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This is a good list. One other important thing to do if you can help it is to never live near a road. Any road, even infrequently driven on ones. If there's only one car per day on a road, but you live ten feet from it, and occasionally the wind blows the exhaust in your direction, you're breathing that in. Walls don't help. Live at least one mile in a straight line from highways.

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Ironically, following this advice makes the problem even worse as you now require a car to do anything.

IMO, cities should just ban almost all car traffic from the centres so people can live car free without being poisoned.

I mean, the article only provides individual tips to fight the global problem of air solution. Extinguishing candles with a lid and avoiding incense won't do shit in the grand scheme of things. It's like putting a bandaid on an open leg fracture.

> IMO, cities should just ban almost all car traffic from the centres so people can live car free without being poisoned.

This would have a much greater impact on the problem for sure, but sadly nobody likes that, some people think owning a car is freedom while it's slavery.

put urban roads (and parking) underground, and use industrial scrubbers at air exchange. expensive but worth it. tax fossil fuels/carbon to subsidize this and internalize the environmental costs.

The cost would be so insane that no one would bother. Just park at the perimeter and take a tram or walk to the last part of your destination.

Where I live it takes several years to paint a pedestrian crossing. Even if we decided to put all traffic underground, nobody alive today would see that project finished.

Often things are said to the effect of it being weird that we're capable of spaceflight, but infrastructure is too hard and expensive. The lack of fluidity in the labor market, i.e. pinning people to a field or worse, a company, for a lifetime creates a lot of that inefficiency, I think.

I know the idea is that specialization is good for everyone, and people doing certain kinds of work should be good at it, but I think allowing more diversity in the types of work people do, more intermingling, and more fluidity are realistic goals with a lot of advantages. We already have a big problem in matching qualified people with jobs efficiently. If we get substantially better at that, we can do it more rapidly, and allocate resources much more intelligently, since demands change in every profession as things develop. I would actively welcome breaks in my knowledge work to do the many types of "dumb labor" I can do when it's useful. It's something to ponder.

i’ve had streets near me repaved twice, many repainted more than twice, and a water main under a street replaced/repaired twice, in the past 10 years, while other pothole-riddled streets nearby are still waiting their turn. it’s inscrutable why that is.

Wouldn’t electric trains and busses make a lot more sense?

yes, but this way, we could have our (expensive) cake and eat it too. we could free up the above ground streets for electric buses, pedestrians, bikes, malls/parks, and the like, make cities denser/more walkable, remove asphalt/concrete to lower the heat island effect, add trees/plants everywhere, and all sorts of human centered stuff. it’s not so realistic (though the boring company may help with that), but what a vision it is!

Aren't parts of Chicago already kind of like this, with two tiers of streets?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilevel_streets_in_Chicag...

To some extent yes. I remember one of my first experiences in Chicago taking the Metra Electric from Hyde Park to downtown and getting out at the north entrance which dumps you out at Lower Water Street, which is very disorienting if you are not familiar with the area.

dunno. i know there’s the el for trains and some old streets were paved over and effectively buried 1 story down, but i didn’t think they were in use.

Yes, reducing pollution always makes more sense than cleaning it up after the fact.

I really hope we get to mag lev highways or something similar in the near future (electrically powered of course). No burning, and no friction

That's a more ideal solution, but it's probably faster to move than for a city to make changes like that. You can try to stock up on food and grow crops to minimize driving.

This is the type of delightfully practical advice that Keeps me returning to HN.

I was thinking the same thing. All this time I had been living near a busy thoroughfare because I assumed it was good for me. I'll have my realtor on the phone this afternoon. How bad could the Texas market be?

I’ve thought about this while cycling to work that I’m inhaling a bunch of exhaust, but with the push to EVs will this no longer be an issue?

Dust and particulates that settle on asphalt will still be a problem though.

It will take time for exhaust particles to be significantly reduced as a result of EVs, plus, the increased weight of EVs will create more tire and asphalt wear, which is also quite bad (possibly worse).

EVs still have tires and brake pads. There's less pollution, but not none.

Regenerative braking largely solves the brake pad issue. Some EVs are efficient enough that brake rotors rusting over from not being used is a concern.

I don't see why would that be a concern. You use normal breaks every time you stop. You can't regeneratively break to 0.

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