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.
