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By the way, EVs reduce brake dust since they are basically braking magnetically a lot of the time.
A lot of EVs will be lighter than plenty of bigger petrol or diesel SUVs.
Large trucks generate a staggering amount of it, so much so that I wonder if it matters much how much an EV generates. I haven’t seen the figures for something like a Model Y though, so it’s hard to say.
Depends of where you are. The share is very significant in Europe (it’s falling but still in the 30%-40% range).
The diesel engines drive an on-board generator to make electricity.
This avoids the need for a transmission, which would have trouble delivering the torque needed to start the train from a standstill.
Since the tracks are closed while ballast is being put down, tamped, etc. passengers don’t tend to be in close contact. By the time the trains are running again, much of the light, dangerous dust will have blown away and/or settled, hence the risk is mostly to track workers during certain types of work. It would pose some risk to people in nearby properties, but since the dust would be dispersed into the air it would probably drop off something like exponentially with distance.
It’s the same with all sorts of things, such as drilling through bricks, concrete cutting, etc. - in my experience tradesmen still take far to little precaution (often none) even though we now know the risks of silica dust.
We see this with many things but activist/special interest groups often distort the risks to persuade people to support their cause. Roundup comes to mind.
A bike costs less than a single monthly car payment, and has approximately zero recurring costs. And the infrastructure is cheaper to maintain than car infrastructure, by a lot, reducing the tax burden on cities and towns.
If a household was able to switch from two cars to one because biking was a reasonable option, they’d save hundreds of dollars a month from insurance, maintenance, and the car payment/depreciation.
I support biking as an alternative largely because I’m cheap, the environmental benefit is just a bonus. (And the health benefits, and that it’s just easier to bike 3mi than to drive that distance and have to search for parking)
Bikes are very important modes of transportation for recent immigrant communities. They’re not likely to be working downtown or in a big corporate campus anyway. Construction, food service, retail, building and grounds services are more spread out in near-urban or suburban areas.
Even a long bike ride could be way cheaper than a car and way faster than public transit, which often is built out like spokes from the urban hub. Traveling perpendicular to the spokes can be challenging.
And: public transit as a viable alternative. I live ~10 miles from work, but it’s just a short trip from home (by bike or tram) to the train station, which drops me within 0.2 miles of the office. And the trains run every 10-15 mins all day.
I could also walk 15 mins from home for a bus that goes to the block of my office, and has service every 10 minutes until ~midnight, but I’m lazy and prefer the train.
(US citizen living in Europe)
Where I grew up in Los Angeles, only the very wealthy lived within 10 miles of where they worked.
Thats not a mode of transporation issue, that is a city planning issue
To eliminate the car, we'd need to move all of humanity into tiny apartments in super-dense cities, something that isn't practical nor desirable given the current design of cities and the current state of society.
(There's also the issue of 'where does food come from?', and the fact we can't fully automate farming yet, so still need people to live and work where the food is produce, in places where cars are essential)
This is a wildly disingenuous argument! Incremental change is possible. Partial change is possible.
Oh, and we could live in villages. Like we did before cities grew into such megaliths. That might work too.
There's plenty of land, plenty of places for people that aren't mega-cities. Those of us out here know that. And my commute? Down the hall to my computer.
Put small towns on train lines, the car issue is lessened. Make the shopping districts walkable, again lessened.
I do use a car out here - to get to a city center where I walk from then on. A train or bus would have worked too.
Is that appreciably different from driving to a mall and then walking through it to do your shopping? A quaint downtown square with a hardware store, a grocer, a butcher, and a barber shop is nostalgic but doesn't serve large populations as well.
Pretty different from driving to one mall I guess.
And who goes to 1 mall to do their shopping? I know people who visits three grocery stores and a big-box store to get their groceries. Different places have different stuff, different prices.
I guess that's all part of the car mentality. Takes as long to walk a mall, as drive to another one.
The village/train idea is, make geography meaningful. So you go to a place to do a thing, invest value in the activity.