With particulate counts from heating and car exhaust falling from better filters and increasing electrification, tyre dust is bound to get more spotlight in the coming decade. Especially in Europe and Asia where the inner city isn't just a place for poor people and offices with air filtration.
I daresay that the bigger problem with tyre dust is that lots of it gets washed into rivers and waterways whenever it rains. Some of the proprietary tyre chemicals (e.g. 6PPD) have been shown to be extremely toxic to fish, so this is yet another pressure that we're putting on our environment.
But we only care about that when it ends up in fish we eat. The fish are dying anyways from overfishing. And even when the fish we eat are full of microplastic we seem to be able to mostly ignore that. Eating fish is a personal choice and all that.
I wish we cared about the rivers and oceans, but as a group we seem to mostly hope that enough bacteria will evolve to eat that stuff. Getting people to do something about the air we breathe is a lot easier (and even then change is slow and with a lot of opposition)
I don't really see it as a choice between water and air as we're utterly dependant on both for the survival of humans.
I think we're behaving like a room full of monkeys that are just throwing shit around and hoping that not too much ends up on ourselves. We can't continue to do that forever.
Anecdotally if you are a lead footed driver switching to an EV can result in tires that last less than 5,000 miles (8,000km), even with "inexpensive" EVs like the Model 3 and Mach-E.
This is the sort of thing that can be alleviated with software, but that won't be satisfying to the people who like the sensation of being pressed into the back of their seat the instant the light turns green. At least with an EV it isn't accompanied by noise pollution.
