Worth noting that 50-60% of passenger cars in France are diesel, but Paris have been gradually banning older higher emission diesels (Crit’air 3, 4, 5) from Paris. Banning cars outright also works, of course, but I suspect a lot of the reduction can be attributed to getting particularly bad diesel cars out vs. the limited areas where cars are entirely restricted.
Also worth noting that with modern emissions standards (and transition to EVs), over 50% of handful particulates come from tires, brakes, road surface wear, and resuspended dust:
I don't think there's any healthy level of private cars coexisting with humans in a city, without even considering the more immediate harms from crashes, etc.
It seems that there has been fundamental mistakes and overstatements in the amount of particles from brakes in much of the secondary research in the last decades.
EVs have very low brake wear because you simply aren’t using the friction brakes at all most of the time.
A lot of EVs even have smart “blended” brake pedals that preferentially apply regen braking when you press the pedal. Only in particularly hard stops will the friction brakes get used.
An easy way to test/observe this is simply to check for wear on the brake pads of EVs compared to combustion vehicles of similar mileage.
Tires, on the other hand, do tend to wear out quicker in an EV. Partly due to weight and also due to higher performance/acceleration compared to combustion models.
This little friction break usage is actually something which manufacture need to consider. They need to activate once in a while to stop rust and other problems.
They almost certainly do. For example, our Chevy Volt (EV + gasoline engine range booster) puts the engine through a maintenance phase if you haven’t used the engine in a few weeks, and will force the engine to consume any fuel left in the tank if it hasn’t been refilled in several months.
But I know at least one EV maker that has a manually selected mode that guides you through driving with the brakes engaged for surface treatment, as rust buildup will be the main issue.
In the US, the average car weight and the average EV weight are basically identical. (4300 pounds vs 4400 pounds). When you compare similarly sized models the EV tends to be about 10% heavier, but gasoline cars tend to be larger than EV's.
In the EU an average car is 1400 kg (3000 lbs), with most vehicles probably in the 1000-1200 kg range. We don't really want the average here, but the median - and we don't want to compare to the average EV, but to the equivalent EV - comparing an F150 to, say, a model 3 isn't right.
A BYD Dolphin, roughly sized like a VW Polo, is some 400kg heavier than the polo. A Polestar 2 is roughly 500 kg heavier than equivalent sized cars. In other words, something like 33% heavier.
FWIW I learned semi recently that cars get heavier and heavier because it improves their “ecology” rating… the ratings consider that moving 50% more weight with only 33% more gas is better than moving 0% extra weight with 0% more gas. And so a heavier car that uses a little more gas gets a better energy rating.
It’s moronic. But that’s how it works and why cars are getting bigger and bigger.
The VW Golf Mk8 might be a better comparison with an unloaded curb weight of 1255 kg, which reduces the gap from 543kg to 403kg.
(Note that for the gasoline and diesel cars, lighter trims give longer range, whereas it is opposite for electric cars, and that a fully loaded 45L tank of a polo weighs less than 40kg, especially if gasoline)
The lower battery trim is not available in all markets, and only does 300km on a charge which is below average. As such the minimum weight will have to be the 1658 kg value.
The BYD is taller to offset the battery, making the size misleading. However, the golf is not particularly a particularly good or space efficient car - others will do better at similar or lower weight.
250kg seems like a fair minimum weight increase, roughly 20%. The larger the car, the larger the gap though, as the rocket equation catches up - see a Skoda Octavia vs. a Polestar 2.
EVs are still way more efficient, but that doesn't mean we should turn our blind eye to making an already bad tire problem worse.
Same tier EVs are always more powerful than gasoline cars as they are generally just battery limited, not motor limited.
EVs are just a better tech in that regard, and buyers are not buying a Dolphin or golf based on torque or max HP. They're compacts in the same space. Someone looking at a dolphin would more likely be looking at the lighter eco motors.
This is true in other tiers too, e.g. a performance tier gasoline car might be 250-350 HP, while the same tier EV might start at 450-550hp just because they can.
The difference within a tier, simply based on the fact you're replacing at best a lightweight 100kg engine with 400-500kg worth of battery, can't be as small as you suggest.
With larger EVs, the battery weight is much greater, increasing the impact. Rocket equation and all.
They're not inherently heavier. They're only heavier if you put a long-range battery in them, even then it's not by very much, and even that may not persist as higher energy density batteries are developed.
Or to put it another way, the difference between a small car and a large SUV is far greater than the difference between an electric car and a gasoline car.
A Tesla Model Y is 30% heavier than a Honda CRV. They have alot of other advantages, and are about the same weight as a three-row SUV and lighter than a Tahoe on a truck frame.
We shouldn’t be singling out EVs if we suddenly care about tire wear… it’s pretty ridiculous.
The lightest current Tesla Model Y is ~25% heavier than the lightest current Honda CR-V. The heaviest current Model Y is ~12% heavier than the heaviest current CR-V (hybrid). A Jeep Grand Wagoneer is ~280% heavier than a Nissan Versa.
Again, bike-shedding stats on EVs is a waste of time if you care about pollution from tire wear.
If we want to reduce particulate pollution, we’d have regulations to govern acceleration on EVs, make tire monitoring more annoying, and have manufacturers certify tires and make compliance required during state emissions inspections, and get aggressive about the motor carrier overweight enforcement.
If Tesla or other EVs have a problem here, it’s that they are putting inappropriate tires on the cars.
There’s a great deal possible that could reduce pollution that has nothing to do with tires. Outlawing non hybrid gas / diesel cars for example would be a significant step forward. As would favoring rail over big rig trucking etc.
Instead the topic is almost exclusively brought up as an attack without any real world studies supporting the ideas presented. Because actual studies show EV’s improve air quality over ICE engines.
I think we violently agree with respect to EVs… it’s just whataboutism.
But I do think tires are a significant environmental problem, especially in urban areas and when combined with diesel soot. We’re also poisoning soil by allowing shredded tires to be used as mulch, which is gross in many levels. Shredded tires are also used as aggregate for roads, so road wear also contributes to particulate pollution from tires.
Those are wildly different crossovers. That glass roof on the Y adds a lot of weight, it’s kind of silly how popular such an impractical feature became.
The other common issue with EV’s is many don’t integrate the batteries casing as a structural element. Skipping the lead acid battery would also be useful, but that’s a different issue.
But the fact that EV brakes don't wear at nearly the same rate as ICE brakes still stands.
My EV6 (pretty heavy car) manual explicitly says "you should probably do some hard breaking from moderate speed to prevent corrosion on the brake discs".
Because 90+% of the time when you press the brake pedal the friction brakes aren't being used at all, it's all regen.
It's true they are not that much heavier in terms of pure numbers. But road wear is a proportional to the difference in axle weight to the fourth power.
> we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles. Compared with regulated exhaust emission limits of 4.5 milligrams per kilometer, the completely unregulated tyre wear emission is higher by a factor of over 1,000.
They took plastic shedded by a gas car on non-EV tires, and compared it by weight to safety limits for gaseous emissions. This makes as much sense as saying that a lump of coal has 1,000 times more carbon than the safety limits for carbon monoxide.
That doesn't pass a sniff test; emitting 5 grams of tyre rubber per kilometer, a 12Kg tyre would be completely vanished in 3000km but really they can last 60,000km with only the tread worn down beyond safe levels and the bulk of the tyre still there.
It doesn't matter though? Less braking material used equals less particles emitted. So if we accept that brakes on EVs last longer (and are otherwise similar in size), then they pollute less.
It is in fact straightforward to assume EVs create way, way less brake dust, because of how much less often they need brake replacements than ICE vehicles with the exact same brakes.
If you want to go into the details of this, for all the things people hve mentioned, you have to calculate the road wear done by trucks carrying fuels to stations every day. Electricity does not need the same regular road wear as ICE vehicles do.
Sure. Because windmills and photovoltaics grow naturally from seeds. You need quite a bit of an equipment to put up one windmill. They are usually built in some distance from an existing road. So you need special service roads. Those need to be wide and take heavy load because the equipment like cranes need space and are themselves heavy. Then you need special transport because main components like propellers are oversize load. Then you need to transport them hundreds for kilometres…, and then you need the rest of the infrastructure to distribute generated electricity. Yes, let’s compare apples to apples.
Yes and what's the service life for that windmill or solar panel? What's the service life of the distribution system?
And what was the cost to build out and constantly repair the refinery?
The problem you have with your talking points is that solar and wind both have decades of service in them whereas fossil fuels are single use product. Further, once the infrastructure is created large portions of it can be reused when solar and wind hit their end of life. You only need new lines and roads for new installations.
All energy collection will have some environmental impact. It just so happens that fossil fuels have an outsized impact for the energy they create.
I'm not an absolutist about crude oil. It'll likely have a place in society for a long time.
With that said, it's a matter of degree and where it should be deployed.
If, for example, burning 1 gallon of gas sets up a power generation which produces the equivalent of 20 gallons of gas without emissions, that's a worthy trade off.
As it turns out, that's roughly the energy trade-off for new solar/wind installations assuming a pure fossil fuel grid.
What you are saying isn't a gotcha. The entire cycle of CO2 released for fossil fuel use is not comparable to the CO2 released installing renewables. That some is released is meaningless.
My Volvo XC60 T8 is not even a full EV but after 5 years of ownership the brakes on this 2200kg, 400bhp SUV are only 10% worn - it's all thanks to regenerative braking with the EV motor. It definitely makes a massive impact on how quickly the brakes wear out(as in - much much much less than in a normal car).
Interesting. Looks like it the line isn't able to take the energy (I'm guessing voltage is already too high) they dump the energy into a resistive heater.
Makes sense, it's just going to be heat anyways. I wonder how often that happens vs the energy getting dumped into the line.
Greens seem to deceive in the same way as green-washing except with greener deceptions (whereas green-washing is capitalists pretending to be green).
Example: a report on the cost-benefit of using bicycles, that comes out with a fantastic positive number for introducing a cycle lane. Except the number depends on a monetary estimate of the benefits to society for health improvements. I'm sure the health improvements exist, and it wouldn't surprise me that the health benefits to society were well estimated. The problem is that by cherry-picking benefits you can simply ignore all monetary benefits of cars (no benefits for cars were mentioned as I recall).
I've seen it in other articles which talk sacharrinely about the benefit of some green tech. But ignoring real costs and certainly not being balanced. The ultra-idealistic greenies are not helping their cause when rubbish is repeated.
It would be great if you could cite the report you're talking about, so we can judge for ourselves whether you're steel-manning or straw-manning its methodology.
" Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the Degree of
Bachelor of Arts with
Honours in Economics
Acadia University, 2013" biased and poorly balanced.
As far as can be determined, no cost-benefit analyses of bicycle facilities have been carried out for locations in Canada.
Maybe says more about the searching skills author than the state of cost-benefit analysis in Canada - but it sounds bad.
The daily benefits from one person switching from car travel to bicycle travel for commuting are estimated to be $2.14.
Most of that 2.14 "savings" is car ownership and maintenance costs, which is bullshit because they say elsewhere you need a car for the days your can't cycle. Nice double counting eh?
Plus the internal+external "health ben." added up to be about equal to vehicle ownership costs.
See the "analysis" bias?
Perhaps an Acadia University Honours in Economics is toilet paper.
> "example: a report on the cost-benefit of using bicycles, that comes out with a fantastic positive number for introducing a cycle lane."
Rubber-stamp a multi-billion dollar highway widening project that won't reduce traffic*, no problem, doesn't deserve any comment. Bike lane? Scrutiny with a fine-tooth comb, subject it to years of studies, complain about the cost, complain about why anyone would want a bike lane - they must be up to something! The slider is jammed 98% over towards 'cars' and still the car drivers are like "Won't someone PLEASE think about the cars?!".
"No benefits for cars were mentioned as I recall" - seriously, you think everyone might have forgotten that cars exist in the twenty seconds between when they last saw one, or heard one, or had to wait to cross a road, or used one, or heard someone talk about one, or saw an advert for one? A study on bike benefits didn't say that cars were great, do you want a study on wheelchair accessibility to talk about the benefits of being able bodied?
> "I'm sure the health improvements exist, and it wouldn't surprise me that the health benefits to society were well estimated"
"Worldwide, we estimate that physical inactivity causes 6% (ranging from 3·2% in southeast Asia to 7·8% in the eastern Mediterranean region) of the burden of disease from coronary heart disease, 7% (3·9–9·6) of type 2 diabetes, 10% (5·6–14·1) of breast cancer, and 10% (5·7–13·8) of colon cancer. Inactivity causes 9% (range 5·1–12·5) of premature mortality, or more than 5·3 million of the 57 million deaths that occurred worldwide in 2008. If inactivity were not eliminated, but decreased instead by 10% or 25%, more than 533 000 and more than 1·3 million deaths, respectively, could be averted every year." - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
*roads are wider than they used to be; if adding lanes reduced traffic, there wouldn't be any traffic these days.
Yeah: I'm totally not a fan of biased car shit either. Some of your examples seem like strawmen to me.
> complain about the cost
Bike lanes in my country are mostly paid for by taxes on cars and petrol. The costs/benefits are often justified by cherry-picked benefits (e.g. reduced car congestion, or reduced pollution). The congestion arguments anecdotally appear to be lies: low usage priority cycle lanes seem to cause extra congestion (through phasing of lights and islands and other traffic controlling features).
Try and fairly point out that the numbers are juggled and you'll get skewered by cyclist ideologues. Read my sister comment where I reference the thesis that was the basis for my original comment.
I have an acquaintance working in our council on improving bike lanes.
I'm not against bikes. I'm against badly biased reports : towards/against both cyclists or cars.
The benefits of getting more of the population to cycle are so beneficial that it's a joke to even try comparing the return on investment of cycle lanes versus car infrastructure and of course, when there's lots of cars, it pretty much pushes out other forms of transport due to the size/weight/danger/pollution of the cars.
Here's a somewhat biased look at the economics of cycling:
> "Bike lanes in my country are mostly paid for by taxes on cars and petrol"
Governments get money in, and they spend money. There's no real sense in which "bike lanes are paid for by petrol taxes", nobody can prove it either way by measuring anything - that's a matter of where they write the numbers in a spreadsheet - it's not the same money, as long as all of it balances. It's an arbitrary accounting choice and you're choosing to raise it as a talking point because it makes car drivers mad, not because it has real world consequences.
> "The costs/benefits are often justified by cherry-picked benefits (e.g. reduced car congestion, or reduced pollution)."
The fact that you default to "the current level of car pollution with tens of millions of cars everywhere is the default" is a bias. That you think "reducing pollution" is cherry picking is a car-bias. That people have to argue for being able to breathe without getting lung cancer as a "nice to have" against a default of cars-for-everything is a massive bias.
> "The congestion arguments anecdotally appear to be lies: low usage priority cycle lanes seem to cause extra congestion (through phasing of lights and islands and other traffic controlling features)."
Public transport (which I will include bike lanes, pavements, sidewalks, L-trains) need to go from where people are, to where people want to go. It's a very car-biased talking point that a city put a bike lane from nowhere to nowhere, and look! The cars are inconvenienced and hardly anybody is using the bikelane, so bike lanes must be the problem, get rid of it. You can't just slap a bike lane in London, decide nobody is using it, and get rid of it. You need enough bike lanes that people can get from where they are, to where they want to go, safely - feeling safe, well lit, clear of mud and snow and muggers and not along a main road - and enough of those safe journeys for long enough that people can change their behaviour. Several rounds of New Year's Resolutions to get fit, months of seeing family and coworkers gradually cycling, increasing numbers of cyclists (or walkers) normalising it, seeing "normal people like me" bringing a bike to work or to the shops not just lycra clad idealists - for large numbers of people to move from car to (foot/bike/bus/tram). Amsterdam started changing towards encouraging cycling in the 1970s and it didn't get a reputation as a bike city for decades. Cars have a hundred and twenty years of being entrenched, multiple generations of people who think cycling is for children and the roads are too dangerous to cycle (they are!) which needs pushing back against.
> "Try and fairly point out that the numbers are juggled and you'll get skewered by cyclist ideologues."
I don't know if you can justify "existing without breathing car exhaust" in economic terms. I don't think one should have to. I don't think one should justify bike lanes in terms of reducing traffic congestion - moving people around effectively needs city planning overviews, zoning changes, joined up public transport where the schedules line up, until it overall becomes convenient to move around without driving. Bike lanes and cycling can be part of it, but you can't justify one bike lane or project in terms of reducing congestion. If one demands that bike lanes be justified in the framework of "good for car drivers" and then rejects the numbers because they've been juggled to fit in terms of "good for car drivers" when that really isn't the point at all, that's not balanced or unbiased.
> "I'm not against bikes. I'm against badly biased reports : towards/against both cyclists or cars."
It's just convenient that dismissing badly biased reports towards bikes means nothing changes, and dismissing badly biased reports in favour of cars means nothing changes, and that continues car dominance, which is nice.
Even starting the sentence "I'm not against bikes" is a bias. Cars parked up and down both sides of every side-road. Solid slow moving car traffic for multiple hours in the morning and evening every weekday. Billions spent on multi-lane motorways moving massive cars with a single person in them. Young drivers revving the bollocks off their engines at midnight, motorbike riders with exhaust volume increasers, pollution, road accidents, burden of cost on car owners, and you start with "I'm not against bikes". It's the millionaire saying "I'm not against helping the homeless, I just don't like the way they're asking for help. I'm just being unbiased and fair".
> "Balanced discussion seems so difficult."
It isn't a balanced world, it's a car-dependent, car-dominated, world, deliberately, by car advertising, governments subsidising car manufacturing, car company lobbying, car company bribing, and capitalism framing everything in terms of profit and having nothing in terms of community, quality of life, wellbeing, welfare, health. It's not an accident that the available land has been dedicated to cars, and that makes cars very convenient. It isn't because cars are inherently convenient it's that we have spent unthinkable amounts of effort carving through hills, flattening rocks, stabilising mud, to make cars convenient. Because cars are expensive so it's good for car companies if lots of people buy them. One can't take an unbiased "fair" position, one must make choices - one can't sit on the fence between "it's important that people can get to home/social/work/shops in many ways" and "it's fine if cars are the only way and if that's a problem for some, tough".
Heavy particles and gaseous emissions are not comparable in such a simplistic way. If you take a dump on the street it doesn't mean you caused 50 million times more emissions than the EPA limits for ICE car exhaust.
For example, iron from brakes is heavy but ecologically pretty harmless. OTOH NO₂ weighs almost nothing, but is toxic. You can eat 30mg of iron per day to stay healthy (just don't lick it off the asphalt directly), but a similar amount of NO₂ would be lethal.
Heavy particles don't stay in the air for long, and don't get easily absorbed into organisms. OTOH gaseous emissions and small particulates from combustion can linger in the air, and can get absorbed into the lungs and the bloodsteam.
Yeah, but brakes are not not made from pure iron and you won't have atomic erosion. Silly argument, really. Notoriously, you could still find brake pads with asbestos not too long ago. Pretty much any fine dust is very unhealthy to inhale, but brakes and tires are made from material mixes you really don't want to breath in. Even the "inert" fraction we find as microplastics in everything, the rain, fish and newborn, and we're only beginning to understand their biological reactivity and long term health consequences.
the break pad and tire particles in question are not so large they precipitate immediately. They aren't iron but rather real/synthetic rubber and other organics. There is research on them being bad for human health.
50% number of particulates might not amount to 50% of the health risk.
Not all particles are the same. Diesel exhaust particulates are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, i.e. pure carcinogen. Whereas I really doubt tire and brake dust has the same health risk "per particle".
Granted it may even be higher! But comparing two different things by simply "number of particles" isn't helpful.
We need to start taxing vehicles based on the damage they are responsible for.
The 4th Power Law is a principle in road engineering that states that the damage a vehicle causes to a road surface is proportional to the fourth power of its axle load. This means that even small increases in axle load can cause exponentially greater damage to the road.
A Prius causes about 50,000 times more damage than a bicycle.
A truck causes 16 billion times more damage than a bicycle.
A truck causes 31,000 times more damage than a Prius.
The solution is to tax trucks 31,000 times more than cars. Improve walking/biking/trains/public transportation. Private cars should be a luxury which is made a necessity with zoning laws.
"The solution is to tax trucks 31,000 times more than cars."
OK, so what about consequences of that solution? With such taxes, I would expect the count of trucks to drop to ~ zero. Which, for many places in the world, means an abrupt cessation of any large-scale logistics.
Maybe big trucks could be replaced by a huge fleet of smaller trucks, but that also means 20x as many parking spots, drivers (there is a shortage of professional drivers almost everywhere) and much more congestion on the highways.
There aren't that many places that could shift their entire logistics onto rail. Even here in Czechia, where the rail network is about the densest in the world, we don't have much free capacity left on the main railway lines, and existing trains are chronically delayed.
Four bicycle wheels, as many batteries as you can safely put on something supported by four bicycle wheels, an aerodynamic CFRP bubble for the driver etc?
I think such a vehicle can be better than one thinks, with acceptable range, acceptable particle emissions, acceptable noise levels; and I think they could easily get to 80 km/h safely.
For a little while in the 80s (remnants of the fuel crisis of the 70s) this was the trend. Go light and then efficiency is guaranteed. Combine with a small efficient engine and that's the optimal solution. A CRX HF from 1988 could do 44 MPG, with an engine that compared to current fuel injection technology is very crude and inefficient.
I want to buy a car that is basically this CRX HF but with 25+ years of engine and materials improvements. It could easily be a 1500lb car getting 60MPG.
But, no. Manufacturers (to some extent forced by terrible government rules) have gone heavier and heavier and heavier and heavier. Which is worse in every possible way.
Colin Chapman had it right: simplify, then add lightness.
Now that I see it in real life I don't know how I feel about it. It doesn't feel safe when I see a Twizy, but when I see these cars in my mind I see them on Swedish bicycle roads.
The whole thing would probably require a total transformation of city travel.
The regulatory regime will take a minute to figure out, but with tiny vehicles like this + good transit + closing streets to regular big cars, we'll figure it out.
The basic ones (and things like the Citroën Ami) are more A-traktor than bicycle – there’s an A-traktor registered Ami in the next village along from me – but that’s typically a software limit. The Twizy could be bought in an 80km/h variant, and there are “remaps” that will take that version up to 110km/h.[1] I’ve seen them doing near that on riksvägar here.
This is certainly a possibility for city cars. In the Netherlands there are a lot more 45kph mini cars driving around now. They were a thing in the past with moped engines but with electric drive trains all these solutions become much more viable. With the low speeds crashes are also less dangerous so everything becomes lighter.
A similar thing is happening with electric bikes and scooters. This was all possible with gasoline but with the lower mechanical complexity this is really taking off.
This results in a wider range for bike like vehicles which replaces a lot of car trips.
The real hurdle to people getting rid of their mostly stationary cars (not everyday for work drivers) is that renting a car is a horrible experience and car shares are also bad mostly. But as the space for personal cars shrinks I suspect this will improve over time.
A really light car would either have to be limited to a very low speed or be terribly unsafe in case of a crash. Since lightness implies small size, it would also not have other desirable properties of cars, like their ability to carry passengers and cargo.
Aptera is shooting for 2,200 lbs with enough performance to handle highway speeds with two people and some cargo. It has three wheels and extreme aerodynamics.
I flipped through the summary of that report, and I would think there is almost surely no way this is true, unless focusing on worst case assumptions like aggressive driving styles and very poorly maintained vehicles.
Your conclusion that there is not “any healthy level of private cars coexisting” is heavy handed. There is a balance, but I suspect it’s more of a jealousy/equality issue. Heavily taxed and high quality requirements can surely lead to a healthy coexisting. Limiting trips to when they are truly worth the cost is an equation to be solved.
If EVs don’t emit tailpipe emissions then 100% of their emissions will be those things. They’re also heavier and so have more tire wear. It seems not unintuitive to me that their emissions might push the boundaries of strict modern emissions standards.
For taxing cars, you’re still leaving so much car infrastructure out there. It swallows the world. Six months ago for the first time ever I got a job where I could bike to work. The world is so much different from a bike. It becomes clear how dangerous cars are to humans, and how they chop up our cities in to little rectangles. I’m constantly at risk of being hit by cars that don’t stop. I love being on my bike. I feel like I’m part of the world. I ride rain or shine thanks to nice gear. We give up so much to have a world with cars. We could move our road budgets to trains and bike paths and have so much more space and health and life.
Cycling to work is nice. But if you are young, sitting all day in a warm office.
Think of blue collar workers that are hungry, exhausted and also people getting older.
Its fucking annoying to wait for the bus that does not show up, the stupid beeps whenever the doors open and the slow movement in general.
Lucky i am at home in half an hour, laws now require you to commute to work in up to 1.5hrs if you cant afford a car or should use public transportation.
Electric bikes are no solution, the minerals and energy must be produced to transport people like me.
I will buy a motor driven classic Vespa, fuel consumption is 2l for 80 mls and i am at home without dispruption and waiting.
Plus i got a new nice hobby to maintain it.
No new vehicle was produced, no rare earth was needed.
Fuel is produced every day for the plastics of the EV and for many other things like pharmacy and so on.
No new bike needed to be shipped from china where all that stuff is made.
Sure you are right with vegan biking, but not all folks can do it.
Not all folks can do it, but here in Oakland there are plenty of folks who could do it if we had better paths, but don’t because the roads are very dangerous for bikes and we have poor bike paths. This means we can get more people on bikes. Also I’m in favor of changing more than just bike paths - we could improve housing affordability so that people don’t have a 1.5 hour commute to their work. Also I have three bikes that are 15 years old. Buying a used bike uses even less resources than a used Vespa. I do have a newer ebike though. They’re really nice when you have more stuff to carry or longer distances to travel!
If you like repairing the vintage Vespa, great project and that sounds fun. That’s worth a lot!
But I will curse at the stink of the exhaust from the crappy old motor when you ride by. Try an e-bike (you can get one built more locally surely), or an e-Vespa (or hell, make that your project to convert the vintage Vespa into a silent sleeper Vespa with crazy performance!). Electric is so, so much more fun.
Worrying about that small amount of “critical minerals” needed for a bike/Vespa is a conspiracy to distract you from the fact that oil is also extracted and has negative externalities, we just live with those already.
My desire not to inhale brake & tire particulate, not to be killed while walking to the store, and not to subsidize others expensive lifestyles, is not rooted in jealousy.
I owned a car once, it was sometimes convenient, interesting & fun, but it was also often infuriating, terrifying and expensive. If I can pull it off, I'd prefer to never own one again. I don't really care if anyone else owns them, I just don't want to subsidize them or have their externalities imposed on me.
An alternative to outright bans is to make some good faith attempt at estimating externalities and internalizing them, and reducing subsidies such as free, or below market rate public land for private vehicle operation & storage. But this is difficult and it's not clear the politics of it would be much better than an outright bans. If a good faith effort determined that operating a car while not being subsidized and not inflicting externalities on others, cost a significant amount of money, then the whole effort would be castigated as limiting driving to the very rich, and probably wouldn't go very far. So it feels like we end up with either "everyone drives everywhere all the time for everything and it's the govt's job to shovel public funds & land at it" or outright bans in popular areas.
Cars, oil, and the internal combustion engine, are all tremendously useful, and we would be foolish to pretend otherwise. But all tools have their ideal uses and all tools can be misused & overused to bad ends, both for the tool user and for others.
A world of 100% gasoline car ownership where the car was simply a fun toy for kick ass weekend road trips, and cities had never been bulldozed to make room for them as substitutes for our legs, would be a pretty great world, even if it involved a bit more pollution/externalities/subsidies than some utopian car free world.
It's not "jealousy"... I've lived in a city where having a car was virtually mandatory, and I've lived in a city where you could safely bike everywhere. There's NO QUESTION which one I prefer.
Even my most reactionary and car-loving extended family members had this opinion when they visited :)
> I don't think there's any healthy level of private cars coexisting with humans in a city
Concentrating humans together into a small locality, which is what a city is, will inherently have a significant environmental impact. Cities before private cars were still quite polluted, because transportation still has to take place just to keep the city running. Electric vehicles are the best-case scenario for truck deliveries, construction vehicles, and everything else you need to keep a city running on a day-to-day basis.
Moreover, you have to consider all cities in this analysis, not just posh, post-industrial cities like those in the US and Western Europe. Manufacturing has to take place somewhere, and logistics considerations imply that most manufacturing will be located next to transportation infrastructure. Just like any other economic activity, manufacturing benefits from talent clusters (a major reason cities exist), so manufacturing will tend to concentrate in cities as well, or at least the suburbs, which you can easily observe in China.
If you really hate air pollution, move to the country and be willing to sacrifice the advantages of cities.
Are they bad for human health compared to other ways of living like rural or suburbs? iirc rural people get the least amount of exercise because you just sit inside all day.
when we lived in the suburbs my family and i spent way more time inside than we do now in a rural setting. i think maybe you got mixed up. rural people are generally very active.
> If you really hate air pollution, move to the country and be willing to sacrifice the advantages of cities.
i really do hate air pollution! it drove me away from idaho, where 2-3 months of the year massive forest fires would choke the air and force everyone inside (gave my kids asthma).
we recently moved away from a suburb near two highways, out to a rural area where we are half a mile from the nearest paved road.
besides the lowered air pollution, the lower noise pollution is a huge benefit. hearing birds instead of traffic is amazing. and my kids don’t choke in their sleep any more!
Lighter cars, really, that's it. Make vehicles that match the transportation case in question instead of palaces on wheels that carry battery sized for solving some once in a year use case.
This is a stupid idea because you’d have to make fasteners and high voltage interfaces that can survive an order of magnitude more cycles than they have to for a fixed pack. It would also be significantly more difficult to use the pack as a stressed member of the car structure. It’s better to just have less batteries and use them more efficiently through weight savings.
Do you realize that one of the reasons for the swappable batteries on various Thinkpads is so that you can hot swap batteries without powering down or rebooting?
I've never had an issue with the connectors for the batteries of the ThinkPad, and being able to swap in a spare fully charged battery has been very helpful many times when out doing field working all day long. What is an issue are the little plastic tabs on the batteries that break off over time. However, usually the batteries have already lost a lot of their lifespan by the time that happens, and since the batteries are removable they can be replaced without opening up the system or melting glue with heat as is the case on most modern cell phones. Seems like a win to me!
My point is that hot swappable battery packs have benefits that outweigh the cost of the connectors for the people that have a use case that needs them, as the grandparent referred to in Thinkpads. Not everyone fits in the constraints of design space chosen for a given product. There's a reason virtually every modern computer has a means of adding expansion devices.
Making a high voltage connector is well understood problem space. Every electrical engineer knows how to deal with ramping up current when a power supply is plugged in or turned on (inrush current specifications are most definitely a thing), and the entire electric grid is based on sizing, insulating, spacing and switching conductors appropriately for the voltage and current being used. Moreover, high voltage battery packs tend to have switches / contactors on the battery pack that keep the high voltage off until the connection is securely made and enabled, hence why even Telsas require a functioning low voltage battery to start the system.
There are also certain use-cases that are likely best served by putting battery packs in a trailer. Take the trucking industry: going by the charging requirements of a Tesla semi (1MW for 30 minutes), replicating your typical truck stop turns into a huge problem for the grid -- you'd need upwards of 50MW of charging capacity to replicate the flow of diesel coming out of a bank of 10 fuel pumps (sorry, I ran the thought experiment on that one back when specs were first released). Having a battery pack attached to the trailer that gets charged at a more leisurely rate at the warehouse while it is unloaded and re-loaded over a couple of hours is far more scalable than charging the truck in a few minutes at a truck stop. Charging overnight while the driver sleeps is fine, but getting the 8-12 hours of runtime for a workday in a semi is a heck of a lot of battery.
The dangers can be mitigated -- that's the entire raison d'etre of the electrical engineering discipline! Otherwise you wouldn't be able to safely charge an electric car at a 350kW rate these days at charging stations all over the world with a connector that is deemed safe to be handled by random humans. It's not like the software industry where we throw half baked shit at the wall and see what sticks when users encounter it by running an A / B test in production....
> Moreover, high voltage battery packs tend to have switches / contactors on the battery pack that keep the high voltage off until the connection is securely made and enabled, hence why even Telsas require a functioning low voltage battery to start the system.
These are little bit different than than what a swappable system would entail, aren't they?
> Otherwise you wouldn't be able to safely charge an electric car at a 350kW rate these days at charging stations all over the world with a connector that is deemed safe to be handled by random humans.
Okay maybe I miss read the initial premise but I took it as a home user swapping in-and-out modules themselves.
That would appear to me to be a significantly different engineering challenge and safety issue than what's currently deployed in consumer market EVs...
I'm not even sure the small upside here would justify the added costs and complexity either.
> These are little bit different than than what a swappable system would entail, aren't they?
From an electrical point of view, swapping batteries is fundamentally the same general problem regardless of whether they are large or small: you want to avoid arcing when the connector is plugged in, and you need to avoid exposing the user to stray voltage. Sure, there's added complexity to achieve that in a safe and cost effective manner when high voltages are involved, but it's a solved problem as the charge port does exactly this today.
> Okay maybe I miss read the initial premise but I took it as a home user swapping in-and-out modules themselves.
Current EVs on the market suffer from decreased maintainability compared to traditional ICE vehicles. The battery swapping skill set needs to be more widely available so that we don't see EV owners being dinged $40k for a battery swap. There are videos on Youtube showing people doing a battery swap themselves, and while it is challenging, it's not all that hard to do safely when the battery is not damaged given that the battery packs don't expose high voltage on the connectors when not enabled. Of course a damaged battery pack means that all bets are off on the safety front depending on the nature of the damage.
> That would appear to me to be a significantly different engineering challenge and safety issue than what's currently deployed in consumer market EVs...
> I'm not even sure the small upside here would justify the added costs and complexity either.
It a solved problem!!! Just put the charge port at the back of the vehicle and then use it for the add-on battery pack like the existing signal light connectors for trailers. You're done. The only added design constraints on the EV are on the location of the port and verification that it works while the vehicle is being driven. The F150 Lightning fails this today since the charge port is just in front of the driver side door, but relocating the charge port is not exactly rocket science.
Many EVs have already taken the step of making the charge port bidirectional so that the expensive battery in an EV can be used to provide power during an outage or to balance the load on the grid, and that is a far, far more complicated problem than accepting power from an external battery pack through the charge port while the vehicle is operating.
> From an electrical point of view, swapping batteries is fundamentally the same general problem regardless of whether they are large or small: you want to avoid arcing when the connector is plugged in, and you need to avoid exposing the user to stray voltage. Sure, there's added complexity to achieve that in a safe and cost effective manner when high voltages are involved, but it's a solved problem as the charge port does exactly this today.
The arcing is the problem AND generally when handling battery packs/modules requires high voltage safety equipment and precautions.
The charge port uses a low-voltage connection to "handshake" as I understand it before the high voltage is being supplied.
You can't, without a good bit more complexity to the battery module itself do that as the batteries terminals will just have the voltage of the battery itself (depends on their state of charge).
Plus the bus bar the module is connecting to also will have a voltage if there's existing modules connected to it.
You're down to having contactors and BDUs at every individual module.
> Current EVs on the market suffer from decreased maintainability compared to traditional ICE vehicles. The battery swapping skill set needs to be more widely available so that we don't see EV owners being dinged $40k for a battery swap. There are videos on Youtube showing people doing a battery swap themselves, and while it is challenging, it's not all that hard to do safely when the battery is not damaged given that the battery packs don't expose high voltage on the connectors when not enabled. Of course a damaged battery pack means that all bets are off on the safety front depending on the nature of the damage.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I am saying it's harder to make it actually safe for the average normal consumer to do as simply as plugging a battery into a power drill for example. In part because of the higher voltages involved.
> It a solved problem!!! Just put the charge port at the back of the vehicle and then use it for the add-on battery pack like the existing signal light connectors for trailers. You're done. The only added design constraints on the EV are on the location of the port and verification that it works while the vehicle is being driven. The F150 Lightning fails this today since the charge port is just in front of the driver side door, but relocating the charge port is not exactly rocket science.
This is a different concept than adding/swapping individual modules in the vehicle itself.
But regarding the concept of a trailer, I suspect that the high cost for the product for the minimum gain it not justifiable for the average consumer. That is you're trying to solve a problem in an inefficient and not profitable manner. (Who wants a trailer of batteries parked in their garage 99% of the time just to have a slightly lighter car?)
> Many EVs have already taken the step of making the charge port bidirectional so that the expensive battery in an EV can be used to provide power during an outage or to balance the load on the grid, and that is a far, far more complicated problem than accepting power from an external battery pack through the charge port while the vehicle is operating.
I understand that, but either you want a trailer or you want internal swappable/addable modules which both economically in my opinion seem of little benefit over engineering better cars with newer/better battery technology and stronger/lighter material.
Additionally, I didn't even mention the annoyance of engineering integrating the heating & cooling system for the modules themselves.
Better energy density batteries & better materials (or smarter manufacturing) make more sense to me than trying to make individual modules for a car swappable or asking people to drive around with a trailer they would use so infrequently that it would not justify the cost to them (not to mention most people don't know how to drive with one properly anyways).
Speed limits for towing smaller trailers mostly derive from safety concerns about overloaded or imbalanced trailers being unstable at high speeds. A battery-only trailer with little or no cargo space, designed and certified in conjunction with specific tow vehicles, could easily be safe enough to operate at highway speeds.
I think the main reason why we don't see anyone seriously pursuing the battery trailer idea is that it would be an expensive niche product. It would have to be mostly a rental-only product, and offer few advantages over simply renting a more suitable vehicle.
Obviously a trailer would not be a clever idea, but Nio already has cars with swappable batteries, for short distances you could just install a battery pack which is maybe 20% battery and 80% empty space
It’s enough of a pain in the ass to swap summer and winter tires, and that’s something that (some) people only do twice a year. I can’t imagine people wanting to swap battery packs (either themself or by making an appointment at a service center) before and after every long trip.
Ideally they could just come to my home or workplace and swap the batteries out there while I am doing something else (if it is going to take longer than 30 mins)
Both upthread replies seem to evidence approximately the same level of effort to me; "It won't be faster" isn't wildly less effort than "what if it will be faster?"
Nio has fewer Nio battery swap stations operating in the entire world than just the state of New Jersey has filling stations (not dispensers, entire stations).
Nothing in the video above made me think "oh wow, that looks like that process will be a lot faster than filling up!" and several segments made it seem like there would be more time involved in just getting the car into and out of the battery replacement service bay than filling up takes. (Nio's claim of a 2.5-3 minute battery swap seems to be measuring only the swap time while the car is stopped in the bay.)
That's all before we consider the travel time to one of the stations (which is unlikely to be as close to your trip as a typical filling station because of the rarity of stations), time waiting for the car [or cars] in front of you to complete their swap (which if Nios ever became popular would likely be longer than waiting for one of the typically eight or more dispensers to free up at a filling station), nor to account for the "all long range batteries are out of stock at this location, because it's the Friday before Christmas and everyone is road tripping to visit family" NACKs that are liable to occur in a Nio-only battery swap system.
For me the killer line in the video that will make it hard for Nio to solve all of these is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w&t=270s : "Building these stations is incredibly expensive and it's no secret that Nio is losing a staggering amount of money right now..."
Having done a long trip in an EV, in a very inhospitable location (the USA, without access to Tesla chargers), I'm not convinced there is an EV range/charge time problem. I think it's mostly in the minds of the public. Hence I'm skeptical that the changeable battery pack is a solution to any problem.
My experience was that you end up stopping to charge a bit more often than you'd stop to fill up gas, but factoring in stops for bathroom and food, it's really not a significant difference. There just needs to be more chargers (to avoid queuing for an open one), and chargers that are more closely spaced (every 50 miles like gas stations instead of every 100+ miles). Then today's EVs will be just fine for long trips. Not completely perfect, but perfectly adequate, to the point that it won't be worthwhile buying an ICE vehicle just to have it for long trips.
I imagine semiautonomous trailers that would just tag along in the slipstream within cable range for distances beyond your daily. With computer-fast reaction to brake and steering inputs of the lead car. Those would universally be rentals that you change like the horses in pre-rail post networks.
NIO does battery swaps in minutes, in China and Europe. I believe you can also perhaps get different ranges but if not, would be great to swap between a 50kwh pack for normal use and say 100+kwh for your road trip.
Then again battery charging/weight tech is getting pretty good pretty fast.
It surprises me how much people are determined to use the "car" form factor when it's clearly not a good design for weight reduction and efficient transport.
If instead people consider EVs that are non-car-shaped then we get things like e-bikes and e-scooters. Both can feature easily swappable batteries as the batteries are so much smaller due to the reduced weight of the vehicle. Also, the problems around congestion can pretty much disappear when you get enough people to use an e-bike/e-scooter instead of a car. The tyre wear/pollution is minimised due to the reduction in weight and similarly the brakes.
It is common for electric cars to use harder rubber compounds in their tires. Not because of particulates, but because tire noise is particularly noticeable in an otherwise quiet electric car, and because tire life is a concern for EV drivers.
Luckily, both reduced noise and increased life are fairly well correlated with reduced particulate emission.
It would be incredible if somebody invented a light car, that would transport one or two people and some groceries. Maybe with two wheels instead of four to take up less space. Hmmm why has nobody invented this?
There's also plenty of other, more practical / affordable microcars [1] on the road around where I live, they're considered equivalent to mopeds in terms of legality / requirements but you don't need a helmet, they seat two people and some groceries, etc. They used to be mainly popular for elderly people but they seem to catch on to other people too. Great for local traffic.
+1 for Cargo bikes, but otherwise if your bike infrastructure sorta sucks, the Citroën Ami and counterparts from Fiat etc are pretty common in European cities… easy to park too.
While bicycles are quite convenient for commuting, I am not sure if there is a way for transporting groceries for an entire week for multiple people. Is there such a way? The only solution I see is doing groceries every day.
Groceries every day (or every few days) becomes viable and common in cities like Paris. It’s a lot easier to do when you don’t have to take a car, and the culture then shifts too to fresher food.
Why does it need to be either/or? I make do almost the entire week without a car. Schools within walking distance, then mass transit to work.
So what if I own and use a small family car, to go shopping and take the kids places?
Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
My neighborhood is a real life 15min city, and most people of all ages choose to walk. We don't need to prevent families from owning a car and taking it grocery shopping once a week.
Plenty of Europeans have cargo bikes and make do with 2-3 supermarket trips per week for families of 4-5 peeps.
Only bulk drinks (crates of beer/soda/...) are challenging. But for those, very often delivery systems are in place that surely are more efficient than individual trips anyways.
I regularly carry four cases of water (48 cans) on my standard bicycle without a problem.
Whenever I go grocery shopping I mount a milk crate to my rear rack (this takes about six seconds) and put the cases in vertically. I can also carry a 4L jug of milk in the handlebar-mounted basket.
My mom used to this year round, in every weather and temperature (incl. -20C), when I was a kid several decades ago.
Honestly I don't know how she did it, but she did. It helped that we had separated bike lanes pretty much everywhere. It is entirely possible if the infrastructure supports it.
This sort of thing is why I'm personally a big fan of the 15-minute city concept.
In London we had multiple supermarket options within 10 mins walk. And even more within 10 minutes cycling distance.
Usually we’d just stop on the way home from work or whatever to do small, quick shops for whatever we needed.
But on the rare occasion where we did need to do a “big shop”, we just ordered groceries online for delivery the next day. All the major UK supermarkets offer this, with free or very cheap delivery, delivered by environmentally-friendly electric trucks.
Cargo bikes or bike trailers are two of many solutions to this dilemma that immediately sprung to mind. In the Netherlands I have seen grocery stores deliver large deliveries in big tricycles.
There are billions of people that manage their shopping without a car. Millions of them live in North America. Surely, some of them have solved this problem for a family without having to go shopping daily.
We can do it, but it's going to be two trips. However, there's like half a dozen grocery stores within a 10 minute bike radius where I live (modern suburb). Others who live out in the countryside will need to travel further, but that's generally the tradeoff; more comfortable / quiet living in exchange for longer distance to amenities.
I don’t know about tires, but for brakes we already know how to make lower dust brakes - use drum brakes instead of disc brakes. The friction material is enclosed on drum brakes so much less of it just flies away.
There's also EVs that generally do most of their braking on the regenerative whatsit, which causes no wear on the brake pads. A lot of it can be prevented by education / driving style, and improving road designs to allow for smooth driving.
If you look at what cars of this type are produced and who drives them, it quickly becomes clear where the road is heading.
Huge off-road vehicles, albeit with electric drive, are missing the mark.
These things are advertised with sporty performance, comfort and so on.
In my opinion, energy is being thrown out the window to satisfy the ego of the buyer.
These people are buying themselves a clear conscience.
Even if the cars are electric, where can they be charged?
Not everyone lives in the houses you see in the advertisements.
Not everyone can just go into debt for something like this.
I drive an economical petrol car with 200k kilometers on the clock.
I don't need to produce anything new or use any rare earths or energy.
Even with electric cars, the plastic for the door panels has to be made from crude oil.
The cost of installing all the electronics is also high.
I drive this car until I can't drive any more, I mostly use public transport, but sometimes I have to use the car for the weekly shop.
I'm also staying in the city because I'm getting older and I'm dependent on doctors and markets, at the moment I work outside the city, like many others, and people just need a car to park here.
Not everyone has the same life as others.
Pretty much every EV does regenerative baking, because it (greatly) extends range. Even hybrids have done this since the very earliest mass-market models (the 1997 Prius has it). EV brakes see a lot less wear and tear than ICE brakes.
Drum brakes are way more prone to fail, the heat cant be transported away, the dust still is produced and the brake power, the law requires, is way to little.
If we switch fully to trams and buses, they produce the dust amount of lets say 100 cars. If the public transportation should be capable of all inhabitants of a city, we would have up to 200 trams running every day and night.
Who should be a tram driver? Most of the younger folks dont want to work shift or at weekends and night.
My town has drivers with grey beards, between 50-60 years old. There are no younger applicants for that job so they drive even if retired to keep up the demand.
They got paid extra which making tickets more expensive.
Most European cars already have engine braking. EV regenerative braking just maintains the behavior that folks only used to automatics forgot about. Automatics I think are still not super common in Europe.
But spews forth more rubber (and plastic, since that's what tyres are made from these days), which is an ongoing problem for Tesla EVs when owners discover their tyres don't last nearly as long because they're transmitting power both when starting and stopping, not just when starting.
I don’t understand this concept. I would expect an ICE and an EV vehicle with the same weight, speed, deceleration, tires, etc to have the same wear on tires. The difference being the energy to stop an ICE being transferred to the brake pads and rotors, rather than recharging the EV’s battery.
What am I missing? Why wouldn’t the tires experience the same forces in both scenarios?
It's because it's wrong. If you decelerate the same vehicle at the same rate, the tires can't even tell whether the deceleration is from regenerative braking or friction braking, so the only difference is less brake dust with regenerative braking.
If anything it's the opposite because regenerative braking is more effective when braking is gradual, giving the driver a direct convenience and financial incentive to brake less aggressively (better range, buy less gas or charging), which generates less tire wear.
Because it's completely wrong. The tires indeed experience the same force and don't care where the energy is dumped. As other posters wrote, the increased tire pollution from EVs is because they tend to be heavier, and because their considerable extra torque is likely to be (ab)used by their drivers. Yours truly included, guilty as charged, though I do practice restraint... often.
You're only considering braking, and for that case you're right. You're not considering acceleration, where EVs supply near maximum torque instantly when you press the accelerator pedal. This causes increased wear in tires, I've seen estimates of 20%.
Which can easily be sorted with a more gentle throttle curve.
My EV has three modes - Eco, Normal and Sport. In Sport you get shoved back in your seat from the instant torque, and the fast 0-60 times. In Eco you take off like in a normal car.
You also need to remember that traction control is inherrently easier and faster in an EV as the ECU has fine grained control of how much power to send to the tyres and can effect it near instantly.
It's due to the regenerative braking, which transmits more power via the wheels when decelerating. Most ICE cards don't have regenerative braking; hybrids tend to.
This doesn't make sense. Energy in the system is conserved. On an ICE car, brakes convert the energy to heat. On an EV, motors convert the energy to electricity. The tires experience the same net force.
EVs wear tires more quickly, in general, because they are very heavy and produce more torque (and drivers are more likely to request that torque, also).
I'd guess an ICE transmission provides some deceleration too. But right on, apples-to-apples you would need to compare a Tesla to a Mercedes or etc and not a Corolla. They are sold as a luxury/performance car.
Fundamental misunderstanding of physics. Slowing 2,500lbs from 60-0MPH in 4 seconds (for example) puts just as much wear on a tire if it's with friction brakes or with regenerative braking or engine braking.
“They weigh more” is something I kinda have a problem with. People act like EVs are these behemoths, but your typical EV is hardly an outlier. The Tesla Model 3, for example, weighs as much as a Honda CRV. Yes, that’s a different car class; but nobody looks at a CRV and complains about its weight and the environmental impact of that weight on air quality nearly the same way.
You don't even have to go to a different class. A Model 3 weighs about as much as a BMW 3 series and both weigh slightly less than the average new car.
A lot of this is modern safety features. Crumple zones and stronger roofs add weight, more weight implies bigger engines, bigger engines require stronger frames, soon the average car is two tons. Volvo S60, Mercedes C class and Audi S4 are also a similar size and weight. The makes from the US and Japan are a little lighter but not dramatically lighter and their safety ratings are also a little worse.
People who care about the externalities of unnecessarily large and heavy vehicles do complain about compact utility vehicles, aka “I want to sit higher up”.
A model Y would be the comparison to a CRV (model Y is 400 pounds / 10% heavier).
I mean, I totally get the criticisms that you see of people having unnecessarily large SUVs, like really who needs an Escalade. But a CRV? Like a Model Y with one passenger weighs the same as a CRV with 3.
Regenerative braking helps with brake dust, but is probably offset by extra tyre wear on EVs. I
go weeks without using the brakes and usually don’t even touch the brake pedal.
Normal car designers who aren't drug-addicted sociopaths have already more than solved this problem. If you put hard, narrow, high-lifetime tires on small diameter wheels you get a car that it more efficient, quieter, cheaper to operate, and pollutes less in terms of particulate matter. If you are Elon Musk you sell a car with totally inappropriate summer racing tires on 20-inch wheels and the owners have to replace the whole set every year.
There are lots of things in cities that are unhealthy for both ourselves and others but we allow them. It's possible to make big improvements while still enjoying a certain amount of the benefit of something.
For example - if you use the London Underground the air you breathe in is significantly worse than the air above ground in busy traffic. Significantly.
Not necessarily. EVs have also an almost perfect traction control due to immediate torque control by the electric motor, so it’s very difficult to spin wheels in situations of low traction, which reduces tire wear and emissions.
On ICE cars, it’s much slower with way higher latency due to the mechanical inertias.
Just not true. I favor EVs, but it is incredibly misleading to say 98% comes from other sources. In many places, natural gas and coal are still used to generate the electricity needed. That must be accounted for in your life cycle analysis. In fact, once you remove the Musk propaganda, Tesla's EVs are by no way greener (draw a boundary around his other company SpaceX, and the rocket fuel it uses, and you immediately see what I mean. Worse than Exxon I would bet)
Ah, that's interesting. Although I imagine cars kick up a lot of old-fashioned dirt dust from the road and swoosh up some more of that from the sidewalks as they drive as well.
I live in a house next to a moderately busy street with car traffic and also some public transport (bus lines). I noticed that the windows (and frames) facing the street get dirty much faster than the windows facing the garden. The dirt on the street side is also pretty gross, sticky and hard to clean. It's just an anecdotal observation, but I could not come up with a better explanation so far.
I had a balcony overlooking a highway in Toronto once, and it got super grimy as well. I think all the different kinds of car emissions combine into some sort of super bad tarry crap that then collects every kind of passing dust particle.
Isn't it more likely that it was tyre dust? Every vehicle (more so the heavier ones) is continually depositing tyre dust into the air, whereas brake dust will only be produced when slowing (and hardly any for regenerative braking vehicles).
Many cities in Europe have introduced climate zones in the past ~20 years, mainly to ban older smoky diesels like that. Petrol cars have also gotten more efficient; smaller engines (1 liter 3 cylinder ones are the norm now for smaller cars), smaller cars, more efficient engines, stop/start systems, hybrids and EVs (especially good for city traffic), etc.
That said, when I was in Paris last there were a lot of motor-scooters; while they also have small engines etc, I can't see them being much cleaner than well-designed cars, only due to their smaller size. Given time, I'm sure the range on their electric counterparts will become good enough as well to become a practical replacement.
Makes me wonder how much of this kind of progress other cities could get just from phasing out the dirtiest vehicles without going straight to car-free zones
How much of this has to do with the policies highlighted - removing 50k parking spots, adding bike lanes and green spaces - and how much has to do with cars having better exhaust?
How much less cars are on the road today vs then?
The charts and title make it look like there's no cars in Paris anymore. That's not the case, at all.
I‘m currently visiting Paris for the second time in my life after 2008. I can tell you it’s much cleaner now than it has been back then. There are many electric (cargo) bikes, scooters, cars and buses. The city is much quieter and there is way less crazy traffic. There are few cars parked on the side of the street. However these parking spots were cleared for bike lanes and bike sharing parking. Biggest polluter are the garage trucks, which are still diesel and noisy. If they manage to replace them by electric ones, many parts of the city will be really quiet.
This paper [0] suggests improvements in car emissions has played a big role in reducing emissions in European cities as a whole. Vehicle emissions of all kinds have fallen pretty dramatically across Europe [1], although this is total emissions for vehicles, so it includes policies to reduce driving as well as those to reduce each vehicle’s emissions. So overall trends toward more efficient cars are certainly part of the story. Given these images are between 2007, when emissions had already been falling, and 2024, I’m inclined to think the policies highlighted in the article played a significant role as well.
No, it’s not just that. There’s a reduction in traffic. Traffic is the biggest cause of pollution. Even if the exhaust is “ clean “ (it’s not) there’s also tire dust and brake dust
Right when covid started I drove around Austin to pick something up. There were hardly any cars on the road and the air looked pristine after several days of people mostly staying at home.
Immediately followig 9/11 in the US, there were a number of atmospheric scientists that were able to conduct studies for the first time without jet con-trails in the air.
Pretty trivial to discount/exempt people as is done in NYC.
An even simpler starting point (which we should actually do for all road-related fees like tickets IMO) is to set fees by the KBB value of the vehicle in question. Let people contest them in court if they want.
This is a bad approach. At least if its only that.
In Manhatten this works because there is already a decent public transport, already a culture of waking and an established culture of biking.
You can just force people into better cities with punishing taxes. You actually have make the roads safer, provide alternatives and so on. And this is easier said then done, almost all cities in the US have zoning codes and other laws that make it completely impossible to build decent urban infrastructure. And the traffic standards are literally 100% backwards to providing safety.
In fact, because the traffic standards are so bad that less cars actually kill more people. This is because a lot of traffic slows down vehicle speeds on avg.
So basically, if all you are doing is forcing less people to drive, without doing anything else, you are just gone make the roads unsafer, and not improve the city or the lives of most people.
You can tax to such levels that you have both the funding for and the road space for a legitimately great bus or tram system.
This is unfortunately a problem where, as you say, many issues interact to make it difficult to solve piecemeal in most places. But that doesn't mean we can or should just allow it to fester. I agree zoning and physical infrastructure need to improve in tandem in most places.
In the UK people consider "speeding" to be going 10mph or more over the limit. So 20/30mph really means 30/40mph, and in addition there are still many places with 40mph (50mph) roads going through.
Speed limit signs don't work. People will drive at whatever speed feels right and this is usually way above 20mph. What works is narrowing the roads. When the carriage way is barely wider than your vehicle it magically makes 20mph feel appropriate and 30mph seem fast (which it is). This has the bonus effect that larger vehicles feel it more, which is perfect considering they are the most dangerous and should be driven by trained professionals who are used to such tight spaces.
It essentially makes driving much more stressful, which is exactly what it should be. The problem at the moment is drivers get everything: big, wide, smooth roads, with the best drainage and grading; the easiest and most convenient mode of transport; but none of the responsibility. We need to shift the balance back. You can drive, but it's a big responsibility and if you fuck up the consequences are serious.
> Speed limit signs don't work. ... What works is narrowing the roads.
Even if you have every intention to stay within limits they don't work. In the US we have these massive stroads in urban areas posted at 35 mph. When I drive (rarely) I have to constantly monitor my speed. It doesn't feel natural and also takes away from, ya know, paying attention to the road. Aside from my opinion that 35 is way too fast anyways.
At the same time I've seen people complain that roads which are clearly not narrow, are too narrow because they can't barrel down side streets at 50. But at least it forces them to drive slower.
> It essentially makes driving much more stressful, which is exactly what it should be. ... the easiest and most convenient mode of transport ...
It boggles the mind. We sit in these big cozy chairs that transport us almost anywhere with little to no effort. It's pretty incredible. Yet, the most minor of inconveniences can cause a lot of car brains to absolutely lose it. Driving feels adjacent to addiction to many Americans and if people don't get their fix they go into complete meltdowns.
I think people do find driving stressful, but for the wrong reasons. Sitting a red light? Stressful. Cyclist slowing you down? Stressful. Too many other people are using cars at the same time you are? Stressful. It's stress originating from believing you had the god given right to drive like a maniac at all times.
In every part of US cities pedestrian walkways have to cross roads. But really roads should have to cross the walkways. Instead of sidewalks dipping down into four lane highways, roads should have to go up and over sidewalks at intersections. In Amsterdam there was huge expansive brick walkways that cars can use, but they're the foreign entity. Not the pedestrians.
Maybe it's just me but every car I've rented while traveling through the UK for the last 3 months starts beeping when you go over the limit. Really helps keep you under it by annoying the shit out of you.
... when driven continuously without stopping, like a on cross country limited access highway.
When driving in the places people live, with cross walks and stop signs and children playing outside requiring frequent slowing & stopping, there's no efficiency benefit from racing 0 to 50mph every block then slamming on the brakes, only to repeat for each block after.
I frequently drive through 20 mph areas with little stop start traffic. I rarely drive at busy times.
There is nowhere in the UK I can think of that has had a 50 limit in my lifetime that requires frequent breaking. 20 mph limits are invariably reduced from 30.
Honestly, kind of amazing to see a big city actually pull it off. So many places talk about reducing car dependence and improving air quality, but Paris really committed - and the data speaks for itself. Of course, the pushback from drivers was inevitable (it always is), but it's hard to argue with 55% less PM2.5 and cleaner skies over the Eiffel Tower. That's not just good urban policy - that's public health in action.
I am highly confident that a sufficient percentage of those whose cars are burned go on to buy another car that the net impact of the act you describe is negative on all counts.
That has little to do with the pollution or traffic, and more about the extreme actions of their manufacturer. It's symbolic, albeit largely ineffective and ignored by the target.
Ah yes, the joy of destroying your neighbor’s property just for fun. Is he a working-class guy, struggling to pay his bills? Too bad. Because nothing says “let’s build a better future” than a riot.
Sadly, that is mostly how it happens. Wars/riots and strikes are the only proven mechanism for effecting systemic change to power structures. It's how you got most of your freedoms.
The only reason Carnegie built 1500 public libraries is because he knew otherwise there was a good chance some vigilantes would take things into their own hands and he and his family would hang.
Yes, it sucks that the only way to reach the rich and powerful is to harm women, children and property. But at least the rich and powerful of old knew this, and preemptively prevented it.
New billionaires are far too cavalier. They believe themselves invisible, and it shows in their utter disrespect onto the average people. Where is our philanthropy? Why do you not fear for your life?
We have become too civilized, and allowed the evil to laugh in our faces.
> Yes, it sucks that the only way to reach the rich and powerful is to harm women, children
I would consider that evil, much as I want the current administration and it's allies to have some healthy respect (and thus restraint) for the power of the people.
Of course it's evil, it's just that historically that's what we've done and historically that's what effective.
It's largely good that we, as a people, have become more civilized and don't resort to that. The unexpected downside of that, though, is that we are much more susceptible to being exploited. It's a sort of naivety trade-off.
Massive strikes that are hard to contain got use the 8 hour work day, weekends and a lot of labor rights. Civil right movements won only because a huge portion of them were militant (back then even the National Rifle Association supported banning guns).
A violent status quo necessitates violence to achieve change.
The suffrage movement in the UK also had a militant component:
> The tactics of the [Women’s Social and Political Union] included shouting down speakers, hunger strikes, stone-throwing, window-smashing, and arson of unoccupied churches and country houses. In Belfast, when in 1914 the Ulster Unionist Council appeared to renege on an earlier commitment to women's suffrage,[27] the WSPU's Dorothy Evans (a friend of the Pankhursts) declared an end to "the truce we have held in Ulster." In the months that followed WSPU militants (including Elizabeth Bell, the first woman in Ireland to qualify as a doctor and gynaecologist) were implicated in a series of arson attacks on Unionist-owned buildings and on male recreational and sports facilities.
This influenced the US suffrage movement, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_Unit... , even during WWI: "groups like the National Woman's Party that continued militant protests during wartime were criticized by other suffrage groups and the public, who viewed it as unpatriotic."
I will note that car burning is rare during protests. It mostly happen during riots, which are quite rare (i think 2005 were the big ones, and some light ones started last year). What can happen is a luxury car finding itself on its own roof (those racing cars are light).
During the yellow vest protest, "unsafe" property destruction started, destroying an apartment and putting in danger bystanders (the only death was due to a police grenade shot trough an open window, but the protesters put in danger bystanders too, and only luck prevented any deaths). Which triggered an interesting response from old punks/antifas (and also active ones): They joined facebook yellow vest protest groups to teach "how to" destroy property properly: spot danger points, how to find a target, how to avoid side effects, when to avoid using fire (99.9% of the time), when not to, how to deactivate teargas grenade (it is surprising, but a lot of people do not know how to), and instilled in some very theoritical points about secrecy and compartmentalization that were passed down from like the "groupe Barta", which, to be honest, is quite funny.
The comment you resond to is obviously a joke, and so is yours (in a way) but owning and driving a car in Paris almost certainly places you in the upper class. Most Parisians don't own cars, most don't use them to drive around the city.
No need to be like that. Yes, of fucking course in a city of millions of people there are still cars. The point here is the relative amount compared to earlier.
It did not appear to me like most people in this thread were talking about a modest reduction in vehicle traffic, or that they'd done any due diligence to estimate the actual effect of the restrictions. Seems like people are mostly shooting from the hip.
I wonder if something less all / none might have nearly the same effects with far less drawbacks otherwise.
E.G. What if only emissions testing certified low emission vehicles were allowed? What if only electric? How about requiring quiet utility trucks for garbage / freight / etc?
For cities that large / dense, adding in Caves of Steel like people-mover belts might be a great alternative too.
Are publicly-owned cars somehow not emitting anything? Or, how else will people get around?
I live in a European city, where I rarely use my car to get around. Banning cars won't do anything, because I don't use my car because I can, I use it because I have to.
If you want to get rid of cars, design cities that can be lived in without having to use cars.
People wouldn't use publicly-owned cars, they would used publicly-owned buses, trams, subways, and other forms of mass transit, plus (as the article points out), making it easier to walk or bike.
I believe the goal of limiting car use in Paris is as part of re-designing the city so it can be lived in without having to use cars, yes.
> With modern emissions standards, more than 50% of the harmful pollution comes from tires/brakes/road surface wear/resuspended dust:
Sure, but what about compared to eg. 15 year old diesels with removed DPF filters? Those were the cars that were removed from paris (with the "eco stickers" and other regulation), and that brought the pollution down.
New cars exhaust very little particulate matter, so percantages don't say a lot.
I mean.. almost 100% of the polution of bicyles comes from tires/brakes/road surface/resuspended dust, but the total amount is very low.
It's not just about emissions. The entire character of the area changes. The streets fill with pedestrians and bicycles.
Garbage trucks and ambulances still use the streets. But they face no traffic and are exceptions rather than the rule. They don't need to be either low emission or quiet, though those things are also nice to have, since those things are no longer the most pressing issues.
I'm not familiar with the particulars of the Paris program but a "car ban" doesn't have to ban garbage & freight trucks.
I'd argue these, along with private or public transit, emergency vehicles etc, are the best uses for the internal combustion engine or just vehicles in general. The problem with ICE/car/vehicles, isn't that they exist or are useful, but that at some point we over-indexed on their utility and ignored their externalities & subsidies.
The most effective changes probably come from stacking a bunch of smaller, less dramatic policies that add up over time: cleaner vehicles, better public transit, quieter freight solutions, smarter zoning, etc
I live in Paris, cars haven't all been banned. Some streets have been made pedestrians only and some lanes have been converted into bike lanes, but overall you can drive almost everywhere in the city (although that was always painful).
We have that certificate you mention. Today in most large cities in France, some streets are forbidden to cars that have a bad "Crit'air" score. It's a sticker you have to order online, with a number from 1 to 6. What number you receive is dependent on your car's model and its age. You have to put it under your windshield or risk getting fined by the police.
In modern cars, including EV, polution and noise come from weight and tires and breaks; the polution levels are a sharp funxtion of speed, but the speeds at which they dont matter much, dont offer benefits either. If we had magnetic/levitated cars maybe some simple solution could be found, but with the current designs where the tires hit the asphalt it seems hard to make things environmentally friendly in a city other than reducing or banning cars.
I like the idea of people-mover belts. Maybe fast surface belts and escalators could help larger cities if cars were out of the way. Subway systems almost feel like people-mover belts sometimes, but their noise levels are incredibly high and they do damage metalic rails during breaking so not sure how low the contribution to air polution could be.
This is a bad-faith fallacy. We had cars that emitted X amounts of tyre/brake particulate and 10X amounts of combustion residue, we got rid of the combustion part, and now we hear "OMG! 100% is tyre particulate!!!"
Sure, but people won't stop moving, and there's no vacuum, you should compare brake particulate to whatever else people would use if cars didn't exist.
Or you could just make a city car-free. There are so many benefits besides fewer particles in the air. People can walk and cycle safely. Kids can play in the streets. The atmosphere is so much nicer, since people are not isolated by walls around them.
I have lived in a city with a (nearly) car-free city center (+ separate bike lines for many roads outside the center) for most of my adult life [1] and it is just glorious. Most locals just walk or cycle. Longer distances by (electric) bus or train.
Kids can't play in streets as now the new predators are cyclists who don't slow down or get down of their bikes. Besides, cars are a staple for families, and hardly substituable. Good luck doing groceries for 6 without one.
I live in Riga, here cyclists ride on the sidewalk, along with e-scooters. I went out for a ten minutes walk with my son, I had to physically and verbally intervene three times to avoid him being hit by a cyclist or e-scooter. Last month our nanny was hit by a cyclist. In Paris it is very common and the main reason they banned e-scooters.
So, while the US paradigm is toxic, I'm not convinced about the one you are proposing, given that, in my experience, cyclists are ruthless and never behave unless I physically intimidate them. And I would rather walk in peace.
I live in Riga, here cyclists ride on the sidewalk, along with e-scooters.
First, give cyclists bike paths, second develop your culture around cycling and walking. It's not a problem here. Virtually everyone cycles here (more bikes than people in this country). I am over 40 and I can only think of two people I know who had more serious injuries (one broken tooth and one broken leg), but both managed to fall without any other traffic involved.
Kids in our city walk or bike to school by themselves when they are 9 or 10 (some earlier) and there are virtually never accidents.
It's a shame that riders of bikes and scooters in your city feel so unsafe riding on the road, that they are forced onto the sidewalks. Blame dangerous drivers and the lack of protected bike lanes though, not your neighbors who are just trying to arrive at their destinations alive.
Pedestrian collisions with bikes versus collisions with automobiles are utterly incomparable both in number and severity. If that cyclist had been driving a car, you would probably need to find a new nanny!
Delivery drivers on e-bikes are the worst in my country, they ride on the sidewalk between pedestrians and cross the roads ignoring traffic lights and rules, feels like you are in a developing Asian country. Why don't they want to ride on the roadway? Because with their and car drivers style of driving it's dangerous.
The problem is that most cyclists in my city have no idea about the basic of safety and how to evaluate risk. Most of them ride with headsets on, often noise-cancelling, no helmets and no reflectors. So I'm a bit dubious about the excuse "they are so scared". And even then, they can still walk instead of endangering pedestrians.
As for your last paragraph, this is false; walking on the sidewalk is and should be safe: adding cyclists there makes it unsafe, irrelevant of the car's behavior. Typical predatory thinking of a toxic cyclist.
You need to develop infrastructure (bike lanes and paths) and a cycling culture (which comes with giving kids training in primary school). To give some examples how things work here:
- Most kids get 'traffic training' and have to do a theoretical and practical exam when they are about 10 or 11.
- Building a cycling culture makes car drivers more aware. If car drivers are also cyclists themselves, they are more aware of cyclists. Also, during driving lessons some techniques are practiced, like e.g. opening a door with your hand that is opposite to the door. By doing so, you automatically turn while opening the door, so you can see if any cyclists are passing. All of this makes cycling on roads (as opposed to pavements safer).
- Give bikes a lane, or even better a separate bike path. Only let cars and bikes share a street in low-speed (30 km/h) non-busy streets. Cars, bikes, and pedestrians differ so much in speed that they usually should not be on the same roads.
- Change your laws such that in accidents involving cars <-> bikes or car <-> pedestrian, the car driver always bares a certain amount of liability even if the cyclist/pedestrian is at fault. To a cyclist/pedestrian a car is like a bullet flying by. Putting more liability on the car driver makes them more careful.
- Design your cities so that cycling/walking is preferred. E.g. the city I live uses filtered permeability. As closer you get to the city center, the harder it becomes to get there by car, whereas you can get everywhere easily by bike or by foot. This fosters a culture where biking/walking is the norm, because you can get in different places faster by bike.
It works very well. I don't know of any pedestrians who were hit by a bike.
Typical predatory thinking of a toxic cyclist.
Please avoid the personal attacks and victim-blaming. I have also lived in a country that was not cycling-safe and usually the only way to avoid getting hit is to ride on the pavement (as most natives did). The problem is not the cyclist, but the miserable infrastructure for anything that is not a car.
This is certainly not very common in Paris. Cyclists behave extremely badly, but don’t ride on the sidewalk. E-scooters were another story though, and were indeed banned for this reason.
Hi Stavros. I would never say OMG—dont believe in deities—and I feel sorry that it came out that way. I was commenting on the GP, which was suggesting alternative ways to get similar effects to those of car-free cities, but in alternative ways. Of those possible ways, to my suprise, the large conveyor belt seemed an interesting possible next step. EVs are not reducing polution in modern cities, unfortunately. They are still way better than gas burning vehicles for a lot of reasons, including CO2 reduction, but as per studies by the Economist they are currently worse on air pollution in cities, unfortunately, due to their typical extra weight, so once we optimize life in cities, we probably want to find ways to reduce their weight and speed, and currently the straightforward solution is to reduce their numbers. As people start obsessing with detecting microplastics in the next decade, these types of changes in city life vs rural life exposure might become even more dramatic.
Cars need to be banned not primary because of emissions but because they are just generally bad in every wy. They need lots of space, even if they are not actually there (parking lots), they are unsafe and the slow down every other transport method and all the utility functions as well. Plus they are fucking ugly.
A city is just 10x more beautiful without cars, and the place in the cities where most people actually want to hang out, doesn't have cars.
No idea what 'people mover belts' are. We already have trains in various forms, add bikes and maybe some scooters to that and your done. Plus of course lots of walking.
For garbage transport and cargo, it would actually be nice to use the existing tram lines. Zürich has something like that but its experimental. But it should be more developed. Until then, small electric trucks are a good solution. Most of this can be done overnight when the tram lines aren't used much.
And it's one of the biggest promoters of inequality.
I am an European who studied at OSU in Columbus for a semester and it was absurd to me how on one side there was lots of work downtown, yet you could live 20 miles of it and it would take you two hours by public transport to get there, an odyssey.
People without a car, insurance, poorer parts of the society were cut off from the job market for not having a way to connect.
Suburbs are cute, but they are a tragedy of city planning, let alone the tragedy they are on a social level, where people will put everything in their houses including movie rooms, entertainment rooms, anything to avoid having to go out and socialize. Terrible.
In the USA, the working poor generally don't work downtown, and it's really the industrial areas where there is awful transit service. So cheapo used cars are a must for these folks.
There is some awful HN bias here where young healthy well-paid tech workers live in some boogie part of SF/NYC/Boston/etc and enjoy the "car-free lifestyle" (and I've been there), without any idea how the other half lives.
I've seen this "car free utopia" idea dismissed as an idea by and for "elites" (see Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's comments on people who ride the subway in NYC) plenty of times as a tactic to avoid doing anything about reducing dependence on cars. It's quite a counterproductive argument in my opinion. Even if there are well paid tech workers who are able to enjoy a "car-free lifestyle", why should it end there?
Just because the system we created means that currently the only affordable place for the working poor is in suburbs where they must rely on cars doesn't mean that it needs to continue to be that way. You can support building infill housing and adding transit to eventually reduce the need for so many people to have cars.
It's one thing to call it "bias" and use that as an argument to not make things better instead of coming up with ways to help make car independence available to everyone across classes.
Because the truth is nobody has any real idea how to retrofit the last 70 years of American suburbia so that mass transit is actually effective and useful for people. "Transit-oriented development" really only helps downtown workers and doesn't get you to the grocery store or daycare. (And even in NYC, the subway is not great out in Queens/etc, so people own cars.)
But it is nice to live in the Mission and take the techbus to Mountain View and handwave all the hard trillion dollar problems and say let the poors eat cake. Which is effectively how these discussions seem to go.
I find it fascinating how the debate around cars in cities evolves. Initially counter arguments always are that reducing cars is not desirable "nobody wants less cars in cities, people need to do their weekly groceries, nobody wants to bike in bad weather...". Once these points are refuted it always evolves into "yes it would be great, but it can't be done, because it's too expensive, politically controversial...". It's almost like there is an irrational fear of less cars in cities.
Regarding it can't be done I encourage anyone to read up on how the investment into public transport transformed Bogota. Which is both much poorer and in a much more challenging geographical environment than most US cities. So if they can do it, why can't US cities?
You are putting a lot of pointless words in my mouth. As I said, I have actually lived the San Francisco car-free bike and streetcar lifestyle, and quite enjoyed it. So I have the perspective of why it does or does not work (for Americans). I would love to see some concrete solutions proposed here other than just the usual Cars Bad/Cars Good handwaving and downvoting.
(I just looked at Bodega in Google Maps, and it is significantly more dense than all but the most "boogie" American cities. Compare it to say Chicago.)
Chicago has a density of 4500 people per sq km compared to Bogota at 4100 so Chicago is denser? That said I actually meant Medellin not Bogota which is significantly denser. However Medellin topology makes it extremely challenging to build infrastructure, the central valley floor is more than 1000m lower than most of the suburbs. Moreover the GDP of Medellin is 70 billion compared to a GDP of Chicago of 800 billion and Chicago can't build public transport infrastructure because it's 1.5 less dense? That doesn't make any sense.
Genuinely curious, do you have a good article about Bogota? Because your entire demeanor is acting like you have some "gotcha", without advocating for anything concrete.
For example, from my brief perusal of Google Maps, it looks like they have some sort of growth boundary, because it goes from dense city to farms in a sharp line. For historical reasons, America is not organized that way. (And Chicago is fucked-up, so be it.)
Bogota is interesting for their bus rapid transit (dedicated bus lanes), which as far as I know was built out for a fraction of the cost of a metro system.
Yep, San Francisco's BRT line has been a huge success (despite being typically way late and over-budget). And actually SF has had 'proto-BRT' for a long time, but IMO they still need more subways.
Bodega does have a growth boundary, per google. (IMO the lack of that is the 'root of all evil' of USA development patterns.)
Except that many European cities copied US cities in their development styles, and then later reversed them. So we absolutely do know how to reverse it.
> But it is nice to live in the Mission and take the techbus to Mountain View and handwave all the hard trillion dollar problems and say let the poors eat cake. Which is effectively how these discussions seem to go.
Every study shows that the poor are hurt the most because of car centric development.
Here is a guide on how to improve American cities that are surrounded by lots of suberbia:
- Remove/close all highways that go across the city, only keep the ring road. People will simple reclaim those space for recreational uses as soon as cars are gone.
- Increase price of parking space or eliminate them completely. Most parking in city is not used by residents anyway.
- Redo even if its with paint and few concrete bolders, the city streets according to Dutch street regulations. Massively increase safety for everybody.
- That frees up lots of space for bike lanes (as US cities tend to have far to many car lanes). This is actually a benefit to the history of US cities, we can't do that in some of the older dense cities.
- Change your zoning code and other access regulations, so proper urban development is actually allowed to happen. The US could adopt something like Japan zoning laws. A heavy use of mixed use and allow living in almost any zone. The US has a hilarious amount of commercial development land that completely underutilized. This also means no more minimum parking space and all that nonsense. See maybe like this: https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/news/land-use-zones-in-japa...
- This will make it so suburbs can go from single house only to a mix of single house, duplex, fourplexes, townhouses and so on. Like suburbs used to be. And it will make it so that light commercial developments can happen in subburbs. Meaning a single house can turn into small shops, coffees and such.
- In the city select a few core blocks in different places in the city, make those pedestrian only. Or like Montreal does, a whole long street. Each year add more of those pedestrian zone, improve walking infrastructure between them.
- Make it so subburban residents start to pay full price for their utilities including water and other infrastructure. New subburban developments are often hilariously subsidized, needing more water pumps and such.
- Redevelop current stroads into much fewer lanes and create separate access roads to the commercial developments. This improves flow on the stroads, reduce accidents and makes walking and biking along those stroads safer. Of course some of those lanes would turn into bike infrastructure.
- In the subburbs, also reduce road with, install protected cycle lanes. Break open the horrible cul-de-sac, the city can buy part of peoples garden to create cross connects between different cul-de-sacs and surrounding developments (cross connects for people and bikes, not cars).
- Make all the bus services public, heir a real transportation engineer to come up with a plan. Consisting of a few main routes, using the old stroads and highways, and smaller buses that serve as connectors to these major routes. Of course for that you would make some lanes on the highway, busways. Despite what some people in the US think, you can actually do decent bus service in suberbia. Combine that with public on demand service, that gets you cheaply to the next closes major public transport node. Maybe start planning a tram route along the major bus-routes.
- Look at your old rail infrastructure and develop a plan for a decent regional service. Develop a 50 year rail plan.
- The city can also simply buy up some cul-de-sacs that are strategically located and redevelop them into proper nice walkable neighborhoods. The city can even own the land and only rent half of the appartments, some at affordable price. This worked well in Britain and still does work well in Austria. And of course develop a transportation plan for those new neighborhoods. See an example, where old soviet style neighborhoods were developed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfonhlM6I7w
- Change your property tax into a land tax, or a property tax heavily focused on land. Or potentially do more with sales or what taxes, importantly, just don't do property tax.
- Like in Japan, require anybody that wants to own a car in a city, to first prove the have a private place to part.
- Make all car registrations based on weight, meaning you pay more for a heavier car.
- Focus development on the city and the first suburban ring around the city. Offer intensives for people in the outer rings to move into the inner rings. So for example somebody that owns a small house in the far outer ring of the city, could move into a duplex in the inner rings.
- If yours city has repair backlog (and most cities do) focus on the city core and the inner ring of subberbia.
- Do not develop more land, US cities already are far to wide spread. Simply announce no new infrastructure or roads. And not taking over into city property stuff that developers have built.
I could list more, pretty much all of these have been discussed in urbanism research.
Pretty much all of these have been done in different places at different times. And the all pretty much work. Doing them all together hasn't been done but there is no reason to believe it wouldn't work.
Of course this does not mean that for 1 day to the next everybody will go from suberbinate to die hard city person. But the culture after 1-2 decades of such changes will be dramatically different.
It's funny, seems like people had me pegged as some Suburb Guy, when that couldn't be further from the truth. (I have mostly walked the talk, which is more than I can say of some of the former Bike Guys I have known.) Anyway, I completely agree with much of this, just a couple nits:
> Every study shows that the poor are hurt the most because of car centric development.
Yes, the poor always lose out versus Hypothetical Utopia. I'm referring to reality as it exists in the current and near future where many many poor & middle-class people need cars. You can't just take them away because of a dumb student-type notion that "cars are only for rich people".
> Change your zoning code and other access regulations (etc)
Yes, I would love to tell Silicon Valley how to zone, but even the popular governor is having trouble doing that.
(Meanwhile, my urban SF neighbors are arguing about what paint colors should be allowed, like it is a HOA or something.)
> Develop a 50 year rail plan.
We have that, but it doesn't actually help because it's mostly about building rail out to new suburbs where people can get into city center office jobs (and the rail agency can get tax money). In the meanwhile, we built an urban subway with 3! stations.
Like I said, it's a trillion dollar problem, and there's no easy button. Just incremental improvements.
> It's funny, seems like people had me pegged as some Suburb Guy, when that couldn't be further from the truth.
I didn't, I read your comment. I think you are just haven't done the necessary level of research or you just have a doomer outlook.
> Yes, the poor always lose out versus Hypothetical Utopia.
But they are not comparing to Utopia, but rather the comparable situation where changes have been made. Or to the same city before and after some change.
Unless you are making the argument that no objective knowledge can exist, the research is pretty clear.
> I'm referring to reality as it exists in the current and near future where many many poor & middle-class people need cars.
Nobody is questioning that. Literally nobody. That why its called 'car centric design'. Who are you arguing against?
> You can't just take them away because of a dumb student-type notion that "cars are only for rich people".
Again, literally nobody is arguing that! You have constructed a complete straw man of urbanist.
The argument is to encourage policy that will make people want to live without cars in the future.
Unless you think, restricting parts of the city center or closing some urban highways is 'taking cars away', you are literally arguing against nobody.
> Yes, I would love to tell Silicon Valley how to zone, but even the popular governor is having trouble doing that.
Yes, all of my suggesting involve politics. And of course not all of them can be implemented practically depending on location. This is always true with literally any suggestion about anything political.
But your claim wasn't 'its politically difficult' rather your claim was 'nobody knows how'.
> We have that, but it doesn't actually help because it's mostly about building rail out to new suburbs where people can get into city center office jobs (and the rail agency can get tax money). In the meanwhile, we built an urban subway with 3! stations.
If be 'we' you mean California, yes there is one. And that is already a lot better then what many other places have. You might not think its enough, but it better then nothing. And the claim that it is bad because its only 'new suburbs' is also factually wrong as part of the rail plan you just had Caltrain electrification, and future improvement to existing rail Caltrain. I'm not an expert on California rail, but the claim that it serves 100% new subburbs is certainty false.
> Like I said, it's a trillion dollar problem, and there's no easy button. Just incremental improvements.
I have no idea why you are claiming its a 'trillion $' problem. That can be said about not doing anything at all too. When we are talking about the infrastructure of 300 million people (assuming we are talking US) then of course, any decision you make its a trillion $. But in that context 1 trillion $ also isn't that much.
And if you actually look at the research you will see that actually many of the suggestion I have SAVE MONEY. The idea that all of this cost unbelievable amounts of money is simply not true.
Lets go threw examples:
- Saver roads pay for themselves because accidents have a really high cost. And the new safer roads will decease avg speed, leaing to easier to maintain roads. In the US today there is a massive amount of overbuilding of incrastructure that simply isn't needed if you were builing roads according to modern scientific principles, rather then some book some engineer wrote in 1960s that just so happens to have been adopted as 'the standard'. And the principles aren't that hard or expensive to implement. This is a clear money safer. Think about all the idiotic lights the US uses at every intersection, each set of lights is expensive, sound road planning would eliminate many of these.
- Closing down urban freeways increases property taxes. Gives the city new land to redevelop and sell, or keep as parks. Also reduces maintenance burden on state level.
- Rezoning pays for itself many, many, many times over, its not even close.
- Increase parking price can raise money for the city. If you don't want to remove them. Removing them is very easy and cheap.
- Putting down protected bike lanes with simple concrete protection is very very cheap and tons of research shows that it is very beneficial. More people on bikes means less car, means less time wasted in traffic. It has also been repeatedly shown that it improves retail on those roads and it also improves property prices.
- Setting up pedestrian zones is also incredibly cheap. Literally a few concert blocks or at most a few bulliards that you can fold down for emergency access. Incredibly cheap, increases property prices and retail.
- Increasing prices on suberbia to reflect actual cost, raises money, rather then losing it.
- Redeveloping stroads is a bit more expensive, but I'm not proposing building anything new, but rather changing the way access and priority works. Cost money but not that much and in the long term it saves a lot of money.
- City buying and developing land does cost money, but since the new mixed use areas will be popular they can actually make a lot of money. Money for this can be raised by cities.
- Setting up a bus network is also really not that expensive. That is some amount of running cost, but if your buses have good priority lanes and are frequent you can cover a lot of the operation. This certainty not a 'trillion $' and each city can handle this themselves, like the do in most of the world. And again, this is increasing tax revenue along bus routes as has repeatedly been shown.
- All the revenue increases are doubly relevant if you switch from property tax to land tax.
The only thing that is at all expensive that I proposed is a long term rail plan. But in terms of your long term transportation plan, you have a lot of cost anyway. And rail is a better long term investment.
I formulate all of my points specifically so they were something cheap that can be done. I didn't propose building huge new parks, or huge metro systems. Or high speed rail. Or anything like that.
You can literally do 95% of what is needed by with paint, concrete blocks, a bunch of buses and bus drivers and a few legal chances. The city will actually increase its revenue a huge amount over time.
The current model of trying to support ever increasingly distant suburbs is what is actually bankrupting cities.
I suggest you look at the detailed research from Urban3. They clearly show how cities that have done many of the chances I propose, are good for the cities finances. In fact, some cities have implemented some of these changes specifically because they are out of money.
So please do not spread the idea that American cities can't change because its to expensive. That is the sort of thing far-right wing people spread, the whole 'we can't afford bike-lanes' nonsense.
A friend of mine is writing a history of the Massachusetts Hill towns. The Strathmore paper company plays a big part in that history the mill owners built housing for their workers within walking distance of the mills.
I also know of a tourism industry company that is buying up older hotels that are no longer competitive in the local market to use as seasonal worker housing.
There are solutions other than having someone drive a beater for 45 minutes to get to a low paying job.
When I look around on the subway here in NYC I see every type of person imaginable. There are wealthy people going to work and unhoused people and everyone in between. There are certainly transit deserts and I have friends that live in them who do have cars -- largely out in Queens, East New York, etc -- but many of the people I know in the city with cars are financially doing just fine.
It's also important to note that the extreme cost of living in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn is relatively recent. My friends that grew up here in the 80s, taking the subway to school, were far from bougie. They were living a car free lifestyle then and now just because that's how the environment of many parts of NYC is built. It's not like NYC was constructed as a walking paradise only for wealthy people in the 19th century.
True, I'm an old urbanite/suburb-hater. But because of ppl like me, I don't think there's any place left in the USA which has 'good' transit and isn't expensive. (And solutions like congestion tolls only work because of the boogieness.) What's done is done.
Yeah, agreed. We built the country for the car and there’s no easy path out of that. Every time I’m in LA I think “man we could have had a city like Barcelona” and get bummed it’s just a sprawling car dependent amalgamation of suburbs. There’s clearly demand for more cities like NYC in the US, but we’re not going to get it.
Yeah, some local billionaires want to build "San Francisco by the Sacramento Delta", and it's been nothing but NIMBY opposition. My guess it will be McMansions in 20 years instead. Politically, we can't even build one high-density suburb.
The working poor struggles to find work and stays poor also because mobility.
By the way that's not something I'm making up, it was literally told me by several people in struggling neighborhoods, lacking a car can be easily make a difference for many between being able or not to have different opportunities in life.
Might be different elsewhere but it made sense to me.
I've heard the same thing, because there's a lot of jobs out in suburban industrial parks and etc. (Some local transit agencies have tried to solve this, but the situation still isn't good.)
Wasn't GP specifically complaining about the other half not being able to enjoy the "car-free lifestyle"? (/not be forced to use the car to live their life.)
Yeah, "mobility opportunities". I recognize the issues, and the lack of easy answers, so I think I'm only "touchy" about is simplistic solutions.
European car commuter rates are almost identical to USA's. But I know little about the details, so don't really have any commentary, other than not all of Europe some glorious bike/transit boogie utopia. (And some ppl get "touchy" about that.)
You are completely correct about the bias on HN against cars: that will change when they get older and have kids. Not everyone is a young single urbanite working remotely or downtown.
I don't have kids but I do have 4 nephews. They all take their bikes or if not possible for whatever reason, buses/trains/trams/metro to school and elsewhere. My 1 sister lives in the countryside and her kids still take the bike to school, which is ~10km away from their house, and if they go to another city they can take their bikes on the train.
Why wouldn't you want your kid to be independent like this? Why force them to have to rely on you and your car if they want to go out and see their friends? It inconveniences you and makes their life much more dull and restricted, not to mention the health benefits of taking the bike vs sitting in a car for a kid.
I'm not judging them for choosing to use public transport or bicycles, that's their right. They should not judge car drivers, but they often do and want them banned.
The secret to successful urban living is tolerance, but sadly that is in short supply.
Thank you for saying this. My household is smack dab in the middle of a food dessert. We have a 25 year old car we got 10 years ago for $2000, and we use it primarily to go to the nice supermarket because you can get fresh, non moldy food at prices better than you can at the sketchy “supermarkets” and bodegas that always have rotting, moldy and non rotated food products on shelves. I do most of the shopping and I keep the freezer full of meat we can get on sale (just got 7 pounds of chicken wings for 2.49 a pound this week) and cook through that. A lot of the types in spaces like these don’t know how to cook and just use services like grubhub, and thinks everyone should too, or they buy 8 dollar a pound organic chicken thighs from Whole foods the day of. Everybody doesn’t live this way.
Also, I use the bus and train to go downtown and places where it would take an hour to find a parking spot. I even lug big bags of food from Aldi on the crowded bus at rush hour weekly. I don’t know why it has to be either you drive everywhere or never need a car in these discussions. Use what you need to use given the situation.
Speaking as "the other half": this is wildly condescending, ignorant, and ironic. The irony of declaring that HN doesn't understand "how the other half lives"...
...while also declaring that "used cars are a must" for poor people (if you can afford a car in a city, you're substantially above a huge number of people, and car ownership rate goes up dramatically with wealth. It rises higher than 1 car/person once you start hitting the single digits. A huge number of service industry people, not to mention students, get around on foot or bicycle. They just don't commute 9-5, and they don't live in your neighborhoods, so you don't see them)
...while also making wildly sweeping generalization about where transit does and doesn't go (in my city, poor people get busses, rich people get trolleys and light rail and commuter rail, and it's pretty clearly purposeful that it is very difficult to get to the rich residential parts from the poor residential parts)
...while also making wildly sweeping generalizations that working poor don't work downtown, and only work in "industrial" areas in cities. It really goes to show how invisible we all are to you....even when you're wagging your finger at the rest of HN for not understanding people like us, lol.
Downtown, who exactly do you think handles all the cleaning, maintenance, repair, delivery, food service, retail, etc in the "downtown" area of a city?
Who do you think delivers the paper towels and bottled water and k-cups? Everything around you in your office - every single fucking thing down to the carpet you're standing on - is there because a poor person put it there.
Who do you think is driving the busses and taxis and trucks and vans?
Who do you think works the "gig" "jobs" delivering everything from dry cleaning to laundry to a fancy lunch for to those "young healthy well-paid tech workers"? (and FYI, your boss/admin assistant/office manager, when they order that big lunch from the fancy place across town? They're shit tippers. And bad communicators. And take forever to show up to grab the order.)
Do you realize that even in the "boogie" (sic) part of the city, the guy running the cash register at that hip coffee joint is making as close to minimum wage as the company thinks they can get away with, which is likely, at best, a buck or two an hour more than average?
Who exactly do you think fills all the entry-level jobs, including in tech companies? What do you think the front desk receptionist is paid? The desktop support person?
I feel like you all think that someone who cleans the offices for the big dot-com or white-shoe law office...or someone who dishwashes or busses or does prep work for a fancy restaurant where a plate costs $50, is getting paid anything remotely proportional to the difference in cost from a restaurant a plate for $18 or the hourly rate of that law firm.
It's the opposite - the fanciest places and the biggest name corps squeeze people the hardest. That's how they got to where they are.
Criticism accepted, I am not trying to generalize everyone. I am an urban dweller from back in the days when that was the cheap (and less desirable) way to live. So I obviously wish we had much better transit and more affordable housing, and all of the good things. Its not like people want to spend an hour in traffic in a beater-ass car, they do it because they have to. (Because all of the shit you mention is even worse in the suburbs.) I would just like to see some real solutions which don't involve taxing the fuck out of the little guy or nuking the suburbs or the usual Cars Bad handwaving. It's a hard problem which nobody has a real good answer for.
Here's the sub-heading from the article you linked to:
"The story: Robert Moses ordered engineers to build the Southern State Parkway’s bridges extra-low, to prevent poor people in buses from using the highway. The truth? It’s a little more complex"
No evidence besides the direct testimony of a person that worked on the project given to one of the best biographers in a piece of work that won a Pulitzer Prize. Also, the physical evidence of the bridges. Circumstantially, the man was openly racist, and openly used design to segregate.
The assertion isn’t that you couldn’t take a bus to the beach. The assertion is that you couldn’t take a bus from the inner city neighborhoods to Jones Beach, which was true.
The prices of cars have “skyrocketed” because the price is now closer to what they actually cost. Meaning, less is being externalized.
Cars are inequality-creators because the drivers offload the cost to everyone, including those who don’t drive. Car centric decisions, air pollution, interstates and freeways, parking lots.
It’s very much akin to tobacco. Tobacco used to be cheap - when the tobacco wouldn’t pay for your addiction, or your COPD, or your eventual death. Now they do - a tiny bit - and tobacco is expensive.
>The prices of cars have “skyrocketed” because the price is now closer to what they actually cost. Meaning, less is being externalized.
This is false. There are no “externalities” that are now getting paid. You don’t pay for the right to drive upfront, you already have a permit for that, and that permit is what pays for road maintenance, etc. Maybe the current price is not fair, but that permit hasn’t increased in price. The reality is that Europe let all manufacturers buy one another so they don't have to compete anymore. So they can do whatever they want with prices.
>Cars are inequality-creators because the drivers offload the cost to everyone, including those who don’t drive.
Which wasn't a problem when everybody could afford to drive before Europe ruined everything.
> Which wasn't a problem when everybody could afford to drive before Europe ruined everything.
It was still a problem, because a lot of those people died or had reduced quality of life. The reality is driving is very dangerous. In the US, it's the primary cause of death for many age groups.
And the pollution kills. And it kills pedestrians. And car-dependence is a lot like heroin. You depend on cars, so you build things further, so you must drive more. It's a self-eating beast.
Once cars started becoming less polluting and less deadly, i.e. _less cost was externalized_, they got more expensive.
If you truly think Europe is "ruined" because morbidly-obese people aren't puttering around in stinky automobiles for 2-3 hours a day, then I don't know what to tell you. To me, it's nice to have beautiful cities were people can walk. It's nice to go to work and not have a sudden urge to kill yourself.
These people can always move to the Land of the Free, of course. Suburban concrete hellscape after suburban concrete hellscape. I'm referring to the US, of course. The land of varicose veins, fatty liver disease, suicide and smog. Ah, beautiful.
It's only hyperbole because you have a car-centric point of view. From an objective point of view, there are A LOT of problems with cars.
It's not hyperbolic to say that cars kill people on the scale of tobacco and alcohol. It's literally true. Again, the primary cause of death for a lot of demographics in the US is driving. You would, literally, have a lower mortality if you walked to work and smoked a Capri methanol on the way.
We just don't view driving in this way because, unlike tobacco, it is a necessary evil. As soon as you dismantle the assumption that it's necessary the rest falls into place.
There is a direct link between car-centric infrastructure and most things that are killing you and making your life worse. The fact you choose to ignore it does not mean it doesn't exist. And, to be fair, ignoring it is good practice. If I had to come to terms with my own mortality before every commute I'd probably kill myself. Ignorance is bliss.
If you simply look at the places world-wide associated with higher quality of life you'll notice a common denominator. More greenery, more walking, fresher food, more public transit, and less cars. It's not a coincidence, it's pretty obvious when you sit down and put the pieces together.
Suburbs are fine. We are in 2025, not 1925, there is no reason why work from home isn't an option for information workers and others who don't need to be physically on premises. You are completely ignoring how much that cuts down on traffic and would lower the cost of real estate, so more people who aren't millionaires could live downtown. We also have electric cars that have basically zero emissions, there is a technical solution for this; not everyone wants to ride a bus or train.
Work from home is great, but there’s more to life than work. Being walking distance or public transport distance to the rest of life’s activities is also great. And EVs aren’t saving the planet they are saving the car industry. They still cause tire particulate pollution, noise pollution, light pollution, and need tons of rare earth minerals
Don't forget the most important scarce resource they require: space.
We waste so much space for parking and other car friendly infrastructure there often is not enough left for a a bike line or even a sidewalk let alone some actually pleasant peaceful passage people could use.
Private cars are an economic sinkhole. They make no financial sense. My town in the exurbs used to have rail service and stagecoaches. The necessity of private cars is a marketing triumph. Not a choice.
I like the freedom a private car gives me. I can go anywhere at anytime. I have nothing against public transportation and want it to be good. But you can't go everywhere at anytime. Here I'm including the country side and smaller towns.
Nothing says freedom like being required to spend thousands of dollars just to get around and participate in society. Imagine how "free" the roughly one-third of folks who are too young, too old, too disabled, etc. to drive a car feel when trying to go about their lives.
Anywhere where a road is. Or anywhere you could park a car. This means the car does not give you the freedom but the entire car transportation network. If instead there was no car infrastructure but only public transport you would say you can't go everywhere at anytime with a car.
So the state of public transportation in your area is bad enough you have to own a car. Being forced to own one is freedom, and so is needing a government-issued driver's license and a license plate.
This is a solved problem in countries with modern public transportation. In Japan for example you can go across the entire country without needing a single car, and indeed it's both cheaper and more available than doing so while driving. If you need to go somewhere really far out of the way that is not reachable by foot or bicycle, then you can rent a car.
All of this results in a system that is far cheaper for you and far more open for the average individual.
I think you're getting cause and effect mixed up. Save for a few petrolheads and train enthusiasts, people use whatever happens to be the most convenient method to get around. In North America, most cities prioritise infrastructure for private cars to such an extent that any other mode is almost useless
Since private cars scale badly, you want to encourage people to take other modes, but in order to change behaviour, the alternatives need to be attractive - cycle layouts that are safe, buses and trains that are frequent and reliable, city layouts that don't involve a long drive to buy food. You can't convince people out of taking the rational choice. You have to build it
If you really don’t like cars, you’ll find a way to minimize use of them.
If you really don’t mind cars that much you’ll make up stories about how if buses and trains and bike lanes were more attractive then people would use them more.
I guarantee that if every American city had an ideal bus and train system, people would still find excuses and reasons to justify driving their cars.
There is literally an example of a city with great public transport and 90% of people there use it exclusively. So most people will not make excuses but just use the thing that is easy.
Everyone loves their car, but hates everyone else's cars. Remember, your car is transport, everyone else's cars are traffic.
Saying "people love cars" is false. Some people love cars. Those are the ones doing their own work/maintenance/restorations etc and just spending time in the garage with their cars. A few more people love driving, they don't just love cars for their own sake, but they will go and just drive for fun. But most people don't do any of that. They just use cars as part of their boring, routine lives.
You might as well say US people fucking love washing machines or knives and forks.
> You might as well say US people fucking love washing machines or knives and forks.
Yeah, you’re getting it.
Nobody will say they love washing machines but they clearly do. We see it in their actions. Same as with cars. Everything they do tells us that they love cars. They drive comically short distances. They spend money they barely have to buy them.
It is, though the problem predates the cars. At the time cars were seen as a huge win over the vast piles of horse poop.
Cities do need to be reconsidered for more public transit and more opportunities to walk, but other issues (delivery, emergency, disability, etc) have to figure in.
There was a time in between, where electric streetcars (trains) were a common mode of transport. But those got torn up for cars. That’s a real tragedy in hindsight.
That's the myth. Streetcars were actually torn up because busses were much cheaper, there was no conspiracy. The streetcars were also old and cold and ppl hated them.
(I lived in a streetcar part of SF, and loved it, fwiw. But the only reason it's still there is a tunnel.)
That is a statement that really needs citation and qualification to back it up. I'd argue that 'cheaper' is used in a vacuum here. By that I mean that the point of mass transit isn't how much it costs, but how much value it provides. By that measure the bus services that replaced streetcars and other mass transit really doesn't stack up. Busses have led to much lower ridership which has led to a massive amount of bad secondary effects. Looking at how congestion pricing in NYC has increased mass transit use AND economic activity it is pretty clear that 'cheaper' has led to secondary effects that far outweigh any narrow operational gains from switching to busses.
So… it kind of made sense at the time (if you ignored a couple of factors which didn’t become obvious until much later, and which ultimately made it a disaster), and it’s not just an American thing. In 1928, Dublin had 28 tramlines. By 1950, it had zero, with the tram routes being replaced by bus routes (many older Dublin Bus routes basically follow old tram routes even today). It didn’t have trams again til 2004; today it has two lines.
But _at the time_, buses were very competitive with trams; there wasn’t all that much other road traffic, so they weren’t really slower (and they could use the tram lines, while they existed, as a right of way), the trams of the time were non-articulated, so buses had similar or higher capacity, and they were more flexible. It’s easy to see how it happened, and it only became apparent that there was a problem when it was far too late to reverse.
There are really two problems with buses vs trams; buses are slow when there is lots of other traffic, and, _with modern articulated trams_, higher total capacities are achievable (one of Dublin’s modern tramlines has trams that take over 400 people with a frequency of under 3 minutes between trams at peak, which is a level of capacity that you just can’t really get with buses). Neither of these were factors when the first-generation trams died.
Very few tram systems worldwide actually survived from the early 20th century to today; while there are lots of trams today, most are second-generation systems put in from the 80s on.
The citation is every American transit system in the 1950s. Even SF only kept the streetcars where they couldn't replace with a bus line.
I think you're making a different argument, where trains attract a more well-heeled commuter. Which is why many cities have brought back LRT as part of a redevelopment plan.
The argument I am making is that you can only say something was cheaper if it provided the same level of service or better for less money. In the case of the bus transition it provided worse service as indicated by utilization dropping. I am also making the argument that evaluating the value of transit shouldn't rest entirely on the cost of that service and ridership but on the value as a whole it brings to a city. I mentioned NYC because the evidence there (and in other cities that have implemented congestion pricing) is that as ridership goes up the economic, environment, and social health of a city also goes up. Point being, the bus transition had a very negative value impact. I will also add a final argument, as your ridership drops things like busses may appear less costly per ride simply because you are loosing volume and low volume routes are likely easier to service by bus so, again, cheaper but not an apples to apples comparison.
Yes, I like trains and wish we had better transit. I'm responding to the claim streetcars were "torn up for cars", which was not really the case (and frequently subject to a conspiracy theory).
Trains are expensive upfront, which might favor buses when expanding into new areas. But if the infrastructure is already there, a train line will always be more economical in the long run than the equivalent bus line.
So ripping out existing serviceable train tracks is stupid (or alternatively: evil) if you think in the long term.
As I said in another post, train tracks don't last forever and are expensive to replace. And trains really only benefit from dedicated ROW, a streetcar is worse than a bus in many respects. (Except appeal.) People back in the 1950s were not stupid or evil, they made a decision which made a lot of sense at the time.
Establishing a new bus service in an area where public transportation had not existed must be indeed much cheaper.
However it is impossible for the operational and maintenance costs for a bus service and for the roads on which the buses go to be cheaper than for an electric streetcar, unless some prices are fake.
It is true that I have seen enough cases where electric streetcars have been replaced by buses, but I cannot see other explanation except bribes, because it was extremely visible that the buses were more expensive, both because of the fuel consumption and because of the much more frequent repairs both for the buses and for the roads.
It's interesting, in San Francisco, the streetcars got too heavy for the old tracks so they replaced them with about 4 feet deep of concrete. That is actual infrastructure and not "fake". (along with all the stops and handicap ramps and etc. obviously, a paved street is going to exist either way.)
Bribes and the mafia may have been a factor[0], but that's how American cities do things.
Emergency response times go down in almost any case where car use is restricted. In the Netherlands emergency vehicles take bike lane shortcuts because people on bikes can move out of the way more easily. In New York, congestion pricing reduced the response times of emergency services.
Disability needs an annotations for only specific disabilities that don't inhibit driving. Which is a small subset of disabilities.
Delivery of most things can be done with small cars/trucks.
I don't understand this part, I read it quite often but... well, we are a family with young children, and although we do have a car we only use it once a week to go to the grand-parents that live 100 km away from here.
A city with less cars is great especially for families (though I would argue that cities themselves are not so great for children, but the comparison here is between cities that are car-centric or that are not). It makes going out easier and more spontaneous.
It's much less of a hassle to hop in the cargo bike and go wherever (including stopping en route if you see something interesting) than having to use the car, sit in traffic, hope you can find parking space at your destination, and pay for it.
I have very two kids, plan to have three. Cargo bikes are not practical, are easily stolen, and are not safe to transport children, especially under 6 years old. Besides, when doing groceries for 5 once a week, I regularly fill my 500L car boot, so an equivalent cargo bike with at least 3 seats and a large boot... would just be a car. Which you have, and use once a week.
Or when you need to go to the doctor. Or when your wife is sick. Or if you have an urgency. So, as a family, you still need a car.
Well I just have the reverse experience. My cargo bike is practical, has not been stolen yet and up to four children under 6 are fine to transport in it. I don't feel it especially unsafe.
I also use it for groceries. Sometimes using both the cargo bike and a bike trailer (on two different bikes). We don't buy nearly at many things though it seems. When I do use my car (doing groceries while the children are with the grandparents) I have to transfer them from the car to the bike anyway because I can rarely park close to my home.
My doctor (and my wife's doctor) is certainly easier to reach by foot than by car. And I guess I never have the kind of urgency that would require me to use a car in the city. If there's something urgent a bike is always faster in this city.
In the 60s, Dutch anti-car protestors had the slogan "Stop the child murder!". People were used to traditional cities where children could safely cycle around, but then cars came and started killing them.
If there are fewer cars on the road, there is a lot less traffic, and driving because much easier for those who are car-dependent. Example: the Netherlands.
Yes, but they're used less frequently. Most middle class people have a car, but they're often only used for irregular trips. Commuting and errands use alternative means at much higher rates than elsewhere.
Point is, they still need cars if they have them. And Netherlands are very far from Paris, infrastructure-wise. In Paris, for instance, leaving your cargo or e-bike outside for the night means finding nothing when you wake up (I got two bikes stolen already, and they were the cheapest available).
The topic of the original post is air pollution. Unused cars don't cause air pollution. The topic of this thread is inconveniencing the disabled. Unused cars don't cause traffic that inconveniences the disabled.
Paris tackled the problem by making it very hard to own a car. It's the same for Amsterdam, too. We all hate pollution, it's just that the solutions available in the Dutch countryside are a bit different than in Paris.
That’s not a given. Nobody here is talking about outright bans on all vehicles. Limited access for taxis and commercial use is a thing. Buses can be built with wheelchair access. Etc.
And with less space reserved for cars and only cars, there’s more space for wide/accessible sidewalks. Less chance of being run over by a car. Less air and noise pollution.
Well if you have less space for cars, parking spots are more expensive as a result. In Paris it's around a year of living wage. And currently, sidewalks are getting smaller due to the need to build bicycle lanes.
My initial post was that in Paris, they removed cars but did not improve public transports, so buses are overcrowded and hostile to strollers.
In Paris, 90% of the metro transportation system isn't accessible to wheelchairs and strollers. Buses are overcrowded and slow. Who doesn't enjoy to see someone cough on their newborn while fighting for a space for their stoller ?
Buses are perfectly accessible in Paris. They are crowded but acceptably so for a city of 10 millions. It’s not fair to expect the collectivity to accept the externalities of cars so rich people can avoid some slight discomfort.
Paris is not a city of 10 millions, it has only two million habitants. And cars are not reserved to rich people, why would they be? I grew up in Paris, my parents weren't rich, we were living in public housing and we had a car.
Families are not second-tier citizens, and currently the public transports are not suited for them. On top of the other problems, such as the pleasure of having to deal with crackheads and various homeless people in the metro when you have a baby.
When it comes to traffic and urban planning, Paris is best understood as a city of 10+ million people. The administrative subdivision called Paris has only ~2 million people, but the city doesn't end at its borders.
Yes, however there is little urban planning for whole metro, and the administrative level we are talking about here is the intra-muros one. When the mayor decided to reduce the speed on the outer loop, she didn't notify nor discussed with the rest of the metro, for instance. And the measures discussed in the article are specific to Paris.
> Yes, however there is little urban planning for whole metro
Paris biggest infrastructure project for the past 20 years is called "Grand Paris" and revolve entirely around the whole metro. Actually there is literally no urban planning not involving the whole metro. And yes, lowering the speed limit involved multiple consultations with the prefect and the region because it impacts the whole metro.
Considering Paris without its metropole doesn’t make sense. Paris intra-muros is ridiculously small, one eightieth of London, 80% of San Francisco.
You can consider as much as you want, it is not unified. The result is that Paris has an anti-car policy, but the neighboring towns are very pro-car, creating a system where Parisians can't own one, but have to bear their neighbor's who use them to get into the city.
The article you quote says the opposite of what you pretend. I invite you to read the paragraph "Une décision sous le contrôle de l’Etat, rappelle le ministère". It explains in details than the mayor could do nothing without the state agreeing to it.
> You can consider as much as you want, it is not unified.
It is unified. The city and its suburb are one economic unit. Where do you think all the service workers live? You have to be an extremely narrow minded inner city dweller to fail to see this.
> creating a system where Parisians can't own one, but have to bear their neighbor's who use them to get into the city.
I kindly invite you to check the average salary of Paris inhabitants vs the one in the suburbs then take a minute to think about what you just wrote.
Only if you just remove the cars without replacing them with good public transportation (family friendly, accessible, with special modes for disabled people).
Well, they aren't exempt. Many French greens will tell you anyway that having children is bad for the planet and that you should abstain. And, as our population grows older, the accessibility problem will be larger and larger.
They were also seen as a safety win [1][2]. Horses and horse drawn carts were a lot more dangerous than most people here probably think they were.
From the second link:
> It is easy to imagine that a hundred years ago, when cars were first
appearing on our roads, they replaced previously peaceful, gentle and safe
forms of travel. In fact, motor vehicles were welcomed as the answer to a
desperate state of affairs. In 1900 it was calculated that in England and
Wales there were around 100,000 horse drawn public passenger vehicles,
half a million trade vehicles and about half a million private carriages.
Towns in England had to cope with over 100 million tons of horse droppings
a year (much of it was dumped at night in the slums) and countless gallons
of urine. Men wore spats and women favoured outdoor ankle-length coats
not out of a sense of fashion but because of the splash of liquified
manure; and it was so noisy that straw had to be put down outside
hospitals to muffle the clatter of horses’ hooves. Worst of all, with
horses and carriages locked in immovable traffic jams, transport was
grinding to a halt in London and other cities.
> Moreover, horse-drawn transport was not safe. Road traffic deaths
from horse-drawn vehicles in England and Wales between 1901 and 1905 were
about 2,500 a year. This works out as about 70 road traffic deaths per
million population per year which is close to the annual rate of 80 to 100
deaths per million for road traffic accidents in the 1980s and 1990s,
although we must not forget that many people who died from injuries
sustained in road accidents in 1900 would probably have survived today
thanks to our A&E departments.
> Motor vehicles were welcomed because they were faster, safer,
unlikely to swerve or bolt, better able brake in an emergency, and took up
less room: a single large lorry could pull a load that would take several
teams of horses and wagons – and do so without producing any dung. By
World War One industry had become dependent on lorries, traffic cruised
freely down Oxford Street and Piccadilly, specialists parked their
expensive cars ouside their houses in Harley and Wimpole Street, and the
lives of general practitioners were transformed. By using even the
cheapest of cars doctors no longer had to wake the stable lad and harness
the horse to attend a night call. Instead it was ‘one pull of the handle
and they were off’. Further, general practitioners could visit nearly
twice as many patients in a day than they could in the days of the horse
and trap.
Not just horse poop, but dead horses that were quite the chore to remove back in the day, and the danger posed to pedestrians by a bunch of quite large and easily panicked animals.
One of the early examples of the Poisson distribution was the rate at which soldiers in the Prussian army would be fatally kicked by horses.
Translates to a little over 30 deaths per year per million, so not a lot, though I suspect the number would have been much greater adjusted for distance travelled and even without that it's more than some countries achieve with their traffic.
This is true, but from the perspective of the time, automobiles were far from "2 tons of metal" and quite a bit slower. They were also a rich man's conveyance, even more so than a nice carriage, and I doubt people understood early on just how widely adopted the automobile would become.
Let's call it what it really is. The stubborn unwillingness to consider scalability in our designs and planning — even in an era where a machine can do calculation for us.
There are cities not designed around cars. We just call them "rural." You could not have had your urban city without cars. There is absolutely nothing "tragic" about this.
Meanwhile you live in a world where petty wars are fought over resources to enhance the wealth of an extreme minority of the population. That's an actual tragedy.
I lived car-free life in a (European) city without any hassle. I moved to "rural" and can't imagine I would be able to live there without a car. In city, you can afford to have public transport on every corner going every ten minutes. In the rural area it's impossible.
> You could not have had your urban city without cars.
… Eh? The city I live in has been here for a thousand years, and that doesn’t even make it a particularly old city. _Outer suburbs_ are a somewhat car-dependent phenomenon, but cities certainly are not.
I’m still not sure what point you’re trying to make… you claimed cities can’t exist without cars. Yet London and Paris and Rome and damn near every big city in Europe did predate cars by centuries.
Paris didn't improve its public transportation system, as it made it impossible to own a car. It ends up as pure sadism for the inhabitants who are not childless, affluent 20/30 years old, and who have no alternative than having to take the piss-smelling cattle trains with no access the disabled people, or strollers.
> it's the people who can't afford to live in the city who need them to get there.
What are you talking about. Paris's public transport reaches out 60km away from the city, and that's not including mainline trains (including high speed). The people who can't afford to live in the city have taken public transport to get there for 50 years.
A lot of economic activity requires cars. Delivery, workers coming with equipment, waste management, and so on. Every construction worker in Paris will tell you that it's very difficult to work there, and that they have doubled their prices as a result.
These people are HELPED by anti-car legislation because it clears the congestion for them to run their business.
Most small, and large, businesses would happily pay a small fee if it means half the transportation time. And it does, because traffic isn’t linear. Just a few more cars can be the difference between coasting at 30 or not moving at all.
If it's really only a difference of a few cars then there should be a dozen other ways to get a similar effect without enacting a regressive tax.
Meanwhile doing it through financial deterrence requires that someone is actually deterred. And then is that going to be poor people and small businesses or rich people and major companies?
It's a compulsory fee charged by the government not based on income/consumption. That's the most regressive tax. Even sales tax is less regressive than that.
> it primarily assists commuters and small businesses
Relative to any alternative that reduces congestion without charging fees, it doesn't. Even relative to doing nothing, the people being deterred are the ones paying the cost, and the people being deterred are the most price sensitive ones, i.e. the poor.
The infrastructure changes required to get cars out meant to reduce the flow speed of cars. As a result, even buses, who have dedicated lanes, are much slower.
[EDIT]: since I'm being answered that it isn't true, here is a chart made by the city hall about the decreasing speed on Paris' roads:
EDIT: Okay, to expand, it's true that speed limits in progressive cities have been falling for a while. This is meant reduce the number of pedestrain fatalities and overall make the cities safer and more pleasant.
HOWEVER, this does not mean that traveling by car is worse. These, in combination with anti-congestion legislation, make driving faster. The thing about driving is that broad roads and clear visibility encourage bad behavior, like speeding and tailgating. This actually increases traffic. It's counter-productive, but reducing speed can improve flow.
Paris has an ever increasing congestion caused by those measures, as most of the drivers are professionals linked to the city's economic activity who need to get there. Deliveries, constructions vehicules and workers, and so on. It is so bad that surface public transports are being shunned and see usage decrease because they are too slow.
The ones who live directly adjacent to a rail line weren't generally the ones in cars to begin with, unless they were the ones using a vehicle to actually transport something.
You clearly have a non-existent knowledge of French political life. This referendum had a participation rate of 4%, and only 62% of the voters voted yes. So around 2% of the total voters.
By the way, the French metro's air is highly polluted, due to tire degradation and brake dust, making it unfit for children or pregnant women.
So yeah, it's manageable for young people. But when a baby arrives, it's hell. Same if you are old. Or disabled.
Dutch people seem to do just fine with baby seats on their bikes, or bakfiets if you have lots of kids.
Anecdotally, kids are also much happier when they can just bike to school/sports/activities with their friends instead of having their parents drive then everywhere on the back of the family SUV.
Dutch people using bikes for everything is a meme, they have as many cars per inhabitants as most of the developed nations. Anecdotically, they are a small, dense, flat country, with an oceanic weather.
But those cars, as has been explained to you, don’t do nearly as many trips per year.
Mobility in families is actually higher, since each individual has sturdy legs, and highly likely, a bike after they’re about 5 years old. Kids often travel to school, after school events etc on foot, bike or public transport, not dependent as in many car-centric places on parents and their cars.
Grandma is as likely to bike over for dinner with the grandkids as drive.
We have cars here, but you're not dependent on them to get everywhere unless you live in the countryside (and even then, I knew plenty of kids who lived up in the North who biked 10+ km 1 way to school) or one of the super small cities where the sprinters are sparse. And isn't that the point most people make? It's not about complete eradication of cars, it's about having viable transport alternatives and the infrastructure to support those. It's just that we live in such a world where it's unthinkable to not have half our countries paved in asphalt to make sure cars can get places, so things like these always end up falling into a 2-sided extremist camp.
But...you still have cars fr when you need one. What many commenters argue here, and what the Paris administration is arguing is that you shouldn't own one.
I mean if you live in a city like Paris, then yeah I'd say that's legitimate. I see nothing wrong with making such dense urban centers car-free other than what's necessary like deliveries or ambulances and such, but for the former these days you've got tiny electric trucks that even fit on bike paths without causing a ruckus, usually you'll see those grocery delivery services use them.
Yes, people outside of urban cities like that (which, basically by definition means the majority of people in the country) still need cars to get around most likely, but at least we can ensure that inside the cities themselves, there are good alternatives for people to get around that benefits every single person who finds themselves in the city not inside a car, which will be the overwhelming majority of people.
I live in Utrecht in the Netherlands, and the single best thing the gov't did a few years ago is rip out the highway that was in the city center and instead turned it back into a canal surrounded by parks [1]. Literally nobody who has ever been to Utrecht would argue we were better off with the highway.
No, the vote was pure communication by the mayor, it didn't have a budget, nor a list of the streets, nor any details. Paris' administration is rife with corruption and mismanagement, so voters weren't very mobilized for another PR coup.
I would suggest to look into the various whimsical subsidies of the city hall, the very expensive procurement of useless products or the ruinous public housing policy, that all serve to help the friends of the mayor and the constellation of fake associations that support her. All has been also documented, and has been mentioned repeatedly by the press.
EV are still not competitive when most of us live in flats, and most would never even consider buying one given their prices if it wasn't for the subsidies.
Europe chose to levy big fuel taxes and punitive displacement taxes. Diesel cars are some of the best when it comes to driving experience and fuel economy for a given displacement. What followed was perfectly predictable.
The road to hell is paved with public policy implemented with willful ignorance to obvious 2nd order effects.
There are many more gasoline cars than diesel cars in the European Union. The latter are used more though and heavy vehicles are also diesel so there is a higher consumption of diesel than gasoline.
This it the most immediate and obvious change in any Chinese city now, they are practically silent. All electric cars means you can actually have a conversation with someone while walking through crowded downtown areas, and you never realize how much of a difference it makes until you experience it.
Of course, noise on sidewalks is important and annoying. But to a German who is used to good (sealed) German windows, French and Spanish cities, just to name some, are just a pain.
Be it in hotel rooms or regular homes, almost nowhere the windows are sealed. Just pressing gently on the window (more pressure on the sealing) reduces the moped noises by 30-50%.
I believe https://carto.bruitparif.fr/ represents 2022 levels, but my French is very rusty and I suspect that historical data review is more readily available to a speaker of it. Perhaps that site has lockdown data as a layer somewhere?
There's this guy on YouTube that travelled to india and one thing stood out to me was the non-stop honking of cars and bikes. Just endless forever. What a nightmare!
I wonder what that does to a population. How does anyone think??
I used to live next to a big intersection with a red light, and the cars accelerating away when it goes green was annoying. I now live at the end of a cul-de-sac with a cemetary behind me. So much more peaceful!
Great that they have made parking more expensive for heavy and huge cars.
My city here offers parking free of charge for EVs, but note they are heavy, have wide tires and cost parking space.
Whats the tradeoff then?
Its wasting electric energy to move such a pile of metal for one person.
I critisized that in the forum of our local newspaper, my comment got deleted....
This just makes me think about how absurd it is that left wing people are lately seeming more anti-EV, and picking up oil industry talking points on EVs.
Car are still a lot in Paris and there are conflicting studies about the air quality evolution in Paris, some days it is better, some days not. But the Parisian regulation on car as no real effect so far.
Paris is like at a bottom of a curve and it is said that the car might account only for less than 20% of it, the biggest contributor being industry in the region.
What had a big impact on thin particules are the evolution of car technologies. Now every engine in France has to be equiped with efficient catalytic exhaust pipes and efficient engine to reduce this kind of bad particules.
In this article, you can see a very deceptive image comparison. There is a picture of the Eiffel tower long time ago and now.
The picture of before has a strong fog, but it is just because being taken on a foggy day but the article would like you to think that it is how a picture would have been everyday due to the popultof the air...
“Someone without bias” is indeed obvious, and therefore unhelpful. Can you be more specific? Who, precisely, doesn’t have a dog in the climate change fight?
How specific am I supposed to be, do you want names, resumes, potential investors?
Not my problem to solve.
However, I no longer accept published reports at face value, unless I check who the authors are, and who funds them. They even have a Cruchbase page, it's easy to check for yourself.
> How specific am I supposed to be, do you want names, resumes, potential investors?
Names would be good, for a start. If you can’t name a single person, group, or entity whose opinion would satisfy you, it’s likely that no amount of evidence would change your mind. Which means that you’re not discussing this topic in good faith.
All human endeavors have human bias, in one direction or the other. If you’re waiting for a bias-free source of information, you’ll be waiting a long time.
> Your argument that I should accept one source blindly
Others may have made that argument, but show me where I’ve done that. So far, all I’ve done is ask you who you’d accept as a valid authority, or what evidence you’d accept. And you can’t even do that.
A claim has been made that air quality in Paris has improved, and evidence has been provided to back that claim up, in the form of AQI readings provided by (in your words) “an NGO run by environmentalists and funded by the EU”. In turn, you have made a 2nd claim that this evidence is flawed, but so far you’ve provided no evidence to back your claim up. Claims which are made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
I simply questioned the independence of the source of the evidence, is such critical thinking not allowed?
Your attempt to somehow make me responsible to provide an alternative source of evidence is classic deflection. That is not my responsibility. Do your own research etc.
This isn’t critical thinking. Your complete inability to even vaguely hint or suggest at someone who might be better equipped to either perform this analysis or fund it makes that clear.
“Someone without bias” is a cop out. Everyone has bias, and literally anyone performing or funding air quality measurements is going to have some sort of interest in their outcome. There is no sterile room of blind and deaf eunuchs performing these services and you know that.
This comment was made in bad faith on your part, all I did was make that fact obvious.
Sigh, I already addressed this demand that I MUST name an alternative in this thread. It's deflection pure and simple, I'm not going over that again...
If you don’t think the current people doing this work or funding it are appropriate, you should be able to give at least a vague idea of an entity you think is better suited for either.
The only qualification you managed to put out there is that they don’t have bias. This is literally unachievable and you know it, which is why you won’t even attempt to even hint at a better party.
If even “an NGO run by environmentalists and funded by the EU” is beyond the pale for you, then there is no such thing as a source which will meet the standard of “independence” that you’re applying. Which again, means you’re not discussing in good faith. Good day.
> However, I no longer accept published reports at face value, unless I check who the authors are, and who funds them.
No, you use this as a cop out to deny results. In this case you have done this check and you have decided you do not want to believe the outcome so you wave around a vague charge of bias in a lame attempt to discredit it.
Please show me one single scientific report or conclusion you’ve accepted that passed this same “bias test”. Neither the authors nor their funding source may have a particular interest in the outcome. Any such example will do.
Since this thread has already established that bias is inherent in all human endeavors, why don't you try addressing the quality of the evidence itself, instead of its source?
More important than the quality of the evidence itself? People you disagree with can still be right from time to time, even if they are "biased" as you suggest.
Right, right, you never said you disagreed. You’re “just asking questions”.
The messenger matters less than the data, the collection methods, and the approach to analysis. Bias can be a reason to more carefully examine a conclusion and the methods, particularly if a source has had quality issues in the past.
But simply throwing out accusations of bias in the absence of literally any other reason to doubt a pretty straightforward conclusion (removing sources of NO2 makes NO2 go down, shocking!) is not a meaningful contribution to a discussion. Every researcher is biased. Every source of funding is biased. Hell, you haven’t even shown that they’re significantly biased, the only thing you’ve pointed out is that apparently some of their grant funding came from the EU, as if that’s some sort of smoking gun.
Did their bias lead them to an invalid conclusion? Do you believe it did? Do you have a reason to believe it did? If so, state it. If not, what was the point in making your comment other than to sow doubt?
Of course I'd be skeptical. Skepticism is healthy, especially in your example. In that case, the most productive conversation to have would be examining (and either refuting or accepting) their evidence. So far you've refused to do either one here. Instead, you repeatedly engage in the genetic fallacy I linked to above, or insisting that we should consult some impossibly impartial oracle of objective truth instead.
That's your right of course. No one can force you to avoid using logical fallacies. But the longer you do that, the more it starts to look like you're avoiding or even conceding the real debate. It's up to you whether that matters to you.
Which part does it exclude? Elderly who are unfit to drive, anyone below driving age or who can't afford a car or license? People with disabilities, like blind people, people with motor issues, people with disabilities that can't afford a modified car? All these people have to dodge cars to get to places.
Horrible propaganda. More then anything else, cars are what excludes access.
It doesn't really work is hilarious statement when some of the cities with highest amount of tourists in the world have car free city centers. Not to mention that many off the cities ranked highest quality of live have lots of car free areas.
https://archive.is/zWfzo
Worth noting that 50-60% of passenger cars in France are diesel, but Paris have been gradually banning older higher emission diesels (Crit’air 3, 4, 5) from Paris. Banning cars outright also works, of course, but I suspect a lot of the reduction can be attributed to getting particularly bad diesel cars out vs. the limited areas where cars are entirely restricted.
Also worth noting that with modern emissions standards (and transition to EVs), over 50% of handful particulates come from tires, brakes, road surface wear, and resuspended dust:
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/non-exhaust-particulate...
I don't think there's any healthy level of private cars coexisting with humans in a city, without even considering the more immediate harms from crashes, etc.
It seems that there has been fundamental mistakes and overstatements in the amount of particles from brakes in much of the secondary research in the last decades.
Details: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.4c00792
One would also expect that EVs wouldn't emit that many particles from brakes since the brakes typically wear much more slowly than with ICE cars.
But they are heavier. Not saying it offsets the effect but it's just not straight forward to assume either way.
EVs have very low brake wear because you simply aren’t using the friction brakes at all most of the time.
A lot of EVs even have smart “blended” brake pedals that preferentially apply regen braking when you press the pedal. Only in particularly hard stops will the friction brakes get used.
An easy way to test/observe this is simply to check for wear on the brake pads of EVs compared to combustion vehicles of similar mileage.
Tires, on the other hand, do tend to wear out quicker in an EV. Partly due to weight and also due to higher performance/acceleration compared to combustion models.
This little friction break usage is actually something which manufacture need to consider. They need to activate once in a while to stop rust and other problems.
They almost certainly do. For example, our Chevy Volt (EV + gasoline engine range booster) puts the engine through a maintenance phase if you haven’t used the engine in a few weeks, and will force the engine to consume any fuel left in the tank if it hasn’t been refilled in several months.
We're talking about brakes, not engines.
But I know at least one EV maker that has a manually selected mode that guides you through driving with the brakes engaged for surface treatment, as rust buildup will be the main issue.
In the US, the average car weight and the average EV weight are basically identical. (4300 pounds vs 4400 pounds). When you compare similarly sized models the EV tends to be about 10% heavier, but gasoline cars tend to be larger than EV's.
In the EU an average car is 1400 kg (3000 lbs), with most vehicles probably in the 1000-1200 kg range. We don't really want the average here, but the median - and we don't want to compare to the average EV, but to the equivalent EV - comparing an F150 to, say, a model 3 isn't right.
A BYD Dolphin, roughly sized like a VW Polo, is some 400kg heavier than the polo. A Polestar 2 is roughly 500 kg heavier than equivalent sized cars. In other words, something like 33% heavier.
FWIW I learned semi recently that cars get heavier and heavier because it improves their “ecology” rating… the ratings consider that moving 50% more weight with only 33% more gas is better than moving 0% extra weight with 0% more gas. And so a heavier car that uses a little more gas gets a better energy rating.
It’s moronic. But that’s how it works and why cars are getting bigger and bigger.
BYD Dolphin is size of Golf not Polo.
BYD Dolphin weight 1600kg, length 4290mm.
VW Polo weight 1580kg, length 3971 mm.
https://www.automobiledimension.com/model/byd/dolphin
https://auto.economictimes.indiatimes.com/cars/volkswagen-po...
You are comparing the max loaded weight of the polo with the unloaded weight of a dolphin.
VW Polo Mk6 is 1751mm wide, 1461mm tall, 4067mm long and has an unloaded curb weight of 1105 kg. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Polo_Mk6
The BYD Dolphin 2025 60kWh is 1770mm wide, 1570mm tall, 4290mm long, and has an unloaded curb weight of 1658 kg. https://bydautomotive.com.au/brochures/BYD-DOLPHIN-2025.pdf.
The VW Golf Mk8 might be a better comparison with an unloaded curb weight of 1255 kg, which reduces the gap from 543kg to 403kg.
(Note that for the gasoline and diesel cars, lighter trims give longer range, whereas it is opposite for electric cars, and that a fully loaded 45L tank of a polo weighs less than 40kg, especially if gasoline)
> You are comparing the max loaded weight of the polo with the unloaded weight of a dolphin.
In this context, what is the air speed velocity of an unloaded dolphin? Especially compared to an unladen swallow?
There is a 200kg difference between lowest trims of Dolphin and Golf, while Dolphin is slightly bigger.
2025 BYD Dolphin, length 4290mm height 1570mm, curb weight 1506kg - 1658 kg
2025 VW Golf, length 4282 mm height 1483 mm, gasoline empty weight 1307 kg - 1492 kg
https://www.volkswagen.de/de/modelle/golf.html/__ui/technisc...
The lower battery trim is not available in all markets, and only does 300km on a charge which is below average. As such the minimum weight will have to be the 1658 kg value.
The BYD is taller to offset the battery, making the size misleading. However, the golf is not particularly a particularly good or space efficient car - others will do better at similar or lower weight.
250kg seems like a fair minimum weight increase, roughly 20%. The larger the car, the larger the gap though, as the rocket equation catches up - see a Skoda Octavia vs. a Polestar 2.
EVs are still way more efficient, but that doesn't mean we should turn our blind eye to making an already bad tire problem worse.
Higher trim Dolphin has 150kW motor and weights 1658 kg. VW Golf with 150 kW (204 PS) engine weights 1492 kg empty. I see only 10% difference.
Same tier EVs are always more powerful than gasoline cars as they are generally just battery limited, not motor limited.
EVs are just a better tech in that regard, and buyers are not buying a Dolphin or golf based on torque or max HP. They're compacts in the same space. Someone looking at a dolphin would more likely be looking at the lighter eco motors.
This is true in other tiers too, e.g. a performance tier gasoline car might be 250-350 HP, while the same tier EV might start at 450-550hp just because they can.
The difference within a tier, simply based on the fact you're replacing at best a lightweight 100kg engine with 400-500kg worth of battery, can't be as small as you suggest.
With larger EVs, the battery weight is much greater, increasing the impact. Rocket equation and all.
They're not inherently heavier. They're only heavier if you put a long-range battery in them, even then it's not by very much, and even that may not persist as higher energy density batteries are developed.
Or to put it another way, the difference between a small car and a large SUV is far greater than the difference between an electric car and a gasoline car.
A Tesla Model Y is 30% heavier than a Honda CRV. They have alot of other advantages, and are about the same weight as a three-row SUV and lighter than a Tahoe on a truck frame.
We shouldn’t be singling out EVs if we suddenly care about tire wear… it’s pretty ridiculous.
The lightest current Tesla Model Y is ~25% heavier than the lightest current Honda CR-V. The heaviest current Model Y is ~12% heavier than the heaviest current CR-V (hybrid). A Jeep Grand Wagoneer is ~280% heavier than a Nissan Versa.
Again, bike-shedding stats on EVs is a waste of time if you care about pollution from tire wear.
If we want to reduce particulate pollution, we’d have regulations to govern acceleration on EVs, make tire monitoring more annoying, and have manufacturers certify tires and make compliance required during state emissions inspections, and get aggressive about the motor carrier overweight enforcement.
If Tesla or other EVs have a problem here, it’s that they are putting inappropriate tires on the cars.
There’s a great deal possible that could reduce pollution that has nothing to do with tires. Outlawing non hybrid gas / diesel cars for example would be a significant step forward. As would favoring rail over big rig trucking etc.
Instead the topic is almost exclusively brought up as an attack without any real world studies supporting the ideas presented. Because actual studies show EV’s improve air quality over ICE engines.
I think we violently agree with respect to EVs… it’s just whataboutism.
But I do think tires are a significant environmental problem, especially in urban areas and when combined with diesel soot. We’re also poisoning soil by allowing shredded tires to be used as mulch, which is gross in many levels. Shredded tires are also used as aggregate for roads, so road wear also contributes to particulate pollution from tires.
Those are wildly different crossovers. That glass roof on the Y adds a lot of weight, it’s kind of silly how popular such an impractical feature became.
The other common issue with EV’s is many don’t integrate the batteries casing as a structural element. Skipping the lead acid battery would also be useful, but that’s a different issue.
Size for size they’re heavier. Maybe someday not but they are.
But the fact that EV brakes don't wear at nearly the same rate as ICE brakes still stands.
My EV6 (pretty heavy car) manual explicitly says "you should probably do some hard breaking from moderate speed to prevent corrosion on the brake discs".
Because 90+% of the time when you press the brake pedal the friction brakes aren't being used at all, it's all regen.
The Standard Range model 3 weighs 3,582 lbs, while the Long Range and Performance trims both weigh 4,065 lbs.
The BMW 3 Series has a curb weight ranging from 3,536 to 4,180 pounds
Drives me up the wall that medium sedans curb in the same ballpark as fullsize trucks from the 70s and 80s.
It's true they are not that much heavier in terms of pure numbers. But road wear is a proportional to the difference in axle weight to the fourth power.
But this also means that almost all of the wear is from trucks.
This whole meme comes from junk science (https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/pollution-tyre-wear-...)
> we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles. Compared with regulated exhaust emission limits of 4.5 milligrams per kilometer, the completely unregulated tyre wear emission is higher by a factor of over 1,000.
They took plastic shedded by a gas car on non-EV tires, and compared it by weight to safety limits for gaseous emissions. This makes as much sense as saying that a lump of coal has 1,000 times more carbon than the safety limits for carbon monoxide.
That doesn't pass a sniff test; emitting 5 grams of tyre rubber per kilometer, a 12Kg tyre would be completely vanished in 3000km but really they can last 60,000km with only the tread worn down beyond safe levels and the bulk of the tyre still there.
Looks like mg was changed to a g, though I'd suggest even then the estimate is too high (but probably to the correct order of magnitude).
What meme? The article you linked talks about tire wear. Not road wear. I didn't even touch on tire wear. Road wear is well studied. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
I really can't place your comment, you simply start talking about something completely unrelated to what I was talking about.
It doesn't matter though? Less braking material used equals less particles emitted. So if we accept that brakes on EVs last longer (and are otherwise similar in size), then they pollute less.
It is in fact straightforward to assume EVs create way, way less brake dust, because of how much less often they need brake replacements than ICE vehicles with the exact same brakes.
But the brakes don't get used 90% of the time,it's all regen.
The pads aren't any bigger. If they last longer then they're emitting less.
If you want to go into the details of this, for all the things people hve mentioned, you have to calculate the road wear done by trucks carrying fuels to stations every day. Electricity does not need the same regular road wear as ICE vehicles do.
Yeah, the refining and transport of petroleum products always gets left out when talking about EV pollution.
It's pretty energy intensive to separate crude oil into it's various parts.
Sure. Because windmills and photovoltaics grow naturally from seeds. You need quite a bit of an equipment to put up one windmill. They are usually built in some distance from an existing road. So you need special service roads. Those need to be wide and take heavy load because the equipment like cranes need space and are themselves heavy. Then you need special transport because main components like propellers are oversize load. Then you need to transport them hundreds for kilometres…, and then you need the rest of the infrastructure to distribute generated electricity. Yes, let’s compare apples to apples.
Yes and what's the service life for that windmill or solar panel? What's the service life of the distribution system?
And what was the cost to build out and constantly repair the refinery?
The problem you have with your talking points is that solar and wind both have decades of service in them whereas fossil fuels are single use product. Further, once the infrastructure is created large portions of it can be reused when solar and wind hit their end of life. You only need new lines and roads for new installations.
All energy collection will have some environmental impact. It just so happens that fossil fuels have an outsized impact for the energy they create.
Oh yes, the refinery. Fortunately some of that oil and gasoline can be used in various stages for renewables.
For sure, it's a matter of degree.
I'm not an absolutist about crude oil. It'll likely have a place in society for a long time.
With that said, it's a matter of degree and where it should be deployed.
If, for example, burning 1 gallon of gas sets up a power generation which produces the equivalent of 20 gallons of gas without emissions, that's a worthy trade off.
As it turns out, that's roughly the energy trade-off for new solar/wind installations assuming a pure fossil fuel grid.
What you are saying isn't a gotcha. The entire cycle of CO2 released for fossil fuel use is not comparable to the CO2 released installing renewables. That some is released is meaningless.
My Volvo XC60 T8 is not even a full EV but after 5 years of ownership the brakes on this 2200kg, 400bhp SUV are only 10% worn - it's all thanks to regenerative braking with the EV motor. It definitely makes a massive impact on how quickly the brakes wear out(as in - much much much less than in a normal car).
Then from what the pollution in the subway come from ?
most subway trains are decades old - newer fleets have regenerative braking[1]
But also ... almost a century of brake dust because nobody is going through and vacuuming the tunnels.
[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparency/freedom-of-informa...
Interesting. Looks like it the line isn't able to take the energy (I'm guessing voltage is already too high) they dump the energy into a resistive heater.
Makes sense, it's just going to be heat anyways. I wonder how often that happens vs the energy getting dumped into the line.
Depends on where you live. There is barely any pollution in Prague metro.
Greens seem to deceive in the same way as green-washing except with greener deceptions (whereas green-washing is capitalists pretending to be green).
Example: a report on the cost-benefit of using bicycles, that comes out with a fantastic positive number for introducing a cycle lane. Except the number depends on a monetary estimate of the benefits to society for health improvements. I'm sure the health improvements exist, and it wouldn't surprise me that the health benefits to society were well estimated. The problem is that by cherry-picking benefits you can simply ignore all monetary benefits of cars (no benefits for cars were mentioned as I recall).
I've seen it in other articles which talk sacharrinely about the benefit of some green tech. But ignoring real costs and certainly not being balanced. The ultra-idealistic greenies are not helping their cause when rubbish is repeated.
It would be great if you could cite the report you're talking about, so we can judge for ourselves whether you're steel-manning or straw-manning its methodology.
I found it:
https://economics.acadiau.ca/tl_files/sites/economics/resour...
" Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Economics Acadia University, 2013" biased and poorly balanced.
Maybe says more about the searching skills author than the state of cost-benefit analysis in Canada - but it sounds bad. Most of that 2.14 "savings" is car ownership and maintenance costs, which is bullshit because they say elsewhere you need a car for the days your can't cycle. Nice double counting eh?Plus the internal+external "health ben." added up to be about equal to vehicle ownership costs.
See the "analysis" bias?
Perhaps an Acadia University Honours in Economics is toilet paper.
Dude someone did this for a check box. It’s honestly more shocking that you read it
> "example: a report on the cost-benefit of using bicycles, that comes out with a fantastic positive number for introducing a cycle lane."
Rubber-stamp a multi-billion dollar highway widening project that won't reduce traffic*, no problem, doesn't deserve any comment. Bike lane? Scrutiny with a fine-tooth comb, subject it to years of studies, complain about the cost, complain about why anyone would want a bike lane - they must be up to something! The slider is jammed 98% over towards 'cars' and still the car drivers are like "Won't someone PLEASE think about the cars?!".
"No benefits for cars were mentioned as I recall" - seriously, you think everyone might have forgotten that cars exist in the twenty seconds between when they last saw one, or heard one, or had to wait to cross a road, or used one, or heard someone talk about one, or saw an advert for one? A study on bike benefits didn't say that cars were great, do you want a study on wheelchair accessibility to talk about the benefits of being able bodied?
> "I'm sure the health improvements exist, and it wouldn't surprise me that the health benefits to society were well estimated"
"Worldwide, we estimate that physical inactivity causes 6% (ranging from 3·2% in southeast Asia to 7·8% in the eastern Mediterranean region) of the burden of disease from coronary heart disease, 7% (3·9–9·6) of type 2 diabetes, 10% (5·6–14·1) of breast cancer, and 10% (5·7–13·8) of colon cancer. Inactivity causes 9% (range 5·1–12·5) of premature mortality, or more than 5·3 million of the 57 million deaths that occurred worldwide in 2008. If inactivity were not eliminated, but decreased instead by 10% or 25%, more than 533 000 and more than 1·3 million deaths, respectively, could be averted every year." - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
*roads are wider than they used to be; if adding lanes reduced traffic, there wouldn't be any traffic these days.
Yeah: I'm totally not a fan of biased car shit either. Some of your examples seem like strawmen to me.
> complain about the cost
Bike lanes in my country are mostly paid for by taxes on cars and petrol. The costs/benefits are often justified by cherry-picked benefits (e.g. reduced car congestion, or reduced pollution). The congestion arguments anecdotally appear to be lies: low usage priority cycle lanes seem to cause extra congestion (through phasing of lights and islands and other traffic controlling features).
Try and fairly point out that the numbers are juggled and you'll get skewered by cyclist ideologues. Read my sister comment where I reference the thesis that was the basis for my original comment.
I have an acquaintance working in our council on improving bike lanes.
I'm not against bikes. I'm against badly biased reports : towards/against both cyclists or cars.
Balanced discussion seems so difficult.
The benefits of getting more of the population to cycle are so beneficial that it's a joke to even try comparing the return on investment of cycle lanes versus car infrastructure and of course, when there's lots of cars, it pretty much pushes out other forms of transport due to the size/weight/danger/pollution of the cars.
Here's a somewhat biased look at the economics of cycling:
https://www.cyclinguk.org/briefing/case-cycling-economy
> "Bike lanes in my country are mostly paid for by taxes on cars and petrol"
Governments get money in, and they spend money. There's no real sense in which "bike lanes are paid for by petrol taxes", nobody can prove it either way by measuring anything - that's a matter of where they write the numbers in a spreadsheet - it's not the same money, as long as all of it balances. It's an arbitrary accounting choice and you're choosing to raise it as a talking point because it makes car drivers mad, not because it has real world consequences.
> "The costs/benefits are often justified by cherry-picked benefits (e.g. reduced car congestion, or reduced pollution)."
The fact that you default to "the current level of car pollution with tens of millions of cars everywhere is the default" is a bias. That you think "reducing pollution" is cherry picking is a car-bias. That people have to argue for being able to breathe without getting lung cancer as a "nice to have" against a default of cars-for-everything is a massive bias.
> "The congestion arguments anecdotally appear to be lies: low usage priority cycle lanes seem to cause extra congestion (through phasing of lights and islands and other traffic controlling features)."
Public transport (which I will include bike lanes, pavements, sidewalks, L-trains) need to go from where people are, to where people want to go. It's a very car-biased talking point that a city put a bike lane from nowhere to nowhere, and look! The cars are inconvenienced and hardly anybody is using the bikelane, so bike lanes must be the problem, get rid of it. You can't just slap a bike lane in London, decide nobody is using it, and get rid of it. You need enough bike lanes that people can get from where they are, to where they want to go, safely - feeling safe, well lit, clear of mud and snow and muggers and not along a main road - and enough of those safe journeys for long enough that people can change their behaviour. Several rounds of New Year's Resolutions to get fit, months of seeing family and coworkers gradually cycling, increasing numbers of cyclists (or walkers) normalising it, seeing "normal people like me" bringing a bike to work or to the shops not just lycra clad idealists - for large numbers of people to move from car to (foot/bike/bus/tram). Amsterdam started changing towards encouraging cycling in the 1970s and it didn't get a reputation as a bike city for decades. Cars have a hundred and twenty years of being entrenched, multiple generations of people who think cycling is for children and the roads are too dangerous to cycle (they are!) which needs pushing back against.
> "Try and fairly point out that the numbers are juggled and you'll get skewered by cyclist ideologues."
I don't know if you can justify "existing without breathing car exhaust" in economic terms. I don't think one should have to. I don't think one should justify bike lanes in terms of reducing traffic congestion - moving people around effectively needs city planning overviews, zoning changes, joined up public transport where the schedules line up, until it overall becomes convenient to move around without driving. Bike lanes and cycling can be part of it, but you can't justify one bike lane or project in terms of reducing congestion. If one demands that bike lanes be justified in the framework of "good for car drivers" and then rejects the numbers because they've been juggled to fit in terms of "good for car drivers" when that really isn't the point at all, that's not balanced or unbiased.
> "I'm not against bikes. I'm against badly biased reports : towards/against both cyclists or cars."
It's just convenient that dismissing badly biased reports towards bikes means nothing changes, and dismissing badly biased reports in favour of cars means nothing changes, and that continues car dominance, which is nice.
Even starting the sentence "I'm not against bikes" is a bias. Cars parked up and down both sides of every side-road. Solid slow moving car traffic for multiple hours in the morning and evening every weekday. Billions spent on multi-lane motorways moving massive cars with a single person in them. Young drivers revving the bollocks off their engines at midnight, motorbike riders with exhaust volume increasers, pollution, road accidents, burden of cost on car owners, and you start with "I'm not against bikes". It's the millionaire saying "I'm not against helping the homeless, I just don't like the way they're asking for help. I'm just being unbiased and fair".
> "Balanced discussion seems so difficult."
It isn't a balanced world, it's a car-dependent, car-dominated, world, deliberately, by car advertising, governments subsidising car manufacturing, car company lobbying, car company bribing, and capitalism framing everything in terms of profit and having nothing in terms of community, quality of life, wellbeing, welfare, health. It's not an accident that the available land has been dedicated to cars, and that makes cars very convenient. It isn't because cars are inherently convenient it's that we have spent unthinkable amounts of effort carving through hills, flattening rocks, stabilising mud, to make cars convenient. Because cars are expensive so it's good for car companies if lots of people buy them. One can't take an unbiased "fair" position, one must make choices - one can't sit on the fence between "it's important that people can get to home/social/work/shops in many ways" and "it's fine if cars are the only way and if that's a problem for some, tough".
Heavy particles and gaseous emissions are not comparable in such a simplistic way. If you take a dump on the street it doesn't mean you caused 50 million times more emissions than the EPA limits for ICE car exhaust.
For example, iron from brakes is heavy but ecologically pretty harmless. OTOH NO₂ weighs almost nothing, but is toxic. You can eat 30mg of iron per day to stay healthy (just don't lick it off the asphalt directly), but a similar amount of NO₂ would be lethal.
Heavy particles don't stay in the air for long, and don't get easily absorbed into organisms. OTOH gaseous emissions and small particulates from combustion can linger in the air, and can get absorbed into the lungs and the bloodsteam.
Yeah, but brakes are not not made from pure iron and you won't have atomic erosion. Silly argument, really. Notoriously, you could still find brake pads with asbestos not too long ago. Pretty much any fine dust is very unhealthy to inhale, but brakes and tires are made from material mixes you really don't want to breath in. Even the "inert" fraction we find as microplastics in everything, the rain, fish and newborn, and we're only beginning to understand their biological reactivity and long term health consequences.
the break pad and tire particles in question are not so large they precipitate immediately. They aren't iron but rather real/synthetic rubber and other organics. There is research on them being bad for human health.
50% number of particulates might not amount to 50% of the health risk.
Not all particles are the same. Diesel exhaust particulates are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, i.e. pure carcinogen. Whereas I really doubt tire and brake dust has the same health risk "per particle".
Granted it may even be higher! But comparing two different things by simply "number of particles" isn't helpful.
We need to start taxing vehicles based on the damage they are responsible for. The 4th Power Law is a principle in road engineering that states that the damage a vehicle causes to a road surface is proportional to the fourth power of its axle load. This means that even small increases in axle load can cause exponentially greater damage to the road.
A Prius causes about 50,000 times more damage than a bicycle.
A truck causes 16 billion times more damage than a bicycle.
A truck causes 31,000 times more damage than a Prius.
The solution is to tax trucks 31,000 times more than cars. Improve walking/biking/trains/public transportation. Private cars should be a luxury which is made a necessity with zoning laws.
"The solution is to tax trucks 31,000 times more than cars."
OK, so what about consequences of that solution? With such taxes, I would expect the count of trucks to drop to ~ zero. Which, for many places in the world, means an abrupt cessation of any large-scale logistics.
Maybe big trucks could be replaced by a huge fleet of smaller trucks, but that also means 20x as many parking spots, drivers (there is a shortage of professional drivers almost everywhere) and much more congestion on the highways.
There aren't that many places that could shift their entire logistics onto rail. Even here in Czechia, where the rail network is about the densest in the world, we don't have much free capacity left on the main railway lines, and existing trains are chronically delayed.
What if the cars were made really light?
Four bicycle wheels, as many batteries as you can safely put on something supported by four bicycle wheels, an aerodynamic CFRP bubble for the driver etc?
I think such a vehicle can be better than one thinks, with acceptable range, acceptable particle emissions, acceptable noise levels; and I think they could easily get to 80 km/h safely.
> What if the cars were made really light?
That is the best answer.
For a little while in the 80s (remnants of the fuel crisis of the 70s) this was the trend. Go light and then efficiency is guaranteed. Combine with a small efficient engine and that's the optimal solution. A CRX HF from 1988 could do 44 MPG, with an engine that compared to current fuel injection technology is very crude and inefficient.
I want to buy a car that is basically this CRX HF but with 25+ years of engine and materials improvements. It could easily be a 1500lb car getting 60MPG.
But, no. Manufacturers (to some extent forced by terrible government rules) have gone heavier and heavier and heavier and heavier. Which is worse in every possible way.
Colin Chapman had it right: simplify, then add lightness.
And then as cars get heavier and heavier you also have people scared to drive smaller/lighter ones for fear of safety.
Seeing as we’re talking Paris, there are plenty of Twizys around. Not light light, but a third the weight of even a new Renault 5 EV. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twizy
Mm.
Now that I see it in real life I don't know how I feel about it. It doesn't feel safe when I see a Twizy, but when I see these cars in my mind I see them on Swedish bicycle roads.
The whole thing would probably require a total transformation of city travel.
The regulatory regime will take a minute to figure out, but with tiny vehicles like this + good transit + closing streets to regular big cars, we'll figure it out.
The basic ones (and things like the Citroën Ami) are more A-traktor than bicycle – there’s an A-traktor registered Ami in the next village along from me – but that’s typically a software limit. The Twizy could be bought in an 80km/h variant, and there are “remaps” that will take that version up to 110km/h.[1] I’ve seen them doing near that on riksvägar here.
[1] https://en.twizyx.com/
This is certainly a possibility for city cars. In the Netherlands there are a lot more 45kph mini cars driving around now. They were a thing in the past with moped engines but with electric drive trains all these solutions become much more viable. With the low speeds crashes are also less dangerous so everything becomes lighter.
A similar thing is happening with electric bikes and scooters. This was all possible with gasoline but with the lower mechanical complexity this is really taking off.
This results in a wider range for bike like vehicles which replaces a lot of car trips.
The real hurdle to people getting rid of their mostly stationary cars (not everyday for work drivers) is that renting a car is a horrible experience and car shares are also bad mostly. But as the space for personal cars shrinks I suspect this will improve over time.
Cotroen ami
https://www.citroen.co.uk/ami
A really light car would either have to be limited to a very low speed or be terribly unsafe in case of a crash. Since lightness implies small size, it would also not have other desirable properties of cars, like their ability to carry passengers and cargo.
That said, there might be something to it:
1. The "bicycle that's more like a car" angle: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/H0jtCfdvwH4, https://youtu.be/9B0eXmbrBIo?t=30
2. The "car that's more like a bicycle" angle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9ly7JjqEb0
You just don’t want to crash with something like that. If all cars were build like that it might even be ok but try crashing into a normal sized car…
Aptera is shooting for 2,200 lbs with enough performance to handle highway speeds with two people and some cargo. It has three wheels and extreme aerodynamics.
https://aptera.us/article/how-does-the-weight-of-aptera-comp...
Looks like the Renault Twizy is only 990lbs with a 28 mph top speed, so a much smaller vehicle.
I flipped through the summary of that report, and I would think there is almost surely no way this is true, unless focusing on worst case assumptions like aggressive driving styles and very poorly maintained vehicles.
Your conclusion that there is not “any healthy level of private cars coexisting” is heavy handed. There is a balance, but I suspect it’s more of a jealousy/equality issue. Heavily taxed and high quality requirements can surely lead to a healthy coexisting. Limiting trips to when they are truly worth the cost is an equation to be solved.
If EVs don’t emit tailpipe emissions then 100% of their emissions will be those things. They’re also heavier and so have more tire wear. It seems not unintuitive to me that their emissions might push the boundaries of strict modern emissions standards.
For taxing cars, you’re still leaving so much car infrastructure out there. It swallows the world. Six months ago for the first time ever I got a job where I could bike to work. The world is so much different from a bike. It becomes clear how dangerous cars are to humans, and how they chop up our cities in to little rectangles. I’m constantly at risk of being hit by cars that don’t stop. I love being on my bike. I feel like I’m part of the world. I ride rain or shine thanks to nice gear. We give up so much to have a world with cars. We could move our road budgets to trains and bike paths and have so much more space and health and life.
Cycling to work is nice. But if you are young, sitting all day in a warm office. Think of blue collar workers that are hungry, exhausted and also people getting older. Its fucking annoying to wait for the bus that does not show up, the stupid beeps whenever the doors open and the slow movement in general. Lucky i am at home in half an hour, laws now require you to commute to work in up to 1.5hrs if you cant afford a car or should use public transportation. Electric bikes are no solution, the minerals and energy must be produced to transport people like me. I will buy a motor driven classic Vespa, fuel consumption is 2l for 80 mls and i am at home without dispruption and waiting. Plus i got a new nice hobby to maintain it. No new vehicle was produced, no rare earth was needed. Fuel is produced every day for the plastics of the EV and for many other things like pharmacy and so on. No new bike needed to be shipped from china where all that stuff is made. Sure you are right with vegan biking, but not all folks can do it.
Not all folks can do it, but here in Oakland there are plenty of folks who could do it if we had better paths, but don’t because the roads are very dangerous for bikes and we have poor bike paths. This means we can get more people on bikes. Also I’m in favor of changing more than just bike paths - we could improve housing affordability so that people don’t have a 1.5 hour commute to their work. Also I have three bikes that are 15 years old. Buying a used bike uses even less resources than a used Vespa. I do have a newer ebike though. They’re really nice when you have more stuff to carry or longer distances to travel!
If you like repairing the vintage Vespa, great project and that sounds fun. That’s worth a lot!
But I will curse at the stink of the exhaust from the crappy old motor when you ride by. Try an e-bike (you can get one built more locally surely), or an e-Vespa (or hell, make that your project to convert the vintage Vespa into a silent sleeper Vespa with crazy performance!). Electric is so, so much more fun.
Worrying about that small amount of “critical minerals” needed for a bike/Vespa is a conspiracy to distract you from the fact that oil is also extracted and has negative externalities, we just live with those already.
My desire not to inhale brake & tire particulate, not to be killed while walking to the store, and not to subsidize others expensive lifestyles, is not rooted in jealousy.
I owned a car once, it was sometimes convenient, interesting & fun, but it was also often infuriating, terrifying and expensive. If I can pull it off, I'd prefer to never own one again. I don't really care if anyone else owns them, I just don't want to subsidize them or have their externalities imposed on me.
An alternative to outright bans is to make some good faith attempt at estimating externalities and internalizing them, and reducing subsidies such as free, or below market rate public land for private vehicle operation & storage. But this is difficult and it's not clear the politics of it would be much better than an outright bans. If a good faith effort determined that operating a car while not being subsidized and not inflicting externalities on others, cost a significant amount of money, then the whole effort would be castigated as limiting driving to the very rich, and probably wouldn't go very far. So it feels like we end up with either "everyone drives everywhere all the time for everything and it's the govt's job to shovel public funds & land at it" or outright bans in popular areas.
Cars, oil, and the internal combustion engine, are all tremendously useful, and we would be foolish to pretend otherwise. But all tools have their ideal uses and all tools can be misused & overused to bad ends, both for the tool user and for others.
A world of 100% gasoline car ownership where the car was simply a fun toy for kick ass weekend road trips, and cities had never been bulldozed to make room for them as substitutes for our legs, would be a pretty great world, even if it involved a bit more pollution/externalities/subsidies than some utopian car free world.
public escalators and moving walkways are a concept for cities from a century ago that we largely missed out on.
It's not "jealousy"... I've lived in a city where having a car was virtually mandatory, and I've lived in a city where you could safely bike everywhere. There's NO QUESTION which one I prefer.
Even my most reactionary and car-loving extended family members had this opinion when they visited :)
> I don't think there's any healthy level of private cars coexisting with humans in a city
Concentrating humans together into a small locality, which is what a city is, will inherently have a significant environmental impact. Cities before private cars were still quite polluted, because transportation still has to take place just to keep the city running. Electric vehicles are the best-case scenario for truck deliveries, construction vehicles, and everything else you need to keep a city running on a day-to-day basis.
Moreover, you have to consider all cities in this analysis, not just posh, post-industrial cities like those in the US and Western Europe. Manufacturing has to take place somewhere, and logistics considerations imply that most manufacturing will be located next to transportation infrastructure. Just like any other economic activity, manufacturing benefits from talent clusters (a major reason cities exist), so manufacturing will tend to concentrate in cities as well, or at least the suburbs, which you can easily observe in China.
If you really hate air pollution, move to the country and be willing to sacrifice the advantages of cities.
Cities have a positive environmental impact when you compare it with spreading the same population in villages across thousands of miles.
It would be an insane amount of roads, cabling, water pipes, etc.
Cities are bad for human health, but good for the environment.
Are they bad for human health compared to other ways of living like rural or suburbs? iirc rural people get the least amount of exercise because you just sit inside all day.
… in the US and Canada.
when we lived in the suburbs my family and i spent way more time inside than we do now in a rural setting. i think maybe you got mixed up. rural people are generally very active.
> If you really hate air pollution, move to the country and be willing to sacrifice the advantages of cities.
i really do hate air pollution! it drove me away from idaho, where 2-3 months of the year massive forest fires would choke the air and force everyone inside (gave my kids asthma).
we recently moved away from a suburb near two highways, out to a rural area where we are half a mile from the nearest paved road.
besides the lowered air pollution, the lower noise pollution is a huge benefit. hearing birds instead of traffic is amazing. and my kids don’t choke in their sleep any more!
Wonder if anyone is working on ways for breaks and tires to be less harmful, or polluting?
Lighter cars, really, that's it. Make vehicles that match the transportation case in question instead of palaces on wheels that carry battery sized for solving some once in a year use case.
And/or make them go slower.
Huh, imagine EVs that have removable add-on batteries that you'd only plug in for the longer trips..
Like the Thinkpads with the "bigger battery" humps: https://sm.pcmag.com/t/pcmag_ap/photo/l/lenovo-thi/lenovo-th...
This is a stupid idea because you’d have to make fasteners and high voltage interfaces that can survive an order of magnitude more cycles than they have to for a fixed pack. It would also be significantly more difficult to use the pack as a stressed member of the car structure. It’s better to just have less batteries and use them more efficiently through weight savings.
Don't the charging ports already have to do that?
Do you realize that one of the reasons for the swappable batteries on various Thinkpads is so that you can hot swap batteries without powering down or rebooting?
I've never had an issue with the connectors for the batteries of the ThinkPad, and being able to swap in a spare fully charged battery has been very helpful many times when out doing field working all day long. What is an issue are the little plastic tabs on the batteries that break off over time. However, usually the batteries have already lost a lot of their lifespan by the time that happens, and since the batteries are removable they can be replaced without opening up the system or melting glue with heat as is the case on most modern cell phones. Seems like a win to me!
I could be wrong but the currents and voltages for EVs are rather bit more dangerous and taxing than that typically found used in laptops.
Which I think the person you replied was partially attempting to point out.
My point is that hot swappable battery packs have benefits that outweigh the cost of the connectors for the people that have a use case that needs them, as the grandparent referred to in Thinkpads. Not everyone fits in the constraints of design space chosen for a given product. There's a reason virtually every modern computer has a means of adding expansion devices.
Making a high voltage connector is well understood problem space. Every electrical engineer knows how to deal with ramping up current when a power supply is plugged in or turned on (inrush current specifications are most definitely a thing), and the entire electric grid is based on sizing, insulating, spacing and switching conductors appropriately for the voltage and current being used. Moreover, high voltage battery packs tend to have switches / contactors on the battery pack that keep the high voltage off until the connection is securely made and enabled, hence why even Telsas require a functioning low voltage battery to start the system.
There are also certain use-cases that are likely best served by putting battery packs in a trailer. Take the trucking industry: going by the charging requirements of a Tesla semi (1MW for 30 minutes), replicating your typical truck stop turns into a huge problem for the grid -- you'd need upwards of 50MW of charging capacity to replicate the flow of diesel coming out of a bank of 10 fuel pumps (sorry, I ran the thought experiment on that one back when specs were first released). Having a battery pack attached to the trailer that gets charged at a more leisurely rate at the warehouse while it is unloaded and re-loaded over a couple of hours is far more scalable than charging the truck in a few minutes at a truck stop. Charging overnight while the driver sleeps is fine, but getting the 8-12 hours of runtime for a workday in a semi is a heck of a lot of battery.
The dangers can be mitigated -- that's the entire raison d'etre of the electrical engineering discipline! Otherwise you wouldn't be able to safely charge an electric car at a 350kW rate these days at charging stations all over the world with a connector that is deemed safe to be handled by random humans. It's not like the software industry where we throw half baked shit at the wall and see what sticks when users encounter it by running an A / B test in production....
> Moreover, high voltage battery packs tend to have switches / contactors on the battery pack that keep the high voltage off until the connection is securely made and enabled, hence why even Telsas require a functioning low voltage battery to start the system.
These are little bit different than than what a swappable system would entail, aren't they?
> Otherwise you wouldn't be able to safely charge an electric car at a 350kW rate these days at charging stations all over the world with a connector that is deemed safe to be handled by random humans.
Okay maybe I miss read the initial premise but I took it as a home user swapping in-and-out modules themselves.
That would appear to me to be a significantly different engineering challenge and safety issue than what's currently deployed in consumer market EVs...
I'm not even sure the small upside here would justify the added costs and complexity either.
> These are little bit different than than what a swappable system would entail, aren't they?
From an electrical point of view, swapping batteries is fundamentally the same general problem regardless of whether they are large or small: you want to avoid arcing when the connector is plugged in, and you need to avoid exposing the user to stray voltage. Sure, there's added complexity to achieve that in a safe and cost effective manner when high voltages are involved, but it's a solved problem as the charge port does exactly this today.
> Okay maybe I miss read the initial premise but I took it as a home user swapping in-and-out modules themselves.
Current EVs on the market suffer from decreased maintainability compared to traditional ICE vehicles. The battery swapping skill set needs to be more widely available so that we don't see EV owners being dinged $40k for a battery swap. There are videos on Youtube showing people doing a battery swap themselves, and while it is challenging, it's not all that hard to do safely when the battery is not damaged given that the battery packs don't expose high voltage on the connectors when not enabled. Of course a damaged battery pack means that all bets are off on the safety front depending on the nature of the damage.
> That would appear to me to be a significantly different engineering challenge and safety issue than what's currently deployed in consumer market EVs...
> I'm not even sure the small upside here would justify the added costs and complexity either.
It a solved problem!!! Just put the charge port at the back of the vehicle and then use it for the add-on battery pack like the existing signal light connectors for trailers. You're done. The only added design constraints on the EV are on the location of the port and verification that it works while the vehicle is being driven. The F150 Lightning fails this today since the charge port is just in front of the driver side door, but relocating the charge port is not exactly rocket science.
Many EVs have already taken the step of making the charge port bidirectional so that the expensive battery in an EV can be used to provide power during an outage or to balance the load on the grid, and that is a far, far more complicated problem than accepting power from an external battery pack through the charge port while the vehicle is operating.
> From an electrical point of view, swapping batteries is fundamentally the same general problem regardless of whether they are large or small: you want to avoid arcing when the connector is plugged in, and you need to avoid exposing the user to stray voltage. Sure, there's added complexity to achieve that in a safe and cost effective manner when high voltages are involved, but it's a solved problem as the charge port does exactly this today.
The arcing is the problem AND generally when handling battery packs/modules requires high voltage safety equipment and precautions.
The charge port uses a low-voltage connection to "handshake" as I understand it before the high voltage is being supplied.
You can't, without a good bit more complexity to the battery module itself do that as the batteries terminals will just have the voltage of the battery itself (depends on their state of charge).
Plus the bus bar the module is connecting to also will have a voltage if there's existing modules connected to it.
You're down to having contactors and BDUs at every individual module.
> Current EVs on the market suffer from decreased maintainability compared to traditional ICE vehicles. The battery swapping skill set needs to be more widely available so that we don't see EV owners being dinged $40k for a battery swap. There are videos on Youtube showing people doing a battery swap themselves, and while it is challenging, it's not all that hard to do safely when the battery is not damaged given that the battery packs don't expose high voltage on the connectors when not enabled. Of course a damaged battery pack means that all bets are off on the safety front depending on the nature of the damage.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I am saying it's harder to make it actually safe for the average normal consumer to do as simply as plugging a battery into a power drill for example. In part because of the higher voltages involved.
> It a solved problem!!! Just put the charge port at the back of the vehicle and then use it for the add-on battery pack like the existing signal light connectors for trailers. You're done. The only added design constraints on the EV are on the location of the port and verification that it works while the vehicle is being driven. The F150 Lightning fails this today since the charge port is just in front of the driver side door, but relocating the charge port is not exactly rocket science.
This is a different concept than adding/swapping individual modules in the vehicle itself.
But regarding the concept of a trailer, I suspect that the high cost for the product for the minimum gain it not justifiable for the average consumer. That is you're trying to solve a problem in an inefficient and not profitable manner. (Who wants a trailer of batteries parked in their garage 99% of the time just to have a slightly lighter car?)
> Many EVs have already taken the step of making the charge port bidirectional so that the expensive battery in an EV can be used to provide power during an outage or to balance the load on the grid, and that is a far, far more complicated problem than accepting power from an external battery pack through the charge port while the vehicle is operating.
I understand that, but either you want a trailer or you want internal swappable/addable modules which both economically in my opinion seem of little benefit over engineering better cars with newer/better battery technology and stronger/lighter material.
Additionally, I didn't even mention the annoyance of engineering integrating the heating & cooling system for the modules themselves.
Better energy density batteries & better materials (or smarter manufacturing) make more sense to me than trying to make individual modules for a car swappable or asking people to drive around with a trailer they would use so infrequently that it would not justify the cost to them (not to mention most people don't know how to drive with one properly anyways).
A battery trailer might affect the speed limit your allowed to drive.
But it would be cool to just rent the extra 500km when needed :)
Speed limits for towing smaller trailers mostly derive from safety concerns about overloaded or imbalanced trailers being unstable at high speeds. A battery-only trailer with little or no cargo space, designed and certified in conjunction with specific tow vehicles, could easily be safe enough to operate at highway speeds.
I think the main reason why we don't see anyone seriously pursuing the battery trailer idea is that it would be an expensive niche product. It would have to be mostly a rental-only product, and offer few advantages over simply renting a more suitable vehicle.
Obviously a trailer would not be a clever idea, but Nio already has cars with swappable batteries, for short distances you could just install a battery pack which is maybe 20% battery and 80% empty space
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w
It’s enough of a pain in the ass to swap summer and winter tires, and that’s something that (some) people only do twice a year. I can’t imagine people wanting to swap battery packs (either themself or by making an appointment at a service center) before and after every long trip.
Ideally they could just come to my home or workplace and swap the batteries out there while I am doing something else (if it is going to take longer than 30 mins)
If it’s faster than filing up, why not.
It won't be.
Low effort reply, really, try to put in some arguments at least.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Both upthread replies seem to evidence approximately the same level of effort to me; "It won't be faster" isn't wildly less effort than "what if it will be faster?"
Nio has fewer Nio battery swap stations operating in the entire world than just the state of New Jersey has filling stations (not dispensers, entire stations).
Nothing in the video above made me think "oh wow, that looks like that process will be a lot faster than filling up!" and several segments made it seem like there would be more time involved in just getting the car into and out of the battery replacement service bay than filling up takes. (Nio's claim of a 2.5-3 minute battery swap seems to be measuring only the swap time while the car is stopped in the bay.)
That's all before we consider the travel time to one of the stations (which is unlikely to be as close to your trip as a typical filling station because of the rarity of stations), time waiting for the car [or cars] in front of you to complete their swap (which if Nios ever became popular would likely be longer than waiting for one of the typically eight or more dispensers to free up at a filling station), nor to account for the "all long range batteries are out of stock at this location, because it's the Friday before Christmas and everyone is road tripping to visit family" NACKs that are liable to occur in a Nio-only battery swap system.
For me the killer line in the video that will make it hard for Nio to solve all of these is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w&t=270s : "Building these stations is incredibly expensive and it's no secret that Nio is losing a staggering amount of money right now..."
Having done a long trip in an EV, in a very inhospitable location (the USA, without access to Tesla chargers), I'm not convinced there is an EV range/charge time problem. I think it's mostly in the minds of the public. Hence I'm skeptical that the changeable battery pack is a solution to any problem.
My experience was that you end up stopping to charge a bit more often than you'd stop to fill up gas, but factoring in stops for bathroom and food, it's really not a significant difference. There just needs to be more chargers (to avoid queuing for an open one), and chargers that are more closely spaced (every 50 miles like gas stations instead of every 100+ miles). Then today's EVs will be just fine for long trips. Not completely perfect, but perfectly adequate, to the point that it won't be worthwhile buying an ICE vehicle just to have it for long trips.
I imagine semiautonomous trailers that would just tag along in the slipstream within cable range for distances beyond your daily. With computer-fast reaction to brake and steering inputs of the lead car. Those would universally be rentals that you change like the horses in pre-rail post networks.
NIO does battery swaps in minutes, in China and Europe. I believe you can also perhaps get different ranges but if not, would be great to swap between a 50kwh pack for normal use and say 100+kwh for your road trip.
Then again battery charging/weight tech is getting pretty good pretty fast.
It surprises me how much people are determined to use the "car" form factor when it's clearly not a good design for weight reduction and efficient transport.
If instead people consider EVs that are non-car-shaped then we get things like e-bikes and e-scooters. Both can feature easily swappable batteries as the batteries are so much smaller due to the reduced weight of the vehicle. Also, the problems around congestion can pretty much disappear when you get enough people to use an e-bike/e-scooter instead of a car. The tyre wear/pollution is minimised due to the reduction in weight and similarly the brakes.
You can use harder rubber compounds but that's a non-starter because longer stopping distances.
It is common for electric cars to use harder rubber compounds in their tires. Not because of particulates, but because tire noise is particularly noticeable in an otherwise quiet electric car, and because tire life is a concern for EV drivers.
Luckily, both reduced noise and increased life are fairly well correlated with reduced particulate emission.
It would be incredible if somebody invented a light car, that would transport one or two people and some groceries. Maybe with two wheels instead of four to take up less space. Hmmm why has nobody invented this?
The French have got you covered there [0].
There's also plenty of other, more practical / affordable microcars [1] on the road around where I live, they're considered equivalent to mopeds in terms of legality / requirements but you don't need a helmet, they seat two people and some groceries, etc. They used to be mainly popular for elderly people but they seem to catch on to other people too. Great for local traffic.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twizy
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcar
What do you think about the Japanese solutions to the problem?
https://powersports.honda.com/motorcycle/standard/cb300r
+1 for Cargo bikes, but otherwise if your bike infrastructure sorta sucks, the Citroën Ami and counterparts from Fiat etc are pretty common in European cities… easy to park too.
While bicycles are quite convenient for commuting, I am not sure if there is a way for transporting groceries for an entire week for multiple people. Is there such a way? The only solution I see is doing groceries every day.
Groceries every day (or every few days) becomes viable and common in cities like Paris. It’s a lot easier to do when you don’t have to take a car, and the culture then shifts too to fresher food.
Why does it need to be either/or? I make do almost the entire week without a car. Schools within walking distance, then mass transit to work.
So what if I own and use a small family car, to go shopping and take the kids places?
Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
My neighborhood is a real life 15min city, and most people of all ages choose to walk. We don't need to prevent families from owning a car and taking it grocery shopping once a week.
Plenty of Europeans have cargo bikes and make do with 2-3 supermarket trips per week for families of 4-5 peeps.
Only bulk drinks (crates of beer/soda/...) are challenging. But for those, very often delivery systems are in place that surely are more efficient than individual trips anyways.
I regularly carry four cases of water (48 cans) on my standard bicycle without a problem.
Whenever I go grocery shopping I mount a milk crate to my rear rack (this takes about six seconds) and put the cases in vertically. I can also carry a 4L jug of milk in the handlebar-mounted basket.
My mom used to this year round, in every weather and temperature (incl. -20C), when I was a kid several decades ago.
Honestly I don't know how she did it, but she did. It helped that we had separated bike lanes pretty much everywhere. It is entirely possible if the infrastructure supports it.
This sort of thing is why I'm personally a big fan of the 15-minute city concept.
In London we had multiple supermarket options within 10 mins walk. And even more within 10 minutes cycling distance.
Usually we’d just stop on the way home from work or whatever to do small, quick shops for whatever we needed.
But on the rare occasion where we did need to do a “big shop”, we just ordered groceries online for delivery the next day. All the major UK supermarkets offer this, with free or very cheap delivery, delivered by environmentally-friendly electric trucks.
Cargo bikes or bike trailers are two of many solutions to this dilemma that immediately sprung to mind. In the Netherlands I have seen grocery stores deliver large deliveries in big tricycles.
There are billions of people that manage their shopping without a car. Millions of them live in North America. Surely, some of them have solved this problem for a family without having to go shopping daily.
We can do it, but it's going to be two trips. However, there's like half a dozen grocery stores within a 10 minute bike radius where I live (modern suburb). Others who live out in the countryside will need to travel further, but that's generally the tradeoff; more comfortable / quiet living in exchange for longer distance to amenities.
I’ve been doing that for years on a cargo bike. I shop for a family of four once a week and everything fits in one cargo bike without any issue.
We just get the bulk groceries delivered. Only fresh vegetables and fruit we get during the week in case we need some that last a week.
We do most of our weekly groceries with a grandma cart, a cargo bike fits much more.
It's a bit futuristic, but I heard the Italian company Givi has some great solutions for transporting cargo on two wheelers:
https://www.givi.it
I‘m delighted to introduce to you the amazing microlino.ch
Crash test ratings.
Maybe even some sort of pedal-powered contraption. Perhaps we could even build lanes for these bi-cycles instead of 22 lane highways.
I don’t know about tires, but for brakes we already know how to make lower dust brakes - use drum brakes instead of disc brakes. The friction material is enclosed on drum brakes so much less of it just flies away.
There's also EVs that generally do most of their braking on the regenerative whatsit, which causes no wear on the brake pads. A lot of it can be prevented by education / driving style, and improving road designs to allow for smooth driving.
If you look at what cars of this type are produced and who drives them, it quickly becomes clear where the road is heading. Huge off-road vehicles, albeit with electric drive, are missing the mark. These things are advertised with sporty performance, comfort and so on. In my opinion, energy is being thrown out the window to satisfy the ego of the buyer. These people are buying themselves a clear conscience. Even if the cars are electric, where can they be charged? Not everyone lives in the houses you see in the advertisements. Not everyone can just go into debt for something like this. I drive an economical petrol car with 200k kilometers on the clock. I don't need to produce anything new or use any rare earths or energy. Even with electric cars, the plastic for the door panels has to be made from crude oil. The cost of installing all the electronics is also high. I drive this car until I can't drive any more, I mostly use public transport, but sometimes I have to use the car for the weekly shop. I'm also staying in the city because I'm getting older and I'm dependent on doctors and markets, at the moment I work outside the city, like many others, and people just need a car to park here. Not everyone has the same life as others.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Pretty much every EV does regenerative baking, because it (greatly) extends range. Even hybrids have done this since the very earliest mass-market models (the 1997 Prius has it). EV brakes see a lot less wear and tear than ICE brakes.
Ever driven a vehicle with drums in the front? Even on a light vehicle they take a long time to stop.
Drum brakes are way more prone to fail, the heat cant be transported away, the dust still is produced and the brake power, the law requires, is way to little. If we switch fully to trams and buses, they produce the dust amount of lets say 100 cars. If the public transportation should be capable of all inhabitants of a city, we would have up to 200 trams running every day and night. Who should be a tram driver? Most of the younger folks dont want to work shift or at weekends and night. My town has drivers with grey beards, between 50-60 years old. There are no younger applicants for that job so they drive even if retired to keep up the demand. They got paid extra which making tickets more expensive.
Some electric vehicles use drum brakes on the rear wheels, like the ID.Buzz.
Can drum brakes be used for all kinds of vehicles?
They were for many decades…
Even if there’s 5% of vehicles that couldn’t use them, it would still be a large decrease in local particulates.
(I don’t expect this to happen, of course, absent draconian particulate emissions laws.)
Regenerative braking would tend to reduce particulates from friction braking.
Most European cars already have engine braking. EV regenerative braking just maintains the behavior that folks only used to automatics forgot about. Automatics I think are still not super common in Europe.
In the UK about one third are automatic but make up three quarters of new registrations.
I don't know if EVs and hybrids are very popular in the UK but they are all automatics.
Hybrids are surely not all automatic, unless the one we own suddenly changed.
But spews forth more rubber (and plastic, since that's what tyres are made from these days), which is an ongoing problem for Tesla EVs when owners discover their tyres don't last nearly as long because they're transmitting power both when starting and stopping, not just when starting.
> because they're transmitting power both when starting and stopping, not just when starting.
For the tires it doesn't matter if the energy from stopping is transferred into brakes or back into a motor though?
I don’t understand this concept. I would expect an ICE and an EV vehicle with the same weight, speed, deceleration, tires, etc to have the same wear on tires. The difference being the energy to stop an ICE being transferred to the brake pads and rotors, rather than recharging the EV’s battery.
What am I missing? Why wouldn’t the tires experience the same forces in both scenarios?
> I don’t understand this concept.
It's because it's wrong. If you decelerate the same vehicle at the same rate, the tires can't even tell whether the deceleration is from regenerative braking or friction braking, so the only difference is less brake dust with regenerative braking.
If anything it's the opposite because regenerative braking is more effective when braking is gradual, giving the driver a direct convenience and financial incentive to brake less aggressively (better range, buy less gas or charging), which generates less tire wear.
> I don’t understand this concept.
Because it's completely wrong. The tires indeed experience the same force and don't care where the energy is dumped. As other posters wrote, the increased tire pollution from EVs is because they tend to be heavier, and because their considerable extra torque is likely to be (ab)used by their drivers. Yours truly included, guilty as charged, though I do practice restraint... often.
You're only considering braking, and for that case you're right. You're not considering acceleration, where EVs supply near maximum torque instantly when you press the accelerator pedal. This causes increased wear in tires, I've seen estimates of 20%.
Which can easily be sorted with a more gentle throttle curve.
My EV has three modes - Eco, Normal and Sport. In Sport you get shoved back in your seat from the instant torque, and the fast 0-60 times. In Eco you take off like in a normal car.
You also need to remember that traction control is inherrently easier and faster in an EV as the ECU has fine grained control of how much power to send to the tyres and can effect it near instantly.
> EVs supply near maximum torque instantly when you press the accelerator pedal.
You do realize you can drive without just slamming the accelerator pedal straight to the floor every time you start going right?
It's due to the regenerative braking, which transmits more power via the wheels when decelerating. Most ICE cards don't have regenerative braking; hybrids tend to.
This doesn't make sense. Energy in the system is conserved. On an ICE car, brakes convert the energy to heat. On an EV, motors convert the energy to electricity. The tires experience the same net force.
EVs wear tires more quickly, in general, because they are very heavy and produce more torque (and drivers are more likely to request that torque, also).
But the brakes experience less work, and so there is less combined brake and tire dust for distance traveled.
I'd guess an ICE transmission provides some deceleration too. But right on, apples-to-apples you would need to compare a Tesla to a Mercedes or etc and not a Corolla. They are sold as a luxury/performance car.
Fundamental misunderstanding of physics. Slowing 2,500lbs from 60-0MPH in 4 seconds (for example) puts just as much wear on a tire if it's with friction brakes or with regenerative braking or engine braking.
If the stopping distance is the same (same accel/decel), I don’t understand this statement
> because they're transmitting power both when starting and stopping, not just when starting.
bri3d’s adjacent post is what my thoughts would be on why EV’s consume more tires.
It’s because they weigh more
“They weigh more” is something I kinda have a problem with. People act like EVs are these behemoths, but your typical EV is hardly an outlier. The Tesla Model 3, for example, weighs as much as a Honda CRV. Yes, that’s a different car class; but nobody looks at a CRV and complains about its weight and the environmental impact of that weight on air quality nearly the same way.
You don't even have to go to a different class. A Model 3 weighs about as much as a BMW 3 series and both weigh slightly less than the average new car.
This is as much of a criticism of bmw as a compliment to Tesla, the new M5 weighs more than a similarly fast lucid air
A lot of this is modern safety features. Crumple zones and stronger roofs add weight, more weight implies bigger engines, bigger engines require stronger frames, soon the average car is two tons. Volvo S60, Mercedes C class and Audi S4 are also a similar size and weight. The makes from the US and Japan are a little lighter but not dramatically lighter and their safety ratings are also a little worse.
I just looked it up and wow, you're right. A Cybertruck weighs less than an F250 depending on specs
People who care about the externalities of unnecessarily large and heavy vehicles do complain about compact utility vehicles, aka “I want to sit higher up”.
A model Y would be the comparison to a CRV (model Y is 400 pounds / 10% heavier).
I mean, I totally get the criticisms that you see of people having unnecessarily large SUVs, like really who needs an Escalade. But a CRV? Like a Model Y with one passenger weighs the same as a CRV with 3.
EU is introducing limits for this as part of the Euro 7 standard, which is spurring various tech improvements.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we make great strides in this at the rate that materials science is barrelling along
Regenerative braking helps with brake dust, but is probably offset by extra tyre wear on EVs. I go weeks without using the brakes and usually don’t even touch the brake pedal.
Normal car designers who aren't drug-addicted sociopaths have already more than solved this problem. If you put hard, narrow, high-lifetime tires on small diameter wheels you get a car that it more efficient, quieter, cheaper to operate, and pollutes less in terms of particulate matter. If you are Elon Musk you sell a car with totally inappropriate summer racing tires on 20-inch wheels and the owners have to replace the whole set every year.
There are lots of things in cities that are unhealthy for both ourselves and others but we allow them. It's possible to make big improvements while still enjoying a certain amount of the benefit of something.
For example - if you use the London Underground the air you breathe in is significantly worse than the air above ground in busy traffic. Significantly.
With EVs, 100% of particulates are from tires, etc! It's a disaster!
Except, you know, the amount remained the same, we just got rid of the other 98% that used to be there.
Since EVs are heavier and accelerate better they probably produce more tire dust.
Not necessarily. EVs have also an almost perfect traction control due to immediate torque control by the electric motor, so it’s very difficult to spin wheels in situations of low traction, which reduces tire wear and emissions.
On ICE cars, it’s much slower with way higher latency due to the mechanical inertias.
Well IIRC ev are significantly heavier than ice in average, which has a direct consequence on amount of stress on the tires and brakes pad.
Just not true. I favor EVs, but it is incredibly misleading to say 98% comes from other sources. In many places, natural gas and coal are still used to generate the electricity needed. That must be accounted for in your life cycle analysis. In fact, once you remove the Musk propaganda, Tesla's EVs are by no way greener (draw a boundary around his other company SpaceX, and the rocket fuel it uses, and you immediately see what I mean. Worse than Exxon I would bet)
True, but even in Wyoming, where you EV is really a coal-powered vehicle, the coal is not burned in the city.
Are you sure about that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Wyom...
What you linked seems to me to support GP’s text.
What content on that page do you read as refuting those claims?
Fun fact: there are no cities in Wyoming.
There are a lot of different ways to define "city". Wikipedia list 19 in Wyoming, but I'm not sure what criteria they use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_in_Wyom...
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I lived in downtown Rome, Italy. By far the biggest pollution you get in your house, it's...dust from brakes. It's a tragedy.
Not saying diesel ain't bad, but even now that diesels have been largely banned or reduced to euro 6, it has changed nothing about brake dust.
My flat would fill with it in a single day. It's everywhere. And I lived on a third floor, not even at street level.
How do you know the dust was specifically brake dust?
Good point.
I'm quite sure it was brake dust because during COVID 19 lockdowns everything was the same (heating etc) but streets were void of cars.
Then I've read some scientific article about brake with pics and it looked exactly as what I got inside my house.
I can't conclude 100% it was it (or just it), but it seems to be the most probable cause along tires.
Ah, that's interesting. Although I imagine cars kick up a lot of old-fashioned dirt dust from the road and swoosh up some more of that from the sidewalks as they drive as well.
There was an article on the topic just today on the economist
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/04/11/...
I live in a house next to a moderately busy street with car traffic and also some public transport (bus lines). I noticed that the windows (and frames) facing the street get dirty much faster than the windows facing the garden. The dirt on the street side is also pretty gross, sticky and hard to clean. It's just an anecdotal observation, but I could not come up with a better explanation so far.
I had a balcony overlooking a highway in Toronto once, and it got super grimy as well. I think all the different kinds of car emissions combine into some sort of super bad tarry crap that then collects every kind of passing dust particle.
Only electric vehicules are allowed inside the ZFE.
Doesn't answer the question though.
Isn't it more likely that it was tyre dust? Every vehicle (more so the heavier ones) is continually depositing tyre dust into the air, whereas brake dust will only be produced when slowing (and hardly any for regenerative braking vehicles).
Many cities in Europe have introduced climate zones in the past ~20 years, mainly to ban older smoky diesels like that. Petrol cars have also gotten more efficient; smaller engines (1 liter 3 cylinder ones are the norm now for smaller cars), smaller cars, more efficient engines, stop/start systems, hybrids and EVs (especially good for city traffic), etc.
That said, when I was in Paris last there were a lot of motor-scooters; while they also have small engines etc, I can't see them being much cleaner than well-designed cars, only due to their smaller size. Given time, I'm sure the range on their electric counterparts will become good enough as well to become a practical replacement.
Have other cities with similar rules seen as significant pollution drops?
Makes me wonder how much of this kind of progress other cities could get just from phasing out the dirtiest vehicles without going straight to car-free zones
It’s not just that. Car exhaust will never be 100% clean. It’s reduction of cars. Sorry.
How much of this has to do with the policies highlighted - removing 50k parking spots, adding bike lanes and green spaces - and how much has to do with cars having better exhaust?
How much less cars are on the road today vs then?
The charts and title make it look like there's no cars in Paris anymore. That's not the case, at all.
I‘m currently visiting Paris for the second time in my life after 2008. I can tell you it’s much cleaner now than it has been back then. There are many electric (cargo) bikes, scooters, cars and buses. The city is much quieter and there is way less crazy traffic. There are few cars parked on the side of the street. However these parking spots were cleared for bike lanes and bike sharing parking. Biggest polluter are the garage trucks, which are still diesel and noisy. If they manage to replace them by electric ones, many parts of the city will be really quiet.
More electric cars and busses does not mean "au revoir to cars".
This paper [0] suggests improvements in car emissions has played a big role in reducing emissions in European cities as a whole. Vehicle emissions of all kinds have fallen pretty dramatically across Europe [1], although this is total emissions for vehicles, so it includes policies to reduce driving as well as those to reduce each vehicle’s emissions. So overall trends toward more efficient cars are certainly part of the story. Given these images are between 2007, when emissions had already been falling, and 2024, I’m inclined to think the policies highlighted in the article played a significant role as well.
[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259016211...
[1]: https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/emissions-o...
Given that tires produce a lot of particulate matter, even EV's contribute to pollution significantly.
Wouldn’t that mean bicycles contribute to air pollution?
It's proportional to weight, so I imagine bicycles are negligible.
Yes, but so do humans walking. The proportions matter.
By a miniscule amount - probably less pollution than that produced by people walking.
Yes cars are bikes
Sure there are cars.
In my ( very personal, more than 20 years living here ) experience, it’s a completely different city, and there definitely are fewer cars than before.
Now if car exhausts are better and both effects compound I won’t complain !
Like another commenter in this thread I suspect it's mostly due to banning cars with Crit'air > 2.
No, it’s not just that. There’s a reduction in traffic. Traffic is the biggest cause of pollution. Even if the exhaust is “ clean “ (it’s not) there’s also tire dust and brake dust
Those are some really awesome changes. If only we could get more of that for cities in the US.
Right when covid started I drove around Austin to pick something up. There were hardly any cars on the road and the air looked pristine after several days of people mostly staying at home.
Immediately followig 9/11 in the US, there were a number of atmospheric scientists that were able to conduct studies for the first time without jet con-trails in the air.
Same thing in LA. It was nice!
We can. Slowly over time we need to raise awareness of the benefits of this.
Just tax road consumption so people who use the roads actually pay for them.
It is amazing what this has achieved in Manhattan.
Poor taxes are not a great solution with respect to equality.
https://www.mta.info/fares-tolls/tolls/congestion-relief-zon...
Pretty trivial to discount/exempt people as is done in NYC.
An even simpler starting point (which we should actually do for all road-related fees like tickets IMO) is to set fees by the KBB value of the vehicle in question. Let people contest them in court if they want.
The population driving into Manhattan is not poor. It's a consumption tax, not a poor tax.
This is a bad approach. At least if its only that.
In Manhatten this works because there is already a decent public transport, already a culture of waking and an established culture of biking.
You can just force people into better cities with punishing taxes. You actually have make the roads safer, provide alternatives and so on. And this is easier said then done, almost all cities in the US have zoning codes and other laws that make it completely impossible to build decent urban infrastructure. And the traffic standards are literally 100% backwards to providing safety.
In fact, because the traffic standards are so bad that less cars actually kill more people. This is because a lot of traffic slows down vehicle speeds on avg.
So basically, if all you are doing is forcing less people to drive, without doing anything else, you are just gone make the roads unsafer, and not improve the city or the lives of most people.
You can tax to such levels that you have both the funding for and the road space for a legitimately great bus or tram system.
This is unfortunately a problem where, as you say, many issues interact to make it difficult to solve piecemeal in most places. But that doesn't mean we can or should just allow it to fester. I agree zoning and physical infrastructure need to improve in tandem in most places.
Remember when Covid hit, and no one was going anywhere (in a plane or a car), and the skies were crystal clear everywhere.
Don't have to ban cars - the UK has adopted a speed limit of 20/30 mph in cities and I'm sure it helps. Surely helps with the noise and the safety
A lot of the problems occur where you couldn't go 20 mph.
The City of London famously has a congestion charge, which also helps lot. A similar plan just got started in Manhattan and already has big wins.
The congestion charge applies to a zone within London that’s much larger than just the City of London.
In the UK people consider "speeding" to be going 10mph or more over the limit. So 20/30mph really means 30/40mph, and in addition there are still many places with 40mph (50mph) roads going through.
Speed limit signs don't work. People will drive at whatever speed feels right and this is usually way above 20mph. What works is narrowing the roads. When the carriage way is barely wider than your vehicle it magically makes 20mph feel appropriate and 30mph seem fast (which it is). This has the bonus effect that larger vehicles feel it more, which is perfect considering they are the most dangerous and should be driven by trained professionals who are used to such tight spaces.
It essentially makes driving much more stressful, which is exactly what it should be. The problem at the moment is drivers get everything: big, wide, smooth roads, with the best drainage and grading; the easiest and most convenient mode of transport; but none of the responsibility. We need to shift the balance back. You can drive, but it's a big responsibility and if you fuck up the consequences are serious.
> Speed limit signs don't work. ... What works is narrowing the roads.
Even if you have every intention to stay within limits they don't work. In the US we have these massive stroads in urban areas posted at 35 mph. When I drive (rarely) I have to constantly monitor my speed. It doesn't feel natural and also takes away from, ya know, paying attention to the road. Aside from my opinion that 35 is way too fast anyways.
At the same time I've seen people complain that roads which are clearly not narrow, are too narrow because they can't barrel down side streets at 50. But at least it forces them to drive slower.
> It essentially makes driving much more stressful, which is exactly what it should be. ... the easiest and most convenient mode of transport ...
It boggles the mind. We sit in these big cozy chairs that transport us almost anywhere with little to no effort. It's pretty incredible. Yet, the most minor of inconveniences can cause a lot of car brains to absolutely lose it. Driving feels adjacent to addiction to many Americans and if people don't get their fix they go into complete meltdowns.
I think people do find driving stressful, but for the wrong reasons. Sitting a red light? Stressful. Cyclist slowing you down? Stressful. Too many other people are using cars at the same time you are? Stressful. It's stress originating from believing you had the god given right to drive like a maniac at all times.
In every part of US cities pedestrian walkways have to cross roads. But really roads should have to cross the walkways. Instead of sidewalks dipping down into four lane highways, roads should have to go up and over sidewalks at intersections. In Amsterdam there was huge expansive brick walkways that cars can use, but they're the foreign entity. Not the pedestrians.
Maybe it's just me but every car I've rented while traveling through the UK for the last 3 months starts beeping when you go over the limit. Really helps keep you under it by annoying the shit out of you.
It can make pollution worse. ICE cars are most efficient at around 50mph.
> ICE cars are most efficient at around 50mph
... when driven continuously without stopping, like a on cross country limited access highway.
When driving in the places people live, with cross walks and stop signs and children playing outside requiring frequent slowing & stopping, there's no efficiency benefit from racing 0 to 50mph every block then slamming on the brakes, only to repeat for each block after.
I frequently drive through 20 mph areas with little stop start traffic. I rarely drive at busy times.
There is nowhere in the UK I can think of that has had a 50 limit in my lifetime that requires frequent breaking. 20 mph limits are invariably reduced from 30.
Never been to Milton Keynes then? 70mph limit between roundabouts. Can think of countless other examples.
Honestly, kind of amazing to see a big city actually pull it off. So many places talk about reducing car dependence and improving air quality, but Paris really committed - and the data speaks for itself. Of course, the pushback from drivers was inevitable (it always is), but it's hard to argue with 55% less PM2.5 and cleaner skies over the Eiffel Tower. That's not just good urban policy - that's public health in action.
It makes sense now why they burn cars every protest (besides being fun). Pollution for a day, clean air for a lifetime
I am highly confident that a sufficient percentage of those whose cars are burned go on to buy another car that the net impact of the act you describe is negative on all counts.
Er, aren't the cars in question electric cars?
That has little to do with the pollution or traffic, and more about the extreme actions of their manufacturer. It's symbolic, albeit largely ineffective and ignored by the target.
Ah yes, the joy of destroying your neighbor’s property just for fun. Is he a working-class guy, struggling to pay his bills? Too bad. Because nothing says “let’s build a better future” than a riot.
Sadly, that is mostly how it happens. Wars/riots and strikes are the only proven mechanism for effecting systemic change to power structures. It's how you got most of your freedoms.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, it’s literally, objectively true.
The only reason Carnegie built 1500 public libraries is because he knew otherwise there was a good chance some vigilantes would take things into their own hands and he and his family would hang.
Yes, it sucks that the only way to reach the rich and powerful is to harm women, children and property. But at least the rich and powerful of old knew this, and preemptively prevented it.
New billionaires are far too cavalier. They believe themselves invisible, and it shows in their utter disrespect onto the average people. Where is our philanthropy? Why do you not fear for your life?
We have become too civilized, and allowed the evil to laugh in our faces.
> Yes, it sucks that the only way to reach the rich and powerful is to harm women, children
I would consider that evil, much as I want the current administration and it's allies to have some healthy respect (and thus restraint) for the power of the people.
Of course it's evil, it's just that historically that's what we've done and historically that's what effective.
It's largely good that we, as a people, have become more civilized and don't resort to that. The unexpected downside of that, though, is that we are much more susceptible to being exploited. It's a sort of naivety trade-off.
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Massive strikes that are hard to contain got use the 8 hour work day, weekends and a lot of labor rights. Civil right movements won only because a huge portion of them were militant (back then even the National Rifle Association supported banning guns). A violent status quo necessitates violence to achieve change.
Do you perhaps see a difference between "massive strikes" and "destroying your neighbor's property?"
I don't think the massive strikes were as peaceful as you imply.
The suffrage movement in the UK also had a militant component:
> The tactics of the [Women’s Social and Political Union] included shouting down speakers, hunger strikes, stone-throwing, window-smashing, and arson of unoccupied churches and country houses. In Belfast, when in 1914 the Ulster Unionist Council appeared to renege on an earlier commitment to women's suffrage,[27] the WSPU's Dorothy Evans (a friend of the Pankhursts) declared an end to "the truce we have held in Ulster." In the months that followed WSPU militants (including Elizabeth Bell, the first woman in Ireland to qualify as a doctor and gynaecologist) were implicated in a series of arson attacks on Unionist-owned buildings and on male recreational and sports facilities.
This influenced the US suffrage movement, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_Unit... , even during WWI: "groups like the National Woman's Party that continued militant protests during wartime were criticized by other suffrage groups and the public, who viewed it as unpatriotic."
I will note that car burning is rare during protests. It mostly happen during riots, which are quite rare (i think 2005 were the big ones, and some light ones started last year). What can happen is a luxury car finding itself on its own roof (those racing cars are light).
During the yellow vest protest, "unsafe" property destruction started, destroying an apartment and putting in danger bystanders (the only death was due to a police grenade shot trough an open window, but the protesters put in danger bystanders too, and only luck prevented any deaths). Which triggered an interesting response from old punks/antifas (and also active ones): They joined facebook yellow vest protest groups to teach "how to" destroy property properly: spot danger points, how to find a target, how to avoid side effects, when to avoid using fire (99.9% of the time), when not to, how to deactivate teargas grenade (it is surprising, but a lot of people do not know how to), and instilled in some very theoritical points about secrecy and compartmentalization that were passed down from like the "groupe Barta", which, to be honest, is quite funny.
The comment you resond to is obviously a joke, and so is yours (in a way) but owning and driving a car in Paris almost certainly places you in the upper class. Most Parisians don't own cars, most don't use them to drive around the city.
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mostly just a new year’s eve celebration now
I don't view terrorism as fun. I guess other people differ.
Burning an unoccupied car is vandalism I think.
What if the owner haven't even paid back a 5-year loan for the car?
Since everything is terrorism now maybe you can stop doing terrorism with your comment and delete it.
Are there any dataset that monitor average NO2 pollution of cities over time? CAMS released one[1], but it's not updated any more.
[1] https://github.com/CopernicusAtmosphere/air-quality-covid19-...
There's still a lot of cars driving in Paris. And motor scooters.
It's mostly in the west of Paris i.e. 8th, 15th and 16th districts, the other districts not so much if at all.
scooters are the worst. So much noise for a tiny vehicle (worse than most cars even) and the old ones smell so so bad.
electrify now!
Shhhhh, we're trying to pretend we know what we're talking about here.
No need to be like that. Yes, of fucking course in a city of millions of people there are still cars. The point here is the relative amount compared to earlier.
It did not appear to me like most people in this thread were talking about a modest reduction in vehicle traffic, or that they'd done any due diligence to estimate the actual effect of the restrictions. Seems like people are mostly shooting from the hip.
"Ban all the cars" does have noticeable effects.
I wonder if something less all / none might have nearly the same effects with far less drawbacks otherwise.
E.G. What if only emissions testing certified low emission vehicles were allowed? What if only electric? How about requiring quiet utility trucks for garbage / freight / etc?
For cities that large / dense, adding in Caves of Steel like people-mover belts might be a great alternative too.
With modern emissions standards, more than 50% of the harmful pollution comes from tires/brakes/road surface wear/resuspended dust:
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/non-exhaust-particulate...
Moving away from privately owned cars entirely seems to be the only way to eliminate the health impact of cars on people in a city.
Are publicly-owned cars somehow not emitting anything? Or, how else will people get around?
I live in a European city, where I rarely use my car to get around. Banning cars won't do anything, because I don't use my car because I can, I use it because I have to.
If you want to get rid of cars, design cities that can be lived in without having to use cars.
People wouldn't use publicly-owned cars, they would used publicly-owned buses, trams, subways, and other forms of mass transit, plus (as the article points out), making it easier to walk or bike.
I believe the goal of limiting car use in Paris is as part of re-designing the city so it can be lived in without having to use cars, yes.
> With modern emissions standards, more than 50% of the harmful pollution comes from tires/brakes/road surface wear/resuspended dust:
Sure, but what about compared to eg. 15 year old diesels with removed DPF filters? Those were the cars that were removed from paris (with the "eco stickers" and other regulation), and that brought the pollution down.
New cars exhaust very little particulate matter, so percantages don't say a lot.
I mean.. almost 100% of the polution of bicyles comes from tires/brakes/road surface/resuspended dust, but the total amount is very low.
It's not just about emissions. The entire character of the area changes. The streets fill with pedestrians and bicycles.
Garbage trucks and ambulances still use the streets. But they face no traffic and are exceptions rather than the rule. They don't need to be either low emission or quiet, though those things are also nice to have, since those things are no longer the most pressing issues.
> What if only electric?
Then the streets would still be unsafe and congested, just with a bit less pollution.
I'm not familiar with the particulars of the Paris program but a "car ban" doesn't have to ban garbage & freight trucks.
I'd argue these, along with private or public transit, emergency vehicles etc, are the best uses for the internal combustion engine or just vehicles in general. The problem with ICE/car/vehicles, isn't that they exist or are useful, but that at some point we over-indexed on their utility and ignored their externalities & subsidies.
Paris has certainly not banned all cars. Just reduced their numbers.
The most effective changes probably come from stacking a bunch of smaller, less dramatic policies that add up over time: cleaner vehicles, better public transit, quieter freight solutions, smarter zoning, etc
P&R outside of a city with good connection to city core would be great.
You would also save sitting in traffic.
And it would push the quality of public transport
I live in Paris, cars haven't all been banned. Some streets have been made pedestrians only and some lanes have been converted into bike lanes, but overall you can drive almost everywhere in the city (although that was always painful).
We have that certificate you mention. Today in most large cities in France, some streets are forbidden to cars that have a bad "Crit'air" score. It's a sticker you have to order online, with a number from 1 to 6. What number you receive is dependent on your car's model and its age. You have to put it under your windshield or risk getting fined by the police.
In modern cars, including EV, polution and noise come from weight and tires and breaks; the polution levels are a sharp funxtion of speed, but the speeds at which they dont matter much, dont offer benefits either. If we had magnetic/levitated cars maybe some simple solution could be found, but with the current designs where the tires hit the asphalt it seems hard to make things environmentally friendly in a city other than reducing or banning cars.
I like the idea of people-mover belts. Maybe fast surface belts and escalators could help larger cities if cars were out of the way. Subway systems almost feel like people-mover belts sometimes, but their noise levels are incredibly high and they do damage metalic rails during breaking so not sure how low the contribution to air polution could be.
This is a bad-faith fallacy. We had cars that emitted X amounts of tyre/brake particulate and 10X amounts of combustion residue, we got rid of the combustion part, and now we hear "OMG! 100% is tyre particulate!!!"
Sure, but people won't stop moving, and there's no vacuum, you should compare brake particulate to whatever else people would use if cars didn't exist.
Or you could just make a city car-free. There are so many benefits besides fewer particles in the air. People can walk and cycle safely. Kids can play in the streets. The atmosphere is so much nicer, since people are not isolated by walls around them.
I have lived in a city with a (nearly) car-free city center (+ separate bike lines for many roads outside the center) for most of my adult life [1] and it is just glorious. Most locals just walk or cycle. Longer distances by (electric) bus or train.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen#Cycling_and_walking
Kids can't play in streets as now the new predators are cyclists who don't slow down or get down of their bikes. Besides, cars are a staple for families, and hardly substituable. Good luck doing groceries for 6 without one.
It's mind boggling to me that this is a genuine comment.
I suggest this yt channel as a start to open your eyes as to how yes, another world is possible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
I live in Riga, here cyclists ride on the sidewalk, along with e-scooters. I went out for a ten minutes walk with my son, I had to physically and verbally intervene three times to avoid him being hit by a cyclist or e-scooter. Last month our nanny was hit by a cyclist. In Paris it is very common and the main reason they banned e-scooters.
So, while the US paradigm is toxic, I'm not convinced about the one you are proposing, given that, in my experience, cyclists are ruthless and never behave unless I physically intimidate them. And I would rather walk in peace.
I live in Riga, here cyclists ride on the sidewalk, along with e-scooters.
First, give cyclists bike paths, second develop your culture around cycling and walking. It's not a problem here. Virtually everyone cycles here (more bikes than people in this country). I am over 40 and I can only think of two people I know who had more serious injuries (one broken tooth and one broken leg), but both managed to fall without any other traffic involved.
Kids in our city walk or bike to school by themselves when they are 9 or 10 (some earlier) and there are virtually never accidents.
It's a shame that riders of bikes and scooters in your city feel so unsafe riding on the road, that they are forced onto the sidewalks. Blame dangerous drivers and the lack of protected bike lanes though, not your neighbors who are just trying to arrive at their destinations alive.
Pedestrian collisions with bikes versus collisions with automobiles are utterly incomparable both in number and severity. If that cyclist had been driving a car, you would probably need to find a new nanny!
Delivery drivers on e-bikes are the worst in my country, they ride on the sidewalk between pedestrians and cross the roads ignoring traffic lights and rules, feels like you are in a developing Asian country. Why don't they want to ride on the roadway? Because with their and car drivers style of driving it's dangerous.
The problem is that most cyclists in my city have no idea about the basic of safety and how to evaluate risk. Most of them ride with headsets on, often noise-cancelling, no helmets and no reflectors. So I'm a bit dubious about the excuse "they are so scared". And even then, they can still walk instead of endangering pedestrians.
As for your last paragraph, this is false; walking on the sidewalk is and should be safe: adding cyclists there makes it unsafe, irrelevant of the car's behavior. Typical predatory thinking of a toxic cyclist.
You need to develop infrastructure (bike lanes and paths) and a cycling culture (which comes with giving kids training in primary school). To give some examples how things work here:
- Most kids get 'traffic training' and have to do a theoretical and practical exam when they are about 10 or 11.
- Building a cycling culture makes car drivers more aware. If car drivers are also cyclists themselves, they are more aware of cyclists. Also, during driving lessons some techniques are practiced, like e.g. opening a door with your hand that is opposite to the door. By doing so, you automatically turn while opening the door, so you can see if any cyclists are passing. All of this makes cycling on roads (as opposed to pavements safer).
- Give bikes a lane, or even better a separate bike path. Only let cars and bikes share a street in low-speed (30 km/h) non-busy streets. Cars, bikes, and pedestrians differ so much in speed that they usually should not be on the same roads.
- Change your laws such that in accidents involving cars <-> bikes or car <-> pedestrian, the car driver always bares a certain amount of liability even if the cyclist/pedestrian is at fault. To a cyclist/pedestrian a car is like a bullet flying by. Putting more liability on the car driver makes them more careful.
- Design your cities so that cycling/walking is preferred. E.g. the city I live uses filtered permeability. As closer you get to the city center, the harder it becomes to get there by car, whereas you can get everywhere easily by bike or by foot. This fosters a culture where biking/walking is the norm, because you can get in different places faster by bike.
It works very well. I don't know of any pedestrians who were hit by a bike.
Typical predatory thinking of a toxic cyclist.
Please avoid the personal attacks and victim-blaming. I have also lived in a country that was not cycling-safe and usually the only way to avoid getting hit is to ride on the pavement (as most natives did). The problem is not the cyclist, but the miserable infrastructure for anything that is not a car.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permeability_(spatial_and_tran...
This is certainly not very common in Paris. Cyclists behave extremely badly, but don’t ride on the sidewalk. E-scooters were another story though, and were indeed banned for this reason.
They don't do it often, but I do see it happen once or twice a day when I'm out. Usually it's only for a short distance though.
Cargo bike?
It isn't very different than a car if you want to reach the same level of features.
Hi Stavros. I would never say OMG—dont believe in deities—and I feel sorry that it came out that way. I was commenting on the GP, which was suggesting alternative ways to get similar effects to those of car-free cities, but in alternative ways. Of those possible ways, to my suprise, the large conveyor belt seemed an interesting possible next step. EVs are not reducing polution in modern cities, unfortunately. They are still way better than gas burning vehicles for a lot of reasons, including CO2 reduction, but as per studies by the Economist they are currently worse on air pollution in cities, unfortunately, due to their typical extra weight, so once we optimize life in cities, we probably want to find ways to reduce their weight and speed, and currently the straightforward solution is to reduce their numbers. As people start obsessing with detecting microplastics in the next decade, these types of changes in city life vs rural life exposure might become even more dramatic.
Compare with the ULEV zone in other cities and control for other differences. You could possibly even publish that as a research paper!
Cars need to be banned not primary because of emissions but because they are just generally bad in every wy. They need lots of space, even if they are not actually there (parking lots), they are unsafe and the slow down every other transport method and all the utility functions as well. Plus they are fucking ugly.
A city is just 10x more beautiful without cars, and the place in the cities where most people actually want to hang out, doesn't have cars.
No idea what 'people mover belts' are. We already have trains in various forms, add bikes and maybe some scooters to that and your done. Plus of course lots of walking.
For garbage transport and cargo, it would actually be nice to use the existing tram lines. Zürich has something like that but its experimental. But it should be more developed. Until then, small electric trucks are a good solution. Most of this can be done overnight when the tram lines aren't used much.
Cars in cities, let alone designing cities around cars, is one of the greatest tragedies of modern life.
And it's one of the biggest promoters of inequality.
I am an European who studied at OSU in Columbus for a semester and it was absurd to me how on one side there was lots of work downtown, yet you could live 20 miles of it and it would take you two hours by public transport to get there, an odyssey.
People without a car, insurance, poorer parts of the society were cut off from the job market for not having a way to connect.
Suburbs are cute, but they are a tragedy of city planning, let alone the tragedy they are on a social level, where people will put everything in their houses including movie rooms, entertainment rooms, anything to avoid having to go out and socialize. Terrible.
In the USA, the working poor generally don't work downtown, and it's really the industrial areas where there is awful transit service. So cheapo used cars are a must for these folks.
There is some awful HN bias here where young healthy well-paid tech workers live in some boogie part of SF/NYC/Boston/etc and enjoy the "car-free lifestyle" (and I've been there), without any idea how the other half lives.
I've seen this "car free utopia" idea dismissed as an idea by and for "elites" (see Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's comments on people who ride the subway in NYC) plenty of times as a tactic to avoid doing anything about reducing dependence on cars. It's quite a counterproductive argument in my opinion. Even if there are well paid tech workers who are able to enjoy a "car-free lifestyle", why should it end there?
Just because the system we created means that currently the only affordable place for the working poor is in suburbs where they must rely on cars doesn't mean that it needs to continue to be that way. You can support building infill housing and adding transit to eventually reduce the need for so many people to have cars.
It's one thing to call it "bias" and use that as an argument to not make things better instead of coming up with ways to help make car independence available to everyone across classes.
Poor people live in the parts of cities you avoid until your rent gets expensive, too.
Because the truth is nobody has any real idea how to retrofit the last 70 years of American suburbia so that mass transit is actually effective and useful for people. "Transit-oriented development" really only helps downtown workers and doesn't get you to the grocery store or daycare. (And even in NYC, the subway is not great out in Queens/etc, so people own cars.)
But it is nice to live in the Mission and take the techbus to Mountain View and handwave all the hard trillion dollar problems and say let the poors eat cake. Which is effectively how these discussions seem to go.
I find it fascinating how the debate around cars in cities evolves. Initially counter arguments always are that reducing cars is not desirable "nobody wants less cars in cities, people need to do their weekly groceries, nobody wants to bike in bad weather...". Once these points are refuted it always evolves into "yes it would be great, but it can't be done, because it's too expensive, politically controversial...". It's almost like there is an irrational fear of less cars in cities.
Regarding it can't be done I encourage anyone to read up on how the investment into public transport transformed Bogota. Which is both much poorer and in a much more challenging geographical environment than most US cities. So if they can do it, why can't US cities?
You are putting a lot of pointless words in my mouth. As I said, I have actually lived the San Francisco car-free bike and streetcar lifestyle, and quite enjoyed it. So I have the perspective of why it does or does not work (for Americans). I would love to see some concrete solutions proposed here other than just the usual Cars Bad/Cars Good handwaving and downvoting.
(I just looked at Bodega in Google Maps, and it is significantly more dense than all but the most "boogie" American cities. Compare it to say Chicago.)
Chicago has a density of 4500 people per sq km compared to Bogota at 4100 so Chicago is denser? That said I actually meant Medellin not Bogota which is significantly denser. However Medellin topology makes it extremely challenging to build infrastructure, the central valley floor is more than 1000m lower than most of the suburbs. Moreover the GDP of Medellin is 70 billion compared to a GDP of Chicago of 800 billion and Chicago can't build public transport infrastructure because it's 1.5 less dense? That doesn't make any sense.
Genuinely curious, do you have a good article about Bogota? Because your entire demeanor is acting like you have some "gotcha", without advocating for anything concrete.
For example, from my brief perusal of Google Maps, it looks like they have some sort of growth boundary, because it goes from dense city to farms in a sharp line. For historical reasons, America is not organized that way. (And Chicago is fucked-up, so be it.)
Bogota is interesting for their bus rapid transit (dedicated bus lanes), which as far as I know was built out for a fraction of the cost of a metro system.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/07/headway/bogot...
Yep, San Francisco's BRT line has been a huge success (despite being typically way late and over-budget). And actually SF has had 'proto-BRT' for a long time, but IMO they still need more subways.
Bodega does have a growth boundary, per google. (IMO the lack of that is the 'root of all evil' of USA development patterns.)
Self driving cars will make it much more viable to use cars for last mile on either side of a public transport trip.
Except that many European cities copied US cities in their development styles, and then later reversed them. So we absolutely do know how to reverse it.
> But it is nice to live in the Mission and take the techbus to Mountain View and handwave all the hard trillion dollar problems and say let the poors eat cake. Which is effectively how these discussions seem to go.
Every study shows that the poor are hurt the most because of car centric development.
Here is a guide on how to improve American cities that are surrounded by lots of suberbia:
- Remove/close all highways that go across the city, only keep the ring road. People will simple reclaim those space for recreational uses as soon as cars are gone.
- Increase price of parking space or eliminate them completely. Most parking in city is not used by residents anyway.
- Redo even if its with paint and few concrete bolders, the city streets according to Dutch street regulations. Massively increase safety for everybody.
- That frees up lots of space for bike lanes (as US cities tend to have far to many car lanes). This is actually a benefit to the history of US cities, we can't do that in some of the older dense cities.
- Change your zoning code and other access regulations, so proper urban development is actually allowed to happen. The US could adopt something like Japan zoning laws. A heavy use of mixed use and allow living in almost any zone. The US has a hilarious amount of commercial development land that completely underutilized. This also means no more minimum parking space and all that nonsense. See maybe like this: https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/news/land-use-zones-in-japa...
- This will make it so suburbs can go from single house only to a mix of single house, duplex, fourplexes, townhouses and so on. Like suburbs used to be. And it will make it so that light commercial developments can happen in subburbs. Meaning a single house can turn into small shops, coffees and such.
- In the city select a few core blocks in different places in the city, make those pedestrian only. Or like Montreal does, a whole long street. Each year add more of those pedestrian zone, improve walking infrastructure between them.
- Make it so subburban residents start to pay full price for their utilities including water and other infrastructure. New subburban developments are often hilariously subsidized, needing more water pumps and such.
- Redevelop current stroads into much fewer lanes and create separate access roads to the commercial developments. This improves flow on the stroads, reduce accidents and makes walking and biking along those stroads safer. Of course some of those lanes would turn into bike infrastructure.
- In the subburbs, also reduce road with, install protected cycle lanes. Break open the horrible cul-de-sac, the city can buy part of peoples garden to create cross connects between different cul-de-sacs and surrounding developments (cross connects for people and bikes, not cars).
- Make all the bus services public, heir a real transportation engineer to come up with a plan. Consisting of a few main routes, using the old stroads and highways, and smaller buses that serve as connectors to these major routes. Of course for that you would make some lanes on the highway, busways. Despite what some people in the US think, you can actually do decent bus service in suberbia. Combine that with public on demand service, that gets you cheaply to the next closes major public transport node. Maybe start planning a tram route along the major bus-routes.
- Look at your old rail infrastructure and develop a plan for a decent regional service. Develop a 50 year rail plan.
- The city can also simply buy up some cul-de-sacs that are strategically located and redevelop them into proper nice walkable neighborhoods. The city can even own the land and only rent half of the appartments, some at affordable price. This worked well in Britain and still does work well in Austria. And of course develop a transportation plan for those new neighborhoods. See an example, where old soviet style neighborhoods were developed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfonhlM6I7w
- Change your property tax into a land tax, or a property tax heavily focused on land. Or potentially do more with sales or what taxes, importantly, just don't do property tax.
- Like in Japan, require anybody that wants to own a car in a city, to first prove the have a private place to part.
- Make all car registrations based on weight, meaning you pay more for a heavier car.
- Focus development on the city and the first suburban ring around the city. Offer intensives for people in the outer rings to move into the inner rings. So for example somebody that owns a small house in the far outer ring of the city, could move into a duplex in the inner rings.
- If yours city has repair backlog (and most cities do) focus on the city core and the inner ring of subberbia.
- Do not develop more land, US cities already are far to wide spread. Simply announce no new infrastructure or roads. And not taking over into city property stuff that developers have built.
I could list more, pretty much all of these have been discussed in urbanism research.
Pretty much all of these have been done in different places at different times. And the all pretty much work. Doing them all together hasn't been done but there is no reason to believe it wouldn't work.
Of course this does not mean that for 1 day to the next everybody will go from suberbinate to die hard city person. But the culture after 1-2 decades of such changes will be dramatically different.
I also suggest to see this video about comparing two cities over time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uqbsueNvag
It's funny, seems like people had me pegged as some Suburb Guy, when that couldn't be further from the truth. (I have mostly walked the talk, which is more than I can say of some of the former Bike Guys I have known.) Anyway, I completely agree with much of this, just a couple nits:
> Every study shows that the poor are hurt the most because of car centric development.
Yes, the poor always lose out versus Hypothetical Utopia. I'm referring to reality as it exists in the current and near future where many many poor & middle-class people need cars. You can't just take them away because of a dumb student-type notion that "cars are only for rich people".
> Change your zoning code and other access regulations (etc)
Yes, I would love to tell Silicon Valley how to zone, but even the popular governor is having trouble doing that.
(Meanwhile, my urban SF neighbors are arguing about what paint colors should be allowed, like it is a HOA or something.)
> Develop a 50 year rail plan.
We have that, but it doesn't actually help because it's mostly about building rail out to new suburbs where people can get into city center office jobs (and the rail agency can get tax money). In the meanwhile, we built an urban subway with 3! stations.
Like I said, it's a trillion dollar problem, and there's no easy button. Just incremental improvements.
> It's funny, seems like people had me pegged as some Suburb Guy, when that couldn't be further from the truth.
I didn't, I read your comment. I think you are just haven't done the necessary level of research or you just have a doomer outlook.
> Yes, the poor always lose out versus Hypothetical Utopia.
But they are not comparing to Utopia, but rather the comparable situation where changes have been made. Or to the same city before and after some change.
Unless you are making the argument that no objective knowledge can exist, the research is pretty clear.
> I'm referring to reality as it exists in the current and near future where many many poor & middle-class people need cars.
Nobody is questioning that. Literally nobody. That why its called 'car centric design'. Who are you arguing against?
> You can't just take them away because of a dumb student-type notion that "cars are only for rich people".
Again, literally nobody is arguing that! You have constructed a complete straw man of urbanist.
The argument is to encourage policy that will make people want to live without cars in the future.
Unless you think, restricting parts of the city center or closing some urban highways is 'taking cars away', you are literally arguing against nobody.
> Yes, I would love to tell Silicon Valley how to zone, but even the popular governor is having trouble doing that.
Yes, all of my suggesting involve politics. And of course not all of them can be implemented practically depending on location. This is always true with literally any suggestion about anything political.
But your claim wasn't 'its politically difficult' rather your claim was 'nobody knows how'.
> We have that, but it doesn't actually help because it's mostly about building rail out to new suburbs where people can get into city center office jobs (and the rail agency can get tax money). In the meanwhile, we built an urban subway with 3! stations.
If be 'we' you mean California, yes there is one. And that is already a lot better then what many other places have. You might not think its enough, but it better then nothing. And the claim that it is bad because its only 'new suburbs' is also factually wrong as part of the rail plan you just had Caltrain electrification, and future improvement to existing rail Caltrain. I'm not an expert on California rail, but the claim that it serves 100% new subburbs is certainty false.
> Like I said, it's a trillion dollar problem, and there's no easy button. Just incremental improvements.
I have no idea why you are claiming its a 'trillion $' problem. That can be said about not doing anything at all too. When we are talking about the infrastructure of 300 million people (assuming we are talking US) then of course, any decision you make its a trillion $. But in that context 1 trillion $ also isn't that much.
And if you actually look at the research you will see that actually many of the suggestion I have SAVE MONEY. The idea that all of this cost unbelievable amounts of money is simply not true.
Lets go threw examples:
- Saver roads pay for themselves because accidents have a really high cost. And the new safer roads will decease avg speed, leaing to easier to maintain roads. In the US today there is a massive amount of overbuilding of incrastructure that simply isn't needed if you were builing roads according to modern scientific principles, rather then some book some engineer wrote in 1960s that just so happens to have been adopted as 'the standard'. And the principles aren't that hard or expensive to implement. This is a clear money safer. Think about all the idiotic lights the US uses at every intersection, each set of lights is expensive, sound road planning would eliminate many of these.
- Closing down urban freeways increases property taxes. Gives the city new land to redevelop and sell, or keep as parks. Also reduces maintenance burden on state level.
- Rezoning pays for itself many, many, many times over, its not even close.
- Increase parking price can raise money for the city. If you don't want to remove them. Removing them is very easy and cheap.
- Putting down protected bike lanes with simple concrete protection is very very cheap and tons of research shows that it is very beneficial. More people on bikes means less car, means less time wasted in traffic. It has also been repeatedly shown that it improves retail on those roads and it also improves property prices.
- Setting up pedestrian zones is also incredibly cheap. Literally a few concert blocks or at most a few bulliards that you can fold down for emergency access. Incredibly cheap, increases property prices and retail.
- Increasing prices on suberbia to reflect actual cost, raises money, rather then losing it.
- Redeveloping stroads is a bit more expensive, but I'm not proposing building anything new, but rather changing the way access and priority works. Cost money but not that much and in the long term it saves a lot of money.
- City buying and developing land does cost money, but since the new mixed use areas will be popular they can actually make a lot of money. Money for this can be raised by cities.
- Setting up a bus network is also really not that expensive. That is some amount of running cost, but if your buses have good priority lanes and are frequent you can cover a lot of the operation. This certainty not a 'trillion $' and each city can handle this themselves, like the do in most of the world. And again, this is increasing tax revenue along bus routes as has repeatedly been shown.
- All the revenue increases are doubly relevant if you switch from property tax to land tax.
The only thing that is at all expensive that I proposed is a long term rail plan. But in terms of your long term transportation plan, you have a lot of cost anyway. And rail is a better long term investment.
I formulate all of my points specifically so they were something cheap that can be done. I didn't propose building huge new parks, or huge metro systems. Or high speed rail. Or anything like that.
You can literally do 95% of what is needed by with paint, concrete blocks, a bunch of buses and bus drivers and a few legal chances. The city will actually increase its revenue a huge amount over time.
The current model of trying to support ever increasingly distant suburbs is what is actually bankrupting cities.
I suggest you look at the detailed research from Urban3. They clearly show how cities that have done many of the chances I propose, are good for the cities finances. In fact, some cities have implemented some of these changes specifically because they are out of money.
So please do not spread the idea that American cities can't change because its to expensive. That is the sort of thing far-right wing people spread, the whole 'we can't afford bike-lanes' nonsense.
Not getting into some back-n-forth when I agree with much of this, and doing what I can locally.
> Again, literally nobody is arguing that! You have constructed a complete straw man of urbanist.
I actually made my post to head the scarecrows off at the pass. Otherwise these HN threads tend to just turn into reddit fuckcars.
A friend of mine is writing a history of the Massachusetts Hill towns. The Strathmore paper company plays a big part in that history the mill owners built housing for their workers within walking distance of the mills.
I also know of a tourism industry company that is buying up older hotels that are no longer competitive in the local market to use as seasonal worker housing.
There are solutions other than having someone drive a beater for 45 minutes to get to a low paying job.
Yeah, "company towns" were another issue that cars solved.
On what planet do you think that people living in company housing could afford cars? People living in company housing were the poorest of the poor.
Please just....stop. Stop trying to talk about how poor people lived or live.
Correct, it was a terrible situation despite the lack of cars.
When I look around on the subway here in NYC I see every type of person imaginable. There are wealthy people going to work and unhoused people and everyone in between. There are certainly transit deserts and I have friends that live in them who do have cars -- largely out in Queens, East New York, etc -- but many of the people I know in the city with cars are financially doing just fine.
It's also important to note that the extreme cost of living in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn is relatively recent. My friends that grew up here in the 80s, taking the subway to school, were far from bougie. They were living a car free lifestyle then and now just because that's how the environment of many parts of NYC is built. It's not like NYC was constructed as a walking paradise only for wealthy people in the 19th century.
True, I'm an old urbanite/suburb-hater. But because of ppl like me, I don't think there's any place left in the USA which has 'good' transit and isn't expensive. (And solutions like congestion tolls only work because of the boogieness.) What's done is done.
Yeah, agreed. We built the country for the car and there’s no easy path out of that. Every time I’m in LA I think “man we could have had a city like Barcelona” and get bummed it’s just a sprawling car dependent amalgamation of suburbs. There’s clearly demand for more cities like NYC in the US, but we’re not going to get it.
Yeah, some local billionaires want to build "San Francisco by the Sacramento Delta", and it's been nothing but NIMBY opposition. My guess it will be McMansions in 20 years instead. Politically, we can't even build one high-density suburb.
The working poor struggles to find work and stays poor also because mobility.
By the way that's not something I'm making up, it was literally told me by several people in struggling neighborhoods, lacking a car can be easily make a difference for many between being able or not to have different opportunities in life.
Might be different elsewhere but it made sense to me.
I've heard the same thing, because there's a lot of jobs out in suburban industrial parks and etc. (Some local transit agencies have tried to solve this, but the situation still isn't good.)
Wasn't GP specifically complaining about the other half not being able to enjoy the "car-free lifestyle"? (/not be forced to use the car to live their life.)
I'm not unsympathetic, but I don't think a "European who studied at OSU for a semester" really knows what they are talking about.
You might be right, I was just sharing my experience and what I've heard from locals.
Anyway, there's an abundant literature that links inequality with transport opportunities.
But those topics are so touchy for you Americans tbh, it's like arguing about weapons, it's too heated of an argument for rational discourse.
Yeah, "mobility opportunities". I recognize the issues, and the lack of easy answers, so I think I'm only "touchy" about is simplistic solutions.
European car commuter rates are almost identical to USA's. But I know little about the details, so don't really have any commentary, other than not all of Europe some glorious bike/transit boogie utopia. (And some ppl get "touchy" about that.)
You are completely correct about the bias on HN against cars: that will change when they get older and have kids. Not everyone is a young single urbanite working remotely or downtown.
I don't have kids but I do have 4 nephews. They all take their bikes or if not possible for whatever reason, buses/trains/trams/metro to school and elsewhere. My 1 sister lives in the countryside and her kids still take the bike to school, which is ~10km away from their house, and if they go to another city they can take their bikes on the train.
Why wouldn't you want your kid to be independent like this? Why force them to have to rely on you and your car if they want to go out and see their friends? It inconveniences you and makes their life much more dull and restricted, not to mention the health benefits of taking the bike vs sitting in a car for a kid.
Why judge others for how they live, when you don't even know their circumstances?
Didn't really intend to be judgy, but are you not doing the same when calling out the "Young single urbanites who work from home/downtown"?
I'm not judging them for choosing to use public transport or bicycles, that's their right. They should not judge car drivers, but they often do and want them banned.
The secret to successful urban living is tolerance, but sadly that is in short supply.
Thank you for saying this. My household is smack dab in the middle of a food dessert. We have a 25 year old car we got 10 years ago for $2000, and we use it primarily to go to the nice supermarket because you can get fresh, non moldy food at prices better than you can at the sketchy “supermarkets” and bodegas that always have rotting, moldy and non rotated food products on shelves. I do most of the shopping and I keep the freezer full of meat we can get on sale (just got 7 pounds of chicken wings for 2.49 a pound this week) and cook through that. A lot of the types in spaces like these don’t know how to cook and just use services like grubhub, and thinks everyone should too, or they buy 8 dollar a pound organic chicken thighs from Whole foods the day of. Everybody doesn’t live this way.
Also, I use the bus and train to go downtown and places where it would take an hour to find a parking spot. I even lug big bags of food from Aldi on the crowded bus at rush hour weekly. I don’t know why it has to be either you drive everywhere or never need a car in these discussions. Use what you need to use given the situation.
Speaking as "the other half": this is wildly condescending, ignorant, and ironic. The irony of declaring that HN doesn't understand "how the other half lives"...
...while also declaring that "used cars are a must" for poor people (if you can afford a car in a city, you're substantially above a huge number of people, and car ownership rate goes up dramatically with wealth. It rises higher than 1 car/person once you start hitting the single digits. A huge number of service industry people, not to mention students, get around on foot or bicycle. They just don't commute 9-5, and they don't live in your neighborhoods, so you don't see them)
...while also making wildly sweeping generalization about where transit does and doesn't go (in my city, poor people get busses, rich people get trolleys and light rail and commuter rail, and it's pretty clearly purposeful that it is very difficult to get to the rich residential parts from the poor residential parts)
...while also making wildly sweeping generalizations that working poor don't work downtown, and only work in "industrial" areas in cities. It really goes to show how invisible we all are to you....even when you're wagging your finger at the rest of HN for not understanding people like us, lol.
Downtown, who exactly do you think handles all the cleaning, maintenance, repair, delivery, food service, retail, etc in the "downtown" area of a city?
Who do you think delivers the paper towels and bottled water and k-cups? Everything around you in your office - every single fucking thing down to the carpet you're standing on - is there because a poor person put it there.
Who do you think is driving the busses and taxis and trucks and vans?
Who do you think works the "gig" "jobs" delivering everything from dry cleaning to laundry to a fancy lunch for to those "young healthy well-paid tech workers"? (and FYI, your boss/admin assistant/office manager, when they order that big lunch from the fancy place across town? They're shit tippers. And bad communicators. And take forever to show up to grab the order.)
Do you realize that even in the "boogie" (sic) part of the city, the guy running the cash register at that hip coffee joint is making as close to minimum wage as the company thinks they can get away with, which is likely, at best, a buck or two an hour more than average?
Who exactly do you think fills all the entry-level jobs, including in tech companies? What do you think the front desk receptionist is paid? The desktop support person?
I feel like you all think that someone who cleans the offices for the big dot-com or white-shoe law office...or someone who dishwashes or busses or does prep work for a fancy restaurant where a plate costs $50, is getting paid anything remotely proportional to the difference in cost from a restaurant a plate for $18 or the hourly rate of that law firm.
It's the opposite - the fanciest places and the biggest name corps squeeze people the hardest. That's how they got to where they are.
Criticism accepted, I am not trying to generalize everyone. I am an urban dweller from back in the days when that was the cheap (and less desirable) way to live. So I obviously wish we had much better transit and more affordable housing, and all of the good things. Its not like people want to spend an hour in traffic in a beater-ass car, they do it because they have to. (Because all of the shit you mention is even worse in the suburbs.) I would just like to see some real solutions which don't involve taxing the fuck out of the little guy or nuking the suburbs or the usual Cars Bad handwaving. It's a hard problem which nobody has a real good answer for.
It’s all by design. Car dependent suburbs with no transit access make it easier to keep “undesirables” out of your neck of the woods.
Robert Moses infamously made great use of infrastructure and urban planning to reinforce redlining.
Just one example. He required bridges be built too low for buses to pass, limiting access to parks and beaches to those who owned cars…
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-mo...
>ust one example. He required bridges be built too low for buses to pass, limiting access to parks and beaches to those who owned cars… >https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-mo...
If you're gonna claim something don't cite an article that's all about debunking that thing.
Read the article. It doesn’t debunk that assertion. It more or less confirms it.
Here's the sub-heading from the article you linked to:
"The story: Robert Moses ordered engineers to build the Southern State Parkway’s bridges extra-low, to prevent poor people in buses from using the highway. The truth? It’s a little more complex"
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"to prevent poor people in buses from using the highway"
No evidence whatsoever for that motivation. You could take the bus to the beach.
You are quoting yourself not the article or me?
No evidence besides the direct testimony of a person that worked on the project given to one of the best biographers in a piece of work that won a Pulitzer Prize. Also, the physical evidence of the bridges. Circumstantially, the man was openly racist, and openly used design to segregate.
The assertion isn’t that you couldn’t take a bus to the beach. The assertion is that you couldn’t take a bus from the inner city neighborhoods to Jones Beach, which was true.
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Suburbs are also financially subsidised by the city centres. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
Posts like these reverse cause and effect.
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The prices of cars have “skyrocketed” because the price is now closer to what they actually cost. Meaning, less is being externalized.
Cars are inequality-creators because the drivers offload the cost to everyone, including those who don’t drive. Car centric decisions, air pollution, interstates and freeways, parking lots.
It’s very much akin to tobacco. Tobacco used to be cheap - when the tobacco wouldn’t pay for your addiction, or your COPD, or your eventual death. Now they do - a tiny bit - and tobacco is expensive.
>The prices of cars have “skyrocketed” because the price is now closer to what they actually cost. Meaning, less is being externalized.
This is false. There are no “externalities” that are now getting paid. You don’t pay for the right to drive upfront, you already have a permit for that, and that permit is what pays for road maintenance, etc. Maybe the current price is not fair, but that permit hasn’t increased in price. The reality is that Europe let all manufacturers buy one another so they don't have to compete anymore. So they can do whatever they want with prices.
>Cars are inequality-creators because the drivers offload the cost to everyone, including those who don’t drive.
Which wasn't a problem when everybody could afford to drive before Europe ruined everything.
> Which wasn't a problem when everybody could afford to drive before Europe ruined everything.
It was still a problem, because a lot of those people died or had reduced quality of life. The reality is driving is very dangerous. In the US, it's the primary cause of death for many age groups.
And the pollution kills. And it kills pedestrians. And car-dependence is a lot like heroin. You depend on cars, so you build things further, so you must drive more. It's a self-eating beast.
Once cars started becoming less polluting and less deadly, i.e. _less cost was externalized_, they got more expensive.
If you truly think Europe is "ruined" because morbidly-obese people aren't puttering around in stinky automobiles for 2-3 hours a day, then I don't know what to tell you. To me, it's nice to have beautiful cities were people can walk. It's nice to go to work and not have a sudden urge to kill yourself.
These people can always move to the Land of the Free, of course. Suburban concrete hellscape after suburban concrete hellscape. I'm referring to the US, of course. The land of varicose veins, fatty liver disease, suicide and smog. Ah, beautiful.
There isn’t a single sentence in your comment that isn’t hyperbolic.
It's only hyperbole because you have a car-centric point of view. From an objective point of view, there are A LOT of problems with cars.
It's not hyperbolic to say that cars kill people on the scale of tobacco and alcohol. It's literally true. Again, the primary cause of death for a lot of demographics in the US is driving. You would, literally, have a lower mortality if you walked to work and smoked a Capri methanol on the way.
We just don't view driving in this way because, unlike tobacco, it is a necessary evil. As soon as you dismantle the assumption that it's necessary the rest falls into place.
There is a direct link between car-centric infrastructure and most things that are killing you and making your life worse. The fact you choose to ignore it does not mean it doesn't exist. And, to be fair, ignoring it is good practice. If I had to come to terms with my own mortality before every commute I'd probably kill myself. Ignorance is bliss.
If you simply look at the places world-wide associated with higher quality of life you'll notice a common denominator. More greenery, more walking, fresher food, more public transit, and less cars. It's not a coincidence, it's pretty obvious when you sit down and put the pieces together.
Suburbs are fine. We are in 2025, not 1925, there is no reason why work from home isn't an option for information workers and others who don't need to be physically on premises. You are completely ignoring how much that cuts down on traffic and would lower the cost of real estate, so more people who aren't millionaires could live downtown. We also have electric cars that have basically zero emissions, there is a technical solution for this; not everyone wants to ride a bus or train.
Work from home is great, but there’s more to life than work. Being walking distance or public transport distance to the rest of life’s activities is also great. And EVs aren’t saving the planet they are saving the car industry. They still cause tire particulate pollution, noise pollution, light pollution, and need tons of rare earth minerals
Don't forget the most important scarce resource they require: space. We waste so much space for parking and other car friendly infrastructure there often is not enough left for a a bike line or even a sidewalk let alone some actually pleasant peaceful passage people could use.
Private cars are an economic sinkhole. They make no financial sense. My town in the exurbs used to have rail service and stagecoaches. The necessity of private cars is a marketing triumph. Not a choice.
I like the freedom a private car gives me. I can go anywhere at anytime. I have nothing against public transportation and want it to be good. But you can't go everywhere at anytime. Here I'm including the country side and smaller towns.
Nothing says freedom like being required to spend thousands of dollars just to get around and participate in society. Imagine how "free" the roughly one-third of folks who are too young, too old, too disabled, etc. to drive a car feel when trying to go about their lives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0MVCyOjvtk
Anywhere where a road is. Or anywhere you could park a car. This means the car does not give you the freedom but the entire car transportation network. If instead there was no car infrastructure but only public transport you would say you can't go everywhere at anytime with a car.
So the state of public transportation in your area is bad enough you have to own a car. Being forced to own one is freedom, and so is needing a government-issued driver's license and a license plate.
That’s fine, take your private car and drive it away from the city.
> But you can't go everywhere at anytime
This is a solved problem in countries with modern public transportation. In Japan for example you can go across the entire country without needing a single car, and indeed it's both cheaper and more available than doing so while driving. If you need to go somewhere really far out of the way that is not reachable by foot or bicycle, then you can rent a car.
All of this results in a system that is far cheaper for you and far more open for the average individual.
I drive an EV. I am not under the mistaken impression that it’s zero emission (or even close).
It emits particulates locally and power-generation-related emissions at the fossil fuel plant that provides the majority of my grid power.
Is it better than an ICE? Probably. Is it “basically zero emission”? Nope.
Not everyone has to ride a bus or a train. They can stay home if they want.
I understand a large amount of car pollution these days is due to the tires.
Yet RTO is in full enforcement all over the place, sadly.
At least in the US people absolutely fucking love their cars.
They will lie about how much they hate them but ask them to actually change their behavior and you get nothing but a litany of excuses.
I think you're getting cause and effect mixed up. Save for a few petrolheads and train enthusiasts, people use whatever happens to be the most convenient method to get around. In North America, most cities prioritise infrastructure for private cars to such an extent that any other mode is almost useless
Since private cars scale badly, you want to encourage people to take other modes, but in order to change behaviour, the alternatives need to be attractive - cycle layouts that are safe, buses and trains that are frequent and reliable, city layouts that don't involve a long drive to buy food. You can't convince people out of taking the rational choice. You have to build it
Like I said, litany of excuses.
If you really don’t like cars, you’ll find a way to minimize use of them.
If you really don’t mind cars that much you’ll make up stories about how if buses and trains and bike lanes were more attractive then people would use them more.
I guarantee that if every American city had an ideal bus and train system, people would still find excuses and reasons to justify driving their cars.
There is literally an example of a city with great public transport and 90% of people there use it exclusively. So most people will not make excuses but just use the thing that is easy.
I walk to work. In the suburbs.
My wife rides a bike. In the suburbs.
We chose a home that has grocers, schools, and dining within a walk or bike ride.
We own cars because there are things beyond ~2 miles and transit options aren’t good.
Sadly, doing this usually requires money. Lots of it.
I love mine and so does everyone else, and I don't feel ashamed at all. They're incredible.
There are probably more reasons for that, but if it's the only thing that allows me to get somewhere, of course I'd love it.
I hate cars. Not using my car wouldn't change any of the things I hate about cars or car infrastructure. It's not lying.
Everyone loves their car, but hates everyone else's cars. Remember, your car is transport, everyone else's cars are traffic.
Saying "people love cars" is false. Some people love cars. Those are the ones doing their own work/maintenance/restorations etc and just spending time in the garage with their cars. A few more people love driving, they don't just love cars for their own sake, but they will go and just drive for fun. But most people don't do any of that. They just use cars as part of their boring, routine lives.
You might as well say US people fucking love washing machines or knives and forks.
> You might as well say US people fucking love washing machines or knives and forks.
Yeah, you’re getting it.
Nobody will say they love washing machines but they clearly do. We see it in their actions. Same as with cars. Everything they do tells us that they love cars. They drive comically short distances. They spend money they barely have to buy them.
I'm not going to lie about it. I feel safest of all in my car. I can lock my car doors. It's the only way to live. In cars.
It is, though the problem predates the cars. At the time cars were seen as a huge win over the vast piles of horse poop.
Cities do need to be reconsidered for more public transit and more opportunities to walk, but other issues (delivery, emergency, disability, etc) have to figure in.
There was a time in between, where electric streetcars (trains) were a common mode of transport. But those got torn up for cars. That’s a real tragedy in hindsight.
That's the myth. Streetcars were actually torn up because busses were much cheaper, there was no conspiracy. The streetcars were also old and cold and ppl hated them.
(I lived in a streetcar part of SF, and loved it, fwiw. But the only reason it's still there is a tunnel.)
That is a statement that really needs citation and qualification to back it up. I'd argue that 'cheaper' is used in a vacuum here. By that I mean that the point of mass transit isn't how much it costs, but how much value it provides. By that measure the bus services that replaced streetcars and other mass transit really doesn't stack up. Busses have led to much lower ridership which has led to a massive amount of bad secondary effects. Looking at how congestion pricing in NYC has increased mass transit use AND economic activity it is pretty clear that 'cheaper' has led to secondary effects that far outweigh any narrow operational gains from switching to busses.
So… it kind of made sense at the time (if you ignored a couple of factors which didn’t become obvious until much later, and which ultimately made it a disaster), and it’s not just an American thing. In 1928, Dublin had 28 tramlines. By 1950, it had zero, with the tram routes being replaced by bus routes (many older Dublin Bus routes basically follow old tram routes even today). It didn’t have trams again til 2004; today it has two lines.
But _at the time_, buses were very competitive with trams; there wasn’t all that much other road traffic, so they weren’t really slower (and they could use the tram lines, while they existed, as a right of way), the trams of the time were non-articulated, so buses had similar or higher capacity, and they were more flexible. It’s easy to see how it happened, and it only became apparent that there was a problem when it was far too late to reverse.
There are really two problems with buses vs trams; buses are slow when there is lots of other traffic, and, _with modern articulated trams_, higher total capacities are achievable (one of Dublin’s modern tramlines has trams that take over 400 people with a frequency of under 3 minutes between trams at peak, which is a level of capacity that you just can’t really get with buses). Neither of these were factors when the first-generation trams died.
Very few tram systems worldwide actually survived from the early 20th century to today; while there are lots of trams today, most are second-generation systems put in from the 80s on.
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The citation is every American transit system in the 1950s. Even SF only kept the streetcars where they couldn't replace with a bus line.
I think you're making a different argument, where trains attract a more well-heeled commuter. Which is why many cities have brought back LRT as part of a redevelopment plan.
The argument I am making is that you can only say something was cheaper if it provided the same level of service or better for less money. In the case of the bus transition it provided worse service as indicated by utilization dropping. I am also making the argument that evaluating the value of transit shouldn't rest entirely on the cost of that service and ridership but on the value as a whole it brings to a city. I mentioned NYC because the evidence there (and in other cities that have implemented congestion pricing) is that as ridership goes up the economic, environment, and social health of a city also goes up. Point being, the bus transition had a very negative value impact. I will also add a final argument, as your ridership drops things like busses may appear less costly per ride simply because you are loosing volume and low volume routes are likely easier to service by bus so, again, cheaper but not an apples to apples comparison.
Yes, I like trains and wish we had better transit. I'm responding to the claim streetcars were "torn up for cars", which was not really the case (and frequently subject to a conspiracy theory).
Trains are expensive upfront, which might favor buses when expanding into new areas. But if the infrastructure is already there, a train line will always be more economical in the long run than the equivalent bus line.
So ripping out existing serviceable train tracks is stupid (or alternatively: evil) if you think in the long term.
As I said in another post, train tracks don't last forever and are expensive to replace. And trains really only benefit from dedicated ROW, a streetcar is worse than a bus in many respects. (Except appeal.) People back in the 1950s were not stupid or evil, they made a decision which made a lot of sense at the time.
Establishing a new bus service in an area where public transportation had not existed must be indeed much cheaper.
However it is impossible for the operational and maintenance costs for a bus service and for the roads on which the buses go to be cheaper than for an electric streetcar, unless some prices are fake.
It is true that I have seen enough cases where electric streetcars have been replaced by buses, but I cannot see other explanation except bribes, because it was extremely visible that the buses were more expensive, both because of the fuel consumption and because of the much more frequent repairs both for the buses and for the roads.
It's interesting, in San Francisco, the streetcars got too heavy for the old tracks so they replaced them with about 4 feet deep of concrete. That is actual infrastructure and not "fake". (along with all the stops and handicap ramps and etc. obviously, a paved street is going to exist either way.)
Bribes and the mafia may have been a factor[0], but that's how American cities do things.
[0] eg. https://www2.startribune.com/streetcars-buses-minneapolis-st...
Many other places just... upgraded the trams.
You know, the less radical solution.
A bus is the least radical thing IMO, but yeah it took too long in most of USA to get some mass transit better than streetcars.
Emergency response times go down in almost any case where car use is restricted. In the Netherlands emergency vehicles take bike lane shortcuts because people on bikes can move out of the way more easily. In New York, congestion pricing reduced the response times of emergency services.
Disability needs an annotations for only specific disabilities that don't inhibit driving. Which is a small subset of disabilities.
Delivery of most things can be done with small cars/trucks.
Those "other issues" are all worse with private cars than without.
Just like the promise of EVs to replace the exhaust from ICE cars is seen as a win.
Let's be real here, a huge chunk of car traffic in cities is purely for convenience.
Once that's reduced by say, 50%, everything becomes much better, but nobody gives up convenience voluntarily.
The problem is that, among casualties, you create an environment that is hostile for families and disabled people.
> an environment that is hostile for families
I don't understand this part, I read it quite often but... well, we are a family with young children, and although we do have a car we only use it once a week to go to the grand-parents that live 100 km away from here.
A city with less cars is great especially for families (though I would argue that cities themselves are not so great for children, but the comparison here is between cities that are car-centric or that are not). It makes going out easier and more spontaneous.
It's much less of a hassle to hop in the cargo bike and go wherever (including stopping en route if you see something interesting) than having to use the car, sit in traffic, hope you can find parking space at your destination, and pay for it.
I have very two kids, plan to have three. Cargo bikes are not practical, are easily stolen, and are not safe to transport children, especially under 6 years old. Besides, when doing groceries for 5 once a week, I regularly fill my 500L car boot, so an equivalent cargo bike with at least 3 seats and a large boot... would just be a car. Which you have, and use once a week.
Or when you need to go to the doctor. Or when your wife is sick. Or if you have an urgency. So, as a family, you still need a car.
Well I just have the reverse experience. My cargo bike is practical, has not been stolen yet and up to four children under 6 are fine to transport in it. I don't feel it especially unsafe.
I also use it for groceries. Sometimes using both the cargo bike and a bike trailer (on two different bikes). We don't buy nearly at many things though it seems. When I do use my car (doing groceries while the children are with the grandparents) I have to transfer them from the car to the bike anyway because I can rarely park close to my home.
My doctor (and my wife's doctor) is certainly easier to reach by foot than by car. And I guess I never have the kind of urgency that would require me to use a car in the city. If there's something urgent a bike is always faster in this city.
People only look at extremes for this. Using your car less is still a win. We don't need to go to "you shouldn't use your car at all".
In the 60s, Dutch anti-car protestors had the slogan "Stop the child murder!". People were used to traditional cities where children could safely cycle around, but then cars came and started killing them.
If there are fewer cars on the road, there is a lot less traffic, and driving because much easier for those who are car-dependent. Example: the Netherlands.
Netherlands have as many cars as most the developed nations.
Yes, but they're used less frequently. Most middle class people have a car, but they're often only used for irregular trips. Commuting and errands use alternative means at much higher rates than elsewhere.
Point is, they still need cars if they have them. And Netherlands are very far from Paris, infrastructure-wise. In Paris, for instance, leaving your cargo or e-bike outside for the night means finding nothing when you wake up (I got two bikes stolen already, and they were the cheapest available).
The topic of the original post is air pollution. Unused cars don't cause air pollution. The topic of this thread is inconveniencing the disabled. Unused cars don't cause traffic that inconveniences the disabled.
Paris tackled the problem by making it very hard to own a car. It's the same for Amsterdam, too. We all hate pollution, it's just that the solutions available in the Dutch countryside are a bit different than in Paris.
Your "point" doesn't exist. You're essentially attempting to equate the transit situation in the US with the Netherlands, which is plain ridiculous.
That’s not a given. Nobody here is talking about outright bans on all vehicles. Limited access for taxis and commercial use is a thing. Buses can be built with wheelchair access. Etc.
And with less space reserved for cars and only cars, there’s more space for wide/accessible sidewalks. Less chance of being run over by a car. Less air and noise pollution.
Well if you have less space for cars, parking spots are more expensive as a result. In Paris it's around a year of living wage. And currently, sidewalks are getting smaller due to the need to build bicycle lanes.
My initial post was that in Paris, they removed cars but did not improve public transports, so buses are overcrowded and hostile to strollers.
People with disabilities gets a special pass that allow them to park on special parking places that are reserved for them.
I can assure you that there are disabled people who really don’t like car oriented environments since so many disabilities preclude driving.
i'm not sure this is true, for instance NYC ranks as the second most disabled-friendly city
https://www.amny.com/lifestyle/new-york-city-ranks-2nd-in-a-...
Surprising, considering the NYC subway has been ignoring the ADA as much as possible.
What else do you expect when elevators are 100M apiece
In Paris, 90% of the metro transportation system isn't accessible to wheelchairs and strollers. Buses are overcrowded and slow. Who doesn't enjoy to see someone cough on their newborn while fighting for a space for their stoller ?
Buses are perfectly accessible in Paris. They are crowded but acceptably so for a city of 10 millions. It’s not fair to expect the collectivity to accept the externalities of cars so rich people can avoid some slight discomfort.
Paris is not a city of 10 millions, it has only two million habitants. And cars are not reserved to rich people, why would they be? I grew up in Paris, my parents weren't rich, we were living in public housing and we had a car.
Families are not second-tier citizens, and currently the public transports are not suited for them. On top of the other problems, such as the pleasure of having to deal with crackheads and various homeless people in the metro when you have a baby.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris
> Families are not second-tier citizens, and currently the public transports are not suited for them.
My family and the dozens I see every day in the Paris public transports beg to differ.
I suggest you might be a bit prejudiced (well more than a bit to be fair).
When it comes to traffic and urban planning, Paris is best understood as a city of 10+ million people. The administrative subdivision called Paris has only ~2 million people, but the city doesn't end at its borders.
Yes, however there is little urban planning for whole metro, and the administrative level we are talking about here is the intra-muros one. When the mayor decided to reduce the speed on the outer loop, she didn't notify nor discussed with the rest of the metro, for instance. And the measures discussed in the article are specific to Paris.
> Yes, however there is little urban planning for whole metro
Paris biggest infrastructure project for the past 20 years is called "Grand Paris" and revolve entirely around the whole metro. Actually there is literally no urban planning not involving the whole metro. And yes, lowering the speed limit involved multiple consultations with the prefect and the region because it impacts the whole metro.
Considering Paris without its metropole doesn’t make sense. Paris intra-muros is ridiculously small, one eightieth of London, 80% of San Francisco.
Le Grand Paris...mostly doesn't involve Paris, as it's a new metro loop around it.
Besides, what your say about the speed limit is false, the mayor didn't wait for the State's answer and decided unilaterally. The State and the region didn't agree with her: https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2024/09/09/anne-hid... https://www.lepoint.fr/politique/la-region-ile-de-france-ref...
You can consider as much as you want, it is not unified. The result is that Paris has an anti-car policy, but the neighboring towns are very pro-car, creating a system where Parisians can't own one, but have to bear their neighbor's who use them to get into the city.
Le Grand Paris is the loop and the prolongation of all the inner lines deserving it. It very much involves Paris as its name implies.
> Besides, what your say about the speed limit is false, the mayor didn't wait for the State's answer and decided unilaterally. The State and the region didn't agree with her: https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2024/09/09/anne-hid...
The article you quote says the opposite of what you pretend. I invite you to read the paragraph "Une décision sous le contrôle de l’Etat, rappelle le ministère". It explains in details than the mayor could do nothing without the state agreeing to it.
> You can consider as much as you want, it is not unified.
It is unified. The city and its suburb are one economic unit. Where do you think all the service workers live? You have to be an extremely narrow minded inner city dweller to fail to see this.
> creating a system where Parisians can't own one, but have to bear their neighbor's who use them to get into the city.
I kindly invite you to check the average salary of Paris inhabitants vs the one in the suburbs then take a minute to think about what you just wrote.
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Only if you just remove the cars without replacing them with good public transportation (family friendly, accessible, with special modes for disabled people).
Which doesn't exist and is hardly possible in Paris.
Shocker, both disabled people and families are easily identifiable and can be exempt from such measures.
Well, they aren't exempt. Many French greens will tell you anyway that having children is bad for the planet and that you should abstain. And, as our population grows older, the accessibility problem will be larger and larger.
A lot of car drivers will respond with “good” and Darwinian arguments about their lack of fitness for the harshness of life.
They were also seen as a safety win [1][2]. Horses and horse drawn carts were a lot more dangerous than most people here probably think they were.
From the second link:
> It is easy to imagine that a hundred years ago, when cars were first appearing on our roads, they replaced previously peaceful, gentle and safe forms of travel. In fact, motor vehicles were welcomed as the answer to a desperate state of affairs. In 1900 it was calculated that in England and Wales there were around 100,000 horse drawn public passenger vehicles, half a million trade vehicles and about half a million private carriages. Towns in England had to cope with over 100 million tons of horse droppings a year (much of it was dumped at night in the slums) and countless gallons of urine. Men wore spats and women favoured outdoor ankle-length coats not out of a sense of fashion but because of the splash of liquified manure; and it was so noisy that straw had to be put down outside hospitals to muffle the clatter of horses’ hooves. Worst of all, with horses and carriages locked in immovable traffic jams, transport was grinding to a halt in London and other cities.
> Moreover, horse-drawn transport was not safe. Road traffic deaths from horse-drawn vehicles in England and Wales between 1901 and 1905 were about 2,500 a year. This works out as about 70 road traffic deaths per million population per year which is close to the annual rate of 80 to 100 deaths per million for road traffic accidents in the 1980s and 1990s, although we must not forget that many people who died from injuries sustained in road accidents in 1900 would probably have survived today thanks to our A&E departments.
> Motor vehicles were welcomed because they were faster, safer, unlikely to swerve or bolt, better able brake in an emergency, and took up less room: a single large lorry could pull a load that would take several teams of horses and wagons – and do so without producing any dung. By World War One industry had become dependent on lorries, traffic cruised freely down Oxford Street and Piccadilly, specialists parked their expensive cars ouside their houses in Harley and Wimpole Street, and the lives of general practitioners were transformed. By using even the cheapest of cars doctors no longer had to wake the stable lad and harness the horse to attend a night call. Instead it was ‘one pull of the handle and they were off’. Further, general practitioners could visit nearly twice as many patients in a day than they could in the days of the horse and trap.
[1] https://legallysociable.com/2012/09/07/figures-more-deaths-p...
[2]https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/31/cars-and-horse...
Not just horse poop, but dead horses that were quite the chore to remove back in the day, and the danger posed to pedestrians by a bunch of quite large and easily panicked animals.
We still have that danger. But the animals are homo sapiens and they are surrounded by 2 tonnes of metal. :)
One of the early examples of the Poisson distribution was the rate at which soldiers in the Prussian army would be fatally kicked by horses.
Translates to a little over 30 deaths per year per million, so not a lot, though I suspect the number would have been much greater adjusted for distance travelled and even without that it's more than some countries achieve with their traffic.
This is true, but from the perspective of the time, automobiles were far from "2 tons of metal" and quite a bit slower. They were also a rich man's conveyance, even more so than a nice carriage, and I doubt people understood early on just how widely adopted the automobile would become.
A lack of foresight is also very human.
>A lack of foresight is also very human.
Let's call it what it really is. The stubborn unwillingness to consider scalability in our designs and planning — even in an era where a machine can do calculation for us.
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There are cities not designed around cars. We just call them "rural." You could not have had your urban city without cars. There is absolutely nothing "tragic" about this.
Meanwhile you live in a world where petty wars are fought over resources to enhance the wealth of an extreme minority of the population. That's an actual tragedy.
I lived car-free life in a (European) city without any hassle. I moved to "rural" and can't imagine I would be able to live there without a car. In city, you can afford to have public transport on every corner going every ten minutes. In the rural area it's impossible.
> There are cities not designed around cars. We just call them "rural." You could not have had your urban city without cars.
That is literally the opposite of reality.
> You could not have had your urban city without cars.
… Eh? The city I live in has been here for a thousand years, and that doesn’t even make it a particularly old city. _Outer suburbs_ are a somewhat car-dependent phenomenon, but cities certainly are not.
It seems we have very different definitions of “city”.
I am very curious to hear yours.
It seems you want to ignore half the problem.
I’m still not sure what point you’re trying to make… you claimed cities can’t exist without cars. Yet London and Paris and Rome and damn near every big city in Europe did predate cars by centuries.
Not just Europe either. Tokyo was not named after the Tokyo Motor Vehicles Ltd.
The first "urban city" predates the car by about 5000 years.
Paris didn't improve its public transportation system, as it made it impossible to own a car. It ends up as pure sadism for the inhabitants who are not childless, affluent 20/30 years old, and who have no alternative than having to take the piss-smelling cattle trains with no access the disabled people, or strollers.
> A city improved the air quality
"Pure sadism!!!"
Yeah I'm sure everyone is real miserable, which is why they just voted in a referendum for more car-free streets.
Amazing how out of touch with reality the car-dominance types are.
The improvement in air quality is overwhelmingly a result of banning diesel cars. It is, of course, possible to ban diesel cars rather than all cars.
The people who live in the city don't want cars because it's the people who can't afford to live in the city who need them to get there.
> it's the people who can't afford to live in the city who need them to get there.
What are you talking about. Paris's public transport reaches out 60km away from the city, and that's not including mainline trains (including high speed). The people who can't afford to live in the city have taken public transport to get there for 50 years.
A lot of economic activity requires cars. Delivery, workers coming with equipment, waste management, and so on. Every construction worker in Paris will tell you that it's very difficult to work there, and that they have doubled their prices as a result.
These people are HELPED by anti-car legislation because it clears the congestion for them to run their business.
Most small, and large, businesses would happily pay a small fee if it means half the transportation time. And it does, because traffic isn’t linear. Just a few more cars can be the difference between coasting at 30 or not moving at all.
If it's really only a difference of a few cars then there should be a dozen other ways to get a similar effect without enacting a regressive tax.
Meanwhile doing it through financial deterrence requires that someone is actually deterred. And then is that going to be poor people and small businesses or rich people and major companies?
It's not a regressive tax, and it primarily assists commuters and small businesses, and I've already explained how.
> It's not a regressive tax
It's a compulsory fee charged by the government not based on income/consumption. That's the most regressive tax. Even sales tax is less regressive than that.
> it primarily assists commuters and small businesses
Relative to any alternative that reduces congestion without charging fees, it doesn't. Even relative to doing nothing, the people being deterred are the ones paying the cost, and the people being deterred are the most price sensitive ones, i.e. the poor.
The infrastructure changes required to get cars out meant to reduce the flow speed of cars. As a result, even buses, who have dedicated lanes, are much slower.
[EDIT]: since I'm being answered that it isn't true, here is a chart made by the city hall about the decreasing speed on Paris' roads:
https://cdn.paris.fr/paris/2024/07/12/original-4ee2d20dafdc9...
This is just not true, sorry.
EDIT: Okay, to expand, it's true that speed limits in progressive cities have been falling for a while. This is meant reduce the number of pedestrain fatalities and overall make the cities safer and more pleasant.
HOWEVER, this does not mean that traveling by car is worse. These, in combination with anti-congestion legislation, make driving faster. The thing about driving is that broad roads and clear visibility encourage bad behavior, like speeding and tailgating. This actually increases traffic. It's counter-productive, but reducing speed can improve flow.
Paris has an ever increasing congestion caused by those measures, as most of the drivers are professionals linked to the city's economic activity who need to get there. Deliveries, constructions vehicules and workers, and so on. It is so bad that surface public transports are being shunned and see usage decrease because they are too slow.
https://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/paris-ville-la-plus-embou...
Most of the cars are not people using them for "economic" reasons.
And even some of those can use bikes depending on the specific thing (some delivery workers).
The ones who live directly adjacent to a rail line weren't generally the ones in cars to begin with, unless they were the ones using a vehicle to actually transport something.
You clearly have a non-existent knowledge of French political life. This referendum had a participation rate of 4%, and only 62% of the voters voted yes. So around 2% of the total voters.
By the way, the French metro's air is highly polluted, due to tire degradation and brake dust, making it unfit for children or pregnant women.
So yeah, it's manageable for young people. But when a baby arrives, it's hell. Same if you are old. Or disabled.
So the people who voted yes still outnumbered the people who voted no.
French metro's air is highly polluted, due to tire degradation and brake dust, making it unfit for children or pregnant women
These sound like...car problems.
True, but the metro space is closed, so pollution can attain a very high level there.
I can insulate myself from these problems in a car with a hepa air filter
Fuck them pedestrians, I guess.
Dutch people seem to do just fine with baby seats on their bikes, or bakfiets if you have lots of kids.
Anecdotally, kids are also much happier when they can just bike to school/sports/activities with their friends instead of having their parents drive then everywhere on the back of the family SUV.
Dutch people using bikes for everything is a meme, they have as many cars per inhabitants as most of the developed nations. Anecdotically, they are a small, dense, flat country, with an oceanic weather.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territ...
But those cars, as has been explained to you, don’t do nearly as many trips per year.
Mobility in families is actually higher, since each individual has sturdy legs, and highly likely, a bike after they’re about 5 years old. Kids often travel to school, after school events etc on foot, bike or public transport, not dependent as in many car-centric places on parents and their cars.
Grandma is as likely to bike over for dinner with the grandkids as drive.
85% of travels in Netherlands happens using car https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/TRAN_HV_MS_PS...
While disappointingly high, that figure ignores walking and cycling. There is no need to misrepresent the data to make your point.
Yes, but they still own them. In Paris, and many commenters here argue that you shouldn't own one.
Rome wasn't built in a day.
That’s certainly not being posited in this particular thread.
We have cars here, but you're not dependent on them to get everywhere unless you live in the countryside (and even then, I knew plenty of kids who lived up in the North who biked 10+ km 1 way to school) or one of the super small cities where the sprinters are sparse. And isn't that the point most people make? It's not about complete eradication of cars, it's about having viable transport alternatives and the infrastructure to support those. It's just that we live in such a world where it's unthinkable to not have half our countries paved in asphalt to make sure cars can get places, so things like these always end up falling into a 2-sided extremist camp.
But...you still have cars fr when you need one. What many commenters argue here, and what the Paris administration is arguing is that you shouldn't own one.
I mean if you live in a city like Paris, then yeah I'd say that's legitimate. I see nothing wrong with making such dense urban centers car-free other than what's necessary like deliveries or ambulances and such, but for the former these days you've got tiny electric trucks that even fit on bike paths without causing a ruckus, usually you'll see those grocery delivery services use them.
Yes, people outside of urban cities like that (which, basically by definition means the majority of people in the country) still need cars to get around most likely, but at least we can ensure that inside the cities themselves, there are good alternatives for people to get around that benefits every single person who finds themselves in the city not inside a car, which will be the overwhelming majority of people.
I live in Utrecht in the Netherlands, and the single best thing the gov't did a few years ago is rip out the highway that was in the city center and instead turned it back into a canal surrounded by parks [1]. Literally nobody who has ever been to Utrecht would argue we were better off with the highway.
[1] https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2020/09/16/utrecht-correc...
So only 1.5% of Paris voted against this? It sounds like they're going by the will of the voters.
No, the vote was pure communication by the mayor, it didn't have a budget, nor a list of the streets, nor any details. Paris' administration is rife with corruption and mismanagement, so voters weren't very mobilized for another PR coup.
Informative panels about the vote where pretty much everywhere around the city.
And yet they couldn't even name one street that would be turned into a pedestrian one! Or give a budget! World class management right here heh?
Mismanagement is (very) well documented but corruption is a very serious accusation. Do you have examples ? ( that don’t go back to Jacques Chirac )
I would suggest to look into the various whimsical subsidies of the city hall, the very expensive procurement of useless products or the ruinous public housing policy, that all serve to help the friends of the mayor and the constellation of fake associations that support her. All has been also documented, and has been mentioned repeatedly by the press.
it’s always shocked me how diesel reliant Europe is, smells absolutely terrible coming from the states
Way cheaper than gasoline, that is why.
That’s all a matter of taxation. Modern refining does not produce diesel/kerosene as a leftover unless you want it.
Indeed, just like buying EVs is a matter of subsidies.
Diesel engines are also more efficient.
What's interesting is that the price of electricity in the EU makes EVs not competitive on that basis.
EV are still not competitive when most of us live in flats, and most would never even consider buying one given their prices if it wasn't for the subsidies.
You get what you incentivize.
Europe chose to levy big fuel taxes and punitive displacement taxes. Diesel cars are some of the best when it comes to driving experience and fuel economy for a given displacement. What followed was perfectly predictable.
The road to hell is paved with public policy implemented with willful ignorance to obvious 2nd order effects.
There are many more gasoline cars than diesel cars in the European Union. The latter are used more though and heavy vehicles are also diesel so there is a higher consumption of diesel than gasoline.
Diesel motors last 2-3x longer on average. It shocks me that we don't use diesel for everything.
Yes but sales of diesel passenger cars are falling fast, so this will change in a few years.
https://robbieandrew.github.io/carsales/
Barely even mentions the noise. Cities aren't loud but cars are. Paris 2025 vs 1995 soundscapes very different.
This it the most immediate and obvious change in any Chinese city now, they are practically silent. All electric cars means you can actually have a conversation with someone while walking through crowded downtown areas, and you never realize how much of a difference it makes until you experience it.
Manhattan recently got congestion pricing and it’s noticeably more enjoyable because of this, even indoors.
Of course, noise on sidewalks is important and annoying. But to a German who is used to good (sealed) German windows, French and Spanish cities, just to name some, are just a pain.
Be it in hotel rooms or regular homes, almost nowhere the windows are sealed. Just pressing gently on the window (more pressure on the sealing) reduces the moped noises by 30-50%.
[cries in American]
Yes, this was very noticeable during covid lockdowns too.
I believe https://carto.bruitparif.fr/ represents 2022 levels, but my French is very rusty and I suspect that historical data review is more readily available to a speaker of it. Perhaps that site has lockdown data as a layer somewhere?
Yep, it says this is a map of noise levels, representing the Lden noise indicator over a full day
There's this guy on YouTube that travelled to india and one thing stood out to me was the non-stop honking of cars and bikes. Just endless forever. What a nightmare!
I wonder what that does to a population. How does anyone think??
https://youtu.be/IFUIdcrgW6M?si=o6LkXK4MyS-PL7m-&t=661
I think there's a few studies. E.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11356-024-33973-9
I used to live next to a big intersection with a red light, and the cars accelerating away when it goes green was annoying. I now live at the end of a cul-de-sac with a cemetary behind me. So much more peaceful!
Agreed. The difference is stunning.
Great that they have made parking more expensive for heavy and huge cars. My city here offers parking free of charge for EVs, but note they are heavy, have wide tires and cost parking space. Whats the tradeoff then? Its wasting electric energy to move such a pile of metal for one person. I critisized that in the forum of our local newspaper, my comment got deleted....
This just makes me think about how absurd it is that left wing people are lately seeming more anti-EV, and picking up oil industry talking points on EVs.
This article is so full of bullshit!
Car are still a lot in Paris and there are conflicting studies about the air quality evolution in Paris, some days it is better, some days not. But the Parisian regulation on car as no real effect so far.
Paris is like at a bottom of a curve and it is said that the car might account only for less than 20% of it, the biggest contributor being industry in the region.
What had a big impact on thin particules are the evolution of car technologies. Now every engine in France has to be equiped with efficient catalytic exhaust pipes and efficient engine to reduce this kind of bad particules.
In this article, you can see a very deceptive image comparison. There is a picture of the Eiffel tower long time ago and now.
The picture of before has a strong fog, but it is just because being taken on a foggy day but the article would like you to think that it is how a picture would have been everyday due to the popultof the air...
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You can edit your previous comments on HN. At least for a certain amount of time, and then they become un-editable.
Airparif is an NGO run by environmentalists and funded by the EU, not sure how independent they are?
Who, exactly, would you like to monitor air quality and who, exactly, do you think should be funding it?
Someone without bias, obviously.
“Someone without bias” is indeed obvious, and therefore unhelpful. Can you be more specific? Who, precisely, doesn’t have a dog in the climate change fight?
How specific am I supposed to be, do you want names, resumes, potential investors?
Not my problem to solve.
However, I no longer accept published reports at face value, unless I check who the authors are, and who funds them. They even have a Cruchbase page, it's easy to check for yourself.
> How specific am I supposed to be, do you want names, resumes, potential investors?
Names would be good, for a start. If you can’t name a single person, group, or entity whose opinion would satisfy you, it’s likely that no amount of evidence would change your mind. Which means that you’re not discussing this topic in good faith.
All human endeavors have human bias, in one direction or the other. If you’re waiting for a bias-free source of information, you’ll be waiting a long time.
Your argument that I should accept one source blindly because I cannot name a better alternative in the moment is pretty weak.
> Your argument that I should accept one source blindly
Others may have made that argument, but show me where I’ve done that. So far, all I’ve done is ask you who you’d accept as a valid authority, or what evidence you’d accept. And you can’t even do that.
A claim has been made that air quality in Paris has improved, and evidence has been provided to back that claim up, in the form of AQI readings provided by (in your words) “an NGO run by environmentalists and funded by the EU”. In turn, you have made a 2nd claim that this evidence is flawed, but so far you’ve provided no evidence to back your claim up. Claims which are made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
I simply questioned the independence of the source of the evidence, is such critical thinking not allowed?
Your attempt to somehow make me responsible to provide an alternative source of evidence is classic deflection. That is not my responsibility. Do your own research etc.
This isn’t critical thinking. Your complete inability to even vaguely hint or suggest at someone who might be better equipped to either perform this analysis or fund it makes that clear.
“Someone without bias” is a cop out. Everyone has bias, and literally anyone performing or funding air quality measurements is going to have some sort of interest in their outcome. There is no sterile room of blind and deaf eunuchs performing these services and you know that.
This comment was made in bad faith on your part, all I did was make that fact obvious.
Sigh, I already addressed this demand that I MUST name an alternative in this thread. It's deflection pure and simple, I'm not going over that again...
If you don’t think the current people doing this work or funding it are appropriate, you should be able to give at least a vague idea of an entity you think is better suited for either.
The only qualification you managed to put out there is that they don’t have bias. This is literally unachievable and you know it, which is why you won’t even attempt to even hint at a better party.
Both are true:
1. You can question the source of evidence and funding.
2. If you do, you are not automatically required to provide alternative sources.
Nobody on this thread has addressed my OP directly, but have instead jumped to point 2.
If even “an NGO run by environmentalists and funded by the EU” is beyond the pale for you, then there is no such thing as a source which will meet the standard of “independence” that you’re applying. Which again, means you’re not discussing in good faith. Good day.
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> However, I no longer accept published reports at face value, unless I check who the authors are, and who funds them.
No, you use this as a cop out to deny results. In this case you have done this check and you have decided you do not want to believe the outcome so you wave around a vague charge of bias in a lame attempt to discredit it.
Please show me one single scientific report or conclusion you’ve accepted that passed this same “bias test”. Neither the authors nor their funding source may have a particular interest in the outcome. Any such example will do.
I am under no such obligation.
Your refusal to give any example of any work that meets your threshold only serves to underscore my point.
Can you demonstrate that Airparif is biased?
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Since this thread has already established that bias is inherent in all human endeavors, why don't you try addressing the quality of the evidence itself, instead of its source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy
Because the source is important, to understand the motives. Don't you agree?
More important than the quality of the evidence itself? People you disagree with can still be right from time to time, even if they are "biased" as you suggest.
Yes they can be right, I agree. Also I never stated I disagreed with them.
I simply questioned their independence.
Let me give you another hypothetical example:
Would you trust a report on the impacts of fracking by a pro-fracking NGO, with private funding? Even if their data looked ok on face value?
The messenger matters.
Right, right, you never said you disagreed. You’re “just asking questions”.
The messenger matters less than the data, the collection methods, and the approach to analysis. Bias can be a reason to more carefully examine a conclusion and the methods, particularly if a source has had quality issues in the past.
But simply throwing out accusations of bias in the absence of literally any other reason to doubt a pretty straightforward conclusion (removing sources of NO2 makes NO2 go down, shocking!) is not a meaningful contribution to a discussion. Every researcher is biased. Every source of funding is biased. Hell, you haven’t even shown that they’re significantly biased, the only thing you’ve pointed out is that apparently some of their grant funding came from the EU, as if that’s some sort of smoking gun.
Did their bias lead them to an invalid conclusion? Do you believe it did? Do you have a reason to believe it did? If so, state it. If not, what was the point in making your comment other than to sow doubt?
Of course I'd be skeptical. Skepticism is healthy, especially in your example. In that case, the most productive conversation to have would be examining (and either refuting or accepting) their evidence. So far you've refused to do either one here. Instead, you repeatedly engage in the genetic fallacy I linked to above, or insisting that we should consult some impossibly impartial oracle of objective truth instead.
That's your right of course. No one can force you to avoid using logical fallacies. But the longer you do that, the more it starts to look like you're avoiding or even conceding the real debate. It's up to you whether that matters to you.
Where did you find this ? This is just plain wrong.
Airparif is a collection of people involving regular people, the local cities, major polluters etc. https://www.airparif.fr/airparif/missions-dairparif ( unfortunately in French)
It’s funded 24% by the state, 24% by cities, 27% by large companies including the polluting ones,20% by selling what they produce/know how etc.
"Airparif has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from 1 Grant (prize money) round on Jun 01, 2014 from European Union."
Source: https://tracxn.com/d/companies/airparif/__7FZ-JDeTGVeYNdb_2-...
Who, exactly, should be funding air quality measurements within the European Union?
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Since then, many city have enforced the same kind of rule where polluting car are banned from center of town.
2 week ago, deputies were discussing the global ban of 'car free town center' because it doesn't really work and it exclude part of the society...
https://www.lefigaro.fr/automobile/zfe-50-deputes-defendent-...
Which part does it exclude? Elderly who are unfit to drive, anyone below driving age or who can't afford a car or license? People with disabilities, like blind people, people with motor issues, people with disabilities that can't afford a modified car? All these people have to dodge cars to get to places.
Horrible propaganda. More then anything else, cars are what excludes access.
It doesn't really work is hilarious statement when some of the cities with highest amount of tourists in the world have car free city centers. Not to mention that many off the cities ranked highest quality of live have lots of car free areas.