Environmental risks of car tyre microplastics and other road pollution runoff
microplastics.springeropen.com
microplastics.springeropen.com
Currently though everyone is in some weird arms race to make larger and larger vehicles. And if you try to buy a tiny one or even a motorbike, you'll just get creamed by some land yacht driver looking through their phone.
Without SUVs nothing of value would change, we might even see less deaths on the roads
I lived at my apartment for over a year before realizing the grocery store was close enough to walk. It's a 15 minute walk so it doesn't feel close if you are in a rush, but also a 15 minute walk through tree-lined streets is really nice for my body and soul and I am trying to rush less and experience each moment as it comes. It's funny that it took me so long to realize I could walk there, but that's car brain for you!
Ideally, a car that's twice as massive is taxed 10x. Fuck this ever increasing drive for bigger cars. Many cars are now so big they don't even fit in parking spaces anymore. And don't even get me started on how dangerous these are for pedestrians and cyclists.
A small 2 seats for cities, a comfy sedan for people who are on the road X hours per day, some kind of van for large families, trucks/buses
In big cities you could even ban personal cars and have a giant fleet of public cars to rent for X km or X days at an attractive price (not hard given the current prices of cars), this would be nationalised of course, maybe included in some kind of global public transport membership.
I bike daily and see what kind of people are on the road, you could replaced 90% of cars with a one seater and 30km of electric range and the vast majority of people wouldn't see a single difference in their daily commute.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence#History>
Citing: The most benevolent machine: a historical assessment of cycles in Canada, by Sharon Babaian, p. 97: <https://archive.org/details/mostbenevolentma0000baba/page/96...>
When billionaires and companies step up I might do the same, until then I'm going to keep loving petrol and I have zero reason to feel guilty.
That's more or less how you sound. Also speaking of "companies" and "billionaires" while not understanding that car ownership is one of the biggest propaganda win of capitalism in the last 100 years is interesting... it's like a morbidly obese and diabetic person telling you mcdonald's and refined sugar are Freedom
That's my point though. It's clearly not a "propaganda win" if the car itself inspires a feeling. I haven't been "sold" anything as I build my own old cheap cars, I like the act of riding something I can control be it a horse or a vehicle. It's chromebook vs thinkpad. I'll take the thinkpad. I'm not against public transportation at all - but to suggest we get rid of cars entirely is insane. Cars are a feat of engineering not capitalism. I want to see 100x more trains and better public transport and to think that they can't coexist is one of the biggest propaganda wins of progressivism :)
>it's like a morbidly obese and diabetic person telling you mcdonald's and refined sugar are Freedom
What diseases does my car give me? Fun and community? Sign me up.
Other than posture and other disorders caused by spending long stretches of time sitting sedentary, increased risk of asthma and heart disease for everyone breathing your exhaust and tire dust, increased stress levels and lower sleep quality for anyone who lives near roads? Then of course you get the low but decidedly non-zero risk of death or life-altering injury from a collision.
Now, it’s not unique or even an outlier in that regard but most of the previous century was spent pretending that we could treat those costs as non-existent until the evidence became hard to ignore.
>increased stress levels and lower sleep quality for anyone who lives near roads?
Damn so literally everyone?
Sorry but it's clear you have never been in a car you liked.
I did? You appear to have confused me with someone else.
> Sorry but it's clear you have never been in a car you liked.
I have, actually, but I don’t let that blind me to the real costs. Driving is the most dangerous activity most of us regularly engage in and I think we should be mindful of the costs. For example, reducing the health impacts of high-speed busy roads on nearby residents is only fair to those people and has minimal impact on quality of life since those roads are a chore to drive on, too. We don’t need to ban someone’s fun trip to the mountains to make big quality of life improvements for millions of people.
Apparently it's better to use plastic in a road than put it in landfill because........ errrr..... because... landfill sounds bad?
If it turns out that putting all that plastic waste into roads in fact is a way of putting microplastics into the environment then India will be at the forefront.
One thing I've really noticed about the US is suburb layouts are designs to shield people from traffic using networks of serpentine streets with courts and dead ends which have the side effect of making them completely unwalkable. Like stores might be 100 yards away if you were a crow. But it's half a mile walking.
It is a problem of the way we allocate power and how susceptible that is to corruption and control by the wealthy, who would rather have old reliable (to their interests) people in charge than young people who might try to upset the balance of things.
The more I notice it the more obvious it becomes. I think a lot about how China is getting better and better at manufacturing and in the USA we’re… well maybe staying the same but really just getting worse. And I think it’s the same issue - old politicians who don’t see what’s going on and aren’t willing to make real change. (And the structures that keep things this way.)
It's an absolutely senseless policy, regardless of country, that's going to exacerbate the problem. And the problem of microplastics is just barely starting to garner mainstream attention and long term implications are not fully understood. Probably not a good idea to spew them all over the place regardless.
And there's some group of people who continue to downplay the issue (eg downvoting any comment suggesting microplastics are not fully understood and _may_ cause long lasting damage to the ecosystem and health)
the problem of microplastics is just barely starting to garner mainstream attention
In non-European western countries, I've seen some news articles now and then mention microplastics, but they're few and very uncommon. Definitely nothing like products that advertise no microplastics. Part of Europe may be ahead of the curve in that regard.
For example, PFAS stuff is now entering mainstream attention and government regulations are now being put in place in some countries and regions. It's now common to see products now advertised as PFAS-free.
Microplastics is likely decade or more away from getting that kind of attention. Hopefully more research and understanding of the impact is done during that time.
But in the meantime countless bits of microplastics are being introduced into the waterways non-stop. Fibers from synthetic clothing, laundry products (PVA, polyester dryer sheets), probably number of other things including tire dust. Unlike the pacific garbage island, this stuff isn't visible, so unlikely to get the type of media attention macro-plastic pollution has gotten over the past decades.
I think that this problem simply hasn't been seriously attacked yet. Clearly it's possible to do much better without going to the extreme of forcing everyone to use bikes or trains instead, as some would like. I personally would much prefer to live in a world where tires are regulated to be completely non-toxic at (say) a 50% performance or cost penalty, vs. a world where I'm not allowed to drive a car at all and have to ride bikes and trains everywhere instead.