, which is a trend that we desperately need to reverse, and won't happen without legislation).
Having said that, as a cyclist the idea of not being able to hear cars around me is somewhat disconcerting.
I have no trouble hearing EVs approaching, they sound identical to modern ICE, which is to say 90% road noise.
Some ICE cars are noisier by choice of course but modern commuter cars are very quiet at the exhaust typically, the road noise is the dominant noise.
I have cars driving past me at about 50kph right now, I am barely hearing the engine for about 3 seconds or less as it passes, and the road noise continues to be audible for about 20-30 seconds. Pretty much all I am hearing is road noise. Same was true when I lived near a highway. Just a whooshing blob of road noise.
Driving both a gasoline car and an EV, I can surely tell you that pedestrians get out of the way when I approach with the former much more often than with the latter. So they are no identical. Of course where I live there's no law-mandated minimum noise level for EVs.
We might end up in the weeds here, but I imagine you are meaning when moving relatively slowly? I hope pedestrians aren't in need of moving out of the way of your driving over 25kmph!
Indeed at slow speeds EVs are quieter. That probably does make a difference for inner city traffic, which is also where you really want less tailpipe emissions, EVs help there too.
Due to their vastly greater mass and torque, EVs produce far more tire pollution than ICE vehicles do. In addition to that, tire dust is a far larger part of the overall pollution from operating a car than even the emissions from an ICE car. "Research done by UK-based independent testing company Emissions Analytics showed that used tyres produce 36 milligrams of particles each kilometre, which is nearly 2,000 times higher than the 0.02 mg/km average from exhausts."
Well, there are no emissions from an EV, so obviously the tire pollution will be larger than the nonexistent tailpipe emissions. I’m surprised this has to be stated.
The problem is that you get what you give incentives for.
Right now, there's a big push to move to EVs. However, in the long run you might end up with more cars total. As the old cars aren't going away for a while. So you're kinda pushing a even heavier car dependence on society. All for a small net gain of reducing a few ICE vehicles.
If the same subsidies were also applied to (electric) bikes, public transit etc it would instead actually shift behavior.
EVs aren't saving society. They're saving the car industry.
For bike subsidies to work a ton of money would need to be put into installation of bike lanes too, though. Where I live a bike would be great, but bike lanes are rare and riding on the road along with gargantuan SUVs and trucks is not an attractive proposition.
It's only expensive because one insists on having all the roads remain for cars and need to build bicycle infra in addition, often by purchasing land next to the road, rebuilding intersections etc.
Can do it cheaper like how they did in Paris: just give some of the roads and lanes to cyclists. Almost free, might need a bollard in the beginning, but the road is there already.
Switching everything about the country's infrastructure from gas to EVs is a huge undertaking. If we're going to do such a massive change, just to end up with something that still carries all the same problems except one, that's a missed opportunity.
If there was a will to spend that quantity of effort in making public transit practical for the long haul and heavily promoting cycling and e-bikes for the short haul we'd be much better off.
> That's why so many people are cautious about "EVs to save us all"
Certainly no, that's not why people are "cautious". They are hesitant about EVs because they fear running out of "gas" mid-trip.
Most people don't give a shit about anything except their plans and needs (and not necessarily unreasonbly so). You can just look around at what kinds of cars most people purchase to reason what their priorities are (or are not).
Reducing greenhouse gasses are not on most people's priority list.
Range anxiety was solved years ago. I don't know of anyone with an EV (which is most car owners here in Norway) that actually feel this is a problem. You can charge at basically every gas station in the country, and new cars have 400km ++ range.
Saying range anxiety was solved years ago is the same as saying hunger was solved hundreds of years ago. Just because you can afford it, doesn't mean everyone else can afford it.
Well if affordability is your concern, what about all those that can't afford cars? Purchasing, insurances, payments, gas, repairs, other upkeep etc. is tremendously invasive in lots of people's economy.
So for affordability's sake, figure out how to avoid cars entirely is the best bet.
Millions of new cars are sold yearly in the US. It's a huge market. It's also a huge country, with some long distances between some cities.
Assuming charging is available at most gas stations on US highways, it's still not attractive to most people to have to wait 30 minutes (or whatever) for a fast charge to allow them to continue their journey.
Norway might be a good use case, but currently the US is not a good use case (except in town). So US buyers will still need one gasoline car for road trips.
Personally I'd prefer passenger train infrastructure over millions of electric cars. Equal or more cars is, as the article notes, still a bad thing.
Well no, it wasn't. My partner just bought a new EV recently and range anxiety is huge. I've been researching places to charge and there's nothing convenient nearby. There's an old business campus but it's a sketchy area to go sit for an hour or more. There's one near a starbucks close by but they are ridiculously expensive (95c/kwh). The best one is at a whole foods, but requires driving 15 minutes away from their destination, go sit there for an hour and then drive to campus. Not so great.
Decarbonization will have negative externalities. Yes, even environmental ones. I'd argue that those externalities are necessary and delay to mitigate them is going to be worse than fixing them later.
It sure isn't going to help with all the other things we are doing in parallel.
Soil exhaustion, poisoning, and erosion; groundwater depletion and poisoning; deforestation; wild ecosystem destruction and food web destabilization; coastal sea surface and seabed destruction; river and lake poisoning; acid rain; carting invasive species around the world willy-nilly; anoxic ocean zones; hunting fish species to extinction; the ruinous effects of mineral and sand mining... all in parallel with the effects of extra carbon in the atmosphere.
The point is that reducing car usage / dependency would solve both. Just switching to EVs doesn't really solve that much, except it saves the car industry.
Exactly. Moving to EVs was a huge mistake. We would have had to practically abandon personal vehicles at some point. This was that chance. Blown. These things will keep us in this same pattern for at least another 50 years leaving this problem for a new generation.
If anyone was serious about any of this, wfh for anyone that can is such an obvious solution with by far the lowest cost. Its a solved problem, we just don’t like the solution enough.
Fixing that is much harder than switching to EVs and would have a massive environmental impact. Buildings have 2x more global warming footprint than transportation.
Coming from a place where I'd bike nine months of the year as my primary mode of transportation, I tried it in the bay area and got hit by a car after a few months. So I got a car, even though I'd much rather bike.
Most trips most people take with a car right now (EV or ICE) are close enough to bike. They are unpopular. There are a lot of disadvantages to explain why.
All the time. Perfectly fine to bike all year. That sentiment is so funny. Before heavy snow days the police and newspapers put out warnings not to drive. But those days it's perfectly fine to bike. Then a few hours later coworkers that drove ti work show up angry about the chaos. If anything, it's the cars that can't handle snow!
A bike ala a Tern cargo bike solves most of a family with kids needs where I live. (disclaimer, I'm not living in a car based society like the US). Then for hauling big stuff or something one just rents one of the share cars in the street for an hour or two.
To be clear, I ebike to work 9 miles each way year-round, including in rain and snow (not a lot of rain where I live, but plenty of snow in winter). I don't have kids though.
But I do live in the US where the city is fairly car-centric, and it is ludicrous to suggest as the person I first replied to did that a cargo e-bike is a full replacement for a short-range electric car like a Leaf. There are large commercial sections of my city that cannot be safely accessed by bike, as the only ways to get there include highway off-ramps that have a 12-inch shoulder, with concrete barriers to the right and cars going 50mph just a few feet to the left.
Few people would regularly bike on such a route with their children. Especially in inclement weather.
I can take care of 70% of my day to day life with my ebike. But for the remaining 30%, a car really is necessary. And that 20% is too frequent to rent, especially lacking the inexpensive carshare services of other countries.
> If a low range EV is enough 100% just buy a bike.
Pretending that a short-range electric vehicle is not useful because ebikes exist is just sticking one's head in the sand and pretending that people unlike oneself and locations unlike where one lives do not exist.
Very rarely actually and I don't have kids. I live in a small city and bicycles are the better mode vehicle for daily transportation. There are many reasons for someone to have a car: travel, heat waves, kids, etc. But the number 1 reason is because it is a symbol of status.
People will buy a car because otherwise they would be a low status male and they want to f#. Note that cars are expensive, I live in a poor country with absurd interest rates, so many are making debts that they will need a decade to get rid of, if ever, just so they can constitute a family.
Here at least car culture is squeezing the middle class into indebtedness and poverty and overcrowding the streets with cars and idiots, not a causal relation but a dangerous combination. Cars are great tools but f# car culture.
I don't know where you live but everything is too far apart in American suburbs. How you would fix that without tearing it all down? And it's totally impractical for transporting a family around.
Road tripping. Visiting far away family. Day at the lake or beach. Going camping. How do you convince people to give all of that up and just be content with whatever is 15min away.
Residents of American suburbs should have to pay for their full costs (infrastructure and maintenance, environmental, healthcare, services, ...), and if many people can't afford it, we should do a universal cash subsidy to every resident at the federal level to make up the difference so the transition is not so damaging, then let people decide if they really want to spend that whole amount on paying the actual costs of their lifestyle or if they would prefer to move to a more efficient living arrangement and keep the cash to do something more productive with it.
The USA subsidizes the suburbs to an absurd degree, pushing most of the costs into the future and making city dwellers pay more than their share for the rest.
Living in a relatively large house in the suburbs should in principle cost several times more than living in a flat in the city, because it requires vastly more infrastructure and the amortized cost of services is much higher. But our broken economic system has flipped this around and made suburbs extremely artificially cheap, while making most of the building practices that make denser walkable neighborhoods possible illegal under building codes and local ordinances.
I don't think it's broken. I think it's working as intended, but what it's optimizing for (people raising families) is perhaps not what you'd like for it to optimize for. Whether it's the right or wrong thing to optimize for is another conversation, but you may be surprised about what the collective political will of the US expresses. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a voting majority support for the idea that "American suburbs should have to pay for themselves."
American style suburbs are worse for raising a family than living in a city. Long commutes practically remove one or more parents from the equation 5 days a week. Long bus rides compromise sleep and exercise etc.
All for a back yard that’s rarely used and worse in just about every way than a nice park.
What they are is a cheap imitation of the wealthy enclaves near cities that only work because so few people can afford to live in them. You can imitate such buildings cheaply, what you can’t do is build or maintain the support structures which made such places so appealing.
From the perspective of the child, it's much worse. You are basically arrested until you are 16-18. No independence whatsoever. Want to meet a friend? Ask your parents to drive. They're busy? Too bad.
My children love it. There are so many friends within walking & biking distance of my house. The roads are slow, traffic sparse, with wide open spaces to play and ride bikes, etc. None of the kids seemed bored, there's so much to do. And little of the unpleasant stuff that makes living in the city more exciting.
Parents and society can be unreasonably restrictive in any environment. People call social services on parents for letting kids walk around alone in suburbs. The freedom you can get as a young teen without a car is however vastly higher in cities due to public transportation.
Social norms also vary widely, first graders in Tokyo take public transportation to school alone. This isn’t inherently unsafe or unreasonable.
Why can't they just walk or bike to their friends? 2-3 km walking distance is perfectly fine, bike extends that range significantly (10 km at least). This was the case for me.
Sorry if the question is naive, I don't live in USA.
Because your friends can easily be 10-30 miles away and only accessible via shared roadways with 55mph road traffic. There are no cross country bike routes here.
Building around roads results in everything being pushed farther away and that includes other people’s homes too.
That is my experience in the East coast US. Here, the suburbs are very spread out, with amenities 15-20 minutes away by car. There are older suburbs where that is not true, but that's more of an exception. Housing in those older suburbs costs more than the newer more spread out developments and there are fewer of them than the newer more spread out ones.
Typically, those old suburbs were originally built around train stations or street car lines, which influenced their design. The newer ones were designed around access by car and zoning prevents any non residential land uses nearby.
it's incredibly ironic but I've lucked into a very bikeable community in a rust-belt state, we have extensive rails-to-trails here and in this situation the rails followed the main state (2-lane) highway, or vice versa. so I actually can bike to some things specifically thanks to rails to trails.
Don’t confuse socioeconomics for inherent advantages. Adjusted for income people live longer in cities, they are thus objectively safer.
Wealthy parts of cities have vastly better schools and less crime than the average suburbs, but the American middle class abandoned cities. Air pollution again can go either way, suburbs often have surprisingly terrible air quality made worse by long commutes.
Per mile, small urban roads were millions of usd a mile (see department of transports annual report and it varies by region). Maintenance is even worse. It’s the 5th highest expense for most cities (US census survey of local and state governments 2020).
Of course the suburbs don’t make sense, you have a half mile of road out to a neighborhood and another half mile of street in the neighborhood itself. The percentage of property taxes going to the road is probably just a few percent points. With only a few hundred houses, it would take decades to raise the 1-3 million to replace the road.
Already have this problem with our subdivision lol. Private road, and replacing the road is going to be $20k a house even over 20 years or something even with a bond lol, and that’s a normal, reasonable-density subdivision. People don’t realize how much rural and suburban roads are getting subsidized.
Initial infrastructure is often paid for with up-front cash transfers from the federal/state government and long-term loans, then the long-term maintenance is supposed to be funded by local taxes but in many cases is set up to be more expensive than the long-term available tax base, so infrastructure just starts falling apart and then either taxes go up or maintenance is put off and people left holding the bag are screwed, or external cash bailouts make up the difference.
In either case, the suburbanites (especially near the beginning of the construction cycle) and initial construction companies are getting a huge subsidy from everyone else (and from future generations) to promote an inherently unsustainable and destructive living arrangement.
It's a kind of Ponzi scheme, and like any other Ponzi scheme, at some point the music stops and then the whole system is in an extremely precarious place.
It is already a huge change if people who drive to thir offices didn't. People going camping or driving across the country aren't the problem. The Dutch do that as well, what they don't need to do is having to drive to go fetch milk or get to work. I have my dentist, grocery shop, restaurants, coffee shops, gym, bike shop, bank, park, hardware storeband bus stops within 15 minutes from my home, and all of those are in a residential neighborhood of an American city that to my Latin American sensibilities is too residential and spread around. The level of density needed to support "15 minute cities" is much lower than people think, but it means allowing there to be a bakery in the corner of your block within a residential neighborhood, and wrestling some space in the commons from inefficient forms of transportation in favour of more efficient ones.
You don’t have to tear it all down. Just tear some of it down. For example, you could tear down a single house and replace it with a shop, and suddenly a whole neighbourhood would have a shop within walking distance.
I wonder where people live that this isn't already true. My suburban neighborhood has several small & medium sized markets. I have a suspicion that many HN participants idea of suburbia is the endless tract housing variety. That's just one version, and comparatively rare in my region. Our suburban neighborhoods are mixed.
Suburbia probably doesn't have enough density that the number of people who choose to walk to the shop over driving twenty minutes to the huge shop could keep the small shop alive.
You start by not making the problem worse. Stop building stroads[0]. Liberalize the zoning code and allow mixed-use development. Get rid of parking minimums.
The upside of how sparse American suburbs are is that we can repurpose all the junk/wasted land with normal market incentives. Roads can be thinned and the land handed back to the owners of that land, along with the setbacks that are used to force people to maintain water-intensive lawns[1]. Upzoned buildings can be redeveloped to higher density or turned into small commercial stores as market forces dictate. Anyone who wants to hold out can still do so.
None of this requires absolutely banning cars[2]. People will stop driving as cars become less necessary for daily suburban life. Road trips can still happen. So instead of families with three or four cars, maybe they only have one or two. As car infrastructure is used less, it can be repurposed for transit networks that don't suck - i.e. BRT, light rail, or tram systems with dedicated rights of way.
"15 minute city" doesn't mean "you should only ever travel 15 minutes on foot and anything further will be stopped by the pollution police". It means "building a city so that everything you need is closer and more convenient".
[0] Surface street / highway combos, i.e. roads with 3 lanes on each side, highway speed traffic, no pedestrian infrastructure, and business access. They try to do everything and fail at everything.
[1] Incidentally this was sold as a way to stop communism, somehow
[2] OK, but can we still at least ban the giant Escalade mega-SUVs that let you run down like ten kids without even seeing them
Cars are great for all that, and an electric cargo bike like an urban arrow is great for all the things nearby, IF you have safe infrastructure. Plenty of people have cars in my Dutch city but it's still safe to do local things by biking and walking
Yeah, EVs are the minimum possible change that at first glance looks like it might work, of course without disturbing the global capitalist system or our cultural values.
Wow, people are going to be pissed off in thirty years. "Why didn't that fix it all? We have to do more?"
EVs could "save us all" if we got over the meme of "range anxiety" and realized that a majority of Americans (who drive more than anyone else) drive less than 40 miles a day, and sized batteries appropriately, especially in dense urban environments. https://electrek.co/2023/03/22/wink-motors-test-drive-electr...
There's no reason that an EV needs to weigh as much as a Sherman tank.
Purpose-built EVs typically weigh 5-10% more than a comparable ICEV. That's not enough to make much of a difference. Go back to the usual target of anti-car hate -- pickups. Those are pretty heavy.
And EVs make almost zero brake dust. On many EVs the pads will last the life of the vehicle, unless they malfunction due to non-usage.
Eh, not really. Teslas tend to, because Tesla's slowest car is pretty fast. A typical EV driven by a normal driver gets pretty average life out of a set of tires.
Yours wasn't a really substantive answer. The next person provided more details and didn't add 'lol' at the end of his short statement. Just some feedback if you want people to accept your points more often!
Yes, they do. Even our lowly Fiat 500e's consumed tires much faster than any of our ICE cars.
It's not just raw power, which a Fiat 500e doesn't have much.
It's the fact that with an electric motor you have 100% torque at 0rpm starting from a standstill, which is when there is most opportunity to briefly spin the tire. Tire wear is much reduced when driving in a straight line at a constant speed.
Agreed. Even solar + wind - when the buzz started it was all rainbows and butterflies because we found a silver bullet to energy!
There is no such thing as free lunch. If you start absorbing massive amounts of solar, you will have some effect on the environment that we have absolutely no clue about. Same with interfering with wind patterns and ocean currents, which would happen with energy generation at true humanity-scale.
> What do you think happens to solar energy which doesn't land on a solar panel currently
It magically disappears from this universe of course. The photons know if it is actually being of use to sentient humans and decides to wreak havoc (in some as yet unknown fashion) only in that instance.
Not sure what to make of your comment. Are you suggesting we don't use any technology? All our actions have consequences on the planet. However your comment seems to suggest that by adopting wind and solar we are buying into an issue we would not have otherwise.
Absolutely not, I can't believe you would take my healthy skepticism as a dismissal of technology. As I said, critical thinking is gone.
I suggest nothing other than what I said - discussions around new technologies, particularly those in response to perceived crises, rarely receive the scrutiny they deserve and rarely show both sides of the coin. This makes me immediately suspicious for the same reasons history has already shown time and time again.
It is not. Proper waste disposal is an unsolved issue that extends beyond so many human generations.
Also I suspect that social licence and NIMBYism will make it impossible to build them in time to save us from global warming.
I get the joke but let me just mention that wood campfire is one of the worst solutions (if done at scale). This may sound idealistic (like the other comments mentioned) but I think we just have to reduce our energy footprint and then many solutions will be green again.
One great example (some will say absurd and impractical) is just using energy whenever it is available, with minimum storage. That means cooking, heating water etc. during the day (or when the wind is high) and only using lighting and low-energy devices at night. Factories could work on a similar principle (producing more in the summer) but then we would have to rearrange a lot more stuff to suit the seasonal renewable energy production capabilities.
This may sound absurd but it only shows how much we are locked in our way of thinking about how reality is supposed to work, not what it is. There's no reason to have high quality on-demand electrical energy available 24/7/365 other than convenience. Convenience that fossil fuels brought us.
What sort of onboarding path do you see to get a majority of the energy consumers (both the populace and industry) willing to accept this? How could the public will to make that change be created?
This feels like about as useful a solution as saying "the US could balance their budget by simply disbanding their military". Would it work if implemented? Sure. Would the resulting world be arguably better than before? Quite possibly. Is there a path to that outcome from the present day with a nonzero chance of success? Well...
We really have to think this all through before jumping 100% on any particular bandwagon. Researching, testing, seeing how it goes and adjusting is a must.
Absolutely agreed. Beyond the need in the name of science, you're more likely to bring every onboard with an idea if you transparently study and share the pros and cons.
I lived in West Oakland for 10 years. Not immediately adjacent to a freeway, but surrounded on 4 sides by a freeway within a half mile. All flat surfaces are eventually are covered in black grit unless it rains. I assume it was not just tire dust but also diesel soot.
Cars have fairly clean tailpipes these days. Older Diesel train engines still in service are disgusting. Construction vehicles are also pretty bad. The worst are large ocean going vessels burning bunker fuel in port which is illegal but very cheap.
I always assumed it was mostly from the soot of diesel rigs. I know they have gotten cleaner in recent years but diesel is still pretty dirty. I remember an apartment I had in SF near some of the muni lines that still ran diesel and it was absolutely disgusting outside the window.
The atherton (aka rich asshole den) nimby lawsuit was settled back in 2016. Then it’s mostly your standard California mismanagement and cost overrun s until ultimate excuse - covid came along
Can confirm; lived about 300 yards away from the 10 freeway in Culver City for several years. The balcony would get coated in fine black dust in just a couple weeks' time. Literally no one would grow vegetables outside--that would be madness. I knew then it was brake dust and tires. Disappointing that this stuff turns out to be even more toxic than I thought.
In Nederland, Texas you're in a small community right in the middle between Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange, Texas, which are known as the "Golden Triangle". These have been major refining and petro-chemical centers dating back to the wild oil gusher known as Spindletop over 100 years ago which really made Texas known as an oil producing state.
Now each of the towns' refineries and chemical plants have grown in response to consumer demand for automotive fuel, but these are not really big cities and they don't have the number of cars you get in Dallas or Houston.
But you still get some fine particulates that build up after a while, like when you wake up and find a layer on your car after you just washed it the day before.
Even when it was black it wasn't tire dust, and sometimes there would be brown, white, grey, or yellow. You never knew what you were going to get and when. Depending on the wind it could be a discharge from Mobil in Beaumont, Texaco in Port Arthur, or DuPont in Orange.
This is what you get before the fuel even makes it into your tank, so that everyone can spread their tire dust all over the rest of the country.
I've also spent time near the 10 freeway, in Texas. A major cross-country thoroughfare for 18-wheelers.
There is no such thing as a sustainable future that centers around automobiles. The US might not internalize this for a generation or two, but it's true. It doesn't matter if they're electric or ICE, or if they're driven by humans or AI, they just don't fit in a sustainable future. There are 278m cars in the US, roughly 83% of the population. To scale to the world, that means 6.7b cars. That's completely absurd and wildly unsustainable, even at half the scale. Here's what's unsustainable:
- sourcing rare earth materials needed for batteries and computer components
- powering them
- handling the waste cars when owners upgrade or crash them
- putting tires on them
- the space needed to operate and store them
- the amount of time people spend in them
- the amount of labor required to build and maintain them
- the amount of labor required to maintain roads for them (maintenance, snow removal, etc.)
Doing any of this arguably involves human rights or ecological disasters. But that aside, barring widespread fusion reactor deployments, it is impossible. This above all else is why I just can't agree that Tesla will save the world or that self-driving cars are the future. They simply can't be, unless the future is absolutely terrible.
The western world is due for a reckoning. If we flatten out living standards across the world, GDP per capita is $12,414. If you want to be extraordinarily generous/cruel and leave out everyone except the US, Canada, Europe, India, and China it only goes up to $17k. That doesn't leave room for things like car ownership, air travel, Macbooks, college, eating out, child care, health care, etc. etc. It also doesn't help (to put it lightly) that the overwhelming majority of population growth is going to occur in poorer parts of the world.
The simple truth is either the western world figures out how to make do with far, far less than it currently does (and notably its elite essentially learn to be poor) or we suffer a prolonged period of intense violence while everyone else either quietly suffers/dies or loudly makes us pay for hoarding. There's a sliver of a chance where we figure out how to generate enough clean energy to raise everyone's living standards enough to pacify them, but it seems inevitable that the inequality that characterizes the current arrangement will apply to that as well, i.e. 1% to Africa 99% to Europe. It's possible they're just used to it and won't complain, but my guess is that climate change will force the issue.
I lived near 880 in Oakland and always had massive amounts of this super fine sticky dust. They call that 880 corridor cancer corridor. My friends who lived next door who I was renting from, their son got leukemia and they think that had something to do with it.
That sounds like a really easy thing to study. (Does living near a highway significantly increase risk of cancer?) A single anecdote like that isn't very convincing.
Do tires shed more dust at higher speeds? I wonder if this has always been a known but unstated problem, or if increasing highway speeds are causing it to get worse.
Vehicle weight is also a significant factor, so EVs will make this particular problem worse. Still worth the tradeoff, but obviously not using a car at all is the best option.
Are you sure about the tradeoff bit? If my memory doesn't fail me, there was an article on HN recently that covered how EVs are environmentally more friendly, but health wise worse exactly because they generate more tire particles.
I'd like to see if that included brake particulates. My understanding is brake particulates is a large contributor to the mix of 'unhealthy ultra-fine dust' from cars. Most EVs should bring down the brake dust to almost zero, since the vast majority of braking is done via regenerative braking.
I'd be interested to see it, that's not an obvious conclusion to me. The health difference of an EV is a percentage increase in tire particles but a complete absence of tailpipe emissions. I would not expect tire particles to be the more significant factor, especially when the impacts of microplastics are so unknown.
Tailpipe emissions are a significant problem (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab35fc), and I know this is an extreme example but you can literally kill yourself by just leaving a car running in an enclosed space. EV tailpipe emissions are not fully replaced by electricity generation emissions, even if you get your power from 100% coal (and you don't). Power plants are much more efficient than internal combustion engines.
I believe this [0] is the article (with discussion at [1]). To cherry-pick two quotes to contextualize what I recalled:
> "Tires release 100 times the amount of volatile organic compounds as a modern tailpipe, says an analyst."
> "Moreover, tire emissions from electric vehicles are 20 percent higher than those from fossil-fuel vehicles. EVs weigh more and have greater torque, which wears out tires faster."
I'm not sure how all of this works out in the grand scheme of things, or how accurate those claims are, but I think those are issues that surely deserve more looking into.
Thanks, yeah this is pretty depressing. Feels almost unsolvable, I love public transit but I don't know how to make everyone else love it. Maybe we'll invent some perfect biodegradable tire, but it feels more likely that we'll just wall ourselves off and people (who can afford it) will drink filtered water and eat lab-grown meat and hydroponic produce to avoid ingesting their own pollution.
> I love public transit but I don't know how to make everyone else love it
By solving the following problems:
- Waiting in the bitter cold / snow, or baking in the sun
- Allow me to transport medium/large size dogs (most restrict animals to being in crates that can fit on a lap), without being a bother to other riders (good luck)
- Reasonable wait times. Even better, do it regardless of time of day
I love my car. I've been in public transit in 5 states and 5 countries, and I'm always whelmed at best. It suffices on a good day.
Great question, I have no idea. I wish the nationwide 55mph speed limit were reinstated, if only to reduce oil consumption. Added bonus that it might actually encourage more public transit and walkable cities. Nobody will take this idea seriously, the US is far too addicted to cars and lacks the density.
I used to live four houses from a freeway and never saw any black dust, probably because of the twenty foot high wall around the freeway. It's possible to build them better.
I used to live on a busy parkway in Brooklyn and the grime that would collect on our 4th floor window sill was gnarly. I'm guessing each floor downward would have been worse.
I'm also guessing that simply walking around the city and being in the subway is also pretty bad. Separating the tracks from the platform with doors would probably help with that.
That can't be from tires tho, a farm field won't have tires in it more than 3 or 4 times a year. And it probably smells like manure because pumping manure onto fields is one of the most common methods of fertilizing.
The only real solution is mandating light and heavy rail. California was hit hard by the car companies that bought out the rail and got replaced it with roads. And now we have even more reason to use rail everywhere we can. Maybe after the nimby boomers die off, we can actually made things make sense.
Why do you think younger property owners are actually going to be any more interested in giving up their land to the government to build more rail lines? I get that it's fun to blame the boomers for everything, but it sounds more like you're complaining about human nature.
Mostly because the younger generation wants the world to be habitable for the foreseeable future. But ultimately light rail and cars are not mutually exclusive. Property doesn't have to be lost to add it. Heavy rail can largely go parallel to current lines and we can add additional rail lines rather than yet another lane to highways. If you look around, rail + highways is already done and has been for decades, it is just poorly mismanaged to maximize RR profits. I posit that nearly none of the Semi trucks out there are only solving the last mile problem, most of it is interstate transit, which is best served by rail. In places that are upstream of water sources, they need to be heavily in rail to prevent the pollution we're talking about here.
If we wait for the Boomers to die off to start making change, things might gain traction by the time GenZ runs things. We really have to start now because the gears of change grind slowly and reluctantly.
I really don't think you meant to use the word externality here. And the other replies so far are not about positive externalities.
Perhaps roads are an indirect positive externality - roads are useful for bikes and buses, also useful for demarcation between properties or areas and addressing!!!
>The positive externalities are even more enormous
What do cars specifically positively provide? NOT including the positives that exists due to constructing infrastructure around that mode of transportation (artificial issues).
But this is not an inherent property of cars. It is only true because we invested all our transit dollars in highways. Cars are not inherently better and roads are not free. If we invest more in public transit we can reduce our need for cars.
The first step is recognizing that cars are not ideal, and the second step is doing something about it. It’s not really a problem if it would take decades, as governments do tend to exist for decades and do plan accordingly.
But what we cannot do is pretend that cars are inherently superior, ignoring the unprecedented investment we made in highways to make that happen.
But it also isn’t the case that improvements will take decades. Maybe solving the problem completely would, but local governments can convert big dangerous streets in to walkable areas with safer bike transport in just a few years or less.
Solving the whole problem would take decades but then, governments do tend to deal in decades long plans when needed. If they’re ever going to launch new national rail projects, they’re going to need the public to recognize the value of alternatives to cars.
> But this is not an inherent property of cars. It is only true because we invested all our transit dollars in highways. Cars are not inherently better and roads are not free. If we invest more in public transit we can reduce our need for cars.
Personal modes of transport like cars and bicycles give you more degrees of freedom compared to public/shared modes with respect to:
Maybe this is true but I’m not convinced “more degrees of freedom” is a useful metric here. It’s not as simple as three bullet points - there is an entire infrastructure that must be built up around cars and that infrastructure has serious problems of cost and land use.
But if you like bullet points, cars are:
a) expensive to operate
b) dangerous to pedestrians
c) more polluting than trains or bicycles
Now I don’t actually think this form of argument is comprehensive but you see that we can easily pull out pluses and negatives without taking a holistic view.
If it is self-evident that bullet trains and their infra are superior to cars and their infra (as your response implies), what are the reasons you think bullet trains have not spread?
I'd like to know why you think cars are not inherently better as it seems very obvious that they are. That is why people overwhelmingly prefer to use them.
No mode of transportation is truly inherently better since they all have unique strong and weak points, but...
Cars as the main method of transportation are obviously not good. They're too inefficient, no matter how you look at them. Manufacturing, infrastructure requirements, footprint per person, energy use, impact on human health and the environment. Cars suck.
People use whatever's most convenient and that's realistically going to be whatever the government has invested in the most.
The more car dependent a society, the more degenerate it is. This is hard to understand due to how car-infested most of the world is. Watch some videos by the Not Just Bikes channel on youtube [1] to see what the world could look like instead. Here's some poignant examples (direct links): [2][3][4][5].
What supports the argument that people overwhelmingly prefer using cars over other transportation methods?
There was some study done in past decade that found that in the US only about 60% of 18 year olds had drivers licenses. Is that because of preference, or other factors?
Real estate located where it is possible to live without owning a car tends to be priced much higher than comparable real estate located where it is inconvenient to not own a car. Is this because people's preferences, a significant under supply relative to only a portion of the market's of demand, or other reasons?
That sounds more like correlation than causation. Places with decent public transit are almost without exception very dense. Of course you wouldn't want to drive there. But if you live somewhere not as cramped, the experience is quite different.
People prefer a lot of things, it's almost never an indicator for what is better or worse. By most metrics, cars are a worse alternative. However, if the infrastructure has already been built around cars, it's hard to change that.
What metrics count? Cars are worse for the environment and health, the infrastructure is more expensive, accidents are worse, they cost more, and they create tremendous opportunity costs by creating car centric cities. One could go on.
They are more practicable/convenient because the infrastructure is already in place. Also, in more rural areas there might never be an alternative. That is pretty much it.
> If we invest more in public transit we can reduce our need for cars.
No we can't. It takes 30 minutes to get to the airport for me by car - even during rush hour, or 1.5 hours by express bus.
Or for a friend of mine - 40 minutes by car, or 2 hours by train + bus.
Sorry, but there's no fix you can apply to public transport that will fix this.
Public transport is also more expensive - I took a group to Washington D.C. by metro - it cost around 5x as much as driving did (we drove the next day) including paying for parking. And the metro was far far slower.
Yeah public transit isn’t great for large groups. Fortunately, 90% of all trips that transit could replace are single occupancy vehicles.
There’s no reason that bus has to take 3x as long as driving. Reducing the number of stops to a strategic few could make it very comparable to driving, especially if busses are given their own traffic lane.
That has more to do with the middling state of public transit in the US than it does with public transit itself.
In Taiwan, when you land at TPE, there is an express MRT line that connects directly to Taipei Main Station. You can also hop on the High Speed Rail and connect to southern destinations. Bypasses all of the traffic and congestion.
Fantastic way to travel and makes it so much more convenient.
>NOT including the positives that exists due to constructing infrastructure around that mode of transportation
This is what this statement was trying to address. If we built everything around using ziplines we couldn't go "OF COURSE ziplines provide a net positive." That'd be an incredibly silly statement.
Do they? I guess occasionally my family and a few friends benefit when we can meet somewhere they haven't bothered to support with proper public transport. I'm not sure I'd class that as an externality.
It’s not just roads, it’s parking lots. Our most valuable land in cities is covered in huge swaths of asphalt instead of dense urban housing. This is a poor use of land. It didn’t even used to be this way. We knocked down buildings in cities in the mid century to make more room to park cars.
Roads of course are useful for economic activity, but we’ve gone so hard in to roads that every person has to have their own car. If we put more commuters on trains, we could still have roads for trucks and other things that don’t work well for trains. But with every person needing a car, way too much land gets swallowed by parking and road infrastructure.
I am a person that has actively chosen to live without a car, despite work in automotive industry.
Recently I wanted to take my vintage computer in a large crate, to a LAN meeting, but I would not be able to transport it without a car. Which forced me to order a taxi, which is a car for hire...
I maybe could have been fine with a cargo bike, but it would not be satisyingly safe for me or the cargo.
I have also heard the perspective of children safety. When they need to be transported to a communal education center, it is said to be much safer and convenient to put them in a large, crashproof car, than stuffing them in a bicycle trolley while it is raining.
How is having to move something a problem? Nobody is saying they never have a place. But is it reasonable for you to purchase, maintain, and store a large expensive object that pollutes just for some moving? No. It's better to have a system that helps you when needed but doesn't produce as much waste per person. The taxi isn't a problem.
What do you mean by crashproof car? Those words don't go together. Even a little.
I worked on a phd for 4 years looking into this problem indirectly and for a decade at Ohio State they have had working solutions to the tire dust issue but it is IMPOSSIBLE to get funding.
A Billion dollar industry and NO ONE cares about cleaning it up if it means increasing costs by 5% or more.
It has been WELL KNOWN for 50 years! We are basically aerosolizing carbon in MASSIVE amounts right where we live and work. Almost like we are purposefully manufacturing microplastics and dumping them in the air as fast as we can. Imagine taking every new tire and just grinding it down into a fine dust then blowing in into the air and dumping it into the rivers. That is what we are doing, AS FAST AS WE CAN.
(For anyone that cares, the solution is natural rubber, which costs slight more than synthetic rubber but lasts longer. So its better for consumers, cheaper all around, and 1,000x better for the environment but Goodyear, Firestone and Michelin flat out refuse to fund research or even block innovation in natural rubber.
> the solution is natural rubber, which costs slight more than synthetic rubber but lasts longer. So its better for consumers, cheaper all around, and 1,000x better for the environment
Is it? I'm Googling but can't find any evidence for that.
Natural rubber tires still produce tons of dust, I can't find any reference to it being less harmful in our lungs, and even natural tire rubber seems to biodegrade on the order of thousands of years.
Natural tire rubber is still extremely processed. It's nothing like the raw latex that comes out of the plant.
So how is it 1000x better for the environment? Or even 2x better, honestly?
I'd love to believe it, but I'm surprised I can't find any references easily. Everything I can find refers to it being more sustainable to manufacture. Nothing about its effects on pollution.
Is the problem "net carbon", or is it "hey there is 100nm carbon particles entering my brain from my lungs" ? I feel like it's the latter ? And I'm not sure how natural rubber is gonna stop that ?
> I'm Googling but can't find any evidence for that.
I'm sorry, but the parent poster said they have been studying in this domain for 4+ years (including PhD research), and you present doubt because your Google searches are unconvincing?
What would it take to convince you?
You do realize that what you find on the first 10 pages of Google (or other) search engines could be junk or intentionally targeted misinformation, right?
A careful reading will reveal that the parent poster merely said they spent 4 years doing PhD research, and during that time, also indirectly looked at things somewhat related to tire research.
I don't know how much time you've spent in academia, but when I wrote my thesis, there were a couple "indirect" things like that that I could sound knowledgeable on but really knew no more about than someone could learn in an hour of internet reading if they really tried.
A source is what it would take to convince me, not an internet commenter claiming to have googled something during their school years.
It's doubtful if you know even a basic bit of chemistry. Vulcanized rubber is a crosslinked thermoset polymer that is very difficult to break down, regardless of whether it is natural or synthetic in origin. It's going to produce roughly the same amount of microplastic per amount of tire. Lets say natural rubber lasts 2x as long, that's half as much microplastic, not 1/1000th. I get that GP is being hyperbolic, but natural rubber is incrementally better (at best) than synthetic, not revolutionarily better.
Can natural rubber be made as soft as synthetic rubber? What kind of rubber is used on race cars (and dirt bikes)? Cost is much less of an issue for those markets.
Natural rubber is used extensively in higher-end applications (race cars, trucks, aircraft). However, almost all tires are some hybrid of the two. Generally, natural rubber is used in the construction of the tire "carcass" and sidewalls while synthetic rubber (compounded with a gazillion and one other things) is used to construct the tread.
The basic issues are pretty intuitive:
* The supply of natural rubber is constrained by the ability to grow the plants which produce it.
* It's hard to make synthetic rubber with polymer chains as long as those in natural rubber (isoprene), so natural rubber tends to be more pliable and stronger, while synthetic rubber (styrene) tends to sheer off into microparticles.
* However, natural rubber degrades more rapidly when heated and cooled, and is more difficult to control in order to achieve a desired level of stickiness at a given temperature (which is basically what tires are aiming for).
I think that OP's research would be quite interesting to learn about more, as my understanding is that tire manufacturers employ hundreds of chemists who are dedicated full-time to attempting to replicate natural rubber synthetically in an efficient way.
> (For anyone that cares, the solution is natural rubber, which costs slight more than synthetic rubber but lasts longer. So its better for consumers, cheaper all around, and 1,000x better for the environment but Goodyear, Firestone and Michelin flat out refuse to fund research or even block innovation in natural rubber.
I’m skeptical. Wikipedia says:
> Synthetic rubbers are superior to natural rubbers in two major respects: thermal stability, and resistance to oils and related compounds. [1]
There are two main working solutions that have ALREADY been used and proven to work since WWII.
First: a fungal disease has wiped out ALL the rubber trees in south america, thats why we cant grow in it the Western hemisphere, a fungus. If we could grow it here we would and it would drop the price by A LOT. But, we already have a solution, a transgenic species that is resistant, nonsense Government regulation and moronic "public opinion" is the only thing stopping this from fixing the rubber problem overnight.
Second: sounds funny, but ever break a dandelion stem in half and see the white stuff come out? That latex, PURE high quality latex. Let that latex air dry and you rubber! No refinement necessary. During WWII they supplied most of the war effort with rubber from dandelions! Yes, it works, its not efficient but progress has been made and with ANY funding at all it could easily produce enough higher quality natural rubber for ALL our need and enough to export.
The ONLY problem is that companies make too much money producing low quality "disposable" tires that they will NEVER switch.
[I'll leave in the hashtags from when I wrote this up to remind myself at the time:]
#DandelionRubber Tires; #Taraxagum
> Aiding the bees and our environment
> Now, Continental Tires is producing #dandelion rubber tires called #Taraxagum (which is the genus name of the species). The bicycle version of their tires even won the German #Sustainability Award 2021 for sustainable design.,
> “The fact that we came out on top among 54 finalists shows that our Urban Taraxagum bicycle tire is a unique product that contributes to the development of a new, alternative and sustainable supply of raw materials,” stated Dr. Carla Recker, head of development for the Taraxagum project.
> The report from DW added that the performance of dandelion tires was better in some cases than natural rubber—which is typically blended with synthetic rubber.
> Capable of growing, as we all know, practically anywhere, dandelion needs very little accommodation in a country or business’s agriculture profile. The #Taraxagum research team at Continental hypothesizes they could even be grown in the polluted land on or around old industrial parks.
> Furthermore, the only additive needed during the rubber extraction process is hot #water, unlike Hevea which requires the use of organic solvents that pose a pollution risk if they’re not disposed of properly.
> Representing a critical early-season food supply for dwindling #bees and a valuable source of super-nutritious food for humans, dandelions can also be turned into coffee, give any child a good time blowing apart their seeds—and, now, as a new source for rubber in the world; truly a wondrous plant.
Interestingly my great grandfather headed up research efforts on breeding fungal resistant rubber trees at a national research institute in now Sri Lanka. Man he'd be rolling in his grave at the thought of public opinion and cheap (and non-biodegradable) synthetics holding back natural rubber production.
Synthetic rubber being the largest microplastic source in the world is an incredibly stroke of irony. Reminds me of us discovering that adding tetra ethyl lead to fuel might not be a wonderful idea.
Well you can't make things TOO good! How else would you sell more shit to the proles?
We were (or at least I was) told in school that capitalism allowed our civilization to make and sell things we used to only dream about. And when I learned the truth, it was that capitalism was only concerned with how much to sell. If that meant making your products cheaper/worse/less durable on a creeping basis, then that's what the company did.
Capitalism itself is subject to enshittification that affects all products and services.
There are many people who would be willing to buy these tires if your claims of being more cost-effective and better for the environment are actually true. You have a PhD in this, so why aren’t you doing it?
Why would natural rubber be better then synthetic rubber for this problem? Asbestos is natural and toxic as hell.
Natural rubber currently has the property of being mostly inside trees not being ground up into a fine powder - but there's no obvious reason at scale it would be any better except in terms of "slightly less wear over time".
Great question! Its super simple, it is ONLY the length of the hydrocarbon chain, a better quality natural rubber has really long chains (10,000+ atoms long) that last a LONG time and are VERY stretchy. Synthetic rubber (or plastic) is shorter (1,000 atoms long) and doesn't last as long.
Thats it, it is the exact same "product" just a chain that gets longer and longer and changes its physical properties as it grows.
It's more than just the chain length.
The most common synthetic rubbers are styrene-butadiene copolymers. Natural rubber is polyisoprene. While it is true that shorter chain synthetic polyisoprene is available, it is a much smaller part of the market than styrene-butadiene.
Genuinely interested here. If natural rubber and plastic are exactly the same thing, then why is natural rubber being advocated as a much more environmentally sound alternative? Would'nt the dust from natural rubber tyres be just as problematic as the plastic is now?
I wonder if there’s a conflict between companies being willing and able to produce natural rubber tires yet marketing them would also implicate themselves in knowingly destroying the environment. It’s a tough line to straddle.
I'm curious to hear some thoughts of an expert - how much does natural rubber reduce the pollution for 100 miles driven by a tyre? Can you think of any alternative technical solutions? Can you think of any political solutions?
With the continued shift to EVs, petrol taxes just don't make sense as a form of taxation to pay for roads. I think we should be shifting entirely to a gross curb weight tax for all vehicles. The fourth power law states that the greater the axle load of a vehicle, the stress on the road caused by the motor vehicle increases in proportion to the fourth power of the axle load. Meaning heavier EVs cough hummer, are doing x^4 damage over my already heavy car.
Capturing vehicle taxes by weight should incentivize lighter vehicles, and therefore, less tire wear.
The Ford F150 is the best selling car in the US by a long-shot and it's a gas guzzler. Given that, I don't think consumers care a lot about how much they pay in taxes when deciding on a vehicle to purchase.
I don't think this'd have the incentive that you're suggesting it would unless something else is done, such as increasing the tax overall.
The most popular F150s are significantly less gas guzzling than my 2005 sedan that I replaced with an F150. Not to mention that my F150 is more capable in winter conditions (major importance in Michigan) and more capable for the DIY stuff I do (I actually do regularly get lumber, plywood, drywall and other things that only fit in the 8ft bed that I actually bought). All while using less gas... Efficiency has gone up markedly in the 13 years between that 2005 and the 2018 F150 I bought. The weird thing is that you can get an F150 with significantly better real world mileage than an Escape, which is massively smaller, lighter, more aerodynamic, etc. Consumers are smarter than you're giving them credit for here.
A new F150 is getting 19 city / 24 highway, while ten year old Prius are getting more than double that at 45mpg. Every single trip you make in an F150 without lumber is more than double the gas guzzling than current state of the art. New Prius are 57mpg and AWD. And I've fit tons of plywood, furniture, and even a 50 gal. water heater in my Prius.
at least in the US, and i believe most countries, gas taxes haven't really paid for roads for a long time. Gas taxes go into the general fund, and road maintenance and construction comes out of the general fund, but gas taxes cover less than half the cost of roads.
Just let’s please not require a government-approved mileage tracking device to make sure that each vehicle is charged it’s fair share. That’s one really nice property of gas taxes they will be hard to replace without going full dystopia, and there is a significant contingent that doesn’t give a shit about the privacy and security implications.
I remember replacing the worm gear on my odometer and wondering how many miles were "lost" from it while it wasn't turning during those 6 months or so that I was getting around to the project.
Not that I'm advocating a Orwellian tracking system be installed. Just saying I can see how existing systems could be argued against.
All you need to do is require people to report their odometer reading when they renew their vehicle registration, and have huge penalties for willful mis-reporting. Traffic stops and service records at tire shops, oil change places, etc. provide plenty of evidence to prosecute someone, and if the penalties are severe enough, the threat of enforcement will be enough to keep most people honest.
Not all states require periodic inspections. Who will be checking those odometers? Is it the honor system or are we requiring a third party inspection?
In Oregon, there are two metro areas (Portland and Medford) where vehicles must be tested because of air pollution concerns. If you have a pre-2005 vehicle, I'm pretty sure they still use a measuring device to see how many pollutants your car generates. For model year 2005 and later, they hook their computer to your car's OBDII port and ask the car's computer how it's feeling. If the computer says "fine", they pass you and you can renew your registration.
Comparatively recently, they let mechanics and quick change oil places do the test for 2005 and later cars, giving them the option of charging a fee for it.
Oregon doesn't have vehicle safety inspections but it doesn't seem unreasonable that I could go to the official DEQ or DMV locations if I wanted to have my mileage inspected or maybe pay Jiffy Lube a bit extra because they're closer and their hours are more convenient.
The issue with that is that, though, is the same problem with taxes: many (most?) people aren't going to want to come up with the money to pay their mileage bill on the spot. There don't seem to be great answers for that.
Oregon has a pilot program where they put a device in your car and charge your credit card 1.9 cents per mile. https://www.myorego.org I'm sure that's what they'd like to have people do but I don't know how many people want to do that.
They should require periodic inspections. Too many vehicles here are too dangerous for public roads, and having bald tires, no brakes, and rusted out suspension just makes them worse.
You'd just have a self reporting system which is then periodically corrected by vehicle inspections. If you underreport you'll end up paying it all back in the future at a likely higher rate than the present rate.
Yeah, my car should be tracked by its manufacturer, my cell carrier, my phone, the mapping software in my GPS, the four random apps I gave location permission to and forgot about, the traffic cameras, my neighbor's door cameras, but god forbid the government actually trying to reduce pollution by getting a raw distance number once a year.
I keep seeing people bringing this up, but what this misses is that a significant portion of road construction and maintenance costs are not due to damage from tires, but other factors like weather (especially freeze/thaw cycles) and the need to widen roads to accommodate the amount of space cars take up while driving.
I support the idea of factoring in axle load to any future road use tax, but it's definitely not the only factor or even necessarily the biggest one.
Isn't the proper tax on tires? The more you shed, the faster they need replacement. So cars which shed a lot of microplastics would both use up more tires, AND would pay more tax. So as the tax increases we correctly linearly decrease tire use.
It would be a mistake to over-punish EV users compared to ICE just because the average weight of an EV is heavier. (We know the weights, we don't need to average by class)
This would reward companies for inventing tech which would wear our fewer tires, leading to less pollution.
Road use tax is intended to be used to pay for road maintenance and infrastructure. It's why if you live on a farm you can get tax-free diesel that is dyed red. You aren't using the road/infrastructure, so you shouldn't need to pay the tax.
If the goal is to reduce tire microplastics, the tax should be specifically based on tire lifespan, which is already well known. It's called UTQG.
Today we tend to conflate tax on pollution and tax on infrastructure though, since gas guzzler cars use much more gas (and cause more pollution, theoritically, all else equal) than the wear on the roads themselves. If this was truly about taxing externalities, it would be 3 taxes. Tax based on weight, tax based on efficiency, and tax based on tire tread life.
The alternative being government restrictions or bans on 'high particulate' tires or something of that nature, if the aim is to fix tire dust.
Which of the two seems more feasible? An outright ban, or an economic incentive that encourages consumers to choose lower particulate tires which thereby applies economic pressure to tire companies?
Agree, but that has already happened. Tires already have tax on them, which makes people replace them somewhat less, since they balance the equation cost vs risk from worn tires, particularly very large scale users like taxi companies, rental fleets, trucking companies etc. We already accept the tradeoff of for example, charging 10% sales tax on tires in return for slightly more accidents.
My point is that we might be able to rebalance it more correctly by raising prices. There could be significant pressure to reduce pollution from wear technically, pressure to drive less, but also pressure to keep tires on carts slightly longer. Given that we're still making the equation more accurate, it would still be a net gain.
You can't just say "don't do that" without also explaining why you do not advocate removing sales tax on tires, or even having negative sales tax (to incentivize more frequent & safe tire replacement). Status quo is not really a defense.
That's the same tax someone would pay for 1000 gallons of gas. A typical 25 mpg car driven a typical number of miles will use more like 600 gallons a year. The Texas EV tax is deliberately high.
> With the continued shift to EVs, petrol taxes just don't make sense as a form of taxation to pay for roads.
In New Zealand soon EVs will face Road User Charges, which mean they pay a per km tax as all diesel vehicles do today. The tax is based on the class of vehicle and so EVs won't be charged more than a diesel cars.
All vehicles in NZ pay road user charges; EVs have just been exempt to encourage uptake. There are RUC weight classes but they only exist to separate light (<3500kg) and heavy (>=3500kg) vehicles rather than distinguish between a Nissan Leaf (1600kg) and a Ford Ranger (2100kg).
Uh, no. All non-petrol powered vehicles pay road user charges.
For petrol vehicles we tax the petrol instead. This is because the cost of compliance is much cheaper (for the government and the car owner) if we tax the petrol. We don't do that for desil vehicles because a large about of desil is used by farm equipment and other off road vehicles. It's easier to do road user charges than to have a refund scheme for desil taxes.
It’s great to bring this problem up. But the focus on EVs is a distraction.
> EVs tend to shed around 20 percent more from their tires due to their higher weight and high torque compared to traditional internal combustion engine-powered vehicles.
Fleet operators don’t see any significant difference in tire wear. EVs have higher torque but that doesn’t matter unless to drive like a mad-man. EVs also allow you to drive very smoothly with no sudden jerk in torque.
Cars have been getting heavier long before EVs came around. One of the problems is that EVs are all new. Too many of them are bigger than they need to be. But that also goes for new ICE vehicle models.
I’m not too worried about the weight of EVs long term. Batteries are expensive. Increases in energy density, increase in vehicle efficiency and decrease in weight tends to have very significant effect on the amount of batteries you need to cover a certain range, which has huge impact on the price.
What we need to focus on is infrastructure for walking, biking and public transportation. An E-bike has made it just possible for me to bike to work in a reasonable time. So I drive our EV less and less to work.
> EVs have higher torque but that doesn’t matter unless to drive like a mad-man
Its not torque that matters. Its simply friction and normal force. And that's directly caused by weight. Tire Wear is something like (weight^4), so small increases in weight will have huge increases to wear-and-tear.
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I think the real issue is that 3000lbs to 4500lbs, while a significant increase in tire wear, is still small compared to the big 5000lb to 8000lb vehicles that people use in practice. I'm sure a 4500lb EV is bad, but I'd expect a 6000 lb SUV or Truck to be worse (and a 8000lb electric-SUV to be the absolute worst).
But beyond just consumer cars are semi-trucks, which almost certainly are the top tire-wear vehicles on the roads. I'd expect almost all of the plastic from "tire wear" to come from a semi-truck (again, weight to the power of 4), given their grossly increased weight.
> walking, biking and public transportation
Semi-trucks are replaced by trains. Not by walking and biking. I mean, I want more walkable paths and all. But this _particular_ problem is solved with freight trains.
Last-mile is difficult. Do we want 100-people in a neighborhood driving 100x cars to a store? Or would we rather have 1x large truck deliver a (heavier) package to 100x different people? We're screwed in both cases, and rail can't save us.
But trains don't use rubber and trains wheels / rails are made from steel. I'm sure some particles fly off as iron (or iron-oxide/rust), but surely much less than rubber given how much stronger steel wheels / steel tracks are.
>Do we want 100-people in a neighborhood driving 100x cars to a store? Or would we rather have 1x large truck deliver a (heavier) package to 100x different people?
Why can't the majority of the people walk to a store and the rest can be serviced by a smaller truck?
My overall point is that the "last mile" we're just screwed unless we fundamentally redesign our neighborhoods and shape of our cities.
Its pretty damn obvious that as the USA is laid out right now, we don't have any good last-mile solutions outside of 100x different people driving to the same store and picking up what they want. And its not like houses are going to pick themselves up and move to a store, and given zoning laws no one is going to move a store into a neighborhood either. (People won't like the crime that comes with it).
So whatever, that's that. I don't see this issue changing. But I do think that the truck/rail situation can change. Fewer people are in the decision-making process for train vs truck, and factories can be designed (and/or redesigned) to fit trains.
I'd assume that its easier to convince one or two factory owners to switch from truck-based to train-based logistics... rather than convincing 100x homehowners to vote at the next HOA meeting to start a city-campaign legal change to change the local zoning laws and possibly lower everyone's housing values by increasing crime in the neighborhood during this rise in shoplifting going on right now...
If people think grocery stores existing within walking distance of
their homes will lower their home values, due to some rise in shoplifting in the news implying crime in their area, then the war for any sensible policy decisions is lost.
That's like ten carts before a horse or some brawndo has what plants crave shit. I can walk to the grocery store where I live -- my house is worth more because it has decent access to amenities.
IIRC there is a push in some areas to switch to e-bikes; while they carry less, you also don’t need a CDL to ride a bicycle and there is a chronic shortage of CDL drivers.
There's no shortage of anything except training and wages/benefits. At some point, companies are going to have to bite the bullet and start training their own employees. The horror!
I somehow doubt that there is truly a lack of people willing to train to obtain a CDL who also don't use marijuana. Hell, I don't use marijuana and I'd gladly do it if I needed a job.
> Data from DOT’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) shows that, since 2020, more than 100,000 truckers tested positive for cannabis, as Transport Topics first reported. Marijuana was by far the most common banned substance to come up in the drug screenings.
> Overall, there have been approximately 166,000 people who tested positive for some prohibited substance since 2020, according to a report that FMCSA’s Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse published last week. There is an option for those truckers to enter a “return-to-work” process that would require another drug test; however, the data shows that a large fraction of people are not taking the opportunity. About 91,000 of those 166,000 truckers who didn’t pass the drug screening have not enrolled in the process yet.
> This would be problematic from an economic standpoint in any industry, but it’s especially troubling in the transportation sector, which has been facing a significant labor shortage.
Trucking is not the best industry to be in and there are a lot of problems, but dismissing people who smoke weed, at all, is adding fuel to the fire.
People don't shoplift at their neighbors homes. They shoplift at grocery stores and whatever.
Crime happens at places of commerce. That's just... how it works. Places of commerce have both goods to steal (especially useful black-market goods, like Tide Detergent) and cash-registers to steal from. I'm not saying like "murders" or whatever, but when a neighborhood has +100 police reports in a month, the Real Estate agents notice that and home values drop.
That's just... how it works. Its not necessarily about "which crimes are actually dangerous" or whatever, people just pay attention to crime heatmaps and don't really look into the details.
You stick a store designed to sell to homes, that store _will_ have homegoods, including Tide Detergent, in stock. That Tide _will_ be stolen, its just so easy to steal, easy to sell in the black market. That stolen good will be reported on police reports (so that the store can get back its insurance, or write it off or whatever they plan to do accounting wise). That police report will drop nearby home values.
Can you quote actual statistics, not merely sensationalizing articles, demonstrating an increase in shoplifting? As far as I've seen there is no evidence to back up this common assertion. The narrative that is floating around is doing a lot of work to convince people it's true but where are the facts?
Empirically, myself and my sister have witnessed shoplifters personally in recent months. I know this is anecdotal data, but anecdotes (especially personal ones) are enough for myself. At least in my area, it seems like shoplifters _are_ on the rise.
I don't need to prove it to other people on the internet. My own eyes with my own life is enough proof for me. If that's not enough for you, whatever. Seeing news reports that others are seeing similar rises matches my "gut check".
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Now people stealing food from grocery stores is... you know... the lowest level of shoplifting. These people aren't stealing like, luxury goods. They're clearly just trying to survive. Its not like a criminal gang or organized crime that'd be deeply rooted and/or difficult to deal with.
IMO, its weird that people would rather shoplift than to apply and/or use a WIC card (food stamps). So its a conundrum for another day in any case, its a crime (albeit relatively victimless. Sure sucks for the staff and the grocery store but I've seen worse...). But its still speaks poorly for neighborhoods and makes people feel less safe. So yeah, it needs to stop. But I can 100% believe that shoplifting is on the rise today. Anecdotally at least.
There's other low-level crimes, like obviously not-paying for the subway, that I think is on the rise by my eyes as well. These also make people feel unsafe and/or unappreciated (tax dollars wasted, etc. etc.) and is bad for our neighborhoods.
I do know that statistically speaking, the personal savings rate of people has declined, wages haven't kept with inflation, etc. etc. So these actions make sense in the greater economic situation IMO.
I don't necessarily want a police crackdown to throw all these people in jail. But we do need to do something, maybe make WIC cards easier to apply for (at every grocery store for example), or stuff like that. We literally have a food-stamps program, why aren't people using it? Why are they shoplifting instead?
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If I cared, I probably would start by interviewing / personally talking to cashiers at my local grocery store before I trusted online articles anyway. And I'd suggest you do the same if you cared about this issue. The internet is just not as good a source of information as the front-line workers here.
Every grocery store clerk has a feel. Talk with them next time you visit the store, don't be a political asshat about it but it wouldn't take more than 1 or 2 minutes to ask them if they've noticed more shoplifters. Obviously don't eat up all their time either (they're on the job after all). With luck, you might see a manager watching all the clerks who'd have more freetime to talk about shoplifters too.
Don't you think police would be jumping at the chance to show hard stats that your claims are true if they measured them? Why would it be so hard to find those things if police could use it to justify their policies and crackdowns?
I don't need to look up the stats. I already believe in them.
And I frankly don't care to convince you of the fact. I'm not sure if anything you'd say could beat out my personal methodology on this particular question. I actually wave / say hi / talk to the grocery store clerks (and their managers) on a regular basis, so I've got people I trust who can tell me about rising (or not) shoplifting. I really don't need the internet to tell me this.
I literally can just ask the manager (and I recognize him by face since we talk so often) at the store next time I see them. I'm not sure if you'd care on their response or not, but... I'd trust him more than anything you'd say or research. No offense to you personally, but I have my methods to gathering information that I trust more.
There's much, much simpler, and direct, ways of getting information than surfing online for a database... or engaging on internet debates over.
I would care about their response, I just wouldn't consider any single source to be the operational "truth". I know how limited personal perspectives can be and how skewed perceptions can get when fear is one of the emotions in the mix. I'd take everything everyone says and judge based on their likelihood to react to incomplete data based on emotions, what's in it for them to spread certain narratives, and what kinds of hard evidence they can summon to back up their claims. None of these are dealbreakers, all of them fit into the wider picture.
infra is not going to change in the US. Too much individual ownership at stake.
For example I care about the environment but not enough to throw away a one million dollar suburban house for it.
Basically to fix this problem is essentially to cause current suburban housing to depreciate in value until the property has become essentially worthless which is against much of the populations self interest as many people own homes. Either way, this kind of thing has sort of already happened in Japan.
That being said in CA there are measures to combat this problem. ADUs and SB-9 to increase density, but adoption has not yet been that wide spread.
Nobody really talks about why there's this dichotomy between Japan in and the US. The reasoning is multifaceted. One of these things is infrastructure. Japan cities have extremely good infrastructure and are super clean. Living in Tokyo is close to living in a futuristic utopian cyberpunk society. So people know that the urban way of life is 100x better.
The Western US is centered around suburban life where everyone drives cars. Property is spread out and not much is invested in cities on the west coast. People don't see the value of city life as much. The east side of the US is more hybridized where rural and city properties are valued for different reasons.
Much of this dichotomy between countries is driven by lack of land in Japan and a lowering population. However this just pushes japan ahead of the curve. As energy becomes more and more expensive all economies will inevitably shift to becoming more like japan where suburban properties become more and more worthless.
Yes now, but I have assume to were talking about improvements and the future of "walking, biking and public transportation" since adunw started this thread with that sentiment.
A lot of people can't look beyond their own generation and if it's something that takes 20-30 years to realize they just simply think it's too difficult. I see this with my generation (Gen-X), newer generations and even older generations.
This kind of gets at the root of the problem. Take away cars, and the whole North American built environment is just not worth as much as the pyramid scheme of real estate we have in place of social safety nets.
> The nearest store is a 45 minute walk (one way) from my townhouse. I'm not in the US, but Canada. Driving drops that to 8 minutes.
Assuming an average adult walking speed of 3 mph, I'm guessing that's somewhere in the ballpark of 2.25 miles? So something like 11 minutes at an average cycling speed of 12 mph, yeah? The distances here don't feel insurmountable.
It isn't the distance that is insurmountable by bike, no.
Alone it would be fine, I know what I'm doing. If I add my children to the mix, it is a little sketchy due to what I'd consider tricky spots.
There are no sidewalks, no bike lanes, no curbs, a squeeze over a bridge where two cars won't fit around the corner simultaneously, and a couple of roundabouts that drivers just don't understand (one normal, one mini). I can't quite trust them to do the right things. The drivers or my children in this instance.
Sure, I don't doubt that the infrastructure is terrible for cycling. It is where I live in the US too. But I think it's worth calling out that the distances involved often are well-suited for cycling, even if the streets today aren't.
Where the distances are okay but the streets aren't, safer streets can make cycling feasible. Where the distances are too far for cycling, you need both safer streets and a shift in land use to get people out of their cars. Both are doable in the long term, but the former is much more tractable in the short- and medium-term.
Yes, because we're a wealthy and productive society and the fruits of human progress in the past 300 years have allowed us to build a civilization where nearly everyone can afford to use a multi-ton machine of nearly incomprehensible complexity and sophistication to carry them around, instead of pushing a cart like a peasant 5,000 years ago did.
Yes we can afford this now. In the context of "Tire Dust Makes Up the Majority of Ocean Microplastics" how long can we afford this? Just like dumping Freon, and CO2 into the atmosphere have long term consequences that require our society to change, how long can we go aerosolizing rubber?
Governments have paid very little attention to this problem to date. It seems like regulation on chemical composition of tires might be warranted. I don't have a problem with that.
The fanatic anti-car people will actually reduce the chances of meaningful regulation being passed here - as they won't be able to resist trying to use this opportunity to actually make cars more expensive and less accessible to people, and reduce overall car use, etc.
Thus, reasonable people who are not fanatically opposed to cars will be suspicious of whether the proposed regulation is really needed, or just an excuse to achieve socio-political goals that can't be achieved directly.
This is exactly the same dynamic that affects other issues, e.g. gun control. The extremists will block reasonable progress.
I wonder how hard it would be to capture this with some kind of aero device in the wheel wells of vehicles. Given what F1 teams can do with aero, it doesn’t seem like a huge stretch to be able to suck up these particles at the source and pass them through a filter bag like a household vacuum or something.
I think the issue is the particles are from the friction of the road and to effectively collect the particles it would drastically reduce tire clearance, not an issue for F1, but for the consumer market tire clearance is important, for some reason.
Check out eg https://youtu.be/hmk5cxpAfcw where he’s flying by all the cars stuck in traffic on his human-powered peasant wheels.
Auto companies lobbied governments and put out propaganda to get cities to rip out street cars and rail in the early 1900s. They did this to sell more cars, so this is what we get.
Unfortunately we have been pushing the costs onto everybody else: as evidenced by climate change and micro plastics. And now the bill is starting to come due.
I have a wheeled shopping cart thing (not sure what to really call it, but it’s the standard one). I can only fit some milk and a few things in there, it is no where near as capable as my car. I still use it, since I don’t like driving to the store (we live near 3 big grocery stores, and a soon to be closed city target), and it’s useful for getting snacks to school when it’s my turn, but I don’t see it as a car replacement.
You seem to have different issues than the person I'm replying to. Maybe your situation is different. If you nearest grocery store is 45 minutes away by walking maybe your situation requires a different solution than someone who has expressed interest to walk but stated that they might buy too many groceries to walk that home.
Housing density, and radius of "walkable" to the average human.
I live in a neighborhood full of small apartments, single level duplexes, and single family homes. What stores are walkable? The liquor store, and gas station, and if i really feel like it, dominos and 7-11, both of which are at least 1/4 mile one way. Most others in this area, dont get those even. Past that its about a mile one way to the actual grocery store. And then after all the shopping, i have to walk back, now with 50+lbs of groceries.
Honestly, all this we need more walkable cities stuff, i get it, yes, you should be able to get places by walking, but really, its just not even feasible most times if youre going to be buying something. Im not gonna walk home from best buy 4+ miles away heaving a huge TV on my back, no one will. We invented transportation that didnt involve humans using their legs because we are slow, and easily over encumbered when carrying things. Theres a reason we saw an explosion of carriages way back. Its easier to haul more, and much faster, than if a person, or even many people at once, were to do it.
Housing density is a huge factor in a lot of this, but having swaths of tall purely apartment buildings is also not the answer. People want single family homes and other styles for many reasons. They wont be going away anytime soon. And even if they did, the only answer is very mixed use zoning.
One of my favorite examples, in downtown Denver, there is a tall apartment building, stacked on top of a large chain grocery store, it includes parking for the store, and spots for the building, under the building too. This is what i would consider peak use, and what people complain about walkable cities really need to focus on. Having a city you can walk anywhere is great, but you need to be able to get to the societal needs without having to walk far. Of course the grocery store also serves for a large part of that neighborhood, and distance to the store is a variable, but this mainly serves multiple buildings in a small area. The big problem is all the space we waste dedicating to parking. It might be more expensive, but you can gain a lot more use if you force parking lots to have shops above/below them, and that reclaimed flat land can then be used for the mixed use building. Parking is also not going away, like i said, we invented carriages for a reason. Howwwweeeeevvvveeerrr all of this comes with a number of caveats, like the ridiculous price to lease a storefront, build the building, etc, and of course its just a feedback loop that gets worse as we waste more space, space becomes premium.
All of this is to sum up my point, walkability is variable by person, and changes greatly depending on if youre going to have to be carrying things, and theres never going to be good "walkable" cities, short of nuking a city and starting over, you wont make it vastly better, especially with the politicians and government we have now.
So people in your type of neighbourhood maybe can't start walking everywhere right away, but you don't need to also think "walking is out forever" - you can start lobbying your local politicians, and voting for the ones who want to improve things rather than sit in their 4x4 enjoying the status quo.
(And personally if I lived somewhere unwalkable I'd move home to address that, though I appreciate there can be reasons to either not want to move or to not be able to move.)
> Also, it’s the year 2023 it is easier than ever to get a tv delivered to your front door without you needing to haul it anywhere.
Is it really better for the environment to double-up on all the packaging and have an even heavier truck (that has worse emissions and even worse tire-wear / microplastic creation) than the car that weighs like 1/4th the weight of the truck?
That's what I mean by the "last mile" problem. The alternative, big trucks that consolidate deliveries, isn't a clear cut win either.
One heavy truck is still better in aggregate than many personal cars. I don’t have the numbers, but when transportation is the biggest cause of GHG emissions and microplastic pollution consolidating that transportation to as few vehicles as possible will always work out to less pollution than the status quo.
A mile to a store is a very comfortable distance. I've lived in such situation for a couple of years and just walked to the store a couple times a week, hauling back a couple of kilograms of groceries in my backpack every time. I needed the walk and the exercise anyway, and this way I was killing two birds with one stone.
Nope. But it wouldn't be a problem to carry even 8-10 kg in a backpack instead of just 3-4 kg. In fact, it's a recommended form of cardiovascular excercise (it's called "rucking").
That's for enthusiasts (super fit people)? From health benefits perspective for average person, what I've heard is that it's enough for the weight to trigger accelerated heart rate, heavier breathing, sweating etc. when walking. 10-15 kg supposedly should do it for most people.
Ah, seems like the term is being co-opted for the general populace and is now trendy! We used to just call it backpacking.
Rucking originated as a military term for a long jog with a heavy rucksack (hence the name!) and was always pretty shitty because rucksacks suck and the military has no shortage of heavy shit to carry. I’ve heard stories of 80+ lb rucksacks and 8+ miles being the norm.
Weirdly, the military also coined ‘Vitamin I’ for ibuprofen. I wonder why?
Ah how the world changes. I can’t wait for it to mean going on a casual walk with a loved one while bringing along a nice meal and some wine. ;)
My data point when I lived in SF is I would walk a third of a mile with two bags of groceries. But didn't really want to walk half a mile.
Back when I lived in San Jose I could also walk to the store because way back in the 1940's they put a pedestrian walkway between two streets which dropped the walking distance from my house to the shopping center from half a mile to again a third of a mile.
Which brings up something I think is over looked. Which is the layout of streets in post war housing tracts makes the distances you need to walk twice are far as they could be. With zoning changes, money and some eminent domain we could make things better.
I'm sure there are many people for whom that is true, but there are also many people who would laugh at the idea of driving two miles instead of walking, or laugh at the idea of driving six miles instead of cycling (even with a bag or two of shopping).
I think a lot of the difference between people comes down to their childhood - what they learned as default behaviour. Though obviously people can change as they grow up too, either personality wise or having health/physical reasons they either can't walk far or can't drive at all. But my point is that just because some people feel that 3 minutes is the maximum time for walking before a car should be used instead it doesn't mean that short distance is an immutable fact, and many people could get used to walking slightly further distances and discover that no only is it not the end of the world, but it's even a good way to stay or become a bit fitter and healthier!
Are you serious? That's 400m. One lap of the athletics track. Should take about 4 minutes at walking speed.
Aren't there shopping malls in the US longer/wider than this?
I think I walk further than that between buildings to get to the canteen at lunch time. I tell people I live "really close" to a metro station and it's 380m away.
> Are you serious? That's 400m. [...] Aren't there shopping malls in the US longer/wider than this?
It's not like people go to malls as frequently as they go grocery shopping, so this doesn't really imply anything. Also don't forget you're carrying potentially heavy bags. Also don't forget not everyone is a fit 30yo.
I was just thinking - why don't they make electrified coin-operated shopping carts that you can take home and return when you're done with them? That would greatly extend the carrying capacity of a single person and maybe make car trips redundant.
Then why don't we make the shopping cart carry people and suddenly its just a car with a lot of extra steps.
Like, a car _is_ your shopping cart you take to-and-from the grocery store. It also carries you to work and does all sorts of other things.
These "crappier than a car" solutions seem to be from people who haven't really thought this through IMO.
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The solution is to have a store walking distance from the house, meaning you don't even take large amounts of groceries home. Why buy a lot of groceries when whatever you want is within walking distance?
When I visited Manila, Philippines, my life was like this. Fresh bread? Just walk to the corner store, no reason to take extra home with me because tomorrow morning it'd be baked fresh again. Why should I spend on 2 pan-de-sal (great tasting Filipino bread btw) for today-and-tomorrow, when I'm planning to walk to the city-corner again to well... do anything anyway? The bus is there, the food is there, breakfast is there, everything is there. Its less convenient to even take anything home outside of eggs or other longer-term goods.
But you need to live _much_ closer together than what Americans are used to. And there needs to be a reason to go "to the corner" (ex: to take the bus or other public transit). Etc. etc. etc. This simply doesn't work in American suburbia.
American City centers, such as New York or Washington DC seem to have figured it out in my experience. But prices for this lifestyle are higher than just buying a car and living in suburbia. So yeah, Americans recognize the value of this lifestyle (despite all of our debate and complaints). But there's not enough space/housing in cities to have enough people live a car-free lifestyle.
Your solution is even worse! Not only it means opening stores everywhere, but you haven't even considered the fact that not everyone wants to go shopping daily. Buying in bulk is a thing, bc of time and money saved.
Besides, I was thinking of something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/Foldable-Lightweight-Shopping-Capacit...
which is already popular with the old ppl in many countries in Europe.
I was in the market for a small electric city car and found out that we're not allowed to have small cars in the US. Europe and Asia have really nice small city cars under 2,000lbs but none of them are available here. I believe the smallest car sold in the US is the Mini Cooper around 3,000lbs. I actually ended up with a souped up street legal golf cart and it's worked out well for my purposes of picking up kids and groceries within a 5 mile radius, though I'm in the Bay Area where the weather is not too extreme most of the year. I'm not sure why this market is neglected.
The bulk of the problem is 5000lb+ vehicles. F150, SUVs like Suburbans, etc. etc. I'm not even sure if people are using these big vehicles to carry their families around, its probably just single-person drivers in most cases.
I'm not even sure how to approach the weight problem. We have plenty of cars in the 3000lb or 4000lb range but more-and-more people are pushing 5000lb+.
There are some horrible states without annual inspections, but they should be federally punished until they comply. If we could force every state to have a drinking age of 21, using access to highway funding, then there's no reason the same thing couldn't be done for vehicular taxation. It would increase state tax revenue anyway...
The Mitsubishi Mirage is available in the US and comes in at just ~2100lbs, but it really ends up just serving the purpose of showing how huge of a gap there is in the American market. The fact that Mitsubishi can make a 4-door, 40mpg, 2100lbs car that passes US regs on a shoestring sale price shows that other mfgs could but just don't have the incentive to. You have the cancelled Chevy Spark at 2246lbs, the 2-seater Miata at 2,341lbs, and then the next lightest is a Versa with +500lbs on the Mirage.
The Honda Fit, which is very popular, isn't even sold in the US anymore. Curb weight is low 3000s, all of the passenger seats fold down, it parallel parks trivially, and it's fun to drive. It's basically a 90s Civic.
I'm angry about this often, as mine is over fifteen years old. If I had to replace it with a new car, I'd want another Fit. The closest thing on the market is probably a hatchback Civic...and the whole reason for the Fit existing is because international pressure made the Civic too large and heavy for the desirable tax bracket in the Japanese market.
And it's not even small for the Japanese market, because they have the whole kei class, with strong incentives to drive smaller cars. Which is how it should work everywhere: severe tax penalties for larger cars, to promote public safety and fairly pay for the fourth-power law that affects road wear.
My Bolt EV has a curb weight of 3624lbs; there are examples of vehicles that could have dramatically lower impact, but it's frustrating that GM doesn't seem inclined to keep cars like this in production. (Yes, they're hinting at producing the Bolt EV in the future, it's unfortunate that they can't just keep producing the current Bolt until then)
Honest question how does shear force proportional to torque not factor in? Coefficient of friction is shear over normal.
Mechanical properties are a function of temperature and quick startups assuredly contribute to wear. An extreme example is drag racing. Cars are highway driving in steady state cruising for more miles and time but in the US around town driving has stop lights.
Even at steady state cruising the the tires are flexing and stretching with each revolution. Tires are round but a driveway is flat. If you look at the contact patch of the tire it flattens a bit to confirm to the driveway's shape. Now visualize with each revolution that flatten part of the tire is cycling around the wheel.
Or people just get their groceries delivered. Way more convenient, not expensive anymore (I get unlimited deliveries for a fairly paltry annual fee), and saves on journeys as the truck just loads up on lots of people’s deliveries all at once.
It also scales better - if more people are having groceries delivered then each trucks stops become more closely clustered (unless the computers involved are just doing a poor job).
I couldn't find an empty weight for a box truck that could carry that much but assuming 10klbs total, and that grocery weight is negligible to the car, it looks like thebtruck is slightly better. It doesn't seem like a clear win.
That's ^4 actually. Friction / Normal Force / Damage to roads is to the Fourth power law.
Yeah, the 100x lighter cars might actually be better in practice. That's what makes this last-mile problem so problematic. We're already (possibly) at the local optimum.
Are horses actually environmentally friendly? I know that having a pet dog can be one of, if not the most, un-environmentally friendly things a person can do due to the amount they eat, so I could imagine horses having the same problem and not being as good as electric cars yet alone electric bikes, but I don't know anything about horses so maybe they're very efficient eaters?
I do know that back before cars, places like NYC had many tens of thousands of horses working in the streets, leading to huge amounts of horse shit everywhere (so much so that even though it does have industrial uses, it's value was practically zero), plus something like half a dozen horses dying on the streets every day and being left to putrefy - so some logistical improvements compared to last time needed at the very least, though 120 years ago people weren't caring much about the fuel efficiency comparisons.
Horses are far more inefficient at carrying than cars. That's why we switched to cars so quickly.
This caused a cascading set of improvement. Horses needed *literally* tons of horse-bread to function well. And those *literal* tons of horse-bread turned into *literal* tons of horse-poop.
> According to some estimates, medieval horses consumed about 20 pounds of food per day.
Note: a "day" of travel was ~30 miles back then.
It gets worse: you need horse-bread (and the waste / horse-poop) to _move_ horse bread into the cities, where all the horses were.
Alternatively, consider that one-gallon of gasoline (~6 lbs) would also travel 30 miles today, but also carry far more load. What, our typical car is like 200 horsepower today? So one gallon of gasoline is roughly the strength of a 200-horse carriage?.
Its an absurd comparison point. We're realistically looking at 1-gallon of gasoline (and its associated waste product) vs something like 4000-lbs (ie: 2 tons) of horse bread (and its associated waste product/2-tons of horse poop).
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Gasoline, for all of its faults, largely turns into CO2. Which escapes into the atmosphere and floats away. But imagine that for every gallon of gasoline you used today you created 20lbs of horse-poop somewhere instead.
Horse poop is something you'd need to scrub out of the streets every night, and it would infect the local rivers each time it rained.
The idea of horses being more environmentally friendly is a laughable myth. They're incredibly dirty creatures, and the poop problem alone would cause a significant rise in infections above-and-beyond anything this microplastics problem has caused, I promise.
Yep, horses are massively expensive to own. Aside from required caloric intake, think living space, waste disposal, pests, specialized care (farrier), vet bills, tack, grooming. Ugh.
> What we need to focus on is infrastructure for walking, biking and public transportation
And busses, light rail, intercity trains.
But America associates one-car-per-person with all kinds of twisted politics and self-esteem anxiety.
We need a psyops program to wean people off cars, and it will take a decade or more. Just look at the anger in any HN thread that is critical of cars, it runs deep.
> We need a psyops program to wean people off cars, and it will take a decade or more. Just look at the anger in any HN thread that is critical of cars, it runs deep.
Be willing to enforce civility in public. In Japan 7-year-old kids can ride the subway; here we have junkies burning fentanyl, vagrants with pitbulls, and "showtime". Gee, why wouldn't I want public transit to be an inseparable part of my life?
No, I lived this. I want to live where I can bicycle entirely (and mostly did, because transit is often dirty). I'm working toward spending a few years in Japan and later the Netherlands. But only because we can't have nice things in the USA. I'm not going to live where junkies own all public spaces and kids get stuck on needles and die.
HN rule require we take our peers' comments at face value.
Assuming your anecdote is 100% absolutely positively true and not made up at all, and that you actually saw kids get stuck with needles and die, here's the rub: your anecdote doesn't matter.
Your argument is literally: the solution to homeless and drug addiction is ... better manners?
// But America associates one-car-per-person with all kinds of twisted politics and self-esteem anxiety.
America offers various lifestyles, from big cities like NYC, Boston, etc where a car is a liability, to near suburbs that are well served by transit (eg, NYC tri-state area) where you probably need a car but your daily commute doesn't involve it, to more spread-out and rural living where car is absolutely necessary.
This speaks to a trade-off between density and car-dependence. People across the globe face similar trade-offs (eg: 50% of Dutch persons own a car, 86% of French households do...)
But we can do better. 92% of Americans own a car, only slightly higher than the rate in France, but the average American drives twice as many miles in a year as the average French person does [1]. There are a lot of trips that will always need a car. Lots of people still want to own a car, even if they live somewhere with a good rail network. But they don’t need to drive it as much. It’s not that they’re being forced not to drive, it’s that rail is such a great option for getting around that there’s simply no need to use a car for most trips. That should be our goal in the US.
Exactly. Designing transit systems around cars was a colossal mistake. Now that the data are clear, it's time to rebuild. Over the next few decades, we need to tear down existing car infrastructure and replace it with walking/biking/transit.
A side benefit (aside from the particulate pollution, energy waste, noise pollution, high death toll, increased inter-destination distance, decreased QOL) is that it'll be like an order of magnitude cheaper. Cars are a rather expensive way to get around. The Netherlands actually considers biking to be +17cents per mile (as in, considered revenue), because of reduced healthcare costs.
Transit systems are designed around cars because people want to use cars. This idea that it was some kind of a massive conspiracy from the auto manufacturers is just bullshit.
Yes, cars are expensive. We can afford cars today. No one wants to get poorer and go back to walking.
The car shaming mindset makes sense if you live somewhere like Japan where transit is clean and fast, and you don't have problematic people who assault other riders and do drugs. As a family man living in a large American west coast city, there is no way I would ever give up my car lifestyle.
I think your final point is key. Apart from curb weight, the reason to emphasize EVs might be just to remind people that they're not a panacea for the environmental collapse we're speeding towards. Instead of inventivizing car-free and car-light living, policymakers would rather not distrupt anything, simply swapping EVs for ICE vehicles in the same miserable sprawl. Yale's findings underline that this can't happen.
The important point is there are far greener alternatives than EV's. EV's cost a lot of resources to build, which means a lot of environmental destruction and carbon output. Plus as we see they still contribute to this tyre dust problem. They are not the holy grail. Rail, public transport, e-bikes and better city design is.
This argument about EV resource use for construction is fossil fuel industry FUD. The difference is outweighed within a year or two of driving versus an ICE vehicle.
It can be simultaneously true that EVs are absolutely a big improvement over ICE vehicles, and that switching all vehicles to EVs doesn't solve 100% of the problems - therefore it's good to both continue pushing to move to EVs, and to push for alternatives as suggested by GP.
> Cars have been getting heavier long before EVs came around. One of the problems is that EVs are all new. Too many of them are bigger than they need to be. But that also goes for new ICE vehicle models.
I’m not too worried about the weight of EVs long term.
Given the rate of climate change / ecological damage, what definition are we using for "long term"?
That aside, you've might have buried the lede. The switch over to EVs should represent an opportunity to revisit and evolve what personal transportation could look like and should look like[1]. Instead we've taking the same *old* bigger, stronger, faster paradigm and replacing petrol with a plug. Humans' role in the bigger broader picture isn't changing. It's the starus quo with a solar panel.
There's a better than fair chance we're going to regret squandering this opportunity.
[1] Similar happened with the pandemic...an opportunity to revist and rethink was quickly swept aside for back to the status quo. ASAP please. That's great for the status quo but certain a concern for the long term.
> Fleet operators don’t see any significant difference in tire wear. EVs have higher torque but that doesn’t matter unless to drive like a mad-man. EVs also allow you to drive very smoothly with no sudden jerk in torque.
Time-to-replace-tyre is insignicant. If tyre manufacturer is tasked with making EV tyre with same durability as normal tyre they will just make rubber and grooves thicker.
Also technically heavier car on wider tyre might use them up at similar rate than lighter car on skinnier tyre (as load-per-cm2 would be similar) but obviously produce more dust.
> Cars have been getting heavier long before EVs came around. One of the problems is that EVs are all new. Too many of them are bigger than they need to be. But that also goes for new ICE vehicle models.
It took ~20-30 years for average ICE car to get ~30% heavier. EVs add another ~30-50% on top of that increase.
> Too many of them are bigger than they need to be. But that also goes for new ICE vehicle models.
That's a very American centric claim. The gap between ICE and EV weight is relatively much higher in many other places where smaller cars are more popular.
For instance, the VW id.3 (small-ish EV) has a curb weight 250-450kg (550-1,000lbs) more than my wife's gasoline VW Passat, a quite spacious estate wagon.
It is close to two tons, I was (clumsily, it appears, but English is my third language, so please bear with me) trying to state that an id.3 compact is 250-450kg (depending on configuration) heavier than a gasoline-powered estate.
The downside applies to "heavy vehicles" more generally, which includes most battery-bearing EVs in addition to most pickup trucks and SUVs driven in the US.
> Fleet operators don’t see any significant difference in tire wear.
Larger vehicles have larger tires. The size of a tire on a Tesla is a lot bigger than on my small sedan. They may both go 150,000km but one surely pollutes more.
Tesla Model 3 uses 235/45R18 tires. The tires that come with the car have a treadwear of 500, so ~50k miles of use. Quite middle of the road in terms of treadwear, and you can get much stickier (and much lower life) tires such as the Pilot Sport 4S.
4 competitors for the sedan in the luxury class:
BMW 330i uses 225/45R18
Audi A3 uses 225/40R18
Lexus ES250 uses 235/45R18
Mercedes C300 uses 225/45R18
Tire size seems all nearly identical to me. Some small variance, but broadly extremely close.
The tire is actually quite large and it appears the s3 (lowest end tesla) still weighs approx 500 more pounds than the Audi a3 (trims vary a lot it seems). This is probably why the smallest Tesla (the model 3) is using 235 and not 225 like the A3. All things considered, wear is going to increase with load.
Yeah this is something that probably will start outside the western world. In poor countries as solar and batteries keep getting cheaper we will start seeing new shapes for vehicles which wont look the same as cars of today. Such vehicles will have a hard time getting cleared for the streets in the developed world because of decades of laws and red tape.
A kia Nero EV is ~200kg heavier than the ice version. That's equivalent to two passengers. The weight delta of large vehicles is far more of an issue than drive train differences.
FWIW, chemical batteries won't ever match the energy density of fossil fuels.
Of course they don't need to, so it's not really an interesting comparison. The range/mass of the entire drivetrain is probably a reasonable comparison.
... for the same capacity. Isn't it funny how people focus on per-vehicle numbers for one segment? There are more oversized gas-burning pickups and SUVs than electric anything, plus millions of diesel-burning vehicles that are even heavier. But somehow those all get left out of most stories on this topic. Truly a strange coincidence, everyone forgetting the same thing all at once.
I’m not surprised. Americans alone traveled a staggering 3.26T (yes, TRILLION) miles (5.24T km) in 2022. [1] That’s a metric shit ton of tire wear particles leaking into the environment.
This is a direct result of how shitty our cities are designed. Single zoned swaths of land. High dependency on car centric transportation. None to minimal alternatives for anything else. Massive subsidies for various road infrastructure across all levels of government. Billions of dollars of handouts (sorry, “subsidies”) for O&G industry which generates trillions of profits collectively…
There’s only so much a single person can do. We need regulation at all levels of government. O&G and auto industries need to start paying reparations. Producers of plastics need to be taxed, regulated, monitored. Cities need to be redesigned/rebuilt.
This is a strong a warning as any for people not to get too hang up on greenhouse gas emissions as the holy grail of sustainability. It creates the wrong mindset.
What we have drifted into is a tech supported civilization that is covering the planet from corner to corner with myriad of footprints (emissions, particulate and chemical pollution of all types, habitat alteration or destruction etc).
The story of ozon layer depletion was an early warning. Greenhouses another dimension. Microplastics and nitrates another etc etc, with no end in sight.
Imagine homo sapiens communities spread around in the billions and a steady stream of polluting stuff emanating from them, not temporarily but continuously and forever.
This is the challenge we are facing and its monumental. How to take that out-of-control, scant regard for externalities tech enabled economic "growth" mindset and turn it around.
Bold ideas are welcome. Burrying heads in the sand not an option.
> Bold ideas are welcome. Burrying heads in the sand not an option.
It's simple. It's more mobility options, especially safe active transportation. EVs are still cars. It's a change in the margin. What is really needed is people biking, walking for their daily errands instead of using a car.
As for the safe part, it does not require anything special. The aspirational world of the future will be made real with bollards and trees. The american brain today cannot comprehend this. Yet it is a certainty.
You're basically saying that you want to force everyone to live in a city - a super dense developed area where all your daily needs are within walking distance. Not everyone wants to live in a city!
No, it's not what I said. Keep the car out in the country.
I wrote safe mobility options for all, so active modes of transportation are a viable alternative to the car. That applies both to the city and the country.
To make walking and biking safe, the implementation will be largely low-tech. Trees, bollards.
It's not EVs (high tech) that will trigger the transformation to curb pollution. It will be people choosing to walk and bike iso choosing to the drive.
I'm glad people are looking at how to reduce the impact of tire dust. I expect we can make big improvements because it's not something we've optimized for yet.
Not mentioned in the article is that EVs also dramatically reduce brake dust because the brakes are hardly used compared to an ICE car.
Surely brake dust must be negligible compared to tire and asphalt dust?
I recently replaced the brake pads on my Land Cruiser; 70,000km (45,000 miles) since they were last replaced. This is a large, heavy 4x4, yet the amount of brake liner worn from the pads must have been on the order of a pound, if not less.
> Surely brake dust must be negligible compared to tire and asphalt dust?
Brake dust is kinda different problem. Yeah it puts particles in the air, but most of it is pretty biodegradable (carbon and iron), and rest of it could probably be made that - technically loss of efficiency here could be compensated for, which is far harder for tyres.
I worked on this indirectly for 4 as as part of a pdh at Ohio State. We have had the solution to this problem since then but because natural rubber is slightly less profitable for the companies (it lasts too long and it too high quality) they use synthetic rubber.
Tire dust is a problem becuase we WANT it to be a problem the solution is available but it is impossible to get funding because the tire companies don't want to use it.
Thats it, that is how capitalism works. Make millions upon millions of people sick so that 3 companies can make slightly higher profits.
Can you link to this research? Is there any tire company using this technology? If the people cared we could either pay a premium for them, or regulate
Yes! All the big tire companies, Goodyear, Michelin and Firestone have a "natural rubber" development department and every couple years they come out with a "green tire" which they quickly drop and forget about.
As for the "technology" of natural rubber, yes again, ALL military aircraft tires are only natural rubber, people know, when it matters use ONLY natural rubber.
Again, we use choose to use and pollute with synthetic rubber because it is more profitable for the companies to sell us more tires that ware out more quickly. They know this and its on purpose.
This is a naive and incorrect view of economics. Tire manufacturers employ synthetic rubber because that's what consumers want (probably because it's cheaper even when accounting for the lower longevity?). They do not just get to dictate which products enter the market.
Which makes me highly doubt your claim that natural rubber tires are both superior AND cheaper. If you are right about that, I'm sure there are VCs who would be more than happy to fund you...
That's the point, natural rubber tires are slightly more expensive. I think the parent said it was like 5% more somewhere above? Tire companies will go the cheapest route every time, so it's up to the government to make it more expensive to create synthetic rubber tires. Maybe start charging them for ocean cleanup.
Seems the issue is that we don't vote on the right politicians. I refuse to believe there are no politicians who could get behind regulating businesses that refuse to adapt superior technology for the wrong reasons.
Also EVs have no tail pipe emissions. At all. An ICE vehicle converts 100% of it's fuel into toxic tail pipe emissions. The tire dust is marginally the same for the same weight. We are not talking a new set of tires every other month for EVs. And there is very little brake dust indeed. So, what are we really talking about here exactly?
Well that's more complicated. Articles like this don't come out of the blue. There's an extremely well funded effort by fossil fuel and ICE car manufacturing companies to spread FUD about EVs. They are looking at double digit percentage drops in demand for their product in the decade ahead. That's going to impact them financially in a big way and they have a huge financial interest in slowing that down. And their tool of choice is misinformation. Little white lies, lots of half truths, twisted facts, lies by omission, etc.
That's not to say tire particles in ocean water aren't an issue. But the reality is that most of those particles come from ICE vehicles right now.
Do they? How does that work? Why does it matter in what way the friction on the axle is generated? Whether I am grinding two metal on metal to generate friction or I'm charging a coil shouldn't matter to how much dust the tire generates, for the same amount of deceleration, should it?
Unless people are just slamming on their brakes and leaving tire marks when they have the option of coming to a gentle stop, which I don't think anyone would do?
EDIT: Apparently I misread "brake dust" for "tire dust", sorry!
I think GP is referring to the dust generated by brake pads. Since EVs can use regenerative braking, there should be less use of the brake pads, and therefore less brake dust.
I would assume that the tyre dust will remain the same
Parent post brought up brake dust, which is not what this article is about. EVs definitely put less wear on brakes but that has nothing to do with microplastics.
> Indeed, the scale of these emissions is significant. Particulate emissions from tires and brakes, particularly in the PM2.5 and PM10 size ranges, are believed to exceed the mass of tailpipe emissions from modern vehicle fleets, as per a study published in Science of the Total Environment this year.
This simply cannot be true. Tailpipe emissions have more mass than the gasoline that gets burned. A car uses several liters od gasoline per 100km. I am pretty sure no car loses several kilograms of tire or brake matter over 100km.
Exactly. Not saying this is good news either way, but I can go multiple years on a set of tires, and majority of the mass is still there when I go to charge tires.
Perhaps they mean just the mass in the pm2.5-pm10 size spectrum?
There's a simple solution to this, known since WW2: slash speed limits and enforce them.
Just about every externality of the car scales super linearly with speed. Furthermore, in reality, except for the interstate, ETA does not scale inversely with speed limit, but a bit better (kids try this at home!). On top of that, traffic is bounded by the bandwidth-latency product just like network traffic is.
Can someone explain why rubber - not a plastic - makes up the majority of plastic in the ocean? They do say "synthetic rubber", but from what I am reading those are also not considered a type of plastic. Not that the definition matters too much, but I think it's important not to use language that could be construed as being purposefully disingenuous to make an argument seem more dramatic, since doing so undermines the argument.
Most writing uses "plastic" to mean any synthetic polymer, even non-organic ones like silicone. I don't think this is deliberately disingenuous or even ignorant; it would simply be awkward and mostly irrelevant to use precise technical terms every time.
Technically rubber is elastic, not plastic. But even "thermosetting plastics" aren't physically plastic anymore. Silicone is synthetic but not organic, while lots of organic polymers aren't synthetic. All the public really cares about is "shit that doesn't belong in the ocean".
Elasticity has no bearing on whether something is a plastic or not, and any attempt to use it as a distinction would be pointlessly arbitrary. Silicone is certainly a polymer...
So many comments here about American spread which I agree on but how to fix it? Even in the Bay Area where cars are hated it’s pretty much a requirement at some point. I always had a dream that some commercial developers built tried building some communities where green space and commercial store front was baked in. Essentially building some tasteful strip malls in the center of the community and making sure a grocery store leased part of it.
Then I always realize that it’s actually probably pretty hard to manufacture this. Which grocery store do you get to move in? Do you allow liquor stores or do you just let the market decide what moves in? You have to have some influence by building it and planning it though.
That always leaves me down the road that I think it’s partially a failure at the local government level and how we do zoning. At the same time though I dont think Americans want to live Asian style in massive apartment skyscrapers or in close quarter multistory buildings with store fronts on the first level. It’s as much of a cultural problem as it is zoning.
I remember watching Formula 1 in the 80's. The amount of 'marbles' from tyre degradation was amazingly high. If you have seen a race with a dry line after rain it was that striking.
And yet now, very few marbles, it would seem though that they are a lot smaller.
It's time we just stopped caring and propagating this doomer scaremongering. Researchers looking for things will certainly find them, not necessarily because they're true, but because the null hypothesis doesn't bring any fame or fortune.
> Researchers looking for things will certainly find them, not necessarily because they're true, but because the null hypothesis doesn't bring any fame or fortune.
Are you saying that the researchers did faulty science? Or that you don't think microplastics are a problem?
Remember when microwave ovens were thought to cause cancer, and then cellphones a few decades later? You can find plenty of "research" to support those claims.
Just like RF, humans have been exposed to microplastics for over a century now. The biggest difference is that sociopolitical ideology has become more pervasive and environmentalist virtue-signaling is now fashionable and brings in the fame and fortune.
This is one of the many externalities associated with private car centred infrastructure that EVs will not solve. In fact, the added weight of EVs make the tire and brake emission problem much worse.
It's not that we don't have filters. You can filter your tap water right now of microplastics with standard filters. We don't have the capacity to filter the world's oceans before the microplastics enter the ecosystem.
The obvious solution is to switch from plastic back to paper tires. /s
But seriously, I think EVs help with lower brake emissions, since regeneration is a different process. The issue with tires is at least partially a choice: drive like a normal person and you don’t have to emit (much — there’s still the extra weight) more tire bits.
I wonder if it’s possible to design tires from materials that will biodegrade in the ocean/environment, or at least sink?
- 90% of emissions come from off road vehicles (agriculture, mining, etc), not in road vehicles.
- Most of the electricity for EV charging stations is not green.
EVs are a way to shift blame for pollution to the public so that corporations can continue doing business as usual. Want to fix pollution? blame yourself while I continue to make money.
I don't want to give liberals more ammo to destroy our civil liberties but mandating carbon fiber break pads would significantly reduce break dust on our roads and oceans. Source: The Joe Rogan Podcast: https://youtu.be/b1wEZwzwcJM?feature=shared&t=291
Typical hackernews to have threads full of well meaning but ultimately misguided people saying ah we have some technological solution for this.
The solution to this problem and every other problem caused by driving is not driving. Period.
Not driving doesn't require any new technology, it just requires getting serious about alternatives to driving. (safe, separated bike ways, ebike and micromobility subsidies, rail, public transit, better urban design, less subsidies to cars and trucks of any kind etc etc - all of these have a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop that lead to even less driving)
In other words: you're proposing to replace a set of possible, if difficult, technological solutions, with an near-impossible social solution. I'd call that misguided.
Technological solutions tend to be discussed because they can be implemented. Social solutions may work better, but only in imaginary la-la land where they can actually be put into practice. In the real world, you can't "just" get people to not drive.
Automobile dependency is not a technological problem, it is a social problem. Enormous sums of money were spent on lobbying, laws, and infrastructure, all just to make driving tolerable. The cost of this social experiment was that walking was made miserable and dangerous.
A century ago people were saying, "in the real world, you can't just get people to not walk". But they did. We coined the term "jaywalking" to refer to walking down a street like a normal person, manufactured consensus against it, and criminalized anything other than crossing streets at 90 degree angles to get from sidewalk to sidewalk. All so that people in cars could drive faster, which prior to this would have been considered, rightfully, reckless.
All the technological problems caused by cars are downstream of the social engineering done to force people into buying them. If people did not have to drive everywhere, then we wouldn't need to worry about tire dust, fuel efficiency, emissions, and all the other things downstream of forcing people to drive heavy metal boxes everywhere.
If we decided to end this social experiment, we could. Slowly, and in degrees, of course. But generally speaking there's a lot of people who would like to not drive, but have to, and would be willing to deal with the infrastructure changes necessary to make that happen.
“We” is not nearly as many as you may believe. I would say most people don’t want to give up their car. That’s why people spend so much time maintaining their cars, polishing them, buying nicer ones, etc. Some people want to give up their cars, but you need everyone to want this, and they don’t. A technical solution is more likely to work than a mass social upheaval.
The "we" clearly refers to society at large. (I suspect you read what you wanted to read)
> Some people want to give up their cars, but you need everyone to want this, and they don’t
This is moving the goal posts, nobody said everyone would want to make s transition and a requirement for this is a novel requirement only now introduced by your response.
The example is akin to: 30 people are currently driving to s grocery store 0.5 miles away. If the sidewalk to that store didn't end after 250 feet but actually went all the way, then 5 people would walk. If there were a bike lane, then 3 people would bike, if there were a decent bus, mird would ride, and finally if it were closer..
The line of logic given is basically, "because 100% of trips are done by car, nobody wants any alternative infrastructure, and suggesting that some people would use any alternative infrastructure is a war on cars."
If we means society at large that requires a large portion of society if not more than a simple majority. That doesn’t exist for ending the use of automobiles. If the goal is the reduce the impact of automobiles, assumed from the thread being discussed, it’s not sufficient to help those who want to walk to walk to the grocery store. That’s a wonderful thing to do. But to reduce the impact of tire microplastics, the most likely route to actually achieve a reduction isn’t to get people to walk to the store. It’s to address the microplastic debris of tires. Better formulations, better runoff management, mass reduction of cars.
Maybe we can change society fundamentally. Maybe. I posit probably not. But we can definitely mitigate the impact of our cars on the environment and must. The rest is “nice to have.”
I don’t think I ever say anything about 100% of trips done by car implies a lack of desire to less car reliance. Truly, this is reading what you wanted to read, and a clear ascribing of a bone headed intention on my part. But reducing reliance isn’t enough to change the problems meaningfully. As has been noted elsewhere the 5 minute drive to the store doesn’t compare to the 2 hour drive of the 18 wheeler trucks distributing and redistributing the products from farm to store. Nor does it compare to the work commute, nor does it compare to the weekend outing to the mountains, with four or five hours of driving total, 50x or more the trip to the store.
I lived many years in NYC, and I walked to buy groceries. It was good (although as my family grew the logistics of carting that much food in a push cart got tedious to be frank). But even in nyc I found myself increasingly buying things via delivery, especially non perishable items. Public transit takes so long to get from one part of the city to another, often two hours round trip, that I found myself buying anything I needed on Amazon. Which then brought delivery trucks into the picture. Uber and Lyft and taxis were a constant part of life, even with a pretty complete transit system, simply because to get to a specific place not on a major line you had to do multiple transfers and the total commute time ballooned. Then you have to add in how incredibly unpleasant public transit can be - hot trains, insane people attacking people randomly, being pressed back to back for an hour with a huge crowd of strangers, break downs of signaling.
Now I have a car and I live in a place that is walkable, but is adapted to cars better than NYC. I enjoy walking and biking, but I will never live in a car hostile environment again.
You make some interesting points. I'm just trying to say this conversation thread is starting to talk past one another.
The 'we' was referring to the full population of people and basically stated a significant subset of that 'we' are willing to entertain (what are currently non-viable) solutions.
In other words, a problem exists for 100 people, and about 15 of them are willing to change their behavior that would help resolve the problem confronting the whole population (of 100 people).
Thus, the tit-for-tat, the OP is not suggesting a simple majority or any kind of majority is required to change their behavior, but is lamenting that a significant minority would change their behavior if they could, if they were enabled.
It's another way of saying, "those of us who would bike, or walk, or would bus - would do so if there were the slightest investment in those modes of transport to make them more viable".
Yeah and it’s absurd we don’t make things more accommodating. However case in point I live almost exactly 0.5 miles from a Safeway. There are bike lanes throughout my part of the city and nice sidewalks with accessible ramps. I’ve literally never seen anyone ride their bike to the store. Probably there are also hills and folks don’t want to ride uphill with groceries but it’s also just not registering as an option in most people’s mind. Nothing stops them at all. It’s just not their habit or preference. But I am glad the infra exists, just I see people use it more for pleasure than necessity.
wow, talk about orwellian language conditioning. other people take issue with me making needless trips in urban spaces with my multiton, polluting, dangerous, microplastics emitting private automobile... poor me i live in such a car-hostile environment... give me a break
yeah wow when the only option people have for getting around is to drive, most people will not want to give up their car
our argument isn't that everyone should just stop driving, leaving everything else as is. that would, as you point out, obviously not work
our argument is that there needs to be feasible alternatives to driving, which in many parts of the world is already the case and it works great (in fact, it works better than north american car dependency)
i do want to call out one more thing though
even if it was true that most people like their cars and driving (which isn't true at all)
given that the degree to which people drive is literally becoming an existential threat not only to future generations but already to us now
should the rest of us really just go ah we'll just let it slide then? like yes they're destroying our planet but, they really like their cars and driving
The debate is whether we wait for society to change or we change the technology. If cars didn’t pollute the existential threat from cars is removed. That problem is pure engineering and tractable, while social change is unsure and difficult thing to accomplish.
This isn’t the end of car related issues. But we can and should address the engineering and technology addressable things, and concurrently with the social change. As you say it’s existential. There are a lot of other issues about car culture - the extensive use of land for car infrastructure for instance, that are important, but not existential. I even think making biking safer is important, but it’s absolutely not existential. A less car dependent culture is neither necessary nor sufficient to address the issues of tire microplastic, co2 release, etc, as we still have the use of cars as they exist pervasively for other reasons than going to the store.
My point though is that people like driving so they will drive even if it kills everyone. That’s abundantly clear. People move out of urban cores into suburbs partly because of the car culture is more to their preference. That’s not a new phenomenon and it’s not restricted to the US. Many friends in UK, Holland, Germany, etc, moved out of the cities for a more suburban car centric life. So, if you can’t easily change the behavior or preference (which I never see happening in a democracy), then why not address the ways in which cars destroy the earth? The logic doesn’t make sense to you because you posed a false dichotomy. The options aren’t “destroy the earth with cars or save the earth without cars,” because cars don’t necessarily have to destroy the earth.
As an exercise of the imagination, imagine hydroelectric charged hovering quadracopter electric vehicles. They no longer produce microplastics or co2. Their batteries are 100% recyclable. What specifically would the issue be then? Is it absurd to imagine such a thing? Given current technology, it’s absolutely NOT absurd. Given future technology it’s fully achievable. Instead of flying vehicles, maybe just not touching the ground is enough? Etc. This may not be how we solve the issues, but it’s a lot more plausible in my mind than convincing everyone to pack into an urban core and stop driving to Costco.
I think your comment shows a very strong inner city, urban bias.
The vast majority of Americans both need and love their cars. Very few people would support some movement that aims to restrict automobiles in any way.
literally every human being on the planet both need and love their planet, including the air they breathe and the oceans they fish in and which regulate the climate
However, instead of telling people what they can and can’t do, let’s endeavor to make cars better for the environment.
Screaming at normal people that they have to give up their earthly possessions and retreat from society in order to save the world is nothing new and it never works.
That’s not what we’re saying though, all we’re saying is let’s get serious about alternatives to driving, the rest will follow. And yeah the die hards who will never give up their car, fine, but they better be prepared to pay the price for the externalities they generate, which isn’t the case currently. I also think it’s funny you think it’s us who are trying to force people to retreat from society. The single family house zoning and sprawl, everyone traveling everywhere alone in their automobile and lack of density, third places and opportunity for spontaneous social life that is the norm in the US has been proven to be devastating for society and individuals and bears no small part of the blame for the loneliness epidemic. You’re the ones who are actually forcing people to retreat from society.
Well, in this case, everyone else is wrong. The environment and society cannot bear the level of automobile dependency North America has. If we want to leave a livable planet and society for the future, it has to end. But you’re right, we cannot and should not do anything about it, because that would infringe on motorists right to drive. After all, what’s more important, not inconveniencing motorists or the planet?
It's not impossible, much of the world operates without 99.9% car usage like the USA.
Every major European city metro area can be traversed without a car. Hell I went through 18 countries and 35+ cities in Europe without renting a car and only using a bus or plane maybe 4-5 times.
This is an entirely self-made problem. A world not reliant on cars is not la-la land. It's a land where a car isn't treated as more important than a human, which should be the norm and is known to work in many other first world countries.
The northeast corridor is practically as dense as western Europe and we have a number of car-dependent cities denser than major transit-rich European cities.
> Guess what, in small towns in Europe and in rural areas, most people have cars too, and they drive to get their groceries.
That's fine! lets get our intra and intercity transit solved and small town people can keep doing what they've been doing.
Hah! Cars have been around for just a hundred years or so, and yet serious efforts to reduce our dependency on them are
"near impossible." Talk about recency bias.
No. But we're talking about cars, not computers, and their novelty is just one among many strong pieces of evidence that a much less car-dependent society is possible, even desirable. Perhaps you can refute the existence billions of people on the planet who live without commuting via car, or the dense networks of public transit which they often rely on?
> Perhaps you can refute the existence billions of people on the planet who live without commuting via car, or the dense networks of public transit which they often rely on?
You have to remember that the infrastructure they depend on to have drinkable water, stores with food on shelves, power and other media, itself is built around cars and trucks, and depends on them being available and able to drive everywhere. Cars are intertwined with everything else in modern civilization - you can't just rip them out. Even if everyone other than critical infrastructure operators suddenly got rid of their cars, this still wouldn't let you eliminate roads from the city, as the trucks and construction equipment and ambulances etc. need to be able to go everywhere.
It’s funny because you’re actually arguing against yourself. Those of us who want to reduce car dependency think exactly that: the use of cars, trucks and roads should be reserved for the less able, the elderly, delivery and emergency vehicles etc. Everyone else who don’t need to be there shouldn’t be. Imagine how much easier and safer everyone’s life would be if roads weren’t gridlocked by the countless million people making unnecessary trips in single occupant automobiles who don’t need to.
Writing off a shift towards walkability as a "near-impossible social solution" I think is misrepresenting the nature of the problem.
Shifting car-centric suburbs and exurbs to a walking-friendly lifestyle is a massive challenge, but that only covers 20% of the population.
The remaining 80% of the population already live in urban areas that, in many cases, are already very livable car-free, and are a few small policy changes away from taking a massive step forward.
Even a couple large municipalities legalizing accessory dwellings, abolishing parking minimums, and rezoning to allow business conversations of existing residential properties could have a sizable impact.
Additionally, many of the most expensive areas in the country are ones that are designed specifically to support walkability, which is a strong indicator of unmet demand for such areas.
Sure you can. Teach your kids cars are stupid and bad and stop driving so much yourself. Trickle-down culture is real, economics not so much. Also your lauded tech solutions rarely do shit but create more problems and the businesses we hire to implement them lie about the problems until we've all got cancer, no air, and no water.
Minimizing driving and making it a cultural value that it's a tool to be used sparingly seems reasonable and about the only solution I can actually trust when you have a culture of selfish assholes and a society with nothing underneath it but a pit of spikes.
The 1950s suburban experiment through cheap money (new suburbs brought in short term influx of cash for cities/counties), massive subsidies of highway infrastructure, subsidies for automobile industries, redlining housing policies, and “white flight” pushed people towards driving.
It can be reversed. Believe it out not, prior to the Industrial Revolution people got around just fine. Somehow the auto industry convinced people their dangerous machines in the hands of commoners was a good idea.
sorry but this is laughable, you don't need to imagine lala-land or some alternate reality, large parts of the world do not have anywhere near the car dependency that north america does and they're fine. (in fact, they're more than fine, they're great, they're better off)
visit tokyo and see for yourself - a huge, sprawling city of 40 million, including many single family home areas, where much, much fewer people drive
The “social solutions” are just policy solutions, and people on HN don’t like the idea of regulation, so they act like “social solutions are impossible”, when the truth is just that “social solutions are impossible without policies I find distasteful”.
Of course we can. This is just a function of public policy.
Once our cities are re-built around walk/bike/transit, nobody is going to drive because it will be slower and less convenient. Just like it is in many cities around the world.
With trains, the hardware isn't the problem. The property rights are - specifically those of people owning land and real estate on, or near, the planned tracks. But it's still a possible (if uber expensive) problem - the government could eminent domain its way through. But expecting people to spontaneously abandon cars and demand trains? That is impossible in practice.
Trains aren't a solution at all in most areas. My subdivision isn't going to build a rail line to the city 15 miles away. That would require a total abandonment of single-family housing at the least.
Not driving requires even less. It requires the local and state governments to stop making it illegal to build the type of dense walkable neighborhoods that we built until the 1930s.
Let landowners build what they deem fit on their own land. That's it (or a large part of it)
Or you know we could just all kill ourselves and that would solve the problem too but people like realistic solutions. Natural rubber exists and we don't have to use synthetic compounds in tires, we can just have shittier tires.
Why do you propose no driving rather than shittier, more expensive driving?
I hate to minimod, but this comment absolutely does not deserve to be flagged. It's not flaming or baiting, it isn't violating guidelines or spam or anything. It's not trolling.
The downvote is for disagreement. Do not flag to downvote, please. FFS let's keep up the standards here and not devolve into reddit.
We cannot simply stop driving anymore than we can stop using an increasing amount energy. There are huge portions of humanity that live in places that depend on cars. It’s a non-solution to say people should just stop driving - billions cannot.
It's unreasonable to expect individuals to unilaterally stop driving. But on a societal scale, it's entirely reasonable to expect our governments to build infrastructure that allows (many of) us to stop driving. That isn't simple, but neither is it an intractable problem.
No, the typical hackernews comment is yours. Take a very complicated issue, present your favored simple solution without evidence, then say "period" as if that somehow settles the issue.
This is backwards, social solutions are actually harder than a tech fix, because any tech fix won't be an actual fix. It will just be a band-aid that won't solve the underlying social issue.
Imagine, for example, thinking the solution to male loneliness or alternative patriarchy is just a better bumble/tinder. Social problems cannot be solved by better technology simply, the problem is much more complicated than that.
And that still solves not all that much because you still have to feed the city by fleet of trucks, and still need to have a fleet of vans to deliver all of that to the stores you now walk or cycle to.
Not much? Do you drive? Do you see the number of consumer vehicles on the road versus the number of trucks/delivery vehicles? If we could work towards a huge reduction in consumer vehicles on the road, even if we just replaced them all with busses, that'd be a huge improvement in gas consumption, traffic, (sub)urban sprawl, and more.
Are you insinuating a single truck carrying supplies for _thousands_ to a store is even remotely comparable to _thousands_ of cars driving to the store?
You're comment can be distilled to "well the solution is many orders of magnitude better than the status quo, but it's not perfect so it's equally bad"
The reason zoning in the US requires developments to take cars into account, is that people in the US want cars. And if someone builds a new residential or commercial development that doesn't recognize this reality, it creates problems for everyone as people have nowhere to put the cars that they definitely want to use.
Yes, there are some people who live in cities and are happy to have the entirety of their life limited to the region they can walk to, or the places where government-organized mass transportation can deliver them like cattle. But those people are the vast minority. Everyone else wants a car.
Chicken and the egg. You can't really make people not want cars without better alternatives, which requires investments that aren't being made.
I want a car, because I need a car. But put in a few bullet trains and offshoots, a business model for vehicles that enables access to a $100/month consumer fleet of shared vehicles so I can grab a truck, minivan, whatever as needed, and I will happily skip ownership.
This is a fantasy. In general, people don't want a shared vehicle. If they did, everyone would own a 5-year-old Toyota Camry, and not luxury pickup trucks, sports cars, Mercedes and BMWs, etc.
The idea that these people are just sheep blinded by marketing is ludicrous. You might spend $5 on a beer instead of $4 because of marketing. You buy a $60,000 new vehicle over a $15,000 used one because it's a good product that you actually want.
To contribute some rough anecdotal evidence, when I look out the window next to where I'm sitting this exact moment I see a mix of newer and older Honda Civics, Toyota Corollas, and some older SUVs. Judging from the age of those cars, I'm going to guess that most of their current owners bought them used and not new. I do not see a single pickup truck.
I'm not going to debate that the Ford F150 dominates new vehicle sales in north America, but that's only accounting for the preferences of people who are buying new vehicles and doesn't track what the used market would buy if given unlimited options.
As for the marketing argument, there's plenty of discourse surrounding it. Most new pickups are sold with short beds and extra features which make them impractical for use by many commercial trades that do use pickup trucks. There's a question of whether the F150s popularity is because of the truck's utility or because of the aesthetic desires of purchasers.
in places where people don't need to buy neither a $15 or $60k private automobile, they don't buy any of them, they just ride the train or a bike like normal people do
visit tokyo, paris or any other transit oriented city and see for yourself
Years of creating artificial reefs from old tires are catching up. I wonder how sharp those people are? Next we should find about how those giant ships that blow their exhaust under water and kill all life.
Perhaps you misread. The microplastics in the ocean are from airborne tire particles, as in from cars' tires rubbing on roads, that get washed away into the ocean.
You could build cities of tires in the ocean and they would probably not be significant compared with normal tire friction in normal vehicle use.
Also most of those reefs will be covered by debris and ocean flora, synthetic rubber is mostly decomposed by friction or UV radiation if it's left alone and covered in ocean stuff it will arguably be insignificant compared to your personal contribution of eroding tires on your way to work.
In other words: sooner or later every bit of synthetic rubber that is part of the tire when it leaves the factory and that isn't part of the tire when it goes to wherever those things go at EOL will eventually be washed away by rain. And then it either becomes inland sediment or make its way into the oceans.
I made the mistake of renting next to the freeway. Noise was perfectly tolerable, but I could not use my back porch, because after just a few weeks, everything had a fine coating of black dust. I could not keep my windows open in the summer. I was certainly breathing this vile shit the entire time I lived there.
This doesn't surprise me in the least. Every time it rained you could see streaks of black sediment trails where rivulets would collect and concentrate it. It flowed completely unfiltered straight into the ocean. Poison.
The negative externalities around cars are incomprehensibly huge. And yet, we have more of them than ever, they are getting bigger and bigger, and they laugh in our face with "green leaf" or "PZEV" decals. It's demonic.