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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

I would really wish other cities followed suit. And I propose to extend this to a ban on all devices with noisy and smelly two-stroke engines: chainsaws, lawn mowers, motor scooters etc. The scooters may not be a problem in Washington, but anyone who has ever been to an Italian or Spanish city can probably relate...

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I agree with the sentiment but pragmatically I think we have to time bans to when replacements are really equivalent or better-- electric mowers in particular are still 4x the cost and get mixed reviews, and I don't think chainsaw usage is a huge civic problem here in DC, but I don't live next to any big parks.

Maybe we could also go with making new ones illegal to sell, though we'd have to coordinate with MD and VA which seems unlikely.

Leaf blowers are a slam dunk, I don't know enough about scooters to comment intelligently.

Battery-powered lawn equipment is definitely getting better. I find less runtime and a bit less performance a good tradeoff for my interchangeable head weedwhacker vs. a temperamental two-stroke engine that I use once a month or so.

However, electric isn't going to do the job for a sit on top mower as far as I know and, in general, professionals who are using their equipment all day long are mostly not going to find electric's tradeoffs reasonable.

I've used EGO's zero turn battery powered mower. It's great, but I agree that it wouldn't be sufficient for a professional.

Also ancecdotally, a friend has cub cadet's battery-powered sit on top mower. He loves it

We don't have to outright ban everything either. I would be absolutely delighted if my city enacted a "quiet Tuesdays" or whatever where any noise making machines above a certain decibel were banned. If people could just coordinate to make all their noise on one day instead of the "leafblower today, mower tomorrow, jackhammar on weekends" we have right now

Not to mention the very serious environmental and health impacts of constant noise pollution

Power washers used regularly on commercial property, too. As far as I can tell, the electric ones are every bit as effective and cost about the same amount. And anyone using a power washer is already trailing a hose around, too — a cable is not much of a hardship.

(Few things are quite as unpleasant as a crew using a stinky 2-stroke engine to do prolonged work on an otherwise nice plaza.)

> the electric ones are every bit as effective and cost about the same amount.

Electric ones are 2000psi and corded (no major battery ones).

Gas are 3200 psi and have no cord.

Probably better to work on emission controls and better engines than to ban things with no gas equivalents.

my pressure washer is 20hp, residential electric services can’t power that large of an electric motor.

The Milwaukee chainsaw and mower do what they're advertised to do, and you could use them "professionally" assuming you had enough batteries laying around.

California has already banned the sale of small gas motors and others will follow suit; but it will take years and years for the existing ones to die off.

With scooters, of course you could argue that a two-stroke-engine scooter is still better than a car that emits more CO2 (and even more if it's stuck in traffic or searching for a parking spot in some European city center). But electric scooters are definitely competitive and noise-free - of course more expensive, but still affordable, at least for an average European income.

2-strokes are actually pretty astoundingly awful for pollution and air quality. They emit so much that when running a leafblower and an F-150 Raptor the same amount of time, the leafblower will emit orders of magnitude more pollutants, save for CO2 specifically. pretty much any vehicle on the road is emitting less hydrocarbons per-mile than a two-stroke.

Obviously CO2 is a problem for global warming, but I definitely don't think its worth the air pollution trade-offs of a two stroke in a crowded city, especially when 4-stroke alternatives exist and are better in almost every way.

https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-...

California banned gas chainsaw sales last year IIRC. It was such a poorly worded law that firefighters and loggers have to go out of state to buy them, instead of it being a prohibition on suburban homeowners using them. The electric saws aren't practical in the woods at all because the battery and spares are so big and heavy. It's hard to beat the energy density of gasoline.

Also electric saws are a damn hazard compared to gas saws. They cut right through safety chaps, no problem.

> They cut right through safety chaps, no problem

Ouch! I assume that's a combination between the higher torque of an electric motor and shoddy low cost Chinese engineering?

Gasoline engines struggle to produce torque at very low RPM's, so once they begin choking on the fibers in the chaps, they lose momentum and stop.

Electric motors on the other hand produce peak torque at 0 RPM, so it's way harder to bring them to a standstill.

Many of these electric chainsaws are premium brands and still have this problem- to my knowledge there are no electric chainsaws that have a safety feature designed to make sure chaps work.

The clever safety feature that could be engineered to help make these safer is to add a torque sensor to the motor that cuts off power if excessive torque is sensed. This excessive torque condition would hopefully be calibrated to not have any nuisance shutoffs, but can still stop the saw when needed for safety.

This surprises me. I visited a major tool manufacturer a couple of years ago and even their midrange electric drills now use a microprocessor (specifically an ARM Cortex of some variety) and a sensor to synthesize the waveform that drives the brushless motor. They were talking to me because it had so much extra computing power for so little cost they were trying to find IoT applications for the thing.

I would expect commercial-grade electric chainsaws to use similar technology, and that they could be programmed to cut power in the event of a sudden speed reduction, mimicking the safety of a gas engine. But what do I know.

The explanation as I've heard it is that ICE's deliver pulsed power. At peak power in the engine cycle it cuts chaps easy but when the output dips it chokes on the fibers.

Electric saws deliver uniform power and don't have this quirk.

Wanna ban stuff based on noise pollution? Fine, I'll give up my gas mower as long as I never have to hear some jerk on a motorcycle blast through my neighborhood ever again.

No argument here. However, note the motorcycle with the obnoxiously loud exhaust is most likely already illegal (subject to a fine), wherever you are. It's just not well enforced/enforceable.

sounds like a win for everybody

For sure, my country (the Netherlands) was set to block use of gasoline scooters by 2025, but the EU blocked that [0, Dutch]. Anyway, about 50% sales is electric now anyway, they are quite attractive on their own.

[0]: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/199590/eu-houdt-nederlands-verbo...

Two stroke engines for new vehicles have already been effectively banned in the EU, and they are banned from the many ULEZ on the continent.

i can relate from the other side. scooters are mostly electric here, and the silence is just wonderful.

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