Study links adoption of EV with less air pollution and improved health
keck.usc.edu
keck.usc.edu
And it is easily 10x worse to me in places that have a lax approach to auto emissions and safety. Where I live now there are zero safety or emissions inspections for auto vehicles (zero!) and it feels like every tenth car going by on the major roadways has an absurdly loud modified or damaged exhaust system. I yearn for the day I can eat outside at the restaurants in my neighborhood without that disturbance. At the current rate of social change in this US state I will probably be very old, or dead before then.
“Most emissions from modern vehicles these days comes from things like tire dust rather than tailpipe. What would be best for local street level pollution would probably be something like a lightweight rickshaw over a multiton EV.”
Unfortunately, some places have gone all-in on cars and it is literally impossible to live a full life without using one. This is where EVs slot in nicely. Further, EVs that fit into the micromobility space are an excellent option for many places-- e-bikes, scooters, Renault Twizy, etc. (Which aligns with what you were told above)
ICE cars produce much nastier stuff than particulates, and EVs eliminate those classes of pollutants.
On the particulate front: EV’s greatly reduce brake dust, but increase tire wear. The market will partially address the latter.
Tire wear on my EV costs $0.15 per mile, and I’ll certainly be taking that into account when I buy my next car!
So, maybe that poster meant $0.015 per mile, not $0.15?
What surprised me was how noticeable the difference in emissions were even ICE vs. ICE, just getting around by bicycle all summer visiting family in Illinois vs. what I was breathing riding in traffic once back in California. IL exhaust is noxious in comparison.
Then when Russia invaded Ukraine I learned CA fuel is an entirely different blend from the rest of the nation targeting better emissions with lower sulfur and particulates. So apparently CARB and all those frequent smog tests and spending more on gas actually makes a QoL difference, surprise!
I fully expect many confirmations of auto emissions-caused disease/death once the nation pivots to electric. It can't happen soon enough. I don't even care if the electricity is produced via fossil fuels away from where people live. Having such large numbers of ICEs constantly spewing exhaust adjacent to where we breathe is categorically DUMB. And we sure have far more ability to clean the exhaust in a large-scale immobile power plant installation than little portable ad-hoc propulsion-as-a-30%-efficient-byproduct rube goldberg machines.
I recall reading somewhere that California's geography means they have to be super-diligent about emissions or their major cities will have a severe smog problems. I think it was something about mountains trapping the emissions and keeping them concentrated.
This wouldn't be so bad if car usage wasn't so necessary to get around there, however car ownership in the LA metro is something like 80-90 percent, with around 1.6 cars per household on average. (Compare to about 32% and 0.45 per household in Tokyo, a very similar place in terms of geography and population) EVs represent about 1% of those cars, so, conservatively you've got about 15 million cars filling up that one air pocket overhead with combustion byproducts.
It gets worse! Traffic in Los Angeles is so bad that a lot of those cars are in stop and go hours-long commutes every day which is a particularly inefficient regime for fuel use and emissions. On top of that this bad traffic has an interesting side effect: over half of all car trips in Los Angeles are less than 3 miles. This is also bad for emissions because the catalytic converter may not get to heat up and achieve full efficiency.
It would be pretty amazing if we could get around on e-bikes a lot more than we could today. Quiet, easy to ride… but in places that are not hospitable to bike riders, less safe than a car, which is likely why they won’t be adopted en masse.
- In most of the city shots, you can clearly hear that road/tire noise and honking are by far the loudest noises. EVs won't change this.
- In the Delft segment, a train was the most significant source of noise so they removed it. Yes, public transit is incredibly loud, much louder than cars.
- The video specifically says that road/tire noise is louder than engine noises for most cars at certain speeds. EVs won't change this.
- Cars are not at all the loudest vehicles he measures, and heavy cars were louder than lighter ones. EVs are significantly heavier than equivalent ICE cars.
- He specifically says that EVs are probably worse noise offenders at higher speeds due to being heavy and having wider tires.
- He specifically measured passing Teslas and they were the exact same loudness as ICE cars.
Hence the arguments make my point for me: EVs are not going to improve city noise levels much if at all. I dislike noise too. But EVs are not the solution here (and if you've ever listened to most public transit, neither is that).
source?
https://jalopnik.com/trucks-and-suvs-are-now-over-80-percent...
60% suvs 20% pickups 20% cars
suvs are the biggest culprit, they’ve eaten the entire car market - some manufacturers only manufacture 1 or 2 models of cars at all now
some people like to hand wave crossovers away, but they’re bigger, heavier, and less efficient than most sedans that they replaced from 10 years ago
Transverse engine FWD based drivetrains, unibody construction, shared floorpans, key dimensions and platforms with sedans/wagons hatches, all the things that are characteristic of a modern crossover are very much mutually exclusive with the things that are characteristic of a truck or truck based SUV.
Cars have to throttle up to climb hills. This is also "city driving." People seem to forget that many cities are not flat, but instead are quite hilly, or even mountainous (when a city is built a narrow valley, getting to most places often involves going up or down the sides of the valley.)
Also, it's not just cars. Frequently, semi trucks go by my apartment, hissing and wheezing their pneumatic brakes as they recover them going up the hill, or expend them going down the hill. And this isn't even an arterial road in my city!
And then there are the local motorcycle clubs that use this stroad to caravan together to places...
Diesel emissions cause cancer, but burning those emissions off takes additional energy. If you have a semi-truck without a diesel particulate filter going down I94 in rural North Dakota, getting 15-20% better fuel economy than if it had one, there’s an argument to be made that this is a net positive for the planet overall. Nobody is getting cancer from the long-haul semi trucks that spend most of their time on the interstate, and the reduced consumption is a better deal for the planet. Even with the NOX. (Citation needed).
Likewise, a semi truck that exists doing short runs in urban Illinois, sitting next to a coffee shop waiting for his trailer, probably should have a DPF.
The main problem I have with EVs is that we’re forgetting reduce-reuse-recycle. A 2005 Corolla is safe, it’s production emissions are already accounted for, and gets decent fuel economy even by modern standards. The correct choice for someone that cares about the planet isn’t to buy a luxury EV (and they’re all luxury cars), it’s to live a simple life and to make the least consumptive choice you can. There’s a total lack of nuance when it comes to climate change.
Paris and Amsterdam have announced that from 2030 onwards, only zero-emission vehicles will be allowed to drive in those cities. Depending on your definition, Paris is a nation-scale settlement. (The population is larger than many countries.)
Petrol/diesel vehicles will be traded away from such cities as time goes by, and their resale value will decrease. This is already happening for the largest goods vehicles and buses in similar European cities. Mostly, older large diesel vehicles have been banned from large cities, but this gradually extends to all large diesel vehicles, then diesel vans, etc.
https://urbanaccessregulations.eu/ lists many of these restrictions, but it's not the easiest site to navigate.
What about the drivers in those trucks and traffic? (I don’t know how to find the data.)
Okay, but why focus on individual choice when it comes to climate policy? That's the same myopic "fix the visible symptoms" thinking that causes voters to demand offices enforce recycling policies on employees, but then does nothing to push for preventing those same companies from dumping 10000x the mass of industrial waste into the nearest river.
Think like the civil engineer who must design the next pre-fab pre-densified /r/UrbanHell development to sit beside an existing factory town somewhere in rapidly-urbanizing China. What type of cars do you want that engineer to design their city to accommodate? What policies, enacted by other countries, would influence their choice?
The point of global climate policy, is to influence the choices that those people make — choices which entirely swamp out (by five or more orders of magnitude) any choice you as an individual commuter will ever make.
The sad reality is that cars are so thoroughly stuck into the urban areas in so many places and it will take longer than my lifespan to unring that bell here in America and fix mobility in urban centers. However, we can potentially unring some smaller bells a hell of a lot sooner with EVs. It's a really valuable transitional tech in that regard, in my eyes. I don't think ICE will ever truly go away, due to the huge power density of the fuel. But, if we just replace say, half of the passenger fleet within say, 10-100 miles of american cities with EVs as they age out by like 2035, life will be much better here from that point until I die. Of course if we can increase the portion of those cars that age out and are not replaced, especially in a 1 mile radius of the city center, that's a much larger win than swapping an ICE SUV for an EV SUV.
I had the unfortunate displeasure of eating at a downtown restaurant in California’s Central Valley during a family visit on a Friday evening and every 5 minutes conversation would be interrupted by a lifted diesel truck revving their engines while they cruise up and down the streets. Same trucks. Up and down the street. All dinner long.
It’s an impossible situation that will only be solved by these individuals being treated like the children they are and having their vehicles impounded until the modifications are scheduled to be removed.
asthma rates for residents of this building would not be affected until all trucks and buses went electric.
In inner London, driving a car from before roughly 2005 incurs a charge of £12.50 per day.
Driving a heavy truck or large bus from before roughly 2014 anywhere in London incurs a charge of £100 per day, or £300/day if it's even older.
Of the public buses, "There are 3,854 hybrid buses, 785 battery electric buses, and 22 hydrogen fuel cell buses operating in London, as of March 2022, out of a total bus fleet of 8,795 - this is around 53% of the bus fleet".
New York seems to be aiming for something similar for buses (not trucks), but is about 5 years behind.
("The New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA) operates the world's largest fleet of buses -- 4,373 public buses" -- well, maybe the largest in the world in America. I'll leave it to a New Yorker to find figures, I don't know enough about how NYC transport is structured.)
Oh, we're just going to ignore this inconvenient truth because the pollution and toxic lakes are somewhere in china and Mongolia. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...
2. You forgot to mention that more than 50% of lithium comes from Australia: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/01/chart-countries-produ...
You're going to need to ramp up the otherwise dirty and disgusting production of LiOn to meet demand. LiOn production is as dirty if not worse than petroleum distillation and drilling.
2. See point 1
But yes, EV lovers will not admit their biases. The only way to save the environment is by REDUCING.
Localized or not, we live in a globalized world and it's a fact that lithium ion battery production is dangerous and dirty work on par with the petroleum that it is trying to eliminate. EV fanatics don't like hearing this, but it is true.
I caught an interview on NPR recently[1] with the author of "Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives"
[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893...
The scale of mining required to produce a lithium-ion battery and the solar panels to charge it is far lower than required to produce and refine the petroleum used over the lifetime of a vehicle.
The other little secret about mining is that nasty as it is, the impact of non-petroleum mining on the environment is miniscule compared to farming, which is far more damaging but has much better PR.
Oh, we're just going to ignore this inconvenient truth.
Oh, we're just going to ignore this inconvenient truth.
But please, let's keep lying by omission.
Oh, we're just going to ignore this inconvenient truth.
Also, China will eventually improve their environmental regulations, just like every developing economy before them.