Ice cream trucks are easy targets.
Those jerks will park next to a playground while their diesel fumes blanket the area.
Those jerks will park next to a playground while their diesel fumes blanket the area.
Ten minutes later, police appeared and arrested the driver.
The council wrote back and said the driver was trading illegally, and had been warned before.
(My colleagues made jokes about this for months.)
I texted several of my neighbors once. Completely polite and to the point “hey, there are dogs barking all day lately. Can you double check yours isn’t one? It’s really disruptive. Thanks!”
One of them passive aggressively never spoke to me again until they moved. The other texted me back berating me. How dare I even suggest their perfect dog…
I will call the cops anonymously from now on.
This is the reason ice cream trucks in my area only take cash. I haven’t seen a legitimately licensed ice cream truck in many years.
I've vended ice cream from a bike
[0] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323426#causes
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4390771/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/04/car-fu...
https://phys.org/news/2019-02-pollution-deaths-linked-diesel...
https://www.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/CATF_Pub_Dies...
https://www.hazards.org/chemicals/fuming.htm
That last article itself cites 15 sources. The data shows significantly more deaths from diesel than asbestos and roughly or par with lead. Remember that those exposures last a lifetime, so the data lags significantly.
Not saying it's not bad, but this equivocation is just not accurate in my view. More deaths sure - because more people were exposed. Can you honestly tell me you would rather be exposed to asbestos or lead (no ppe)? Also, emissions controls have increased as has air quality since the 80s. I doubt this idea that the data still has lag left in it. We would expect to see the most impact at the higher exposure levels.
Obviously you personally would rather not be exposed to asbestos or lead but at the societal level 1000 people that are really really dead and 1000 people who are just normally dead aren’t that different. And honestly it’s worse for diesel having wide exposure because there are in between states between totally fine and dead and those affect more people.
We all know that car accidents are one of the top killers in the world, yet we don't ban cars outright. But that's because absolute numbers are big simply because billions of people drive cars: on a per-trip basis, they are actually not that bad.
The question was not which dosages of which chemicals would be more harmful for a short term exposure. That’s not relevant to answering the above question. In fact it likely has a different answer.
(For lag I’m referring to the lead/asbestos data. Exposure to these has been on the decline for decades but we’re still seeing deaths due to exposures 40 years ago), so they presumably cause an outsize number of deaths per year currently).
If you mean by perception only, then sure. These three things have existed together for a long time. If you eliminate the two more dangerous ones, then the remaining less dangerous/acute one will be next in priority and get the attention.
Again, tell me you'd rather be exposed to lead or asbestos.
In any case, under normal conditions, nobody is going to choose realilistic exposure levels of lead or asbestos over ambient diesel fumes.
There are plenty of events in history where stale air in a city along with significant pollution killed tens of thousands of people over a short period, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London.
But taking it to a philosophical level, what framework gives one the right to pollute? In my view, the opposite is true. Clearly, if a factory dumps toxic waste on your property, they are violating your property rights. I don’t believe anyone should have the right to pollute, based on the simple fact that any polluter violates another’s property. Our society of course isn’t quite there, but I believe we are sacrificing a rights by allowing pollution (even from ourselves), rather than the other way around (polluters having a right to pollute.)
But do you, for instance, run a Wifi access point at home? Do you use a cell phone? And you surely know how radios work: electromagnetic waves. To use your phrasing, "what intuition leads to anyone thinking that electromagnetic radiation is safe in large quantities?"
While we know something of electromagnetic radiation effects on health, we know almost nothing regarding long term effects of the type that have become our daily environment, because this level of exposure (wifi APs, cell phones) is a very recent phenomenon.
But, we could find out in the long run that they have a non-negligible effect on a part of the population that it may end up being classified as "pollution" in the future too.
The point is that people disagree on what are "large quantities" with exhaust gasses (even different governments do, which is why there are different standards), or where do we draw the line. Going with the extreme example can actually be counterproductive because it can easily be proven irrelevant.
The other problem with air pollution from cars is that it's conflated with global warming today (not saying it's not an issue, just that everyone wants to solve both problems at once). One can easily solve for one problem without solving for another (eg. allow only use of clean vehicles during peak hours as a pretty light restriction, to banning non-clean vehicles only in dense urban areas as a pretty strong one).
It can run off of a battery bank or the built in accumulator. Well insulated fridges are pretty efficient
Anyway basically there was no power at the festivals, it was usually just a parking lot at a local highschool, so they'd plug it in overnight. Not sure whether they had batteries/etc, but they were perfectly fine being out in a hot parking lot for 16 hours, no problem. And we were constantly in and out of the trucks selling ice cream which is not what a delivery truck was designed for.
These days it's the local taxi companies they have their teeth into, so I'm told.
Not only because it makes you miserable but also because there's always a risk when you start calling law enforcement on people.