Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics

Tailpipe emissions are a significant problem (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab35fc), and I know this is an extreme example but you can literally kill yourself by just leaving a car running in an enclosed space. EV tailpipe emissions are not fully replaced by electricity generation emissions, even if you get your power from 100% coal (and you don't). Power plants are much more efficient than internal combustion engines.

This is what this statement was trying to address. If we built everything around using ziplines we couldn't go "OF COURSE ziplines provide a net positive." That'd be an incredibly silly statement.

What do you mean by crashproof car? Those words don't go together. Even a little.

The USA subsidizes the suburbs to an absurd degree, pushing most of the costs into the future and making city dwellers pay more than their share for the rest.

Living in a relatively large house in the suburbs should in principle cost several times more than living in a flat in the city, because it requires vastly more infrastructure and the amortized cost of services is much higher. But our broken economic system has flipped this around and made suburbs extremely artificially cheap, while making most of the building practices that make denser walkable neighborhoods possible illegal under building codes and local ordinances.

The upside of how sparse American suburbs are is that we can repurpose all the junk/wasted land with normal market incentives. Roads can be thinned and the land handed back to the owners of that land, along with the setbacks that are used to force people to maintain water-intensive lawns[1]. Upzoned buildings can be redeveloped to higher density or turned into small commercial stores as market forces dictate. Anyone who wants to hold out can still do so.

None of this requires absolutely banning cars[2]. People will stop driving as cars become less necessary for daily suburban life. Road trips can still happen. So instead of families with three or four cars, maybe they only have one or two. As car infrastructure is used less, it can be repurposed for transit networks that don't suck - i.e. BRT, light rail, or tram systems with dedicated rights of way.

"15 minute city" doesn't mean "you should only ever travel 15 minutes on foot and anything further will be stopped by the pollution police". It means "building a city so that everything you need is closer and more convenient".

[0] Surface street / highway combos, i.e. roads with 3 lanes on each side, highway speed traffic, no pedestrian infrastructure, and business access. They try to do everything and fail at everything.

[1] Incidentally this was sold as a way to stop communism, somehow

[2] OK, but can we still at least ban the giant Escalade mega-SUVs that let you run down like ten kids without even seeing them

You could also rent a car for the 5 or so days a year the average person is doing anything other than commuting, shopping, and other local activities.

It magically disappears from this universe of course. The photons know if it is actually being of use to sentient humans and decides to wreak havoc (in some as yet unknown fashion) only in that instance.

I suggest nothing other than what I said - discussions around new technologies, particularly those in response to perceived crises, rarely receive the scrutiny they deserve and rarely show both sides of the coin. This makes me immediately suspicious for the same reasons history has already shown time and time again.

Agreed. I can't even hear the engine in my car on the highway over tire and wind noise.

It's pretty evident when you drive next to a large vehicle with knobby tires meant for off-roading (Jeeps seem to commonly have these). The tire noise is easily MUCH louder, even ignoring any engine noise.

The other thing, broadly, is road construction can lead to a huge difference in noise from highways. I'm sure you've experienced huge differences depending on the road surface.

Not to mention the jerks intentionally making noise with loud engine mods but I guess there's no getting rid of them.

Make competing modes of transit at least one of more useful at no more cost or no less utility but at a lower cost and people will switch incredibly quickly. That's a tall order, because the modern automobile is a wonder of transport speed, comfort, and convenience.

Literally nobody thinks that EV's will reduce microplastics. What are you even talking about?

EV's have the potential to dramatically reduce our reliance on gasoline. Current EV technology is far from perfect, but do you think people will just stop having personal transportation? Do you think it's better to keep using gasoline cars forever? So you agree that some kind of non-gasoline personal vehicle is likely to be dominant for some time as a method of personal transportation, unless you are just ignoring reality completely or think that people will magically change how they live in even more fundamental ways without incentives to do so, which is magical thinking. So EVs are inevitable, since there is no other credible alternative to gasoline personal vehicles that is even proposed, and EVs are starting to displace gas vehicles in significant numbers.

So keep shouting as much as you like about how we need to 'stop normalizing the idea of a car' but just realize that less than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 1% of the world will even bother to listen to it, and in the meantime we are likely to end up building several billion electric cars before another alternative comes around. If you want to change the world, develop the technology that makes it make sense to act the way you want people to act, because nothing else will persuade anybody.

Entangling ideology with progress is a recipe for getting nothing at all. We see this consistently in climate activism and drug activism. If you try to use a crisis (say, global warming) as a wedge to force your ideology (say, austerity) on the public, you get zero progress on said crisis.

So, EVs are a huge improvement.

Recently, tire manufacturers have started phasing out some of the nastier additives in tires (due to a new one causing fish die offs when it rains).

Tire dust is still terrible though. Hopefully, it’ll be the biggest environmental problem today’s toddlers have to deal with.

Also, due to range anxiety, they tend to use low rolling resistance tires that wear more.

I spend more on tires than electricity for my EV, so I can imagine someone offering low efficiency / low wear tires as an option.

The above leads to about 20% more tire dust on average.

Assuming charging is available at most gas stations on US highways, it's still not attractive to most people to have to wait 30 minutes (or whatever) for a fast charge to allow them to continue their journey.

Norway might be a good use case, but currently the US is not a good use case (except in town). So US buyers will still need one gasoline car for road trips.

Personally I'd prefer passenger train infrastructure over millions of electric cars. Equal or more cars is, as the article notes, still a bad thing.

Well no, it wasn't. My partner just bought a new EV recently and range anxiety is huge. I've been researching places to charge and there's nothing convenient nearby. There's an old business campus but it's a sketchy area to go sit for an hour or more. There's one near a starbucks close by but they are ridiculously expensive (95c/kwh). The best one is at a whole foods, but requires driving 15 minutes away from their destination, go sit there for an hour and then drive to campus. Not so great.

https://www.caltrain.com/projects/electrification

You can still stock supermarkets, etc, with larger vehicles that only run once a day or every few days depending on demand, etc.

It's common in places other than the US with it's hyper car centric development to have more walkable spaces.

These bad faith arguments are tiring.

Roads and streets existed before cars. Even then, that ignores that the same location can be traveled to through different means. Goods can be delivered to a store by a van even if most customers arrive on foot or by public transportation.

There are streets within north America which ban passenger vehicles but still allow trucks and vans for deliveries.

The other times these are closed with things like this: https://lowist.be/app/uploads/2017/03/Meir-antwerpen-4-1024x...

Is the dust just as bad for the environment, but natural rubber wears more slowly due to the longer chains?

Or is the dust somehow a less harmful kind of dust?

Other Common Names Include: Dandelion, Kazak dandelion, TKS, rubber root. Latin Name: Taraxacum kok-saghyz

Dandelion roots also contain substantial amounts of the starch inulin, which can be fermented to produce fuel ethanol.

USDA Report from 1947 entitled "Russian Dandelion, an Emergency Source of Natural Rubber" https://archive.org/details/russiandandelion618whal/page/n1/...

Comparatively recently, they let mechanics and quick change oil places do the test for 2005 and later cars, giving them the option of charging a fee for it.

Oregon doesn't have vehicle safety inspections but it doesn't seem unreasonable that I could go to the official DEQ or DMV locations if I wanted to have my mileage inspected or maybe pay Jiffy Lube a bit extra because they're closer and their hours are more convenient.

The issue with that is that, though, is the same problem with taxes: many (most?) people aren't going to want to come up with the money to pay their mileage bill on the spot. There don't seem to be great answers for that.

Oregon has a pilot program where they put a device in your car and charge your credit card 1.9 cents per mile. https://www.myorego.org I'm sure that's what they'd like to have people do but I don't know how many people want to do that.

I get 40 to 50 MPG from my Diesel Chevette, 25 to 30 MPG towing, and it can tow more than it weighs.

Which of the two seems more feasible? An outright ban, or an economic incentive that encourages consumers to choose lower particulate tires which thereby applies economic pressure to tire companies?

The sprawl is real and I just don't always have 1.5 hours to dedicate to grabbing bread.

Back when I lived in San Jose I could also walk to the store because way back in the 1940's they put a pedestrian walkway between two streets which dropped the walking distance from my house to the shopping center from half a mile to again a third of a mile.

Which brings up something I think is over looked. Which is the layout of streets in post war housing tracts makes the distances you need to walk twice are far as they could be. With zoning changes, money and some eminent domain we could make things better.

For example I care about the environment but not enough to throw away a one million dollar suburban house for it.

Basically to fix this problem is essentially to cause current suburban housing to depreciate in value until the property has become essentially worthless which is against much of the populations self interest as many people own homes. Either way, this kind of thing has sort of already happened in Japan.

That being said in CA there are measures to combat this problem. ADUs and SB-9 to increase density, but adoption has not yet been that wide spread.

That's like ten carts before a horse or some brawndo has what plants crave shit. I can walk to the grocery store where I live -- my house is worth more because it has decent access to amenities.

Does crime come with it? I certainly wouldn't expect that.

(And personally if I lived somewhere unwalkable I'd move home to address that, though I appreciate there can be reasons to either not want to move or to not be able to move.)

Also, it’s the year 2023 it is easier than ever to get a tv delivered to your front door without you needing to haul it anywhere.

I’m ready for your excuses.

This caused a cascading set of improvement. Horses needed *literally* tons of horse-bread to function well. And those *literal* tons of horse-bread turned into *literal* tons of horse-poop.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-horse-bread

> According to some estimates, medieval horses consumed about 20 pounds of food per day.

Note: a "day" of travel was ~30 miles back then.

It gets worse: you need horse-bread (and the waste / horse-poop) to _move_ horse bread into the cities, where all the horses were.

Alternatively, consider that one-gallon of gasoline (~6 lbs) would also travel 30 miles today, but also carry far more load. What, our typical car is like 200 horsepower today? So one gallon of gasoline is roughly the strength of a 200-horse carriage?.

Its an absurd comparison point. We're realistically looking at 1-gallon of gasoline (and its associated waste product) vs something like 4000-lbs (ie: 2 tons) of horse bread (and its associated waste product/2-tons of horse poop).

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Gasoline, for all of its faults, largely turns into CO2. Which escapes into the atmosphere and floats away. But imagine that for every gallon of gasoline you used today you created 20lbs of horse-poop somewhere instead.

Horse poop is something you'd need to scrub out of the streets every night, and it would infect the local rivers each time it rained.

The idea of horses being more environmentally friendly is a laughable myth. They're incredibly dirty creatures, and the poop problem alone would cause a significant rise in infections above-and-beyond anything this microplastics problem has caused, I promise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

There are some horrible states without annual inspections, but they should be federally punished until they comply. If we could force every state to have a drinking age of 21, using access to highway funding, then there's no reason the same thing couldn't be done for vehicular taxation. It would increase state tax revenue anyway...

I'm angry about this often, as mine is over fifteen years old. If I had to replace it with a new car, I'd want another Fit. The closest thing on the market is probably a hatchback Civic...and the whole reason for the Fit existing is because international pressure made the Civic too large and heavy for the desirable tax bracket in the Japanese market.

And it's not even small for the Japanese market, because they have the whole kei class, with strong incentives to drive smaller cars. Which is how it should work everywhere: severe tax penalties for larger cars, to promote public safety and fairly pay for the fourth-power law that affects road wear.

That's ^4 actually. Friction / Normal Force / Damage to roads is to the Fourth power law.

Yeah, the 100x lighter cars might actually be better in practice. That's what makes this last-mile problem so problematic. We're already (possibly) at the local optimum.

Tesla Model 3 uses 235/45R18 tires. The tires that come with the car have a treadwear of 500, so ~50k miles of use. Quite middle of the road in terms of treadwear, and you can get much stickier (and much lower life) tires such as the Pilot Sport 4S.

4 competitors for the sedan in the luxury class:

BMW 330i uses 225/45R18

Audi A3 uses 225/40R18

Lexus ES250 uses 235/45R18

Mercedes C300 uses 225/45R18

Tire size seems all nearly identical to me. Some small variance, but broadly extremely close.

Which makes me highly doubt your claim that natural rubber tires are both superior AND cheaper. If you are right about that, I'm sure there are VCs who would be more than happy to fund you...

> Guess what, in small towns in Europe and in rural areas, most people have cars too, and they drive to get their groceries.

That's fine! lets get our intra and intercity transit solved and small town people can keep doing what they've been doing.

> Some people want to give up their cars, but you need everyone to want this, and they don’t

This is moving the goal posts, nobody said everyone would want to make s transition and a requirement for this is a novel requirement only now introduced by your response.

The example is akin to: 30 people are currently driving to s grocery store 0.5 miles away. If the sidewalk to that store didn't end after 250 feet but actually went all the way, then 5 people would walk. If there were a bike lane, then 3 people would bike, if there were a decent bus, mird would ride, and finally if it were closer..

The line of logic given is basically, "because 100% of trips are done by car, nobody wants any alternative infrastructure, and suggesting that some people would use any alternative infrastructure is a war on cars."

our argument isn't that everyone should just stop driving, leaving everything else as is. that would, as you point out, obviously not work

our argument is that there needs to be feasible alternatives to driving, which in many parts of the world is already the case and it works great (in fact, it works better than north american car dependency)

i do want to call out one more thing though

even if it was true that most people like their cars and driving (which isn't true at all)

given that the degree to which people drive is literally becoming an existential threat not only to future generations but already to us now

should the rest of us really just go ah we'll just let it slide then? like yes they're destroying our planet but, they really like their cars and driving

i don't share that logic

maybe that's more important

visit tokyo, paris or any other transit oriented city and see for yourself

I'm not going to debate that the Ford F150 dominates new vehicle sales in north America, but that's only accounting for the preferences of people who are buying new vehicles and doesn't track what the used market would buy if given unlimited options.

As for the marketing argument, there's plenty of discourse surrounding it. Most new pickups are sold with short beds and extra features which make them impractical for use by many commercial trades that do use pickup trucks. There's a question of whether the F150s popularity is because of the truck's utility or because of the aesthetic desires of purchasers.