Diesel cars can be banned from German cities, court rules

I'm totally sympathetic to the end goal, I would just like to see a realistic approach and the GGP's call for an outright ban on vehicles in the present is not supportable.

The biggest problem I have with various 'green' parties is that for the most part their solutions are bordering on the militant and do not take in to account the various complications that will need to be dealt with in order to implement the final vision.

I cycle a lot, wear out a couple of bike tires in a year. I also drive a lot, live in a small town outside of Amsterdam. So I think I see the world from both sides and a life-long interest in green technology (windmills, solar) as well as electric vehicles has given me a pretty good ground level of knowledge about all this stuff.

There is one part of me that would very much like to see this car-free city of the future come to pass in my lifetime, I'd probably move there in a heartbeat if it were done properly. But if it were done improperly I highly doubt it would fly and it would likely end up being undone and that would cause a setback we can not afford.

So better to think really hard about how to make this work, prepare plans that are properly wrought through in such a way that they work for everybody and in ways that do not accidentally kill the thing they are aiming for.

Keep in mind that cars were not thrown into cities without reason, and that at the time they were invented the bicycles were already there as well. The car mostly displaced the horse because it was cleaner.

The time when things went wrong is roughly the 1960's (for Europe at least) when suddenly a car was within reach of everybody that wanted one and the cities were ill prepared to deal with that. By the 1970's the disaster was already complete and traffic became a mess. It's been downhill from there so we definitely will need to make changes.

In my experience to date it takes roughly as long to get out of a problematic situation as it takes to get into it. Any major changes on time-scales of less than a few years will lead to trouble, a realistic transition plan would probably run for a decade or more.

A modern society requires some amount of pollution to function. This has been reduced, and we should work to continue to reduce it, but generating/storing/transporting energy (as well as many other activities) generate some pollution. Some of it we directly benefit from (powering our homes, getting food on our tables), but others are indirect (pollution to produce/transport medical equipment when we aren't the ones using it). Given this, one can think of it as a tax on your health for the benefit of society.

Of course there are issues with ensuring people pay their fair share, that people aren't over burdened with the taxation, and that the revenue is being efficiently utilized.

The towns that have banned vehicles completely that I am aware of are all small and have simply set up a major parking lot right next to the access road into town. For the ones that I am aware of this was a practical thing to do because the streets in winter were already more or less useless due to the snow and the inclined roads so it was a relatively minor step.

A nice example of such a town:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saas-Fee

Pop. < 2000, car free since the 1950's.

Oh, sorry about that, forgive me for speaking my mind in a public forum, and out of turn at that. Would you like a position paper with references?

I claim things because I've been interested in transportation for a very long time and have read up on the subject from countless sources. There are a whole pile of reasons why you can't just overnight remove all traffic from cities. For one you're still going to have to supply the cities which means you will need to keep all road and other infrastructure in one piece but with a far smaller tax base available to pay for them, you will have numerous exceptions to your rule (due to for instance people with handicaps, emergency vehicles and so on), there is the small detail of a lack of public transport capability, the fact that public transport is not usually practically usable when you need to transport more than a small bag of stuff and so on. Another issue is that if the larger part of the alternative transportation methods will use electricity that we will need more grid infrastructure, charging points and generating capacity, all of which will not spring into being overnight.

Simplistic solutions such as 'ban all cars' from one day to the next will have serious side effects and you're not going to win this battle by making such idiotic suggestions. Society is like a super tanker, the minimum turning radius is large and if you try to exceed that limit something will break.

'Plans with regarding alternative means of transportation' require time to be implemented and require actual alternatives.

Amsterdam has been slowly but surely pushing vehicles out of the cities inner center with a combination of tax pressure, changes to infrastructure, improved public transport and so on, it's been going on for decades and the effect is very clear. If they had done this any faster there would have been too little time to adapt for all the individuals and businesses depending on mobility.

It's akin to how you change a large technological system: the agile method applied to society. Large uncontrolled swings in direction will not be manageable and will result in only one of two things: some kind of disaster or a reversal. If you don't want either of those you are going to have to be a bit more patient for a proper solution.

Sound reasonable and good to you? I mean you do believe in what you're saying, yes?

What's your email address so that I can mail you the contract?

It’s easy to gauge how many lives are lost due to the automobile. But how many lives are saved? How many lives are enriched? How many lives are even made possible because of the automobile?

You can look at only the costs of a thing, but I find the appeal to emotion, similar to gun control arguments, to be entirely unconvincing.

Furthermore, technology has steadily improved the safety of these machines, and I’m convinced we’re less than a decade away from a quantum leap in safety by automating more and more of the driving process.

As automobiles get quieter, safer, less polluting, available on demand, and less expensive, I’m afraid you’re going to see quite a bit more of them, not less.

It’s nothing less than economic warfare to ban diesel cars outright from entering a city. Ban the sale of new diesels if you want. Tax the hell out of diesel fuel if you want. Add a toll booth and set a lower speed limit. But your well meaning compatriots spent their hard earned money to buy their vehicles and if you’d just assume fuck them over for it, I’m sure they will find a way to repay the favor. Probably by not coming to your city (and spending their money there) in the first place. To which you might say, “Good riddance!” And we have an expression for that too.

Oftentimes there is an entirely valid reason to get in a car and drive somewhere. I know, this may be shocking to you. Shocking to the people talking about bicycling a couch uphill downthread too.

There are 45 million passenger cars in Germany (for 82 million people) so it seems you’re in the minority on this. Before you call for just outright banning cars, maybe consider how you could make public policy which would decrease the number of cars by 10% without increasing the cost of cars.

I took a guess of $2.50 per gallon in total net externality. Turns out after a bit of Googling a study out of Harvard University [1] put the number at $2.10. So, yeah I do believe it, seriously!

By the way, those $2.50 peanuts would add up to $360 billion per year in the US.

I don’t have a problem with a gas tax that tries to fully cover the externalities of driving, as long as the money is earmarked to actually try to offset the cost.

[1] - https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/m-rcbg/heep/ee-workshop_131024...

In Germany, there's a "right to sell"?

But I find suprising that over the last years it became obvious that electric cars are not the choice for the largest majority of any new car buyers. But all of the sudden the car manufacturer industry is having a scandal (aparently mostly in Germany) that becomes such a manficent scandal that is reaching a dimension never seen before. As a result a large number of cars is most likely going to be taken out of the market that would have never been replaced that early on.

Besides from kicking out a few employees, updating a few models and paying fines, the latter both probably covered by their insurances, the companies have no real consequences experienced. Sales and revenues seem to be stable and a few % changes in brand reputation are not going to hurt them either. Ultimately there will soon be a lot more cares purchased at a time where Tesla is still not mainstream ready.

Sometimes you have to kill the one to save the many.

There is still inner city parking too (the underground garages) so Ghent is not really free of cars yet.

If you want to live without cars the best place would be a nature reservation or silence zone, there are a few of those in Europe and the few houses that are there are priced quite high as a result but I think they would come closest to your vision.

Great idea, but how would you feasibly transport them?

The deliveroo boxes are going to have to increase in size...

Germany mostly has a positive import rate (importing more than exporting) during the summer mornings and evenings, mostly because it's less windy in summers, it's dark so no solar, foreign surplus energy is readily available and cheap so that it doesn't make sense to increase hard coal energy production for a few hours each.

But the coal plants are far from maxed out, and Germany does not rely on imports. E.g. during summer mornings when Germany imports about 4 GW to make up for lack of wind and solar, the hard coal plants produce 4-12 GW, meaning to avoid those imports you'd have to run them at 8-16 GW. Those plants alone can produce 19 GW easily, and that's just hard coal.

If you like playing with interactive charts about energy production in Germany and the import/export rate, Fraunhofer ISE offers https://www.energy-charts.de/

PS: Since 2006 up until now, Germany had a negative annual import rate (more exports than imports)[3]. And the last month Germany imported (not necessarily had to import) more energy than exported was September 2011.

[1] https://energytransition.org/2017/01/france-cant-meet-its-ow... [2] http://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-pla... [3] https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&p... and make sure to enable the Import stuff in the graphs

Renwable power in Germany is mostly a mix of solar and wind energy. In the summer, the curve of solar production fits nicely the daytime of the highest demand, while the higher production of wind energy is in cold stormy winter months. What needs to complement the mix are gas power plants which can be ramped up and down quickly. Coal plants are too slow for that.

However over 90% of France’s generating capacity is from nuclear power, so during low demand times there is a lot of excess. They do actually shutdown some reactors during weekends, but it’s better if they can sell the electricity cheaply to their neighbours, who can then avoid running some of their gas or coal plants - so it’s a win-win for everyone.

For both nuclear and renewable, the marginal costs for producing an extra MWh, once the plant is built, are close to zero. Because on a market of any commodity, the marginal costs determine the market price, this means that once there is more electricity produced than there is current demand, the price goes to zero. This is actually the realization of the old promise from the fifties that with nuclear energy, energy would be so 'cheap' that it would not be worth the effort to install an electrical meter.

The flip side of the coin is that energy production with this cost structure, marginal costs at zero, need some degree of subsidies to be economically interesting for the operators. Renewable energy in Germany is funded by a very visible green energy tax. Nuclear power in turn is expensive to build and was mostly funded by research funds and hidden subsidies. Such as that the final storage of spent nuclear fuel is paid by the state. Extremely expensive but it does not appear in the books of companies.

Have you driven a modern diesel? At lower speeds, they easily beat similar-displacement petrol cars off the line with superior torque. They are weaker at high speeds, but in normal (especially city) driving, a diesel is usually faster than a petrol.

But yeah, their main factor for popularity is the cost per km. They use less fuel than petrol engines, and the fuel is less expensive (in Germany). This is offset by higher road tax and insurance somewhat, but for commuters and others who drive a lot (>~20000km per year) diesels are a much more cost effective option in Germany than anything else.

a. the torque is great - not slow to accelerate at all. Try one! The PD engine had great low-end torque but the common rail has great torque for the entire power band, which is extensive. Really rapid. Perhaps you were driving an ancient SD-engined vehicle without a turbo??

b. Driving is so smooth; petrol is quicker to respond which is less forgiving.

Also, as the engine components are larger and slower moving, they last far longer; my work colleague's 2005 5-series BMW is nearing 250,000 miles and is still supremely fast. (Contrast with a bike engine that goes for 40k or 50k due to high revs?)

My 2008 Golf did get smokey but the guy I sold it to has been using the BP cleaning diesel (or the Shell equivalent) and says it doesn't smoke at all any more.

I like the sound of them; the non-sporty petrol cars round by me sound like the engine is rattling to pieces (eg my colleague's Vauxhall Astra); with high-performance tuned sports cars then yes the petrol sounds great. I rarely see any V-configuration engines these days.

This perspective is from myself in the UK.

And petrol cars don't smell?

> slow to accelerate

I think you've never driven a big modern engine diesel car. I have driven this BMW 535d[0] and believe me this monster is not "slow" in any way (0-100km/h in 5.5 seconds). It accelerates faster than the petrol equivalent because of the more torque it produces.

[0]http://www.automobile-catalog.com/car/2011/1337945/bmw_535d....

Edit -- sources: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es034928d, https://theconversation.com/fact-check-are-diesel-cars-reall...

I wouldn't assume that there's a direct relationship between diesel engines still being around and diesel engines still having an advantage over others. Not having to replace your fleet of trucks, buses, trains or whatever is a big enough advantage for most companies.

Also, importing energy from other countries isn't a sign of poor energy production. If buying energy from you costs me less than turning my power plant on for a day I'm gonna shut it down and call it a day. Not to mention the fact that energy prices are sometimes negative (i.e., they pay you for taking it).

I am a diesel car owner (have been for about 15 years) and I have yet to experience those issues you mention. Currently it has -12°C outside and my car starts just fine.

One example is French excess nuclear energy in the summer (in central Europe AC are very uncommon, so energy demand is low when it's hot): Germany can more easily switch off renewable plants and import French nuclear power, yet still is a net exporter.

No, it's not. Most electricity is used during the day, since that is when the cooking and washing is done. German companies prefer working during days too, although the larger factories will have a shift system.

(see eg the plot here: https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...)

most western european nations have a very interdependent energy grid. (more so then the post-warsaw pact countries). The corridor BeneLux, Germany, france and italy is highly integrated. These systems are already reliant on each other, so power dependency in terms of nuclear power isn't really an additional issue.

I was a proponent of nuclear power for a long time, but I became cautious when I realized that it still involves humans making mistakes. Now I hope that the German reactors hit their shutdown dates without incident now that all incentive to maintain them properly has been removed by setting those dates in the first place.

The only fuel in Europe that you could class as 'subsidized' is so called 'red' diesel that is used in agriculture. You could run that in your regular diesel engine and it will work just fine but the coloring will stain the fuel delivery system and the tank in such a way that even many runs of regular fuel later it is detectable and this will get you a very heavy fine.

The Diesel has become somehow the victim of this (sadly, since as mentioned by other commenters here, Diesel cars have their advantages).

The reason Stuttgart is Germany's pollution capital has almost nothing to do with the Diesel but:

- its topography, being a city almost completely surrounded by hills, thus unusually hot and windless for a German city

- the upper class areas on the hillside/slopes are the main polluters with houses dating from ca 1900 and/or re-equipped with pellet heating systems that were subsidized because of energy footprint while being even worse pollution-wise than even older heaters

Both of these points are validated by the fact, that it's not the weekends when the pollution calms but its the winters when there is almost a daily pollution warning - its when the rich people heat.

Even the plaintiffs in the other recent (particulate matter focused) important German pollution case complained that a Diesel ban does nothing for the pollution situation: The main source for car based emissions aren't the engines - but the wheels.

https://maps.luftdaten.info/#2/0.0/0.0

Building and deploying your own sensor is pretty easy: https://bergie.iki.fi/blog/microflo-particulate-sensors/

That looks like a huge issue, why is it not publicized more?