We need to stop using ICE vehicles. All the other people on the street are even worse off. The people driving the cars are also causing the very pollution this mentions.
(I have an EV, a gasoline powered sports car, and a diesel SUV (with particulate filter and urea injection))
https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/pollution-tyre-wear-...
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/14/world/microplastic-pollut...
"Using a popular family hatchback running on brand new, correctly inflated tyres, we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles."
Most tires seem to be around 7kg, which means according to their data a car would have all 4 tires reduced to nothing after 4828km. With most tires going bald after ~50,000km (not fully vaporized mind you), there's clearly something wrong here.
My guess is they tested brand new tires which may shed particulate quickly at the start, similar to how a new carpet sheds exponentially more at the start.
https://www.ukimediaevents.com/publication/955cc42f/30
They said that all four tires combined lost 1.8kg, which implies they only drove 340km? Also, this is literally based on measuring the weight of the tires apparently, so how much of that became PM2.5 class particles is a mystery.
The article also mentions "track testing", which if used for the test, would easily explain the enormous material lost after a short time. Track racing is very different than highway driving...
I also find it humorous that the busybodies who insist that stop signs be installed every block of their neighborhood arterial have to suffer from the resulting air and noise pollution.
I drive 'spiritedly', but I suppose the tire wear due to hard cornering is not nearly offset by the saved brake pad and exhaust emissions!
I think there's more than one problem here.
A stop sign that serves no purpose than to slow people down will piss off drivers more than anything, and lead to people speeding between signs or running them. It will make your street noisier as impatient people aggressively obey the signs.
A typical neighborhood would be much better off if traffic was calmed by adding kerb extensions or narrowing the lanes.
I think the above commenter might share my frustration that local politics is often full of people unknowingly demanding the wrong solution to their problem.
Almost everyone elects to drive on one of the nearby "thoroughfares" rather than stop and start all the way through the neighborhood. So I see stop signs as the perfect solution.
I'd agree this wouldn't probably work on a road that sees heavy traffic already though.
Interruptions reset focus (unless you're so distracted that you don't notice the sign).
A number of 4-way stops existed on the route to the office complex for no valid reason whatsoever. The arterial traffic was the vast majority of traffic. I watched over the course of 10 years as more 4-way stops were installed to calm traffic, which is specifically contra-indicated by proper traffic engineering. In fact, I remember reporting on one community meeting, where the community hired a traffic engineer who specifically told them not to use stop signs for traffic calming; they did anyway.
The stop signs actually took away from the attention folks paid to cross streets. Eyes down, stare at stop line, come to a stop, go.. it was much easier to not notice cross traffic or pedestrians!
They all should have been roundabouts, frankly.
Anyway, my point is, 4 way stops are an environmental nightmare in every possible way, and rarely the correct solution.
I've often wondered how much harm to health has been done by the increased emissions at excess of stop signs (at least in the parts of the US I've visited). Does it outweigh whatever reduction in accidents you get by forcing a stop at junctions which (to my untrained eye) could safely be controlled with a yield?
And then to confuse matters further “traffic circles” are common as traffic calming devices on the west coast. These are also round, but are very small and do not have a splitter island preceding. They usually sit in the middle of small residential intersections.
Also, sometimes rotaries (the largest, fastest, and most dangerous of the trifecta of round traffic things) are sometimes called traffic circles, which are otherwise the smallest / slowest traffic device.
If all that is confusing, well, you’re not alone. My feeling is that roundabouts and traffic circles are good, but rotaries are just highway interchange supercolliders. Removing them from the northeast was very good.
please don't
My recommendation is to consider getting into motorcycles (seriously!). People who push things in their car are largely externalizing risk to other people. Motorcycles largely internalize their risk.
You can get an inexpensive motorcycle that will likely thrash any car you’re likely to afford. Plus, the skill required to operate a motorcycle makes it a lot more engaging to ride. Lastly, motorcycling is just far more exhilarating than driving.
I don’t want to shame you for wanting to drive hard, but you can satisfy your desires more fully while reducing the chances of killing or disabling someone who doesn’t have your appetite for risk.
EDIT: I am a motorcyclist, but not a very spirited rider. It turns out riding safely is plenty of excitement for me. I have friends who love to push it however, and I only challenge them to wear better gear and learn more skills.
I no longer feel the need/desire to "go for a spirited drive" on the weekends, or whatever. Part of that is age, part of it experience, I suppose. But I very much enjoy a good run at an on-ramp or particularly nice section of open road from time to time.
Drivers of manual petrol cars can already reduce their brake dust by using engine braking. If one drives very carefully it is possible to not use brakes at all. Indeed it should never be necessary. Any time you hit the brakes means you were going too fast. But how many people drive like this? Barely any. Instead people speed right until the last minute then slam on the brakes. Then as soon as the opportunity arises it's heavy acceleration until the next slam of brakes. Driving EVs like this will produce just as much brake dust.
Eventually I had to brake on purpose a few times to keep my brake discs shiny, because the rusty discs looked awful
Out in the country, and for me that often means the hills and mountains, then engine breaking is a much bigger part of my driving style, esp down hills!
Engine breaking also doesn't cause your break lights to come on, and they provide a quicker signal that a car is slowing, than relying on people to detect the change in speed.
I've been driving hybrids for the past five years and in my experience even in heavy traffic friction brakes aren't used nearly as much as in regular ICEs.
There's a constant, thin layer of rust on my rotors that I just can't scratch off in any way short of braking on an off-ramp on a highway.
I imagine EVs, having overall better regenerative braking, rely even less on their rotors.
I've always owned at least one manual transmission vehicle, but the EV does an order of magnitude more regenerative braking than any passenger car internal combustion engine does.
That crap ruins clothes too. I cycle and the stuff that comes off the road is crazy sticky, oily, black and horrible. It doesn’t wash out and is even hard to get off clear coated bike.
Does that change things?
Sounds like because that poster has options they don't have to drive the ice vehicles very often
FWIW, my wife and I carpooled in the EV to and from work, every work day, until covid hit; now I work from home and she drives solo to the hospital.
But again, it probably doesn't matter. The EV is too heavy and the rare earth materials were mined in unfriendly ways, and the weight of the car means it sheds lots of tire material, and not all of our electricity comes from the solar panels on the roof, and we should live closer to work and walk everywhere anyway, and the alcohol I consume has a negative impact on the water supply in a drought state, and....
(don't let anyone find out that sometimes I drive to the racetrack just to go around in circles and end up back where I started!)
Everything that you said is true, and it should be evident by now that baby steps like a couple of people carpooling in an EV when it's convenient to do so will not cut it. For every couple like you there are 10 couples who don't have the means to purchase an EV and their situation won't change by 2050, when cheap energy (read petrol) will be on the way out.
While it's an honourable thing that you are using your excess hard-earned money to buy EVs and solar panels instead of SUVs and fracking stocks, please understand that you're living above the living standards of most people and not everyone can afford this, and for them, reducing footprint = self-restraint.
Specifically, PM10, hard particles below 10 micrometers. CO2, Nox, etc from a car are hot gasses which expand relatively quickly, so dumping kilograms and kilograms of them is required to raise ambient air measurements above unsafe zones (measured in ppbs usually, see [0] for the EPA standards for NOx, PM, lead, etc).
Particulate matter, being solid, doesn’t spread as quickly as gasses. Small enough particulate emissions can be ingested into the lungs, and from there into the bloodstream. Once there, they can scrape blood vessels, eventually leading to plague and various heart conditions. Very trace amounts of PM10, and specifically smaller PM2.5 that can slip through the lungs easier, can have terrible health outcomes. In the EPA standards I linked, ug/m^3 is roughly equal to ppb, so the standard for PM2.5 is about 1/5 the level of NO2.
ICE engines generally only develop PM10 particles from insufficiently high temp combustion. For modern cars it isn’t absurd to suspect that brakes and tires produce more PM10. Here’s a summary of research done on the matter [1].
If you live in Europe, the US, or Canada, indoor and outdoor PM2.5 emissions will shave a few months off lifespans. China’s lifespans may be cut by as much as 5 years from particulate matter. [2] (not a scholarly source but links to them)
[0] https://www.epa.gov/criteria-air-pollutants/naaqs-table [1] https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J... [2) https://qz.com/1071421/this-is-how-much-of-your-life-air-pol...
Yes, but that's the "spin", the gaslighting. "Hey, don't look at the huge amount of other pollution our gas vehicles produce, instead look at this small portion where we are not the main villain. Repeat after me: Baaaad break pads, baaad!!" Fossil fuel industry is fighting for their survival. Even if I agree with the numbers and the research, I can't agree that we should focus on this. The greenhouse gases pollution is a much bigger problem, EVs solve that, so if their break pads still produce the same amount of particulates, what does it matter? Don't let them get away with "see those EVs are not as good as you were told".
PM studies are able to tie pollution directly to lives and thus dollars (through statistical lives). So, if reducing coal use costs $2.7B a year, but we extend enough lives, prevent asthma, etc., to equal at least $2.7B then as a country we should enact the regulation. The US starting doing exactly this from 1996-2003 and it reduced CO2 emissions by making coal plants, steel mills, etc., more expensive to operate. As a result, PM studies like the Harvard Six Cities study were highly controversial and fossil fuel companies lobbied hard against them. It is a lot harder to tie climate change to direct costs because the impacts are somewhat fuzzy and on a long timeframe.
In this case, discovering brake pads and tires cause PM2.5 means we can invest in less-emitting brake pads. But this isn’t likely to produce tires/brakes that dramatically reduce emissions. A more likely approach is investing in mass transit, which would reduce CO2 output.
I wouldn’t say greenhouse gasses are a larger problem but a rather a harder to coordinate long-term global problem. PM pollution caused 4.2 million premature deaths in 2016 [0]. It is hard to directly state how many deaths climate change caused in 2016 but conservative estimates [1] are for about 500,000 deaths a year by 2050. Most PM deaths stem from terrible industrial air in poorer countries which if combated would also dramatically cut CO2.
[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-(ou...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/16/health/climate-change-health-...
(And at least cycling -- for any amount of time -- is a net positive in terms of health everywhere but the few most polluted cities. But even in the most polluted city, brief cycling is a net positive.)
I don’t understand your point here. If everyone makes the effort to walk/bike more there will be a reduction in pollution.
I believe it's worse here in Europe than in the US as we have a large proportion of diesel cars (though where I live now, most pollution comes from the harbour) and during bad pollution events you don't just smell it but you feel the particle-polluted air aggressing your respiratory system.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297712056_Can_air_p...
The reality for most people in a city is that to exercise they inevitably first need to escape 5 miles worth if clogged up car arteries.
* It makes the streets dangerous for everyone else
* It occupies a vast amount of physical and visual space
* It facilitates the construction of centralized shopping spaces that are at awkward distances for anyone not also driving
The rest of the circa US$10,000/capita should be garnished by taxation and spent on comprehensive electric bus, light electric rail and long distance train infrastructure.
Neighborhoods need to be quiet, safe, green and relaxing. This cannot happen with personal automobile use.
Not only is this not possible without probably half a century of building high density housing (and realistically, never, because it would require lots of eminent domain seizures and tons of lawsuits), but it’s also... not really desirable? Half the point of not living in a city is cleaner air, less light and sound pollution, and less people.
Why would a programmer, artist, schoolteacher, hairdresser, restaurant owner need to travel any great distance from their village or town?
Most people in the world already live in cities... and they like them. They like looking at other people, smelling them, ranking and comparing them, copying them. They like the convenience of being able to get around easily, have other people cook food for them or play music for them.
The inevitable and obviously viewable consequence of people moving out of cities is that they create noisy, polluting, long-distance commuting sprawl: exactly the opposite of cleaner air and less light and sound pollution.
In order to move back away from the existing situation of an earth riven by roads the incursion of humans into ever smaller fragments of natural ecosystems we need to reduce the population and concentrate it in cities.
This¹ is mostly concentrating on tropical rainforest destruction but the same is true nearly everywhere: more and more roads are built in order to service human desires (cheap wood, grazing or (in EU and NA) solitude and privacy.
It can't go on.
1. https://e360.yale.edu/features/as_roads_spread_in_tropical_r...
Oh wait! Cities should be sub-terran! Can be built very deep and dense, outside temp is fixed so no heating cost, electricity can be produced by compact nuclear reactors, air/water fully recycled. Only essential/important people will be allowed to go outside, to not pollute the environment. Right?
Absolutely, this is another excellent argument against mindless sprawl.
unfinished concrete Concrete is not an ideal construction material if you are worried about reducing CO2 emissions.
It also follows that intercity travel should be restricted, for the same reasons. Yes, if you want to have a pleasant earth to live on then feckless, wasteful travel should be restricted. This does not have to be done by rules -- simply charging people the full cost of their trip would place it out of their ability.
outside temp is fixed so no heating cost, No, the outside temperature is rising, thanks to the freedom-loving, brave self-expression of car drivers crawling like ants to and from their places of consumption to their places of production.
In case you missed the memo: the party bosses are now the ones selling you the polluted suburban lifestyle while they cycle bicycles around clean, gated, low-traffic, tree-lined communities. So, keep living in the past... after all the future won't hold much for you.