https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcars_in_North_America#Hi...
While streetcars may have made it easier to transport people, you still need to deliver goods to stores. There’s also the problem of having to wait for tracks to be built.
Horse droppings, urine, and carcasses were a major inspiration for the formation of New York City's sanitation department, including such features as standard uniforms (white as I recall, originally) to emphasize sanitation.
[B]y 1880 there were at least 150,000 horses in the city. Some of these provided transportation for people while others served to move freight from trains into and around the growing metropolis. At a rate of 22 pounds per horse per day, equine manure added up to millions of pounds each day and over a 100,000 tons per year (not to mention around 10 million gallons of urine).
99% Invisible Podcast, "The Big Crapple: NYC Transit Pollution from Horse Manure to Horseless Carriages": <https://99percentinvisible.org/article/cities-paved-dung-urb...>
The sanitation challenges caused by the 2.5 million lbs of manure daily and 60,000 gallons of urine from the City's more than 100,000 animals led to the First International Urban Planning Conference.
"The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894"
<https://themuseumwithoutwalls.org/Site?itemId=19747>
Tracked transport is efficient, but it is not flexible, and streetcars on rails are inherently limited in routes, as well as being subject to congestion (delays and stoppages tend to propagate).
Note that as of 1900, horses also consumed 25% of all grain production in the US. One reason the industrialised world switched to fossil fuels was that the limits of biofuels had already been reached.
(This is of course not the same as suggesting that fossil fuels are without their own side effects, limitations, or are inexhaustible.)
While they may have not been the main cause of the epidemics at the time, they certainly had some large part in it. The main part simply too many people packed too dense together in not so good conditions.
And the horses giving a shit...
In New York City in 1900 for example the pedestrian fatality rate from horse accidents was higher than the 2003 pedestrian fatality rate from cars [1].
Here's an comment from a medical historian with similar numbers for England and Wales [2]. About 70 road traffic deaths per million population from 1901 to 1905 compared with 80-100 in the 1980s and 1990s from cars. (It is down to around 26 nowadays).
We are better at treating injuries nowadays so it is likely that had they had modern medicine circa 1900 a fair number of those fatalities would have just been serious injuries.
[1] https://legallysociable.com/2012/09/07/figures-more-deaths-p...
[2] https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/31/cars-and-horse...
Unfortunately it’s going to take decades to fix the car mistake
I'm all for it, I'm for policies that "force" people to change certain careers or lifestyles in a sensible way, and I'm sure there's a good solution however imperfect it may be.
It's not impossible.
It's often used to promote change, see Canada for instance where the money goes back to citizens et al: https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...
Now coming up with a reasonable acceptable good solution that would actually work long term and not bring down civilization to its knees, that's another level very rarely seen.
Something much better than 'X is a problem, although with 10,000 side effects, dependencies and benefits, so lets attack X mindlessly full force with no second thought'. It would appeal to me when I was maybe in 15-18, but understanding how hyper complex and connected whole world is can be sometimes quite depressing.
The intuition that we should globoindustrially produce man-made materials and dispose of novel waste materials in our water supplies until proven toxic and cancerous is a mistake, and we should be coming at the question from the other side, assume naturally occurring materials are less harmful than man-made ones until we have evidence indicating otherwise.
It turns out that it is really, really hard and motivated work to find evidence of the harmfulness of many materials, and there is no commercial incentive to do so, and the health of human beings and the natural world are suffering because we accept "three papers in the last 2 years checked this novel plastic and couldn't find much evidence of harm" as a good enough answer before we start manufacturing thousands of tons of it and dumping the manufacturing wastes into our rivers.
I don't think you realize you've descended in self parody here.
And in my view, we have enough evidence that the standards of evidence used by the present regime of medical and ecological scholarship to establish the absence of long term environmental and health risks of novel materials, are seriously insufficient, and the solution must come externally, derived from the mode of knowledge which "science" is subject to and not master of. That mode of knowledge which is capable of hearing all the mountains of papers screaming that "we've checked and everything is all groovy man nothing wrong in this asbestos here!" and pointing at the world and saying, "Either your mode of investigation was flawed, or your evidence was fabricated, so we should check again."
Vulcanization reduces the rate of biodegradation of rubber, I understand. From what I looked up, it seems it takes natural rubber 300 years to biodegrade in the environment. This doesn't seem to me to be fast enough to significantly affect human exposure.
In in ideal world this would extend to generational IQ changes with increased exposure, however I doubt this is practical and would probably involve testing on monkeys instead of mice.
Materials and chemicals that we've used for centuries or millennia without issue should probably go on the 'innocent until proven guilty' list, but should still be investigated.
I don't think that it's necessarily wise to classify this kind of thinking as an 'aesthetic intuition', though. I simply think that the longer we've been in contact with a substance or material as a species the more we know about its safety profile, and so it's wiser to start with the relatively newer or man-made materials/chemicals.
>"we've checked and everything is all groovy man nothing wrong in this asbestos here!"
Asbestos being used as an example of a "globoindustrially man-made materials" and how we should "assume naturally occurring materials are less harmful" is absolutely great considering that asbestos is a naturally occurring material that has been in use since the Stone Age. Quite literally the opposite of the line of reasoning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos
>Archaeological studies have found evidence of asbestos being used as far back as the Stone Age to strengthen ceramic pots
Besides, alcohol, which people also put in their bodies regularly, is known to cause also sorts of horrible problems, and yet it's a very legal drug. So we already live in a world where the counterfactual - that strong evidence of dangerousness demands regulation - is false.
https://avadaenvironmental.com/2024/05/27/the-environmental-...
However, I doubt this specific chemical could not be replaced in that role, now that we know it's a problem.
Weirdly enough in the US there is the UTQG (Uniform Tire Quality Grading) which includes treadwear, and the EU tire label does not. The EU label does include noise, but the US one does not.
In general treadwear warranties are a thing here in the states, but I've never seen them in Europe.
I wonder if this is why tires are louder here in the states, are harder tires last longer.
Just thinking off the top of my head, but build out rail infrastructure to decrease long-distance truck transport and replace it with rail freight? Trains have metal wheels, so no tire dust.
For some of the other stuff, I'd really like to see durability/repairability prioritized over lowest initial purchase cost, as well as disposability be greatly discouraged (at least when it comes to plastic). My intuition is that could also lead to a lower TCO for a lot of products.
https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/238333-quieter-safer-and...
https://www.projectfutura.com/
https://nachhaltigkeit.deutschebahn.com/en/measures/whisperb...
https://www.bund-naturschutz.de/wirtschaft-umwelt/leise-guet...
http://www.gegen-bahnlaerm.de/flusterbremsen/
https://nachhaltigkeit.deutschebahn.com/de/dialog/veroeffent...
I hear train engineers are not that fond of them, because they brake like shit, depending on the downgrade (because heating, rapidly changing braking characteristics), and weather. It's one last drop bursting the barrel, for some I personally know to go into early retirement, amongst all the other shit happening within DB-Cargo/Schenker/whatever they wanna be called at the day.
Pick your poison…
The Association of American Railroads estimates that on average, a freight train can move 1 ton of freight about 484 miles on just one gallon of fuel.
I suspect the reason lorries are rating lower is that they're not typically filled to maximum weight capacity, and likely have greater idling losses.
Though a more recent (2017) source gives a better showing for overland transport:
The study shows that barges can move a ton of cargo 647 miles with a single gallon of fuel, an increase from an earlier estimate of 616 miles. In contrast, trains can move the same ton of cargo 477 miles per gallon, and trucks can move the same ton of cargo 145 miles per gallon.
<https://maritime-executive.com/article/barge-transport-wins-...>
The study being "A report commissioned by the U.S. National Waterways Foundation".
"A Modal Comparison of Domestic Freight Transportation Effects On the General Public: 2001–2014"
<https://nationalwaterwaysfoundation.org/file/31/final%20tti%...> (PDF)
Upshot regardless is that water transport is efficient, if not always convenient.
In fact, there are few modern problems that can't be helped (if not solved) by drastically lowering speed limits.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026974912...
Drum brakes are old fashioned, most US vehicles switched to at least disc brakes in the front in the late 1970s and early 80s. Drums in the rear make the parking brake simple, and rear brake performance is less important as more braking force comes from the front.
I don't know about being "for poor people", except that poor people may be more likely to have older vehicles, but I don't know that that extends to using vehicles that old, most vehicles with drums are 40+ years old at this point, and keeping something that old alive starts to get spendy because parts are trickier to find, and it costs time or money or both to adapt parts from other vehicles (like upgrading to disc brakes from a newer car)
New EU regulations are coming in to limit brake dust and so people are looking at them again. And other ideas, like mercedes has a prototype that puts the brake inside the motor.
Drum brakes are also slightly more efficient, with the shoes exhibiting less drag when not applied, which is important on small battery EVs. (They are worse for high-energy or repeated braking, but better in cruise.)
It's not just a tradeoff between ICE and electric, or drum vs pad brakes, or rubber additive A vs B. It's a complex ecosystem upon which people's lives and livelihoods are dependent, with unpredictable and chaotic relationships.
The naive view is to simply replace the apparently "bad" material in tire dust, but if that raises the cost of transportation, food prices go up, quality of life goes down, nutrition suffers, and possible downstream effects end up causing more harm than good.
This isn't to say we shouldn't bother, just that a superficial approach targeted at a single issue could end up doing a lot of unintended damage, and there's no bounded scale of harm. Trying to reduce cancer rates by .0001% might end up reducing average lifespan by a decade, or some other consequence that's orders of magnitude more impactful than the thing being "fixed".
We live in a complex and dynamic system; the supply chain sits at the base of it all. We benefit from the economies of scale serving the supply chain, so we have access to cheap vehicles, efficient and cheap long haul trucks give us access to food and products. Tinker with that too aggressively and people can die.
The best route toward action on things like this are cultural - educate individuals and make alternatives available. People can adjust at their own convenience, and the trend of markets will resolve on a balance between health and safety risks and convenience.
You could simply ban private cars, and presumably 35k fewer deaths would occur each year in the US, and we could work on monolithic solutions to things like brake dust and tire dust. We've decided that our collective quality of life and the benefits conferred us by allowing private transportation far outweigh the harms. We need to find where the balance is between the potential harms of these dusts and how much we're willing to give up in mitigating those harms.
Anyway - it's not a trivial exercise, it's a microcosm of the global economy, with surprising complexity and dependencies at every level.
Speak for yourself. At least in cities, cars and car-centric cities have absolutely destroyed our economies. People drive for trip less than a mile because walking is miserable, and walking is miserable because the city is built around driving and without regard for pedestrians needing to constantly cross major intersections.
To be fair, cars aren't the root problem here - the root problem is the hypertrophic cities craze that started in the 1780s that made streets so cavernous and muddy (with incredibly wide streets, the middle was often left unpaved to save money, since there was plenty of room on the side to walk) and miserable that cars were a genuine improvement.
( A Traditional City Primer: https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20131204.php )
That link doesn't cover the history of hypertrophic cities, but it demonstrates quite well how terrible modern streets are.
To be clear, it is a plausible sounding claim. I'm just growing nervous accepting plausible things.
In the case of leaded gas we got literally no benefit. There was never a legitimate reason to put lead in motor fuels.
That's the easy model where you basically know what you are doing is wrong but you like it so you decide to do less of it. The net result is still positive.
An alternative approach is to try to actually innovate and/or invest in means of transport that don't require tyres nor friction for braking (e.g. eddy current brakes).
That was the stated rationale, anyway. It was an anti-knock compound. So, was that false? Did it not help knocking at all? Or was reducing knocking not a benefit at all?
That's not true. The benefit was anti-knocking without using more expensive high-octane fuel (or later, ethanol).
It was still a terrible, terrible decision though, given the centuries of knowledge that lead is a poison.
When thinking about the explanations, keep in mind that leaded gas adoption was near-universal, including economies where "companies" or "competing fuel" weren't really a thing in that sense - e.g. USSR. They still went for leaded gas because of its objective benefits.
And even today, we still use leaded gas for aviation...
It is a horrible trade-off either way, but it was not done for no gain at all.