I have a hard time taking an article like this as seriously as it is presented. To shift a population from internal combustion engines toward EVs is a massive shift and its happening, very slowly,...
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I have a hard time taking an article like this as seriously as it is presented. To shift a population from internal combustion engines toward EVs is a massive shift and its happening, very slowly, in my country (Canada) because for many Canadians EVs are still not a practical choice - too expensive, too little charging infrastructure, lack of charging speed and lack of flexibility (eg, range and towing ability).
But to focus on tire wear seems like nitpicking at this juncture. Yes, they do wear out tires faster than regular cars, but the benefits to the environment from not emitting exhaust gasses is a massive leap forward. Cant ask for a zero polluting transportation, there is no such thing and tire particles are pretty minor compared to exhaust gas emission.
I do agree that electrifying massive vehicles like the Hummer seems counter productive. Why create such a beastly huge vehicle and then put batteries in it to pretend you're treading lightly on the planet? But that's not too hard to solve - if vehicle registrations are based on weight like they are in Hawaii, buyers are given incentive to buy smaller vehicles. The Hummer EV, at 4700 kg (10,340 lbs) weighs TWICE as much as a large gas SUV and should be taxed into oblivion for its irrationality.
Not to mention, all the current statistics in that article on tire pollution would have to be based on ICE cars primarily. Additionally, electric cars are only one potential band-aid on solving...
Not to mention, all the current statistics in that article on tire pollution would have to be based on ICE cars primarily.
Additionally, electric cars are only one potential band-aid on solving the problem of cars in the climate crisis. It must be supplemented by new infrastructure - especially long-distance electrified high-speed rail, and much, much more local public transit. City centers that are restructured to be pedestrian-friendly and limit vehicle access. And most importantly, either rehabilitation, or elimination, of the US-style suburb.
Articles like this that go all-in on "ELectRic cARs Are a ProblEM AcTuAllY" are just ammunition for climate deniers.
We should absolutely go into the next era of personal vehicles with eyes wide open about what the issues are. We certainly didn't enter this one cognizant of all the problems. But FUD pieces about electric cars are counterproductive and irresponsible.
Where I live and work in development and completely restructured to be pedestrian-friendly. But that usually means moving parking seat from the destinations, and when it's 100+ degrees for several...
Where I live and work in development and completely restructured to be pedestrian-friendly.
But that usually means moving parking seat from the destinations, and when it's 100+ degrees for several months a year that's problematic.
I'm having a bit of a hard time parsing your comment - but I do just want to mention that there are viable solutions to the problem of having people drive and other problems people don't...
I'm having a bit of a hard time parsing your comment - but I do just want to mention that there are viable solutions to the problem of having people drive and other problems people don't necessarily account for in the current climate.
As it is, a large amount of land is taken up by parking lots that are massively too big for the business they support, and don't offer any economic benefit to the city. Plus they add to the heat simply by not offering shade and often are large enough you'll have to walk far away anyway.
Alternatively, you could allow for this to be a one time inconvenience, build out public infrastructure across your city, and have park and ride stations outside the city so people can commute to wherever they need to go in climate controlled transport while also eliminating a lot of inner city traffic. Removing massive low level buildings and encouraging mixed development for cities can also lead to more people just living in the city and eliminating the need for individual car ownership. Fewer cars, less traffic, fewer parking spaces needed. Plus people don't usually have to travel very far in mixed use neighborhoods since almost everything is readily available nearby.
I personally view rebuilding cities as one of the most fundamental steps in creating a healthier world for the future. We've done a lot of damage across the country by not planning for people - and if we change it we can reduce many of our other impacts in the process.
My point is that for months people refuse to go places where they can't park close to their destination. Walking a few blocks is a big ask for many people when it's 105 degrees in the shade for...
My point is that for months people refuse to go places where they can't park close to their destination. Walking a few blocks is a big ask for many people when it's 105 degrees in the shade for weeks at a time.
The areas where we've reduced parking to make things more walkable is where businesses go to die.
Park and rides just move the giant parking lots and add a bus or train that stops 3 blocks from their destination. It's not just the last mile we need. It's the last block.
Areas that work better are where you have underground, climate-controlled walkways, but the cost is astronomical.
In a genuinely walkable neighborhood with good access to other parts of the city, this is categorically untrue. When a municipality removes parking without simultaneously increasing density and...
The areas where we've reduced parking to make things more walkable is where businesses go to die.
In a genuinely walkable neighborhood with good access to other parts of the city, this is categorically untrue. When a municipality removes parking without simultaneously increasing density and walkability, of course there will be problems. Likewise, when they attempt to build a self-contained "walkable" commercial district without necessary amounts of housing, of course there will be problems. And even if they create a largely self-sustaining mixed-use zone, if it doesn't have good transportation to other parts of the city... of course there will be problems.
The council has to consider at least five urbanist concepts when reducing automobile over-dependency:
Human-first design principles: Safe and prioritized pedestrian access to all realistic locations within the city. This means pedestrian-prioritized crossing signals (to spend less time in the sun), curb bumpouts to decrease crossing distances (and spend less time in the sun), shaded awnings (to spend less time in the sun), and acceptance of related principles that make it easy to walk around (to spend less time in the sun).
Considerate roadway design: Better distinctions between low-access/high-speed roadways from high-access/low-speed local streets; i.e. the elimination of "stroads," which are both high-speed and high-access, contributing to major safety issues for pedestrians. There are various ways we can explore transforming stroads, and they don't have to be very expensive. The nature of automobiles mean that they will inevitably damage the road enough to require it to be resurfaced within a few years. Then, the city can decide how to structure lanes and implement speeds and traffic calming measures in a way that makes walkability better without significantly hurting throughput. Depending on the kind of road and the amount of traffic it gets, improvements could include: separating through-traffic from local traffic with a small median (boulevard-style); an all-out road diet, decreasing the number of driving lanes and adding one or more bus/bike lanes (or both); widening the pedestrian sidewalk; planting trees to provide visual guidance to motorists, encouraging them to slow down in general and/or near crossings; raising crosswalks and/or adding speed humps at important crossings to save pedestrian lives; and adding protected infrastructure to any existing cycling or pedestrian lanes, like concrete barriers and bollards.
Transit corridors on important routes: Even a single dedicated bus lane on a major arterial road can significantly improve transportation access to a neighborhood. The number of passengers served by a bus relative to its square footage is enormous when compared to what realistically happens with a car (that is, effectively a single-occupancy vehicle in 50% of trips). As long as transit is frequent and actually goes places people want, like other walkable neighborhoods, inter-city transit hubs, sporting arenas, parks, etc., it can easily succeed.
Mixed-use zoning: Diverge from archaic Euclidean zoning practices by allowing for mixed-use zoning, with local commercial businesses on the first floor and two to three (or more) floors of apartments/condos on upper floors. This kind of construction does not have to be expensive, nor does it have to negatively affect your town's character. It also tends to be the only part of a city whose municipal infrastructure is economically sustainable without state and federal assistance: towns and cities need more of this to survive long-term.
Flexible residential zoning: Allowing for the construction of duplexes and quadplexes rather than just single-family homes. These houses look very similar to SFH stock but house 2–4 times the people. On a lot that would be appropriate for a SFH, there is still enough space for all these families to have green space and cars if they want them.
Elimination of minimum parking requirements: Without actively removing parking, the city can improve its walkability, affordability, and livability significantly by removing "minimum parking requirements." These rules enforce an arbitrary, unscientific, and wasteful amount of parking for commercial and residential buildings relative to their size. The exact numbers are actually made up: not even joking. There is no legitimate statistical basis for them. For example, a new local business generally has to purchase 2–3x the land they actually need in order to provide more parking than is realistically ever going to be used by customers. Infinite parking sounds nice, but can also double the cost of land acquisition, and more than double construction if a building requires any complex parking structure (which a large building often will). These costs are inevitably passed onto customers and residents. On a societal scale, if every building has to do this, your city becomes artificially expensive for no actual benefit. It also increases the urban heat island effect and significantly increases urban sprawl, which makes transportation more difficult. By eliminating these regulations, towns can allow local businesses to create exactly the amount of parking they need. Customers can still park if they need to, but suddenly the town becomes that much more walkable and vibrant as other businesses, residences, and parks can infill what were formerly parking lots.
Create shade infrastructure: Even simple and inexpensive awnings along streets make a big difference. Another realistic option is to plant deep-taprooted trees (as to not interfere with the sidewalk) that have reasonable canopy cover. This is still possible in the desert: low-water shade trees do exist. Your city can consult with professional arborists and foresters to identify the best trees for your situation, or if using artificial infrastructure is better in some places.
...and more that I don't feel like typing.
If your city tried to do one of these things without any of the others, that's nice, but it obviously isn't going to succeed! Realistically, you can't always do everything all at once, so many of these projects tend to happen on a timeline of a few years. That's OK!
That your municipality has attempted to maintain existence in what appears to be a desert incompatible with human life is laudable, but perhaps speaks to the greater issue of "humans living in the desert." Environmentally and economically speaking, it's not exactly an efficient location. As a society, I don't know how much we should incentivize living in a place with those peak temperatures.
Regardless, it's also OK if pedestrian and cycling modes decrease somewhat in unbearably hot summer months. The entire year is not like that. In a properly walkable area, it's walkable year-round: and even if we see benefits just most of the year, that's still an improvement to quantitative metrics like vehicle miles traveled (VMT), emissions, local budgets, personal affordability, and various qualitative metrics related to aesthetics and happiness.
And literally implemented all of those ideas. All of our planners (myself included) are Certified New Urbanists and drink deep of these principles. But it's also just too hot too much of the year....
And literally implemented all of those ideas. All of our planners (myself included) are Certified New Urbanists and drink deep of these principles.
But it's also just too hot too much of the year. Shade does very little in a humid environment where the humidity carries the heat into the shady areas.
I would have to sit down and review specific planning studies for your city to provide any meaningful comments here. I believe what you're saying, though to me—from my distant armchair—this sounds...
I would have to sit down and review specific planning studies for your city to provide any meaningful comments here. I believe what you're saying, though to me—from my distant armchair—this sounds like an issue with your city population's emotional understanding of its microclimate (as well as, I suspect, incomplete implementation of all/many of these principles, though I'm sure you've tried) more than a problem with urbanism per se.
Conceivably the most important issue here is albedo/green space: not just the canopy (though that's important), but greenification of the entire urban landscape. Singapore with its ~80–85% average humidity is doing some interesting work in this regard. No Western city has attempted anything like this, as far as I know, and certainly no American city. With enough shade, and enough transpiration from flora, temperatures drop meaningfully. Clever use of water features in conjunction with analysis of the micro-microclimates created by buildings can also contribute positively to this metric.
Or it could be something out of your control as a planning board. There may be some crucial element missing—it might just be time, or a complex series of statewide tax incentives (or barriers) related to transportation/driving. Or a deeper socioeconomic condition of your city that underpins pedestrian behavior, like an association of being outdoors with being poor/low-class. This could also be an issue with the size of your city and/or the design (or lack thereof) of neighboring municipalities. If your city is relatively small, fairly suburban, and not that dense, the urban planning policies of surrounding towns make as much of a difference as your internal ones. If that's the case, your county or state would have to get more deeply involved in an inter-city urbanism corridor plan. It's also possible that your board has not identified the causes of failure due to data constraints and/or non-optimal surveying methodologies.
It could be and likely is a combination of many of these things.
The city I currently live in reaches around 98 F in the summer, easily as high as 104. It gets humid, perhaps 70% on average, but often higher. From your description, it sounds like your city is further south and more humid. However, having spent some time in Atlanta, GA recently, I'm not sure the difference is really that big. Atlanta is a little hotter and a little wetter, but walking around the city was at times more unpleasant mainly because the streets are three times as wide as they need to be and designed for cars, not people; and because it's comparatively too spread out. And because I couldn't reasonably take transit many places. The temperature/humidity, by themselves, weren't the critical factors: the lack of urbanism was. From my anecdotal and qualitative perspective, the city's saving grace was its generally good canopy, at least in the neighborhoods I visited. Likewise, my city has problems implementing some urbanist concepts, but the weather (though a contributing factor) isn't really the core of the issue. There are lots of walkable urban areas in certain hyper-humid cities in the Deep South (Atlanta had several small ones, though Miami, FL comes to mind too). Climate control is more comfortable than being out in the humid weather, but shade does make a quantitative, provable difference (radiant heat loads of maybe 30% less compared to the sun: that's big) even when humidity is high. If the incentives to use your legs are great enough, people will put up with some stickiness, and they do physiologically acclimate to it. They certainly manage it fine in other parts of the world.
Regardless, public transportation effectively keeps people out of the sun, and if your reasonably large city is still car-dominated, your transportation system is incomplete.
More broadly, if your city is inherently too hot for people to comfortably (safely?) live in for a majority of the year, I question whether we should continue incentivizing development in that city. As a country, we kind of need to make an effort to settle in locations that are human-habitable and environmentally sustainable. 105 isn't where I'd draw the line (maybe 125+), but as the climate continues to worsen, that might be an overriding concern. :P
As for greenspace, I don't want to give away too many details and reveal exactly where and who I am, but suffice to say that saying we have more green space per capita than 99 percent cuties would...
As for greenspace, I don't want to give away too many details and reveal exactly where and who I am, but suffice to say that saying we have more green space per capita than 99 percent cuties would be underselling it.
A huge impact is that we aren't the only city around. Why come to our sweat factory where people literally die from the heat on the 15 minute walk to the Cafe when you could dive 10 minutes down the Interstate and park at your destination?
Coming to our walkable downtown is a slower, more unpleasant, more expensive experience. Why should people put up with that?
When urban design principles require creating barriers to convenience, all a town has to do to become more successful frim a business and tax revenue perspective is refuse to adopt those principles when the neighboring city does.
DC gets into the 90s with very high humidity for basically all of July and August as well as much of June and September. I still walk the half mile to the metro from home and quarter mile from the...
Walking a few blocks is a big ask for many people when it's 105 degrees in the shade for weeks at a time.
DC gets into the 90s with very high humidity for basically all of July and August as well as much of June and September. I still walk the half mile to the metro from home and quarter mile from the metro to my office. I wouldn’t exactly call it pleasant, but you also just learn to live with it. I find doing the walk preferable to driving in city traffic, even before we get into the hassle of finding parking or paying $15-$20 for the privilege. I think maybe people need to stop being pansies and learn to suck it up. The benefits of not needing a car to be a functioning member of society far outweigh it.
Humans have lived in hot climates before air conditioning or cars existed. It’s accomplished largely through shade and clothing and hydration as well as architecture that’s conducive to it. When you don’t have large setbacks off the sidewalk and let the buildings get more than 2 stories then you get natural shade cover through the pedestrian walks. When you keep a decent amount of tree canopy or grass then you don’t have wide swathes of asphalt soaking up and radiating heat all day. And yeah some part of it is lifestyle change, people just avoid going out in the peak sun parts of the day.
And yeah sartorial choices matter. In DC we tend to have suit and tie dress codes in our offices for men, which is extremely inconvenient. On bad days I’ll just go in a t-shirt and linen pants and change at the office gym (and shower if I decided to bike or walk instead of taking metro/bus).
If you go to tropical countries in Asia they get by mostly with having large indoor public spaces that people cut through. The train stations have multiple entires and exits and are little malls on their own that sprawl across big chunks of neighborhoods, so you can walk through them to get somewhere else. People go through building lobbies and the mezzanines are partly considered public areas during the day. In the Gulf states (not exactly exemplars of urbanism themselves) they sometimes just have covered and air conditioned tunnels to get across parts of town.
"Suck and it and deal with it" is a very ableist/agest approach to the problem. And the difference between the 90s and the temps we have been experiencing are extreme. We haven't had a day under...
"Suck and it and deal with it" is a very ableist/agest approach to the problem.
And the difference between the 90s and the temps we have been experiencing are extreme. We haven't had a day under 105 for weeks, and the heat index hasn't been under 115 in the same time period. Elderly people and those in poor health trying to walk 3 blocks in the shade are literally dying.
We have green space and shade. In fact, we're famous for the amount of green space power capita and the number of trees. We've made developers spend millions moving old trees to the walkable frontage of their property instead of permitting them to cut the trees down and replace them. Unlike most cities, we even have a fire department that doesn't force us to remove shade trees along the sidewalks.
We have more green space and trees per capita than 99% of cities. Our percentage is actually higher than that, but giving more precise numbers would reveal who I am to anyone who looked it up.
October through April our downtown is bustling with people there specifically because of our walkable, green, shady city.
But May through September, any business without parking has a 30-70 percent decrease in business because we can't urban design ourself out of this problem.
Nah. I see elderly people doing it all the time. My wife did it while pregnant. For people with real mobility issues the metro system offers free shuttle service from their house to the stations...
"Suck and it and deal with it" is a very ableist/agest approach to the problem.
Nah. I see elderly people doing it all the time. My wife did it while pregnant. For people with real mobility issues the metro system offers free shuttle service from their house to the stations and from the stations to wherever they're going. I have a baby and I still take him out in the head (with a fan and a shade over his stroller and plenty of water). It's doable. The only times I've opted to drive him places when I could walk have been when we had air quality issues due to wildfires, not often due to heat.
What is actually ableist and ageist is designing the built environment such that you need to be able to drive to get around. How exactly do you reckon blind people are supposed to function in a world like that? Or elderly people or individuals with tremors or other problems who are no longer able to drive safely? Currently we have many such people on the roads, significantly upping the general risk to everyone because it's worse for them to restrict their driving because we can't build towns where you can be a functioning person without a car.
It's not as if cars are being banned. If you need one, you can use one, and most businesses do still have handicapped parking available as well as some spots on the street reserved for them. Most of the people availing themselves of car dependent infrastructure, though, are no so disabled. It's just a creature comfort that they want others to subsidize.
But May through September, any business without parking has a 30-70 percent decrease in business because we can't urban design ourself out of this problem.
I've lived in Chicago where you get multiple weeks with sub-zero temperatures. Yeah clothing can mitigate cold better than it can mitigate extreme heat, but the city is designed to let you function yeah? The bus shelters and metro stations have heaters they turn on when it gets that cold.
There is sufficient density that almost all businesses have most of their customers either living or working within walking distance. It's not like an excursion to go participate in commerce if you live in the city. They can achieve this because they haven't spread the density of businesses and living spaces far apart from each other to facilitate people driving in. When each business doesn't need its own parking lot, errands that may require traversing 5 or 6 blocks can happen within 1 block. The idea of needing to walk more than a 5 block radius for any daily necessities is crazy to me. When you do need to go further, you just take a cab which is doable because you're not spending the money on owning and maintaining a car and it's sufficiently dense that it's economical to have a lot of cabs circulating near wherever you are.
Not every city can be Chicago or New York. Many of the solutions you're talking about don't scale down. Just the idea of being able to call a cab afforably is a crazy thought in my area where the...
Not every city can be Chicago or New York. Many of the solutions you're talking about don't scale down.
Just the idea of being able to call a cab afforably is a crazy thought in my area where the city/ETJ population is around 45,000.
Getting sidewalks, trees, etc is easy because we make these improvements a requirement of Site Development. Building a picnic transit system is absolutely impossible. We have a senior transportation bus that we can only afford to run 2 days a week.
You don’t need to be one of the worlds largest metropolii to have a functional bus service. Plenty of tier 2, 3, or 4 cities around the world accomplish basic levels of urbanism that American...
Not every city can be Chicago or New York. Many of the solutions you're talking about don't scale down.
You don’t need to be one of the worlds largest metropolii to have a functional bus service. Plenty of tier 2, 3, or 4 cities around the world accomplish basic levels of urbanism that American planners keep insisting is impossible. They just don’t think big enough, it’s all onesy twosy things under highly constrained policy mechanisms with no master planning.
Like the fact that there’s an entire ETJ where the total population is only 45k people is silly. The ways boundaries are drawn and populations are distributed are inefficient, which makes it hard to have enough density of people anywhere to do anything or have a tax base to support a sustainable development pattern. But there’s no reason it needs to be that way. Redrawing town boundaries to foster denser development would probably be politically non viable? But it’s basically necessary. You mentioned people dying from the heat, but people are dying now from sedentary lifestyles, loneliness, and just traffic fatalities. We just don’t register any of that because it’s part of the plan.
Like with cabs, I’ve been in towns in Thailand and India of not much larger than 50k that accomplish pretty decent coverage through jitney cabs. In the US such services are relegated to airport pickup and dropoff (e.g. supershuttle) but that’s mostly driven by regulatory restrictions. With modern app based dispatch you can mix some of the benefits of bus service with limited taxi service. Even if it costs more to run you can do transportation credits for people. We have all these expectations on what Americans will put up with, but a lot of those expectations are based on just so stories from windshield biased policy people.
A lot of the housing and transportation patterns that make density possible (boarding houses, jitney cabs) are either illegal or heavily discouraged by regulatory policies which is a dense knot to untangle, but defeatism won’t untangle it.
They also seem to neglect the impacts of brake dust, which I imagine has a fair number of nasty things in it, even if they no longer use asbestos -- electric and hybrid vehicles with their...
They also seem to neglect the impacts of brake dust, which I imagine has a fair number of nasty things in it, even if they no longer use asbestos -- electric and hybrid vehicles with their regenerative braking produce far less of the nasty stuff.
Appropriate weight-based vehicle registrations would be welcome. Most states actually already have these, the issue is that they're extremely minimal. I shared an article about the problems with...
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Appropriate weight-based vehicle registrations would be welcome. Most states actually already have these, the issue is that they're extremely minimal. I shared an article about the problems with vehicle weight last month.
But to focus on tire wear seems like nitpicking at this juncture.
This article is about the environment, which I feel is not a "nitpick"—there are billions of cars driving on roads, and at least 4x that many tires. That's a lot of rubber. Even if we disregard wear and tear itself (which we shouldn't), 90% of those tires are being burned or thrown away after they're worn down. The faster they're worn down, the more waste we see from tires as a whole. Even if they're worn down fairly slowly, they still have short lifespans. Recycling all tires is realistically improbable, but even if we recycle a portion of them, we are contributing to the unnecessary extraction and discarding of raw materials from the Earth. That's inherently environmentally unfriendly.
My perspective on tires tends to focus on the externalities of rubber-on-asphalt as it pertains to road maintenance and municipal infrastructure budgets. I am specifically interested in the alternative of steel-on-steel—that is, trains and trams, which have a different friction coefficient. I don't have an engineering background, but there's a reason trains can go much faster than cars per unit of fuel, while also carrying much more load! We don't replace train wheels at the same rate we replace car tires. More importantly, we don't replace train tracks at the same rate we have to constantly resurface roadways. Driving a car on an asphalt road is an inherently economically inefficient transportation strategy. No other method of transportation destroys its own infrastructure as actively as heavy vehicles destroy roadways. (Lightweight vehicles are better, but they still cause a lot of damage.) We don't need to spend $60 billion/yr on highway construction and maintenance when a more efficient, safer, and environmentally friendly alternative exists. Cars will always be important and useful tools for certain use-cases, but it behooves us to minimize their unnecessary proliferation wherever possible.
I'm relatively familiar with the holistic externality data on electric vs. ICE vehicle use, and EVs are overall more environmentally friendly when you take this into account. I'd rather we drive electric cars than gas-powered cars for any number of health reasons alone. But governmental incentives aimed to support EV use are still subsidies for personal automobiles and their infrastructure, which is expensive and inefficient relative to public transportation via rail and even relative to electric buses. We should be aware of these problems and not dismiss them.
Trains and trams are great - IF you live in an urban environment or a densely populated country. They are totally impractical for those of us who live outside major centers or in sparsely...
Trains and trams are great - IF you live in an urban environment or a densely populated country. They are totally impractical for those of us who live outside major centers or in sparsely populated areas, which realistically is almost ALL of Canada that's not along the Trans Canada highway or in lower Ontario and Quebec. We live in a country of 10 million sq km and very little of it is serviced by trains except for major lines for hauling goods along the main east-west corridor. There are zero passenger trains in most of our country and there is no way a country like Canada is going to be putting in rail lines to service the thousands of small towns that dot our country. Its just not practical. Heck, we cant even keep bus services going to many of those towns and Greyhound went out of business here because there just wasnt enough ridership to make it viable. Personal transportation is a necessity here.
The nice part about urbanism is that it does not require you to live in a major city. Any town with an "urbanist" mindset can: Adopt zoning policies that slightly increase density in the downtown...
They are totally impractical for those of us who live outside major centers or in sparsely populated areas
The nice part about urbanism is that it does not require you to live in a major city. Any town with an "urbanist" mindset can:
Adopt zoning policies that slightly increase density in the downtown (many newish towns do not even really have a downtown because it is literally illegal for them to build mixed-use developments). By encouraging slightly more economic activity downtown and discouraging urban sprawl, the city can free up a large portion of its budget previously spent maintaining roadways, car infrastructure, parking lots, etc. that cost a lot and offer fairly limited social benefit. They can direct some of these funds toward more efficient transportation modes.
Prioritize human-first design by eliminating the use of dangerous "stroads" and improving pedestrian access to the town. For example, more, better, and wider sidewalks; shorter and faster pedestrian crossings; pedestrian priority in crossings; sidewalk trees to provide shade; and more. This is a philosophical change: the purpose of building a town is to house people, so let's design it for people first, not just cars!
Permit and support the construction of inter-city rail networks, like Amtrak, by not actively resisting reasonable construction to their town. The federal government will pay for it anyway.
Where feasible, build light rail networks to and from important destinations within and near the city, such as the downtown, airport, sporting arenas, and along population corridors.
In towns too small to afford rail infrastructure, expand bus networks and create bus rapid transit (BRT) lines traveling at least from the downtown outward, along population corridors. This tends to be affordable.
If you do a serious economic evaluation of passenger rail, it's usually feasible to offer basic transit services within a small city. This even includes train lines. Switzerland, for example, has very dense cities but also very not-dense rural areas. Yet even the smallest of these towns, often with only tens of thousands of people, will have an active rail line through the mountains. The main reason the United States does not have this (anymore) is because we actively decided to divest from rail 75 years ago. Every town used to have its own trolley network, but these tracks were ripped up (to some extent by car companies, in order to create a modal monopoly) and never rebuilt. As I understand it, Canada's situation is similar. We don't have to match Switzerland's model, but it goes to show that public transit can totally be implemented if we choose to prioritize it.
Personal transportation is a necessity here.
A light rail network is not going to be implemented in an extremely rural area. But most people do not live in extremely rural areas. Public transportation can't, won't, and doesn't need to serve literally every single human in the country. However, it creates an incentive for slightly denser living insofar as places with good public transit are more desirable. Additionally, mixed-use zoning and walkable streets encourage "hubs" of activity that can reignite a local region and invite transit to return. Long-term, there is significant environmental and social benefit to designing cities in a way that encourages a dense core, rather than sprawling out endlessly. Rural places will always exist, but starting off with a mindset of urbanism is what will allow our society to prosper.
The US does not have "very large" portions of it with such low populations as you describe. They exist, but they make up a fraction of the country. In general, ~83% of the US population is...
The US does not have "very large" portions of it with such low populations as you describe. They exist, but they make up a fraction of the country. In general, ~83% of the US population is classified as "urban," a number which is expected to grow to 90% in the coming decades. 17% of people is not nothing, but there's also a major spread in what constitutes "rural." A very significant portion of this "rural" population is still within the sphere of influence of an urban area; that is, they could make use of something like inter-city rail to another city or region, even if it takes a short drive to get to the station. And their cities could also be inherently better in the sense that they could be designed for people rather than machines.
Wyoming, the state I assume you're referring to, does not have any particularly large cities. The bus network in Cheyenne could reasonably see expansion. It would be economical if the political will were there, considering most of the funding would be federal anyway. I'm not sure about local heavy rail—inter-city connections to Amtrak are feasible, but extensive regional rail connections (à la Philadelphia) likely less for obvious population density reasons. A light rail network or line (such as a tram, or a trackless trolley using a catenary system) could be both useful and economically feasible.
Wyoming also has 578,000 people. The United States has a population of 331.9 million. Wyoming's difficult transportation sector thereby comprises the astonishingly low fraction of 0.0017 or 0.17% of all people in the country. That's not 1.17%, that's one tenth of a single percent of people who live in a state where the largest city is 60,000. Yes, people in your state deserve better transit—many seniors, disabled, and young people cannot drive—but it's also unrealistic to expect a New York City-style subway in Cheyenne. I don't think anyone would question that particular assertion. But good city planning and transportation does not have to look like New York City in order to be effective.
As I stated:
Public transportation can't, won't, and doesn't need to serve literally every single human in the country. However, it creates an incentive for slightly denser living insofar as places with good public transit are more desirable.
Again, I was very clear: urbanism is not about how big your city is. You can still make towns more multi-modal through pedestrian, cycling, and bus infrastructure in municipalities of any significant size. Even the tiniest towns can benefit from principles of human-first access. You would be interested in Strong Towns' Small Town and Rural Design Guide for some examples of simple and inexpensive infrastructure and policy changes that can accommodate better living for people in the near term.
I don't really agree with your last paragraph. A electrifying a huge vehicle like a hummer is obviously not going to be as good as a smaller one from an environment standpoint, but it's going to...
I don't really agree with your last paragraph. A electrifying a huge vehicle like a hummer is obviously not going to be as good as a smaller one from an environment standpoint, but it's going to be better than an ICE version. And the key to getting people to actually adopt electric vehicles is going to be make them as close to a drop in replacement for what they're used to as you can. Americans are used to big ass vehicles, so a law that tries to force them into a smaller car is going to be met with a lot more pushback than one that just mandates it be electric. Once electric cars are mainstream, then begin to increase the tax on larger vehicle. But if you try to do both at once, neither is going to happen. It is irrational, but since when are consumers rational?
Except that the Hummer isn't really a popular vehicle to begin with. It seemed like a really odd choice for GM to electrify. A pickup truck, like the Silverado or the already released Ford...
Except that the Hummer isn't really a popular vehicle to begin with. It seemed like a really odd choice for GM to electrify. A pickup truck, like the Silverado or the already released Ford Lightning, sure, but the Hummer is mostly a 'hey, look at the size of my balls' halo vehicle so why they chose to electrify it is a bit mystifying. According to this article (https://insideevs.com/news/660537/us-gmc-hummer-ev-pickup-sales-2023q1/) GM delivered all of TWO Hummer EVs in the first quarter of this year. Not exactly selling like hotcakes.
I wonder if it got delivered near me, because I just saw one for the first time yesterday on my way home. Seeing it in person for the first time I can definitely conclude that it's an absolute...
I wonder if it got delivered near me, because I just saw one for the first time yesterday on my way home.
Seeing it in person for the first time I can definitely conclude that it's an absolute joke of a vehicle. It looks like if a newbie designer was making a military style car for hot wheels and it was just blown up to a scale bigger than a normal car should be. I'm sure the body must be made of steel or aluminum but it looks like it's plastic. The truck bed is so tiny that it's basically the size of a larger bathtub.
Let's be real. Those truck beds are mostly for holding the contents of a CostCo/Sams Club run. Nobody who drives this car is thinking about actual practical use cases. Someone (I can't remember...
Let's be real. Those truck beds are mostly for holding the contents of a CostCo/Sams Club run. Nobody who drives this car is thinking about actual practical use cases.
Someone (I can't remember who) once called Oliver North a "dumb person's idea of what a smart person sounds like." This is a useless person's idea of what an actual useful/practical thing looks like.
I don't think many quad cab pickup drivers even use the truck bed for their average grocery store run at a place like Publix or Aldi where I shop. Stuff slides around back there, so they put it in...
Those truck beds are mostly for holding the contents of a CostCo/Sams Club run.
I don't think many quad cab pickup drivers even use the truck bed for their average grocery store run at a place like Publix or Aldi where I shop. Stuff slides around back there, so they put it in the back seat of the cab.
In my opinion, that's pretty much every modern truck in the US market that isn't available with a diesel engine. And probably a lot of the ones with diesel options, too. I honestly haven't seen an...
In my opinion, that's pretty much every modern truck in the US market that isn't available with a diesel engine. And probably a lot of the ones with diesel options, too.
I honestly haven't seen an electric pickup truck that doesn't look like a toy, but to be fair I'm not exactly looking for them. In any case, I haven't heard of any EV being sold with a variable transmission, and in cases where hauling heavy things would require high torques, it seems really wasteful to do an EV truck because that means wasting a lot more power. This might just be a theme for GM because the Bolt I traded up to from a Leaf has so much power behind it that I have to baby the accelerator pedal.
From what I've been told turbochargers apparently fake diesel engine levels of torque well enough to not really matter. The Porsche Taycan technically has a variable transmission with 2 gears, one...
In my opinion, that's pretty much every modern truck in the US market that isn't available with a diesel engine.
From what I've been told turbochargers apparently fake diesel engine levels of torque well enough to not really matter.
I haven't heard of any EV being sold with a variable transmission
The Porsche Taycan technically has a variable transmission with 2 gears, one for highway speeds (60+ mph) and the other for lower. But that's more about efficiently using the battery than managing how much power is delivered to the wheels. The way electric drive trains work as long as you can supply current to the motor you can get as much of its theoretical torque as you want.
We're actually saying the same things here. The comment about Diesel was because trucks useful for work are more likely to have a diesel model available. The transmission comment was because if...
We're actually saying the same things here. The comment about Diesel was because trucks useful for work are more likely to have a diesel model available. The transmission comment was because if you were to use an electric pickup presumably efficiency would be an issue they'd want to address.
I don't think it's mystifying at all. I think the best way to normalize electric cars is to take the biggest, most ostentatious vehicle you can imagine, which is definitely a hummer, and electrify...
I don't think it's mystifying at all. I think the best way to normalize electric cars is to take the biggest, most ostentatious vehicle you can imagine, which is definitely a hummer, and electrify it. The biggest hurdle electric cars have is one of perception. People not really in the know hear "Electric car" and they think of something small and weak. They think they're sissy cars and that turns them off the whole idea. But if you can replace that image with a big ass hummer, it's going to do a lot to get them on board. Again, I'm not saying it's rational in any sense, but it is going to be effective. And I think it's a shame more of them didn't sell. I think when one of the big three comes out with an electric muscle car that drives circles around anything ICE it's going to have a similar effect.
Almost EVERY electric car drives circles around ICE cars (unless its a Prius). My tiny Fiat 500e is laughably small (smaller than a VW Beetle) but its very quick off the line. I have pulled up to...
Almost EVERY electric car drives circles around ICE cars (unless its a Prius). My tiny Fiat 500e is laughably small (smaller than a VW Beetle) but its very quick off the line. I have pulled up to a stop light more than once and had the guy in the car next to me laugh at my little grocery getter. The last time it was guy in a brand new Jeep Wrangler. I nodded to him and pointed at the next light down the road and mouthed "Lets go!" and he threw his head back in laughter and nodded "ok!". When the light turned green, I punched it and in three seconds I was a car length ahead of him. I could hear his engine roaring but there was no way he was catching up and by halfway to the light I was several car lengths ahead. I let off on the accelerator and waved out my window. I would love to have been in his cab as he wondered how his 'fast' Jeep got blown away by a micro EV lol.
Yeah, I'm very aware of that. An electric motor is going to be better in nearly every way than an ICE. The problem isn't with the actual performance of an EV, it's the perception of them. The...
Yeah, I'm very aware of that. An electric motor is going to be better in nearly every way than an ICE. The problem isn't with the actual performance of an EV, it's the perception of them. The actual performance of a car doesn't matter the vast majority of the time, because most people aren't going to use 90% of it 90% of the time. People aren't (generally) racing between lights on the way to work or home from the grocery store. But people want to think they have a fast car. They want something that looks fast.
I have never thought of the Jeep as a "fast" car. A heavy duty car that can climb over rocks and through ditches sure, but it's a Jeep, not a Camaro! If someone in a little sedan said they'd race...
I have never thought of the Jeep as a "fast" car. A heavy duty car that can climb over rocks and through ditches sure, but it's a Jeep, not a Camaro! If someone in a little sedan said they'd race me there's no reason I'd think I could win.
I'm surprised how many people in big trucks are like this. My friend drives a 2010 Miata and he tells me dudes in big bro-dozer trucks try to challenge him a decent amount of the time. I don't understand what goes through these truck-guy's brains. I mean look at the thing! Sure it's cute and small, but what part of that doesn't look like it'll go fast? It's honestly impressive that a modern F-150 can hit 0-60 times similar to it because those cars certainly aren't designed for drag racing!
FWIW it seems my friend generally wins, despite more modest performance, because he actually knows how to drive and also understands what the other cars on the street are capable of.
Since road wear increases with the fourth power of vehicle weight, in my opinion, so should registration fees. This is especially true for EVs that aren't paying fuel taxes, which have...
I think your next point about the Hummer is where the value in criticism like this lies. Even aside from the insane size of the Hummer, EVs in general are fairly indifferent about curb weight as...
But to focus on tire wear seems like nitpicking at this juncture. Yes, they do wear out tires faster than regular cars, but the benefits to the environment from not emitting exhaust gasses is a massive leap forward. Cant ask for a zero polluting transportation, there is no such thing and tire particles are pretty minor compared to exhaust gas emission.
I think your next point about the Hummer is where the value in criticism like this lies. Even aside from the insane size of the Hummer, EVs in general are fairly indifferent about curb weight as something worth worrying about. Electric motors are good enough to where the weight isn't that much of an issue. They do feel kind of heavy to drive if you're sensitive to those sorts of driving dynamics, but they get so much torque it's not noticeable to most people.
The problem extends beyond just extravagances like the Hummer. Most of the weight is the battery and there is a race to have EV ranges to keep getting longer and longer between charges. This isn't a fully rational need, it's actually not good for anyone for the median EV on the street to be aiming at 300-400+ mile ranges. That's so much battery and additional curb weight that it suggests maybe we should start taxing cars (or car manufacturers) based on it because they impose a serious external cost on road wear and tear, pedestrian safety, and the particulate emissions. We want people to switch to EVs but we want them to avoid the negative externality of super-heavy vehicles for a feature that adds them no utility.
I like to think of the move to EVs as harm reduction. Moving from smoking cigarettes to vaping is certainly a lot healthier for the user. But it's not as healthy as giving up the habit altogether....
I like to think of the move to EVs as harm reduction. Moving from smoking cigarettes to vaping is certainly a lot healthier for the user. But it's not as healthy as giving up the habit altogether. Likewise, switching to EVs is better than the current status quo of driving noisy, polluting ICE cars everywhere, but it's still not as good as riding eBikes, building up missing middle density, and building up transit systems.
Where a lot of pro-transit folks get frustrated is the mindshare that EVs have. Simply because of how car-oriented North America is, a lot of people see themselves using EVs but don't take the extra leap to see themselves trying to use eBikes or ride the bus. This keeps the problem of advocating for bike lanes and bus lanes as hard as ever while perhaps giving individuals the sense that they've fixed the problem.
I'm not really a fan of either side of the fight personally. While most of my transport miles are done via (acoustic) bike and transit, I also do own an EV for when I have to travel long distances that transit just can't get me to or as an alternative to flying. But I do think people need to be very aware that cars are much harder on the environment, both from an infrastructural load perspective and a purely environmental one, than transit and micromobility alternatives.
Edit: An example of how much more prominently EVs are featured is in subsidies. States like CA jumped to subsidize EV ownership years ago. On the other hand, CA and other states are much more guarded and cautious about funding eBikes even though 1/20th the investment spent on EVs would go so much further in enabling eBike ownership. Despite the cost delta, politicians still default to benefiting the car over cheaper multimodal solutions.
I am honestly baffled by how one lives one's life with a bike and a bus unless you're single and have a simple lifestyle. eg. How do you move a family around with just a bike/bus? Personally my...
Simply because of how car-oriented North America is, a lot of people see themselves using EVs but don't take the extra leap to see themselves trying to use eBikes or ride the bus.
I am honestly baffled by how one lives one's life with a bike and a bus unless you're single and have a simple lifestyle. eg. How do you move a family around with just a bike/bus? Personally my vehicle(s) have varied uses and none of them would be satisfied by a bike/bus. Yesterday we finished driving a 1000 km trip pulling a boat to a lake for a family vacation with an SUV carrying the two of us plus two very large dogs - all of the dog's gear took up the entire back of the vehicle with the seats removed (which is slightly more room than two kids with all their stuff would use). The day before we left I used our SUV to pull a trailer to haul water. We buy large items on a regular basis that couldn't easily be carried onto a bus or carried on a bike like building supplies and tools.
That is, I dont think a lot of people are car centric because we dont like bike/busses, I think we're car centric because once you expand to a family or pets, its really inconvenient and impractical to use a bike or bus for transport.
It's not terribly difficult to imagine. Busses accommodate many people, and everyone rides their own bikes. Kids too young to ride a bike get strapped to a parent. If you've got a lot of stuff to...
It's not terribly difficult to imagine. Busses accommodate many people, and everyone rides their own bikes. Kids too young to ride a bike get strapped to a parent.
If you've got a lot of stuff to carry you can use a bike trailer, and if you regularly transport a lot you can get a cargo bike.
And in winter? Last winter we hit -40c here for several days and there was 5 feet of snow on our yard that I had to plow with my 4WD SUV mounted snow blade so I could even get out to the main...
And in winter? Last winter we hit -40c here for several days and there was 5 feet of snow on our yard that I had to plow with my 4WD SUV mounted snow blade so I could even get out to the main road. Which is why NONE of my neighbors use bicycles for anything other than leisure riding in the summer. Absolutely impossible to get around with one in winter. Nice for urban settings, but useless in harsh winter environments for much of Canada.
I can only dream in living in a place like that, but I'd imagine you'd just wear a parka and walk your bike to the road if you can't shovel it out of the way. To me it sounds like you live in a...
I can only dream in living in a place like that, but I'd imagine you'd just wear a parka and walk your bike to the road if you can't shovel it out of the way.
To me it sounds like you live in a city built for cars rather than pedestrian, much like the majority of the United States.
Edit: I see in one of your other comments that you're not even living in a town. I wouldn't expect there to be bus service in your area either. I don't know what to tell you. You have to pay for your rural lifestyle. That's the tradeoff you get.
I live in Munich and I don't know many people with cars, even though it's a very car centric city for German standards IMO. At about 2-3 yo many kids are learning to ride a bike, before that they...
I live in Munich and I don't know many people with cars, even though it's a very car centric city for German standards IMO. At about 2-3 yo many kids are learning to ride a bike, before that they are in cargo bikes, bike seats, bike trailers. Typically they ride on their own bikes at about 4-5 yo. Not fully in traffic, kids under 10 have to ride on the sidewalk, while >12yo have to ride on the road/bike paths. At about 7-8yo, you'll see a lot of kids out and about on their own by bike, tram, subway, bus etc.
As for pets, most of the time dogs are either running next to the bike or in a trailer. For surgeries, I've had friends rent a Carsharing car for the way back from the vet.
I couldn't imagine wanting to own a car - even renting a carsharing car once every weekend for a day is cheaper than owning a car. Up to distances of about 15km, I'm typically faster by bike as the cars all get stuck in their traffic jams. And to go hiking in the mountains, etc. there are buses and trains that take you to the trailheads.
You're car-centic because the urban design is terrible, it's entirely poßible with kids, pets, etc. Walking across one (large) parking lot in the US takes me just as long as walking to the supermarket from my home. I love a bit further than average from the nearest supermarket (500m)
No, Im car centric because I live 20 km from the closest town. My business dealings are spread out over 1000 km and I have to visit those locations regularly and I not only carry a lot of tools, I...
No, Im car centric because I live 20 km from the closest town. My business dealings are spread out over 1000 km and I have to visit those locations regularly and I not only carry a lot of tools, I often even sleep in my vehicle. And for at least 6 months of the year its below freezing here, with about 4 months in the -10 to -30c range with, in general, 3 to 5 ft of snow in an average winter. A bike is useless here and the only public transport are buses in town that run every 30 to 60 minutes making them highly inconvenient to getting around with any kind of efficiency. The only people who ride them are students and those who cant afford a car. Everyone else drives a car/truck because its a necessity. But I live in rural Canada. Your mileage may vary but its not an option for most of us here. Bikes are great for smaller urban settings. They just dont work in our climate and locale.
I also lived 20km outside of the city before the past few months - was definitely doable year-round, even at -20C. Granted, I could have used the buses or trains, which ran every 10 minutes, but...
I also lived 20km outside of the city before the past few months - was definitely doable year-round, even at -20C. Granted, I could have used the buses or trains, which ran every 10 minutes, but that's the benefit of a government prioritizing public transport. It's exceedingly rare that most people are driving 1000km regularly, in fact most trips are under 5km.
Bear in mind that what one used to think of as a bike is no longer what all e-bikes are like. Here in Santa Cruz CA I'm seeing many varieties and shapes of e-bikes which, although perhaps not...
Bear in mind that what one used to think of as a bike is no longer what all e-bikes are like. Here in Santa Cruz CA I'm seeing many varieties and shapes of e-bikes which, although perhaps not accommodating two huge dogs or pulling a boat trailer, carry two or three children behind the adult driver. There are even three wheeled e-bikes with a kind of bucket seat for two adults in front of the driver. Santa Cruz is of course exceptional in being fairly compact, not too hilly, having little rain in summer, and having bike trail infrastructure, but it's obvious here that e-bikes can become the primary transport for many people. (And my neighbor often carries his construction materials, including ladders, on a tricycle).
SO limited. How do you pull a camper trailer for a family of 5 with a bike? How do you take your 3 visiting relatives two hours to the mountains on a bike while carrying a crib, high chair, and...
SO limited. How do you pull a camper trailer for a family of 5 with a bike? How do you take your 3 visiting relatives two hours to the mountains on a bike while carrying a crib, high chair, and stroller for a baby? How do you go buy a car in another city and haul it home with a bike? How do you go to the lumber store and buy 5 sheets of drywall with a bike? How do you bring home fence posts and boards for an entire yard with a bike? How do you carry a full size air compressor on a bike? A riding lawn mower? A power aerator? How do you plow 2 feet of snow off your driveway with a bike?
If you just want to move a person or two or a bag of groceries or two, they're great if you dont have wildly challenging weather. But some of us are pretty demanding of our vehicles - they are tools to facilitate our lives.
Which becomes highly impractical when you do that every week. Renting is impractical for those of us who live outside a city and its a pain in the butt for those who are inside too. There are...
Which becomes highly impractical when you do that every week. Renting is impractical for those of us who live outside a city and its a pain in the butt for those who are inside too. There are plenty of situations (for many people) where owning a vehicle is the only logical option.
People who live in cities and town are not moving construction supplies and heavy machinery every week, and while there may be some who are moving camping trailers every week they are far from a...
People who live in cities and town are not moving construction supplies and heavy machinery every week, and while there may be some who are moving camping trailers every week they are far from a majority of people and tend to be relatively privileged.
I honestly don't know why you seem so upset about this. I think it's pretty clear that everyone talking about bikes is referring to people who live in cities and towns. Nobody's trying to take away cars from people who live in the country. Nobody is trying to judge you for your reliance on cars.
You started off this conversation saying you couldn't understand how people could live without cars, and I and others have explained it. I can only assume by all the pushback you've given that you aren't actually interested in understanding.
Maybe. I do love my car(s) and have no comprehension of living life even in a city without one. I lived in a city of 1.2 million for 25 years and out of all of our friends and neighbors I knew of...
Maybe. I do love my car(s) and have no comprehension of living life even in a city without one. I lived in a city of 1.2 million for 25 years and out of all of our friends and neighbors I knew of only one person who biked to work, even in the summer. Even in a car it was at least a 45 minute drive from one side of the city to the other on a good day. It would take several hours on a bike. But then again there weren't many bike lanes back then and you took your life in your hands biking along busy roadways on a bicycle. I suppose if a city were reconstructed from scratch with lots of bikeways and safer streets I might think differently but they just dont make sense where I live and lived.
So I think I can I say that people in US are car centric because US government is prioritizing cars, especially considering you said you lived in a city and even there it didn't have enough public...
So I think I can I say that people in US are car centric because US government is prioritizing cars, especially considering you said you lived in a city and even there it didn't have enough public infrastructure for public transport and bikes.
Actually I USED to live in a city. Now I live in the boonies, in northern Canada, in a rural area. There's a town about 20 minutes away but since we have lots of things to haul/carry/tow, we now...
Actually I USED to live in a city. Now I live in the boonies, in northern Canada, in a rural area. There's a town about 20 minutes away but since we have lots of things to haul/carry/tow, we now have 5 vehicles, everything from a tiny electric car to a massive 40 ft diesel motorhome - but vehicles have been my hobby for 40 years. But I know very few people who dont own at least two.
Well, yes, it's limited of course. And I did write "the primary transport for many people". I could have qualified that with all kinds of caveats; there are plenty of instances where some other...
Well, yes, it's limited of course. And I did write "the primary transport for many people". I could have qualified that with all kinds of caveats; there are plenty of instances where some other transport is necessary. But, how often do you pull a camper trailer for five? How often do you take all that to the mountains .. go to the lumber store .. carry an air compressor/mower .. etc.? Your life might not fit a bike, I guess, but I'd like to think people are becoming kinder to our planet, and more willing to live lightly.
Archive/non-paywalled link. Electric vehicles, often touted as a cleaner alternative to gasoline-powered cars, introduce an additional pollution issue just as the solve the one we're most familiar...
Electric vehicles, often touted as a cleaner alternative to gasoline-powered cars, introduce an additional pollution issue just as the solve the one we're most familiar with. Unfortunately, while EVs shift us away from burning fossil fuels in the transportation sector, they have one important thing in common with internal combustion engine vehicles:
They have rubber tires.
Like all cars, their tires are constantly rubbing against pavement, releasing particulates that float through the air and leach into waterways, damaging human health and wildlife. New EV models tend to be heavier and quicker—generating more particulates and deepening the danger.
...
This pollution is the inevitable result of the tire wear that every car owner experiences over time. Composed of hundreds of ingredients that can include natural and artificial rubber, petroleum, nylon, and steel, tires constantly spit out tiny bits of material, much of it invisible to the naked eye.
There's only one: reduce car dependency through infrastructure and policy changes and reduce vehicle miles traveled. Luckily, there are lots of specific plans we can make to make this a reality. Examples of policies that could directly or indirectly reduce this major pollution issue include:
Funding for high-speed passenger rail services, such as Amtrak, and their tracks
Funding for multi-modal city transport, like heavy rail, light rail (trams), buses, and bike lanes
Elimination of minimum parking requirements in all local municipalities
Elimination of Euclidean zoning codes in favor of mixed-use zoning, or at least allowing duplexes/quadplexes to be built in residential areas (rather than just single-family homes)
A tax on electricity for EVs: like the gas tax, but actually indexed to inflation
Materials science research funding to create biodegradable tires and/or longer-lasting tires
Engineering research funding to decrease the weight of EVs
A much higher tax on vehicle weight, to reduce tire wear (and road wear)
...and so on.
This is a complex problem and not every potential solution will be applicable to every municipality in the country. However, we need to address the root causes of pollution instead of chipping away at its downstream implementations. That starts by recognizing, philosophically, that we have to change our attitude toward internal combustion engine cars: the issue isn't just the engines, it's the car altogether.
It just isn't. EV's are awesome for car companies. They suck for the environment and very little is going to change that. Taxes won't help as it'll just be factored into the price of ownership and...
This is a complex problem and not every potential solution will be applicable to every municipality in the country.
It just isn't.
EV's are awesome for car companies. They suck for the environment and very little is going to change that. Taxes won't help as it'll just be factored into the price of ownership and the same issue goes round and round.
Electric Public Transport (Trains, Trams, Buses) should be default. Roads need to be re-prioritised into bike lanes and substantial shared transport networks. To compensate, we need more amenities to allow for you to safely store bikes and other such devices.
Cars in general need to be massively scaled back in both size, weight and sheer damn amount of them.
Bikes: My commute is the most dangerous part of my day, and bikes would only make that much worse. Not to mention exposure to the elements (biking in heatwaves sounds great!). Mass transit: my...
Electric Public Transport (Trains, Trams, Buses) should be default. Roads need to be re-prioritised into bike lanes...we need more amenities to allow for you to safely store bikes and other such devices.
Bikes: My commute is the most dangerous part of my day, and bikes would only make that much worse. Not to mention exposure to the elements (biking in heatwaves sounds great!).
Mass transit: my commute is already taking up too much of my day and interfering with work:life balance, and mass transit would make that worse by 50-100%. Waiting for it to arrive, being at the whim of breakdowns and schedule delays, waiting for all the other stops, riding alongside unstable people, having to walk the last mile - my mental health could not take it.
That's why you give them dedicated infrastructure. You take it away from cars and give it to people who aren't taking up huge amounts of space. Not shared resource, dedicated resource. Then your...
Bikes: My commute is the most dangerous part of my day, and bikes would only make that much worse. Not to mention exposure to the elements (biking in heatwaves sounds great!).
That's why you give them dedicated infrastructure. You take it away from cars and give it to people who aren't taking up huge amounts of space.
Not shared resource, dedicated resource.
Mass transit: my commute is already taking up too much of my day and interfering with work:life balance, and mass transit would make that worse by 50-100%. Waiting for it to arrive, being at the whim of breakdowns and schedule delays, waiting for all the other stops, riding alongside unstable people, having to walk the last mile - my mental health could not take it.
Then your public transport is setup awfully. It's designed and setup like that so you'll go and buy a car and have the 'sheer convienience of paying the deposit, monthly payments, MOT, registration...'
Public transport should be (and in many nations/cities/towns) easy to access, use and get around with.
There are exceptions. Being out in rural New South Wales or something. Makes sense to have a truck, Roo's suck to hit and everything is 10's+ kilometers away. But counties like the UK/Western Europe & the US? Absolutely not.
I live ~20Km away from a largeish city in Germany. I have no options to get to work via public transport - there are two busses per day, and it's a Bus -> Train -> Bus (or walk ~3Km) situation...
I live ~20Km away from a largeish city in Germany. I have no options to get to work via public transport - there are two busses per day, and it's a Bus -> Train -> Bus (or walk ~3Km) situation that would take about 3 hours just because of the timings.
The big companies will have company transport (think BMW, Audi, etc), but that's just for their own people.
In-city transport is much simpler - you can get from essentially anywhere to anywhere (at most with 1 change) within ~40 minutes... but it's less of an option if you're outside of the city.
I have an electric bike I use as much as I can, but it's not always an option
Aye. It's a similar problem when you pop into the UK outside the cities. It's a good identification of public transport that has actually failed if that's the case.
Aye. It's a similar problem when you pop into the UK outside the cities.
It's a good identification of public transport that has actually failed if that's the case.
Yeah pretty much. But those areas contribute so little (in transport) that I'd expect electrification to be beneficial towards machinary, rather than just cars. I.e. farm equipment.
Yeah pretty much. But those areas contribute so little (in transport) that I'd expect electrification to be beneficial towards machinary, rather than just cars. I.e. farm equipment.
The thing is though, the further you live from work the more miles you drive every day. So there’s this odd thing that happens where the more rural you are, the more you drive. Most people living...
The thing is though, the further you live from work the more miles you drive every day. So there’s this odd thing that happens where the more rural you are, the more you drive. Most people living in cities end up driving very little.
In order to reduce total miles driven, you have to push public transportation infrastructure into areas where it might not be that efficient. Building it out only in the very populous areas only does so much.
Then I think the govt should consider some financial aid to help people move closer to the cities. Cas, fuel should be taxed heavier and that would be a price to live in a countryside and produce...
Then I think the govt should consider some financial aid to help people move closer to the cities. Cas, fuel should be taxed heavier and that would be a price to live in a countryside and produce more pollution. So one could move nearer city with govt financial aid or stay on the countryside, knowing their resposibility for pollution.
I think it's just something that hasn't caught up to the state of the world in general - I can't afford to live near my work (I'd pay almost twice what I currently pay for a space half the...
I think it's just something that hasn't caught up to the state of the world in general - I can't afford to live near my work (I'd pay almost twice what I currently pay for a space half the size...), so I moved further away. The places further away from the larger cities are seeing a lot of development and population growth, and the public transport infrastructure isn't getting any changes to cope, party because there's no demand - everyone has cars already...
I don't have the education or experience to even picture how it would look for it to be a good option over private vehicles. Having busses run empty would be a waste (there are a couple of lines in the city that you need to call when you want to get to a couple of the furthest stops during the week)
Yup. The housing crisis sure as hell doesn't help. There's lots of interconnected systems that need to be complimentive, but traditionally that's just not been done.
Yup. The housing crisis sure as hell doesn't help.
There's lots of interconnected systems that need to be complimentive, but traditionally that's just not been done.
Public transport is a service, not a profitable private company. It is not built to be profitable. If public transport was decent, people would get back to it. I myself own and drive a car but...
Public transport is a service, not a profitable private company. It is not built to be profitable. If public transport was decent, people would get back to it.
I myself own and drive a car but every time I argue with people I'm so against car centric environment, also I vote for politicians who want to change it and make areas pedestrian friendly. I would love to get rid of my car, it costs a lot, it needs repairs, space, I drive according to the law which gets many drivers mad, I just hate drivers for this, most of them seem very selfish piece of human. Yes, it gets me to the place, but at the same time I know that there are places with decent pubtransport and I know how convenient it can be.
I live in a medium sized town in the US, and when I was in college I used public transport for just about everything, driving < 1000 miles per year. Now as a middle aged adult with a kid I can...
I live in a medium sized town in the US, and when I was in college I used public transport for just about everything, driving < 1000 miles per year. Now as a middle aged adult with a kid I can tell you that it's 100% impossible for me to function without a car. Taking a two year old on an hour+ bus ride with multiple transfers to get within a half mile of their daycare only to hop back on the bus to go to work wouldn't let me get to work by 8am even if we left at 6am.
For what it's worth, the public transport in my town is the best of any non major city I've lived in. The bus is free and can get you just about anywhere in the city limits, but it is slow and inefficient time wise. As a single student with no kids it didn't bother me since I could read or whatever on the bus, but when we make arguments like these it's important to acknowledge that a big chunk of the population in cities with decent public transport cannot rely on the public transport for most of their needs.
My morning drive is ten minutes to the kid's daycare then twenty minutes to my work. I'm working 60+ hour weeks and simply couldn't come close to this level of productivity or safety (walking down major roads with a reluctant two year old isn't fun or safe) without driving my daily route.
As a transit and cycling advocate, I want to emphasize that this is bad transit. This is the result of a system that has for decades, almost a century, designed the entire built environment around...
Taking a two year old on an hour+ bus ride with multiple transfers to get within a half mile of their daycare only to hop back on the bus to go to work wouldn't let me get to work by 8am even if we left at 6am.
As a transit and cycling advocate, I want to emphasize that this is bad transit. This is the result of a system that has for decades, almost a century, designed the entire built environment around cars. I'm not trying to detract from your experience that the bus sucks, but I just want to emphasize that it doesn't have to be that way. When I lived in a college town, our bus system was only 10-15% than driving, it was frequent (with 15 min headways being the worst case scenario), and convenient.
In Japan where lots of children ride the local bus system, dense areas have 2-3 min headways, and smaller towns have buses with 5-10 min headways to hubs which are walkable to schools, restaurants, and businesses.
Transit doesn't have to be the way it is in the US and the longer we dig our heels into the current form of car-oriented development, the harder it becomes to dig ourselves out of the unsustainable hole we're in. In the meantime, maybe an eBike will help reduce your vehicle miles?
I grew up in Las Vegas, and I can tell you from my experience with their bus system that one hour rides were blessings. Most bus lines ran at 30 minute intervals when everything was working...
I grew up in Las Vegas, and I can tell you from my experience with their bus system that one hour rides were blessings. Most bus lines ran at 30 minute intervals when everything was working perfectly, and it never ran perfectly. So if you wanted to go anywhere that was not on the street you were on, you would need to take at least one transfer and that would mean anywhere between 20 minutes to an hour just waiting for the bus to arrive. This wasn't in the boonies, either; this was almost exactly in the center of the city. It's also very different than the touristy areas like the strip, where there were actually multiple routes going through it that could have busses coming as often as once every 5 minutes between the routes. One of them was an express bus that would visit every third stop so you could get there faster.
Biking also wasn't really a very good solution because the vast majority of the city didn't have bike lanes and, being a desert, the heat made it unbearable for most of the year. It actually made it unbearable to even go outside long enough to be picked up by the bus in Summer. I wish that ebikes were affordable when I was there because that would have made it much more viable of a solution, though because the place wasn't really bike friendly an ebike would have been a much bigger target for thieves since most businesses didn't have places to chain up your bike.
There's a great book called Invisible Women that touches on how shocking some bus routes can be (Even in great Public Transport cities like London). It talks about the very thing you're talking...
There's a great book called Invisible Women that touches on how shocking some bus routes can be (Even in great Public Transport cities like London). It talks about the very thing you're talking about.
Public transport has some frustrating legacy issues in that it's usually designed around a guy going to work in the centre of a city... rather than actually being helpful to people for the sake of getting around. That's what you're experiencing.
Like I've said elsewhere, that's a failing of the system of public transport that needs to be addressed, rather than an assertation that a car is easier/better/faster/what have you.
I've had a few notices about new bus routes through my door today. Both of which completely miss my little suburb of London spectacularly. It's left me very bemused by it, but definitely not dismayed by the notion that Public Transport is perfectly viable providing it's designed as a Service, and not purely for the sake of profit.
i live in the American west and i've been to NSW. i struggle to see how you can put a distinction between them in terms of distances and fauna road hazards.
i live in the American west and i've been to NSW. i struggle to see how you can put a distinction between them in terms of distances and fauna road hazards.
I did miss "cities" as a reference, apologies. There are definitely very rural areas where it kind of doesn't make sense. But the reality is... those areas are actually probably better as...
I did miss "cities" as a reference, apologies.
There are definitely very rural areas where it kind of doesn't make sense. But the reality is... those areas are actually probably better as self-sufficient. There are swathes of open land that have more land than some nations and less people than those nations smallest villages.
I mean do you have any experience with what that would actually be like in practice? Basically have you ever lived in the Netherlands or Copenhagen? Several of the problems you listed out are...
I mean do you have any experience with what that would actually be like in practice? Basically have you ever lived in the Netherlands or Copenhagen? Several of the problems you listed out are primarily a problem if you're dealing with underfunded poorly implemented versions of these.
Good public transport is regularly quicker and less stressful than driving and generally able to get you much closer than a mile.
Dedicated bike infrastructure similarly makes a big difference as far as safety and overall pleasantness goes. I don’t ride bikes particularly, except when I’m in Copenhagen where it really makes the most sense and is pleasant.
Of course no one is planning to mandate that you stop driving instead the idea is simply to allow for some actual real alternatives. So that not everyone is forced to drive. Though you might be surprised at the ways it could end up being good for your mental and physical health.
And on the other hand our car centric attitudes are contributing to the destruction of ourselves and the world we live in.
While correct, I feel like this argument really ignores the massive undertaking it would be to make retrofit public transportation like you're talking about. I live in a city in the midwest of the...
While correct, I feel like this argument really ignores the massive undertaking it would be to make retrofit public transportation like you're talking about. I live in a city in the midwest of the US that has a little under 300,000 people, and currently the only public transportation we have is a very sparse bus system. You'd have to entirely rebuild the infrastructure of the entire city to get the kind of coverage you're talking about. That's a project that takes billions of dollars and probably decades, assuming you could drum up the public support for them. Which you absolutely couldn't.
Electric cars, on the other hand, are a drop in solution that wouldn't change peoples day to day lives in any meaningful way. So unless you're going to argue that electric cars are overall worse than ICE cars, I think these kinds of insistent conversations are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. It would be great if public transit were more of a realistic option for more people and that is absolutely something we should work towards. But that is a long term change, and we need to continue to make short term changes to buy time to make the long term. It isn't an either/or proposition.
I can't comment on public support, but the money exists, it just goes to car-centric uses of roadways. Strictly speaking, there isn't any reason your city can't at least build rapid bus lanes when...
That's a project that takes billions of dollars and probably decades, assuming you could drum up the public support for them.
I can't comment on public support, but the money exists, it just goes to car-centric uses of roadways. Strictly speaking, there isn't any reason your city can't at least build rapid bus lanes when it resurfaces its major arterial roads. The cost of this would be relatively minimal (the road is being resurfaced anyway). Buses and stations cost money, but so do highway expansions and ridiculously complex interchanges.
Most significant infrastructure funding comes from the federal government anyway. Your city probably wouldn't end up spending that much. For example, the Department of Transportation recently announced grants of $17 billion to go to local zero-emission bus services in cities across the country. If your city didn't apply for a grant, that's a problem to take up with your local councilors!
Infrastructure projects are always going to cost billions and take decades. The distinction is that if we adopt a pessimistic, "it's impossible" attitude toward public transportation... then of course it isn't going to happen. The key here is to not consider EVs "environmentally friendly." They aren't. They're just a little bit better than ICE vehicles. That's a philosophical change that we have to recognize.
You're right that this isn't an "either/or" proposition, but we can't be complacent about switching to EVs and calling it a day. We have to switch to EVs, but we simultaneously have to reduce car dependency. That means banning ICE vehicles while also disincentivizing personal vehicle use in general via better rail and bus alternatives.
But it isn't that simple, is it? It isn't a matter of just taking one lane away and making it a bus only lane. For a city to make the kind of changes you're talking about, it would require a...
But it isn't that simple, is it? It isn't a matter of just taking one lane away and making it a bus only lane. For a city to make the kind of changes you're talking about, it would require a complete redesign of the way a city is laid out. If you expect people to be able to travel by bus to wherever they want to go, the bus has to to go everywhere. You could probably change one lane of a main road to bus lane, but the majority of the roads in my city are only one lane either way. So now you're talking about either widening them or completely stopping car traffic on the. And the bus has to start where people live. So now you're talking about either expanding bus service into the suburbs or moving the people into the city. Neither of which are as trivial as just marking out a bus lane where there is already a road.
My city actually applied for those grants and I am pretty sure they got them. I've seen the plans for what they plan to do with that money. And while it is a step in the right direction, it is a drop in the bucket compared to what you'd need to even get into the same ballpark as what you're talking about. Even if that was a sufficient amount of money, there are 125 cities in the US with a population over 200,000, so giving them all 17 billion dollars would be 2.2 trillion dollars. Significantly larger than the largest infrastructure invest ever made.
And again, the doesn't even address the public support. Support that these kinds of arguments are only going to hurt. Talking about banning cars is only ever going to get a politician laughed out of a room, because the average American understands for that that to even begin to be a reality will take generational change. We are only just getting people on board with electric cars, a huge leap forward from an ICE vehicle. And we need to focus on that because that is a change that is actually possible in a time frame to make a difference.
The grants are not $17 billion to each city. The most any particular city got was a little over $100 million. It does not cost $17 billion to develop a bus rapid transit network, nor anything...
Exemplary
The grants are not $17 billion to each city. The most any particular city got was a little over $100 million. It does not cost $17 billion to develop a bus rapid transit network, nor anything remotely close. A very expensive subway line may cost that much, but easily recoups the cost in social benefits. You can expect a short but effective starter light rail line to cost perhaps $100 million on the low end, or closer to $1 billion in a large city, depending on how much tunneling is required, how many stations there are, the rights of way required, etc. Larger projects obviously cost more money, as we've seen in many cities.
The annual spend on highways and roads in the United States by states and local governments is over $200 billion, of which ~$51 billion was allocated through the federal government. In contrast, the Federal Rail Administration requested $4.66 billion in federal funding for 2023, already higher than in the past. This isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, but it demonstrates that we are overspending on one area of inefficient area of transit and underspending on an efficient area.
Again, the money is there. It's all there. It just has to be allocated in a more effective way. The recent I-95 collapse in Philadelphia was attended to in a matter of weeks, but the Hudson River Tunnel has been in a state of dire repair for over a decade, since Hurricane Sandy severely damaged it. There isn't a great reason for this discrepancy, even though the NEC is critical to transportation. In this case, the project is only now seeing work due to a series of past underinvestments in the region for state political reasons (cough Access to the Region's Core cough) as well as a recent presidential administration that has personal beef with the city of New York. Very unprofessional on either account, but if the public better recognized the utility of these transportation projects (and particularly of the harm caused by the alternative of exclusively funding car-centric infrastructure), they would be more likely to hold politicians accountable for underfunding them.
it would require a complete redesign of the way a city is laid out
You don't need a bus lane on every street, you just need them within walking distance of where people live, work, and want to go for leisure. Streets don't have to be widened and buildings don't have to be demolished. A narrow one-lane street is not where you'd put a bus lane. And if a two-lane street with parking is an important enough corridor to warrant a bus lane, you can take away parking from one side. The number of cars that can fit on a particular block is laughably small relative to the number of passengers who would be served by almost any bus line. There isn't a shortage of parking in this country, not even in urban areas! Anyway, most arterials within cities feature at least two or three lanes in each direction. There's more than enough space.
BTW, stopping personal car traffic on select high-priority streets so that they can become bus-only (or tram-only, or both) rights of way is actually a completely legitimate practice. This is commonplace in many parts of the world. It generally has more benefits than drawbacks. You can alternatively prioritize transit on certain streets, allowing local traffic but banning through-traffic, as in Toronto's King Street. You have to plan this out carefully, but it's not as difficult as you're making it out to be.
So now you're talking about either expanding bus service into the suburbs
I will note that "where people live" is where density is (by definition). The suburbs are, by definition, not urban and therefore not nearly as dense. Suburban express buses are important to a region's use of public transit, but a city's internal bus network can and will operate by itself as long as it connects valuable locations within the city to each other. Implementing suburban bus lines isn't trivial, but it isn't particularly complicated either. Outside of dense urban areas, congestion lessens and space becomes less of a concern on arterial roads. Small bus stations are not particularly expensive: the only infrastructure to speak of that they require is a shelter and potentially an island, if the street redesign includes a bike lane. The island may be raised slightly to provide level boarding to riders, or the bus may be able to lower itself to do that. Either way, we aren't talking enormous investments here. It's extremely possible.
Indeed, local infrastructure and traffic routing is complicated and requires planning beforehand. For an extreme (and non-local) example, the NEC Future Tier 1 Environmental Impact Statement took about five years to clear environmental review (in 2017), and the Tier 2 statement has still not been released six years later. But that's a planning process spanning seven and a half states in the densest part of the country. It also features the country's most complex single piece of rail infrastructure (or perhaps any infrastructure). Any particular city is not facing a planning process this complicated for a bus line. The timeline is going to vary, but again, it's extremely realistic to implement better public transit in a small city.
Many cities have been able to successfully implement bus networks. Many cities have been able to successfully implement tram and other light rail networks. Many cities have been able to successfully implement heavy rail in the form of subways or elevated rail. Honolulu, HI recently opened its newest metro. It took years, but they did it, and the benefits outweigh the drawbacks by an enormous margin. Spokane, WA just launched a new bus rapid transit system, and Oklahoma City, OK is in the process of developing its own. Obviously, so are all the other 130 cities who just received grants from the federal government!
It's not unreasonable, it's not unrealistic, it's not too expensive, it's not too difficult, it's not too unpopular, and it's not impossible!
Talking about banning cars
I never suggested that cars be banned as a form of transportation. Manufacturing of ICE engines is already on schedule to be banned in multiple states within the next two decades. Politicians are hardly being "laughed out of the room" for suggesting such things.
Manhattan's recent congestion pricing plan has passed environmental review and will be implemented next year. That doesn't ban cars from the island, it just makes them a less attractive form of transportation, thereby encouraging more efficient use of public transport.
There are many areas of cities that do ban car traffic in select areas, though. Sections of Broadway in Manhattan are an example, though plenty of cities have this sort of thing for their main streets. On the whole, car-free zones demonstrate incredible economic and social benefit to their local communities.
will take generational change
Sure, these things take a while. But I'm not going to wait 25 years to start talking about changes that we need to have begun planning 10 years ago. Because infrastructure takes a while to develop, it's important that conversations like this are happening early on.
I’ve lived in Helsinki, and unless you live in the peninsula or are lucky and live close to a daycare, once you have two or so children you’ll end up moving and buying a car. That’s what most...
I’ve lived in Helsinki, and unless you live in the peninsula or are lucky and live close to a daycare, once you have two or so children you’ll end up moving and buying a car. That’s what most families end up doing - it is too much work to take two kids to daycare vis public transport - even when it works at world class levels.
I don't think myself or anyone else is really arguing for the complete banning of cars. Simply for the enlargement of other options. And the comment I was replying was talking solely about commute...
I don't think myself or anyone else is really arguing for the complete banning of cars. Simply for the enlargement of other options. And the comment I was replying was talking solely about commute options for a single person to and from work. Obviously if you have a multiple young children and a house in the suburbs or further afield things get more complicated. But there's no reason why that means that everyone else should absolutely have to rely on a car.
More bikes and fewer cars would make everyone's commute safer, not less dangerous. Changing city infrastructure to be less car centric includes adding additional tree cover and reducing heat...
More bikes and fewer cars would make everyone's commute safer, not less dangerous. Changing city infrastructure to be less car centric includes adding additional tree cover and reducing heat islands - like parking lots - so biking in a heatwave wouldn't be as bad. There would also be fewer heatwaves if we can do enough to reduce climate change, although that seems unlikely.
Mass transit also doesn't have to be that time consuming and unreliable. I moved from an extremely unwalkable city in Florida to a small but very walkable town in Sweden. Most bus trips take me 5 minutes longer than it would take by car, because I have to walk to the bus stop. The walk to the bus stop is always pleasant and mostly under trees. There are dedicated bus lanes so they don't get stuck in traffic. The busses come very frequently and several lines go to the same places. Even with shutdowns there's never more of a delay than a traffic accident on a major highway would cause. Not even close. Also on a bus, your commute doesn't require a much of your attention, so you can reclaim that time for you in a lot more ways. Reading a book, watching a movie, or just texting a friend.
It wouldn't be easy to make cities less car-centric, and different locales will have different challenges, but your problems may have solutions that you haven't heard of.
Some thoughts on reducing car dependence: Would smart meter surveillance be implemented to tax EV charging separately from other electricity usage? Would such a tax be primarily for Supercharger...
Some thoughts on reducing car dependence:
Would smart meter surveillance be implemented to tax EV charging separately from other electricity usage? Would such a tax be primarily for Supercharger stations and not for in-home charging?
IMO, the #1 barrier to dense living being acceptable is noise prevention. Change building codes to require recording-quality soundproofing between units and the desirability of dense apartment blocks in lively neighborhoods skyrockets.
Biking to work will become more acceptable once more offices have showering facilities.
My work has a shower facility and I love it - the ability to bike in to work, hose off, then change into dress clothes is a game changer! If I ever switch to another job, having a locker room or...
My work has a shower facility and I love it - the ability to bike in to work, hose off, then change into dress clothes is a game changer!
If I ever switch to another job, having a locker room or shower available is absolutely going to be something I ask about.
Probably. I was thinking about charging stations on the highway. I don't know how it would work in homes. That's an engineering challenge I'm not equipped to personally answer at this time. At a...
Probably. I was thinking about charging stations on the highway. I don't know how it would work in homes. That's an engineering challenge I'm not equipped to personally answer at this time.
At a population-wide level, noise is not the #1 barrier to urbanism: cost is, followed by transportation. However, I agree that noise pollution is an under-recognized problem. Personally, this has always been one of my priorities. Most noise in cities is generated from vehicles. Electric engines tend to be quieter than ICEs, which is nice, but at speeds above ~20mph, most of the noise originates from the tires. There are ways you can engineer tires to be quieter, though there's only so far you can take it. It's better to limit local speeds to ~20mph under all circumstances (except, obviously, emergency vehicles). This requires greater use of bollards, speed humps, and other traffic calming measures. I agree that better soundproofing between units would also be useful.
I agree with that as well. I would support bike infrastructure one way or another though. Being able to easily and safely bike to the store to get groceries instead of driving is really nice.
For whatever reason, I find traffic noise (assuming no sirens or horns) to be less disruptive to my sleep or, especially, concentration than the human noises of daily living. As soon as I'm...
For whatever reason, I find traffic noise (assuming no sirens or horns) to be less disruptive to my sleep or, especially, concentration than the human noises of daily living. As soon as I'm reminded that there are others around who might interrupt me, my focus is gone.
This is the second time I've seen a news article about this subject and I've looked both times, and it's possible I just skipped over it so if I'm wrong please someone correct me, I have yet to...
This is the second time I've seen a news article about this subject and I've looked both times, and it's possible I just skipped over it so if I'm wrong please someone correct me, I have yet to see any actual hard numbers. I get very weary when I just see percentages You would think if the difference was so acute that the numbers would just speak for themselves but yet here for a second time they're nowhere in the article. I always get the impression that when people write articles like this they already know the agenda they want to push and cherry pick numbers to prove their point. It would be refreshing if someone just laid out the facts and let me make up my own mind.
I think youre correct in that if they've only used percentages then they're not entirely convinced by the numbers themselves. When I've written reports in the past, if I've wanted to hammer home a...
I think youre correct in that if they've only used percentages then they're not entirely convinced by the numbers themselves.
When I've written reports in the past, if I've wanted to hammer home a point and make it fully understood, I've started with the value, and then reiterated the point by adding the percentage difference. Adding the percentage only almost adds a level of obscurity.
The other comments about having to reduce our use of all cars in general are right on in my opinion. But even if we are just comparing ICE cars to EVs I'm pretty skeptical that the tire pollution...
The other comments about having to reduce our use of all cars in general are right on in my opinion.
But even if we are just comparing ICE cars to EVs I'm pretty skeptical that the tire pollution is that much worse. EVs are typically heavier all else being equal. I have the EV6 which they mentioned in the article. It weighs just over 4500 lbs, which is heavy, but about normal for a midsize SUV.
Also it does not go 0-60 in 3.5, I wish. That's the special high performance GT model which they only made 2500 of. It seems misleading to use that stat. The dual motor models are the fastest of the normal production cars and their 0-60 times are around 5.0.
Even then that only affects the tires when you are actually using it. My wife primarily drives the EV6 and I don't think she's ever had the accelerator more than half way down.
It's interesting to think about tire pollution. I'd love to see some more actual data about it. I would guess driving habits and cars traction/stability control has a bigger overall effect than ICE vs EV. I would also guess if we found it was a serious issue car manufacturers could tweak those control systems to dramatically reduce it. probably running in Eco mode already does that since it reduces acceleration.
Until I see data that proves otherwise I'm assuming tire pollution is a problem that EVs fail to address, but aren't significantly making worse.
In the end it's less important than greenhouse gas emissions. And I feel like this article is being deliberately provocative without any data to back it up.
I was hoping for more data as well, though I shared the article with the intention of informing/reminding people that EVs are not "environmentally friendly," they're just less worse than the...
Exemplary
I was hoping for more data as well, though I shared the article with the intention of informing/reminding people that EVs are not "environmentally friendly," they're just less worse than the alternative.
The research appears to suggest that it's very challenging to study tire pollution because of the way microplastics ("MPs") from tires are inherently hard to study (being so tiny, I assume).
Kim et al. 2022 state in "Toxicity assessment of tire particles released from personal mobilities (bicycles, cars, and electric scooters) on soil organisms" that:
Many MPs have been detected in various environmental media, and these pollutants primarily originate from terrestrial sources, such as tire wear particles (TWPs) (30.7 %), asphalt derived polymer bitumen (5.7 %), abrasion of shoe soles (2.7 %), and plastic packages (2.5 %) (Hanik et al., 2019, Luo et al., 2021, Ding et al., 2022).
They also state that:
Environmental media are heavily contaminated with [Tire Wear Particles ("TWP")]. The TWP concentration detected in soil and sediment near the road was 9.1 g/kg and 7.4 g/kg, respectively (Panko et al., 2013, Unice et al., 2013). [...] The average worldwide TWP emission has been calculated to be about 2.64 million tonnes from 2016 to 2021.
I don't have enough context to know exactly how I should react to these numbers, but my impression from the statements in these articles is that it's significant.
Research into tire plastic toxicity leaves a lot to be desired, but there are apparently clear indications that these particles are toxic to organisms, both plant and animal, because of the way they leech into groundwater and soils. Air pollutants don't seem to be a focus of this particular study, but they also exist.
Selonen et al. 2021 reach similar conclusions in "Exploring the impacts of microplastics and associated chemicals in the terrestrial environment – Exposure of soil invertebrates to tire particles."
It has been estimated that more than one million tons of tire particles are generated annually both in the European Union and in the United States (Wagner et al., 2018) and almost 6 million tons globally (Boucher and Friot, 2017; Kole et al., 2017). Due to the synthetic nature of the polymers in tire wear, micro-sized particles released from tires are generally considered as microplastics (Eisentraut et al., 2018; Hartmann et al., 2019; Wagner et al., 2018), and abrasion of tire wear is one of the largest sources of micro- and nanoplastics to the environment (Boucher and Friot, 2017; Kole et al., 2017; Sieber et al., 2020; Siegfried et al., 2017; Wagner et al., 2018).
...the article continues with a shocking number of references to the likely negative health effects of tire particles on organic life. But also:
Even though tire wear is considered to be one of the main sources of microplastics in the world's oceans (Boucher and Friot, 2017; Kole et al., 2017), it has been estimated that only 12% of the particles from tires eventually reach surface waters, whereas 67% end up in soils and the rest in air and in waste water treatment plants (Kole et al., 2017).
Emphasis mine. It seems that this is a significant issue. And as the article states, heavier vehicles do induce more tire wear than lighter vehicles. As I understand it, more force is being applied to the tires to move an EV (because they're heavier) and so tires are pressed more harshly against asphalt and wear down faster. Even with a fairly light vehicle, tire microplastics are a problem.
Van den Bossche 2018 seems to indicate in "Electric cars compared to ultra-light electric vehicles and global warming" that a sufficiently lightweight electric vehicle design "has also effect on the indirect CH4 emissions in electricity, but also at tire dust, which might be even the biggest source of particulate matter PM10-PM2.5." i.e. yes, heavier vehicles contribute significantly to this problem.
Singer et al. 2021 seem to indicate in "Tire Particle Control with Comfort Bounds for Electric Vehicles" that over time "the impact of particulates, in particular from tires, will become larger, due to both the weight of these vehicles and the torque profile of electrical machines." i.e. yes, vehicle weight contributes significantly to this problem. They investigate some solutions but I can't read the article.
Obereigner et al. 2021 state in "Active Limitation of Tire Wear and Emissions for Electrified Vehicles" that:
Furthermore, as electrified vehicles weigh more and typically exhibit higher torques at low speeds, their non-exhaust emissions tend to be higher than for comparable conventional vehicles, especially those generated by tires. Fortunately, tire related emissions are directly related to tire wear, so that limiting tire wear can reduce these emissions as well. This can be accomplished by intelligently modulating the vehicle torque profile in real time, to limit the operation in conditions of higher tire wear.
Emphasis mine. I can't read the article, so it's unclear to me how much these engineering possibilities can solve the issue (though it's good that there are potential solutions) or if manufacturers would actually implement these changes voluntarily. My guess is that it would be possible, though relatively difficult and expensive, and that governments would have to legally mandate manufacturers to create better tires like this. Hopefully we can reduce tire wear through various means, but unless we find ways to develop and mandate hyper-lightweight vehicles as described by Van den Bossche 2018, tire pollution is here to stay. For the good of society and human health, I think engineering research like this is best done in tandem with re-evaluations of car-centric urban design in order to reduce car dependency and therefore unnecessary use.
I have a hard time taking an article like this as seriously as it is presented. To shift a population from internal combustion engines toward EVs is a massive shift and its happening, very slowly, in my country (Canada) because for many Canadians EVs are still not a practical choice - too expensive, too little charging infrastructure, lack of charging speed and lack of flexibility (eg, range and towing ability).
But to focus on tire wear seems like nitpicking at this juncture. Yes, they do wear out tires faster than regular cars, but the benefits to the environment from not emitting exhaust gasses is a massive leap forward. Cant ask for a zero polluting transportation, there is no such thing and tire particles are pretty minor compared to exhaust gas emission.
I do agree that electrifying massive vehicles like the Hummer seems counter productive. Why create such a beastly huge vehicle and then put batteries in it to pretend you're treading lightly on the planet? But that's not too hard to solve - if vehicle registrations are based on weight like they are in Hawaii, buyers are given incentive to buy smaller vehicles. The Hummer EV, at 4700 kg (10,340 lbs) weighs TWICE as much as a large gas SUV and should be taxed into oblivion for its irrationality.
Not to mention, all the current statistics in that article on tire pollution would have to be based on ICE cars primarily.
Additionally, electric cars are only one potential band-aid on solving the problem of cars in the climate crisis. It must be supplemented by new infrastructure - especially long-distance electrified high-speed rail, and much, much more local public transit. City centers that are restructured to be pedestrian-friendly and limit vehicle access. And most importantly, either rehabilitation, or elimination, of the US-style suburb.
Articles like this that go all-in on "ELectRic cARs Are a ProblEM AcTuAllY" are just ammunition for climate deniers.
We should absolutely go into the next era of personal vehicles with eyes wide open about what the issues are. We certainly didn't enter this one cognizant of all the problems. But FUD pieces about electric cars are counterproductive and irresponsible.
Where I live and work in development and completely restructured to be pedestrian-friendly.
But that usually means moving parking seat from the destinations, and when it's 100+ degrees for several months a year that's problematic.
I'm having a bit of a hard time parsing your comment - but I do just want to mention that there are viable solutions to the problem of having people drive and other problems people don't necessarily account for in the current climate.
As it is, a large amount of land is taken up by parking lots that are massively too big for the business they support, and don't offer any economic benefit to the city. Plus they add to the heat simply by not offering shade and often are large enough you'll have to walk far away anyway.
Alternatively, you could allow for this to be a one time inconvenience, build out public infrastructure across your city, and have park and ride stations outside the city so people can commute to wherever they need to go in climate controlled transport while also eliminating a lot of inner city traffic. Removing massive low level buildings and encouraging mixed development for cities can also lead to more people just living in the city and eliminating the need for individual car ownership. Fewer cars, less traffic, fewer parking spaces needed. Plus people don't usually have to travel very far in mixed use neighborhoods since almost everything is readily available nearby.
I personally view rebuilding cities as one of the most fundamental steps in creating a healthier world for the future. We've done a lot of damage across the country by not planning for people - and if we change it we can reduce many of our other impacts in the process.
My point is that for months people refuse to go places where they can't park close to their destination. Walking a few blocks is a big ask for many people when it's 105 degrees in the shade for weeks at a time.
The areas where we've reduced parking to make things more walkable is where businesses go to die.
Park and rides just move the giant parking lots and add a bus or train that stops 3 blocks from their destination. It's not just the last mile we need. It's the last block.
Areas that work better are where you have underground, climate-controlled walkways, but the cost is astronomical.
In a genuinely walkable neighborhood with good access to other parts of the city, this is categorically untrue. When a municipality removes parking without simultaneously increasing density and walkability, of course there will be problems. Likewise, when they attempt to build a self-contained "walkable" commercial district without necessary amounts of housing, of course there will be problems. And even if they create a largely self-sustaining mixed-use zone, if it doesn't have good transportation to other parts of the city... of course there will be problems.
The council has to consider at least five urbanist concepts when reducing automobile over-dependency:
If your city tried to do one of these things without any of the others, that's nice, but it obviously isn't going to succeed! Realistically, you can't always do everything all at once, so many of these projects tend to happen on a timeline of a few years. That's OK!
That your municipality has attempted to maintain existence in what appears to be a desert incompatible with human life is laudable, but perhaps speaks to the greater issue of "humans living in the desert." Environmentally and economically speaking, it's not exactly an efficient location. As a society, I don't know how much we should incentivize living in a place with those peak temperatures.
Regardless, it's also OK if pedestrian and cycling modes decrease somewhat in unbearably hot summer months. The entire year is not like that. In a properly walkable area, it's walkable year-round: and even if we see benefits just most of the year, that's still an improvement to quantitative metrics like vehicle miles traveled (VMT), emissions, local budgets, personal affordability, and various qualitative metrics related to aesthetics and happiness.
And literally implemented all of those ideas. All of our planners (myself included) are Certified New Urbanists and drink deep of these principles.
But it's also just too hot too much of the year. Shade does very little in a humid environment where the humidity carries the heat into the shady areas.
I would have to sit down and review specific planning studies for your city to provide any meaningful comments here. I believe what you're saying, though to me—from my distant armchair—this sounds like an issue with your city population's emotional understanding of its microclimate (as well as, I suspect, incomplete implementation of all/many of these principles, though I'm sure you've tried) more than a problem with urbanism per se.
Conceivably the most important issue here is albedo/green space: not just the canopy (though that's important), but greenification of the entire urban landscape. Singapore with its ~80–85% average humidity is doing some interesting work in this regard. No Western city has attempted anything like this, as far as I know, and certainly no American city. With enough shade, and enough transpiration from flora, temperatures drop meaningfully. Clever use of water features in conjunction with analysis of the micro-microclimates created by buildings can also contribute positively to this metric.
Or it could be something out of your control as a planning board. There may be some crucial element missing—it might just be time, or a complex series of statewide tax incentives (or barriers) related to transportation/driving. Or a deeper socioeconomic condition of your city that underpins pedestrian behavior, like an association of being outdoors with being poor/low-class. This could also be an issue with the size of your city and/or the design (or lack thereof) of neighboring municipalities. If your city is relatively small, fairly suburban, and not that dense, the urban planning policies of surrounding towns make as much of a difference as your internal ones. If that's the case, your county or state would have to get more deeply involved in an inter-city urbanism corridor plan. It's also possible that your board has not identified the causes of failure due to data constraints and/or non-optimal surveying methodologies.
It could be and likely is a combination of many of these things.
The city I currently live in reaches around 98 F in the summer, easily as high as 104. It gets humid, perhaps 70% on average, but often higher. From your description, it sounds like your city is further south and more humid. However, having spent some time in Atlanta, GA recently, I'm not sure the difference is really that big. Atlanta is a little hotter and a little wetter, but walking around the city was at times more unpleasant mainly because the streets are three times as wide as they need to be and designed for cars, not people; and because it's comparatively too spread out. And because I couldn't reasonably take transit many places. The temperature/humidity, by themselves, weren't the critical factors: the lack of urbanism was. From my anecdotal and qualitative perspective, the city's saving grace was its generally good canopy, at least in the neighborhoods I visited. Likewise, my city has problems implementing some urbanist concepts, but the weather (though a contributing factor) isn't really the core of the issue. There are lots of walkable urban areas in certain hyper-humid cities in the Deep South (Atlanta had several small ones, though Miami, FL comes to mind too). Climate control is more comfortable than being out in the humid weather, but shade does make a quantitative, provable difference (radiant heat loads of maybe 30% less compared to the sun: that's big) even when humidity is high. If the incentives to use your legs are great enough, people will put up with some stickiness, and they do physiologically acclimate to it. They certainly manage it fine in other parts of the world.
Regardless, public transportation effectively keeps people out of the sun, and if your reasonably large city is still car-dominated, your transportation system is incomplete.
More broadly, if your city is inherently too hot for people to comfortably (safely?) live in for a majority of the year, I question whether we should continue incentivizing development in that city. As a country, we kind of need to make an effort to settle in locations that are human-habitable and environmentally sustainable. 105 isn't where I'd draw the line (maybe 125+), but as the climate continues to worsen, that might be an overriding concern. :P
As for greenspace, I don't want to give away too many details and reveal exactly where and who I am, but suffice to say that saying we have more green space per capita than 99 percent cuties would be underselling it.
A huge impact is that we aren't the only city around. Why come to our sweat factory where people literally die from the heat on the 15 minute walk to the Cafe when you could dive 10 minutes down the Interstate and park at your destination?
Coming to our walkable downtown is a slower, more unpleasant, more expensive experience. Why should people put up with that?
When urban design principles require creating barriers to convenience, all a town has to do to become more successful frim a business and tax revenue perspective is refuse to adopt those principles when the neighboring city does.
Shade does quite a bit. Yeah the humidity makes it sticky and unpleasant, but just keeping the sun off your skin is a huge deal in staying cool.
DC gets into the 90s with very high humidity for basically all of July and August as well as much of June and September. I still walk the half mile to the metro from home and quarter mile from the metro to my office. I wouldn’t exactly call it pleasant, but you also just learn to live with it. I find doing the walk preferable to driving in city traffic, even before we get into the hassle of finding parking or paying $15-$20 for the privilege. I think maybe people need to stop being pansies and learn to suck it up. The benefits of not needing a car to be a functioning member of society far outweigh it.
Humans have lived in hot climates before air conditioning or cars existed. It’s accomplished largely through shade and clothing and hydration as well as architecture that’s conducive to it. When you don’t have large setbacks off the sidewalk and let the buildings get more than 2 stories then you get natural shade cover through the pedestrian walks. When you keep a decent amount of tree canopy or grass then you don’t have wide swathes of asphalt soaking up and radiating heat all day. And yeah some part of it is lifestyle change, people just avoid going out in the peak sun parts of the day.
And yeah sartorial choices matter. In DC we tend to have suit and tie dress codes in our offices for men, which is extremely inconvenient. On bad days I’ll just go in a t-shirt and linen pants and change at the office gym (and shower if I decided to bike or walk instead of taking metro/bus).
If you go to tropical countries in Asia they get by mostly with having large indoor public spaces that people cut through. The train stations have multiple entires and exits and are little malls on their own that sprawl across big chunks of neighborhoods, so you can walk through them to get somewhere else. People go through building lobbies and the mezzanines are partly considered public areas during the day. In the Gulf states (not exactly exemplars of urbanism themselves) they sometimes just have covered and air conditioned tunnels to get across parts of town.
"Suck and it and deal with it" is a very ableist/agest approach to the problem.
And the difference between the 90s and the temps we have been experiencing are extreme. We haven't had a day under 105 for weeks, and the heat index hasn't been under 115 in the same time period. Elderly people and those in poor health trying to walk 3 blocks in the shade are literally dying.
We have green space and shade. In fact, we're famous for the amount of green space power capita and the number of trees. We've made developers spend millions moving old trees to the walkable frontage of their property instead of permitting them to cut the trees down and replace them. Unlike most cities, we even have a fire department that doesn't force us to remove shade trees along the sidewalks.
We have more green space and trees per capita than 99% of cities. Our percentage is actually higher than that, but giving more precise numbers would reveal who I am to anyone who looked it up.
October through April our downtown is bustling with people there specifically because of our walkable, green, shady city.
But May through September, any business without parking has a 30-70 percent decrease in business because we can't urban design ourself out of this problem.
Nah. I see elderly people doing it all the time. My wife did it while pregnant. For people with real mobility issues the metro system offers free shuttle service from their house to the stations and from the stations to wherever they're going. I have a baby and I still take him out in the head (with a fan and a shade over his stroller and plenty of water). It's doable. The only times I've opted to drive him places when I could walk have been when we had air quality issues due to wildfires, not often due to heat.
What is actually ableist and ageist is designing the built environment such that you need to be able to drive to get around. How exactly do you reckon blind people are supposed to function in a world like that? Or elderly people or individuals with tremors or other problems who are no longer able to drive safely? Currently we have many such people on the roads, significantly upping the general risk to everyone because it's worse for them to restrict their driving because we can't build towns where you can be a functioning person without a car.
It's not as if cars are being banned. If you need one, you can use one, and most businesses do still have handicapped parking available as well as some spots on the street reserved for them. Most of the people availing themselves of car dependent infrastructure, though, are no so disabled. It's just a creature comfort that they want others to subsidize.
I've lived in Chicago where you get multiple weeks with sub-zero temperatures. Yeah clothing can mitigate cold better than it can mitigate extreme heat, but the city is designed to let you function yeah? The bus shelters and metro stations have heaters they turn on when it gets that cold.
There is sufficient density that almost all businesses have most of their customers either living or working within walking distance. It's not like an excursion to go participate in commerce if you live in the city. They can achieve this because they haven't spread the density of businesses and living spaces far apart from each other to facilitate people driving in. When each business doesn't need its own parking lot, errands that may require traversing 5 or 6 blocks can happen within 1 block. The idea of needing to walk more than a 5 block radius for any daily necessities is crazy to me. When you do need to go further, you just take a cab which is doable because you're not spending the money on owning and maintaining a car and it's sufficiently dense that it's economical to have a lot of cabs circulating near wherever you are.
Not every city can be Chicago or New York. Many of the solutions you're talking about don't scale down.
Just the idea of being able to call a cab afforably is a crazy thought in my area where the city/ETJ population is around 45,000.
Getting sidewalks, trees, etc is easy because we make these improvements a requirement of Site Development. Building a picnic transit system is absolutely impossible. We have a senior transportation bus that we can only afford to run 2 days a week.
You don’t need to be one of the worlds largest metropolii to have a functional bus service. Plenty of tier 2, 3, or 4 cities around the world accomplish basic levels of urbanism that American planners keep insisting is impossible. They just don’t think big enough, it’s all onesy twosy things under highly constrained policy mechanisms with no master planning.
Like the fact that there’s an entire ETJ where the total population is only 45k people is silly. The ways boundaries are drawn and populations are distributed are inefficient, which makes it hard to have enough density of people anywhere to do anything or have a tax base to support a sustainable development pattern. But there’s no reason it needs to be that way. Redrawing town boundaries to foster denser development would probably be politically non viable? But it’s basically necessary. You mentioned people dying from the heat, but people are dying now from sedentary lifestyles, loneliness, and just traffic fatalities. We just don’t register any of that because it’s part of the plan.
Like with cabs, I’ve been in towns in Thailand and India of not much larger than 50k that accomplish pretty decent coverage through jitney cabs. In the US such services are relegated to airport pickup and dropoff (e.g. supershuttle) but that’s mostly driven by regulatory restrictions. With modern app based dispatch you can mix some of the benefits of bus service with limited taxi service. Even if it costs more to run you can do transportation credits for people. We have all these expectations on what Americans will put up with, but a lot of those expectations are based on just so stories from windshield biased policy people.
A lot of the housing and transportation patterns that make density possible (boarding houses, jitney cabs) are either illegal or heavily discouraged by regulatory policies which is a dense knot to untangle, but defeatism won’t untangle it.
They also seem to neglect the impacts of brake dust, which I imagine has a fair number of nasty things in it, even if they no longer use asbestos -- electric and hybrid vehicles with their regenerative braking produce far less of the nasty stuff.
Appropriate weight-based vehicle registrations would be welcome. Most states actually already have these, the issue is that they're extremely minimal. I shared an article about the problems with vehicle weight last month.
This article is about the environment, which I feel is not a "nitpick"—there are billions of cars driving on roads, and at least 4x that many tires. That's a lot of rubber. Even if we disregard wear and tear itself (which we shouldn't), 90% of those tires are being burned or thrown away after they're worn down. The faster they're worn down, the more waste we see from tires as a whole. Even if they're worn down fairly slowly, they still have short lifespans. Recycling all tires is realistically improbable, but even if we recycle a portion of them, we are contributing to the unnecessary extraction and discarding of raw materials from the Earth. That's inherently environmentally unfriendly.
My perspective on tires tends to focus on the externalities of rubber-on-asphalt as it pertains to road maintenance and municipal infrastructure budgets. I am specifically interested in the alternative of steel-on-steel—that is, trains and trams, which have a different friction coefficient. I don't have an engineering background, but there's a reason trains can go much faster than cars per unit of fuel, while also carrying much more load! We don't replace train wheels at the same rate we replace car tires. More importantly, we don't replace train tracks at the same rate we have to constantly resurface roadways. Driving a car on an asphalt road is an inherently economically inefficient transportation strategy. No other method of transportation destroys its own infrastructure as actively as heavy vehicles destroy roadways. (Lightweight vehicles are better, but they still cause a lot of damage.) We don't need to spend $60 billion/yr on highway construction and maintenance when a more efficient, safer, and environmentally friendly alternative exists. Cars will always be important and useful tools for certain use-cases, but it behooves us to minimize their unnecessary proliferation wherever possible.
I'm relatively familiar with the holistic externality data on electric vs. ICE vehicle use, and EVs are overall more environmentally friendly when you take this into account. I'd rather we drive electric cars than gas-powered cars for any number of health reasons alone. But governmental incentives aimed to support EV use are still subsidies for personal automobiles and their infrastructure, which is expensive and inefficient relative to public transportation via rail and even relative to electric buses. We should be aware of these problems and not dismiss them.
Trains and trams are great - IF you live in an urban environment or a densely populated country. They are totally impractical for those of us who live outside major centers or in sparsely populated areas, which realistically is almost ALL of Canada that's not along the Trans Canada highway or in lower Ontario and Quebec. We live in a country of 10 million sq km and very little of it is serviced by trains except for major lines for hauling goods along the main east-west corridor. There are zero passenger trains in most of our country and there is no way a country like Canada is going to be putting in rail lines to service the thousands of small towns that dot our country. Its just not practical. Heck, we cant even keep bus services going to many of those towns and Greyhound went out of business here because there just wasnt enough ridership to make it viable. Personal transportation is a necessity here.
The nice part about urbanism is that it does not require you to live in a major city. Any town with an "urbanist" mindset can:
If you do a serious economic evaluation of passenger rail, it's usually feasible to offer basic transit services within a small city. This even includes train lines. Switzerland, for example, has very dense cities but also very not-dense rural areas. Yet even the smallest of these towns, often with only tens of thousands of people, will have an active rail line through the mountains. The main reason the United States does not have this (anymore) is because we actively decided to divest from rail 75 years ago. Every town used to have its own trolley network, but these tracks were ripped up (to some extent by car companies, in order to create a modal monopoly) and never rebuilt. As I understand it, Canada's situation is similar. We don't have to match Switzerland's model, but it goes to show that public transit can totally be implemented if we choose to prioritize it.
A light rail network is not going to be implemented in an extremely rural area. But most people do not live in extremely rural areas. Public transportation can't, won't, and doesn't need to serve literally every single human in the country. However, it creates an incentive for slightly denser living insofar as places with good public transit are more desirable. Additionally, mixed-use zoning and walkable streets encourage "hubs" of activity that can reignite a local region and invite transit to return. Long-term, there is significant environmental and social benefit to designing cities in a way that encourages a dense core, rather than sprawling out endlessly. Rural places will always exist, but starting off with a mindset of urbanism is what will allow our society to prosper.
The largest city in my state only has 60k people. most towns are below 3k people.
Most states have cities of significantly over 60k.
My point is that the US has very large portions of it without the population density the above poster seems to think exist.
The US does not have "very large" portions of it with such low populations as you describe. They exist, but they make up a fraction of the country. In general, ~83% of the US population is classified as "urban," a number which is expected to grow to 90% in the coming decades. 17% of people is not nothing, but there's also a major spread in what constitutes "rural." A very significant portion of this "rural" population is still within the sphere of influence of an urban area; that is, they could make use of something like inter-city rail to another city or region, even if it takes a short drive to get to the station. And their cities could also be inherently better in the sense that they could be designed for people rather than machines.
Wyoming, the state I assume you're referring to, does not have any particularly large cities. The bus network in Cheyenne could reasonably see expansion. It would be economical if the political will were there, considering most of the funding would be federal anyway. I'm not sure about local heavy rail—inter-city connections to Amtrak are feasible, but extensive regional rail connections (à la Philadelphia) likely less for obvious population density reasons. A light rail network or line (such as a tram, or a trackless trolley using a catenary system) could be both useful and economically feasible.
Wyoming also has 578,000 people. The United States has a population of 331.9 million. Wyoming's difficult transportation sector thereby comprises the astonishingly low fraction of 0.0017 or 0.17% of all people in the country. That's not 1.17%, that's one tenth of a single percent of people who live in a state where the largest city is 60,000. Yes, people in your state deserve better transit—many seniors, disabled, and young people cannot drive—but it's also unrealistic to expect a New York City-style subway in Cheyenne. I don't think anyone would question that particular assertion. But good city planning and transportation does not have to look like New York City in order to be effective.
As I stated:
Again, I was very clear: urbanism is not about how big your city is. You can still make towns more multi-modal through pedestrian, cycling, and bus infrastructure in municipalities of any significant size. Even the tiniest towns can benefit from principles of human-first access. You would be interested in Strong Towns' Small Town and Rural Design Guide for some examples of simple and inexpensive infrastructure and policy changes that can accommodate better living for people in the near term.
I don't really agree with your last paragraph. A electrifying a huge vehicle like a hummer is obviously not going to be as good as a smaller one from an environment standpoint, but it's going to be better than an ICE version. And the key to getting people to actually adopt electric vehicles is going to be make them as close to a drop in replacement for what they're used to as you can. Americans are used to big ass vehicles, so a law that tries to force them into a smaller car is going to be met with a lot more pushback than one that just mandates it be electric. Once electric cars are mainstream, then begin to increase the tax on larger vehicle. But if you try to do both at once, neither is going to happen. It is irrational, but since when are consumers rational?
Except that the Hummer isn't really a popular vehicle to begin with. It seemed like a really odd choice for GM to electrify. A pickup truck, like the Silverado or the already released Ford Lightning, sure, but the Hummer is mostly a 'hey, look at the size of my balls' halo vehicle so why they chose to electrify it is a bit mystifying. According to this article (https://insideevs.com/news/660537/us-gmc-hummer-ev-pickup-sales-2023q1/) GM delivered all of TWO Hummer EVs in the first quarter of this year. Not exactly selling like hotcakes.
I wonder if it got delivered near me, because I just saw one for the first time yesterday on my way home.
Seeing it in person for the first time I can definitely conclude that it's an absolute joke of a vehicle. It looks like if a newbie designer was making a military style car for hot wheels and it was just blown up to a scale bigger than a normal car should be. I'm sure the body must be made of steel or aluminum but it looks like it's plastic. The truck bed is so tiny that it's basically the size of a larger bathtub.
Let's be real. Those truck beds are mostly for holding the contents of a CostCo/Sams Club run. Nobody who drives this car is thinking about actual practical use cases.
Someone (I can't remember who) once called Oliver North a "dumb person's idea of what a smart person sounds like." This is a useless person's idea of what an actual useful/practical thing looks like.
I don't think many quad cab pickup drivers even use the truck bed for their average grocery store run at a place like Publix or Aldi where I shop. Stuff slides around back there, so they put it in the back seat of the cab.
In my opinion, that's pretty much every modern truck in the US market that isn't available with a diesel engine. And probably a lot of the ones with diesel options, too.
I honestly haven't seen an electric pickup truck that doesn't look like a toy, but to be fair I'm not exactly looking for them. In any case, I haven't heard of any EV being sold with a variable transmission, and in cases where hauling heavy things would require high torques, it seems really wasteful to do an EV truck because that means wasting a lot more power. This might just be a theme for GM because the Bolt I traded up to from a Leaf has so much power behind it that I have to baby the accelerator pedal.
From what I've been told turbochargers apparently fake diesel engine levels of torque well enough to not really matter.
The Porsche Taycan technically has a variable transmission with 2 gears, one for highway speeds (60+ mph) and the other for lower. But that's more about efficiently using the battery than managing how much power is delivered to the wheels. The way electric drive trains work as long as you can supply current to the motor you can get as much of its theoretical torque as you want.
We're actually saying the same things here. The comment about Diesel was because trucks useful for work are more likely to have a diesel model available. The transmission comment was because if you were to use an electric pickup presumably efficiency would be an issue they'd want to address.
I don't think it's mystifying at all. I think the best way to normalize electric cars is to take the biggest, most ostentatious vehicle you can imagine, which is definitely a hummer, and electrify it. The biggest hurdle electric cars have is one of perception. People not really in the know hear "Electric car" and they think of something small and weak. They think they're sissy cars and that turns them off the whole idea. But if you can replace that image with a big ass hummer, it's going to do a lot to get them on board. Again, I'm not saying it's rational in any sense, but it is going to be effective. And I think it's a shame more of them didn't sell. I think when one of the big three comes out with an electric muscle car that drives circles around anything ICE it's going to have a similar effect.
Almost EVERY electric car drives circles around ICE cars (unless its a Prius). My tiny Fiat 500e is laughably small (smaller than a VW Beetle) but its very quick off the line. I have pulled up to a stop light more than once and had the guy in the car next to me laugh at my little grocery getter. The last time it was guy in a brand new Jeep Wrangler. I nodded to him and pointed at the next light down the road and mouthed "Lets go!" and he threw his head back in laughter and nodded "ok!". When the light turned green, I punched it and in three seconds I was a car length ahead of him. I could hear his engine roaring but there was no way he was catching up and by halfway to the light I was several car lengths ahead. I let off on the accelerator and waved out my window. I would love to have been in his cab as he wondered how his 'fast' Jeep got blown away by a micro EV lol.
Yeah, I'm very aware of that. An electric motor is going to be better in nearly every way than an ICE. The problem isn't with the actual performance of an EV, it's the perception of them. The actual performance of a car doesn't matter the vast majority of the time, because most people aren't going to use 90% of it 90% of the time. People aren't (generally) racing between lights on the way to work or home from the grocery store. But people want to think they have a fast car. They want something that looks fast.
I have never thought of the Jeep as a "fast" car. A heavy duty car that can climb over rocks and through ditches sure, but it's a Jeep, not a Camaro! If someone in a little sedan said they'd race me there's no reason I'd think I could win.
I'm surprised how many people in big trucks are like this. My friend drives a 2010 Miata and he tells me dudes in big bro-dozer trucks try to challenge him a decent amount of the time. I don't understand what goes through these truck-guy's brains. I mean look at the thing! Sure it's cute and small, but what part of that doesn't look like it'll go fast? It's honestly impressive that a modern F-150 can hit 0-60 times similar to it because those cars certainly aren't designed for drag racing!
FWIW it seems my friend generally wins, despite more modest performance, because he actually knows how to drive and also understands what the other cars on the street are capable of.
NO ONE thinks a Fiat 500 can beat anything other than a one legged guy on a bicycle :)
In city traffic, my money's on the one-legged cyclist.
Since road wear increases with the fourth power of vehicle weight, in my opinion, so should registration fees. This is especially true for EVs that aren't paying fuel taxes, which have traditionally been used for road maintenance.
I think your next point about the Hummer is where the value in criticism like this lies. Even aside from the insane size of the Hummer, EVs in general are fairly indifferent about curb weight as something worth worrying about. Electric motors are good enough to where the weight isn't that much of an issue. They do feel kind of heavy to drive if you're sensitive to those sorts of driving dynamics, but they get so much torque it's not noticeable to most people.
The problem extends beyond just extravagances like the Hummer. Most of the weight is the battery and there is a race to have EV ranges to keep getting longer and longer between charges. This isn't a fully rational need, it's actually not good for anyone for the median EV on the street to be aiming at 300-400+ mile ranges. That's so much battery and additional curb weight that it suggests maybe we should start taxing cars (or car manufacturers) based on it because they impose a serious external cost on road wear and tear, pedestrian safety, and the particulate emissions. We want people to switch to EVs but we want them to avoid the negative externality of super-heavy vehicles for a feature that adds them no utility.
I like to think of the move to EVs as harm reduction. Moving from smoking cigarettes to vaping is certainly a lot healthier for the user. But it's not as healthy as giving up the habit altogether. Likewise, switching to EVs is better than the current status quo of driving noisy, polluting ICE cars everywhere, but it's still not as good as riding eBikes, building up missing middle density, and building up transit systems.
Where a lot of pro-transit folks get frustrated is the mindshare that EVs have. Simply because of how car-oriented North America is, a lot of people see themselves using EVs but don't take the extra leap to see themselves trying to use eBikes or ride the bus. This keeps the problem of advocating for bike lanes and bus lanes as hard as ever while perhaps giving individuals the sense that they've fixed the problem.
I'm not really a fan of either side of the fight personally. While most of my transport miles are done via (acoustic) bike and transit, I also do own an EV for when I have to travel long distances that transit just can't get me to or as an alternative to flying. But I do think people need to be very aware that cars are much harder on the environment, both from an infrastructural load perspective and a purely environmental one, than transit and micromobility alternatives.
Edit: An example of how much more prominently EVs are featured is in subsidies. States like CA jumped to subsidize EV ownership years ago. On the other hand, CA and other states are much more guarded and cautious about funding eBikes even though 1/20th the investment spent on EVs would go so much further in enabling eBike ownership. Despite the cost delta, politicians still default to benefiting the car over cheaper multimodal solutions.
I am honestly baffled by how one lives one's life with a bike and a bus unless you're single and have a simple lifestyle. eg. How do you move a family around with just a bike/bus? Personally my vehicle(s) have varied uses and none of them would be satisfied by a bike/bus. Yesterday we finished driving a 1000 km trip pulling a boat to a lake for a family vacation with an SUV carrying the two of us plus two very large dogs - all of the dog's gear took up the entire back of the vehicle with the seats removed (which is slightly more room than two kids with all their stuff would use). The day before we left I used our SUV to pull a trailer to haul water. We buy large items on a regular basis that couldn't easily be carried onto a bus or carried on a bike like building supplies and tools.
That is, I dont think a lot of people are car centric because we dont like bike/busses, I think we're car centric because once you expand to a family or pets, its really inconvenient and impractical to use a bike or bus for transport.
It's not terribly difficult to imagine. Busses accommodate many people, and everyone rides their own bikes. Kids too young to ride a bike get strapped to a parent.
If you've got a lot of stuff to carry you can use a bike trailer, and if you regularly transport a lot you can get a cargo bike.
And in winter? Last winter we hit -40c here for several days and there was 5 feet of snow on our yard that I had to plow with my 4WD SUV mounted snow blade so I could even get out to the main road. Which is why NONE of my neighbors use bicycles for anything other than leisure riding in the summer. Absolutely impossible to get around with one in winter. Nice for urban settings, but useless in harsh winter environments for much of Canada.
I can only dream in living in a place like that, but I'd imagine you'd just wear a parka and walk your bike to the road if you can't shovel it out of the way.
To me it sounds like you live in a city built for cars rather than pedestrian, much like the majority of the United States.
Edit: I see in one of your other comments that you're not even living in a town. I wouldn't expect there to be bus service in your area either. I don't know what to tell you. You have to pay for your rural lifestyle. That's the tradeoff you get.
I live in Munich and I don't know many people with cars, even though it's a very car centric city for German standards IMO. At about 2-3 yo many kids are learning to ride a bike, before that they are in cargo bikes, bike seats, bike trailers. Typically they ride on their own bikes at about 4-5 yo. Not fully in traffic, kids under 10 have to ride on the sidewalk, while >12yo have to ride on the road/bike paths. At about 7-8yo, you'll see a lot of kids out and about on their own by bike, tram, subway, bus etc.
As for pets, most of the time dogs are either running next to the bike or in a trailer. For surgeries, I've had friends rent a Carsharing car for the way back from the vet.
I couldn't imagine wanting to own a car - even renting a carsharing car once every weekend for a day is cheaper than owning a car. Up to distances of about 15km, I'm typically faster by bike as the cars all get stuck in their traffic jams. And to go hiking in the mountains, etc. there are buses and trains that take you to the trailheads.
You're car-centic because the urban design is terrible, it's entirely poßible with kids, pets, etc. Walking across one (large) parking lot in the US takes me just as long as walking to the supermarket from my home. I love a bit further than average from the nearest supermarket (500m)
No, Im car centric because I live 20 km from the closest town. My business dealings are spread out over 1000 km and I have to visit those locations regularly and I not only carry a lot of tools, I often even sleep in my vehicle. And for at least 6 months of the year its below freezing here, with about 4 months in the -10 to -30c range with, in general, 3 to 5 ft of snow in an average winter. A bike is useless here and the only public transport are buses in town that run every 30 to 60 minutes making them highly inconvenient to getting around with any kind of efficiency. The only people who ride them are students and those who cant afford a car. Everyone else drives a car/truck because its a necessity. But I live in rural Canada. Your mileage may vary but its not an option for most of us here. Bikes are great for smaller urban settings. They just dont work in our climate and locale.
I also lived 20km outside of the city before the past few months - was definitely doable year-round, even at -20C. Granted, I could have used the buses or trains, which ran every 10 minutes, but that's the benefit of a government prioritizing public transport. It's exceedingly rare that most people are driving 1000km regularly, in fact most trips are under 5km.
While I don't particularly like his style, the video by Not Just Bikes Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can) is pretty true.
Bear in mind that what one used to think of as a bike is no longer what all e-bikes are like. Here in Santa Cruz CA I'm seeing many varieties and shapes of e-bikes which, although perhaps not accommodating two huge dogs or pulling a boat trailer, carry two or three children behind the adult driver. There are even three wheeled e-bikes with a kind of bucket seat for two adults in front of the driver. Santa Cruz is of course exceptional in being fairly compact, not too hilly, having little rain in summer, and having bike trail infrastructure, but it's obvious here that e-bikes can become the primary transport for many people. (And my neighbor often carries his construction materials, including ladders, on a tricycle).
SO limited. How do you pull a camper trailer for a family of 5 with a bike? How do you take your 3 visiting relatives two hours to the mountains on a bike while carrying a crib, high chair, and stroller for a baby? How do you go buy a car in another city and haul it home with a bike? How do you go to the lumber store and buy 5 sheets of drywall with a bike? How do you bring home fence posts and boards for an entire yard with a bike? How do you carry a full size air compressor on a bike? A riding lawn mower? A power aerator? How do you plow 2 feet of snow off your driveway with a bike?
If you just want to move a person or two or a bag of groceries or two, they're great if you dont have wildly challenging weather. But some of us are pretty demanding of our vehicles - they are tools to facilitate our lives.
You do what regular people who want to move large things do: rent or borrow a truck.
Which becomes highly impractical when you do that every week. Renting is impractical for those of us who live outside a city and its a pain in the butt for those who are inside too. There are plenty of situations (for many people) where owning a vehicle is the only logical option.
People who live in cities and town are not moving construction supplies and heavy machinery every week, and while there may be some who are moving camping trailers every week they are far from a majority of people and tend to be relatively privileged.
I honestly don't know why you seem so upset about this. I think it's pretty clear that everyone talking about bikes is referring to people who live in cities and towns. Nobody's trying to take away cars from people who live in the country. Nobody is trying to judge you for your reliance on cars.
You started off this conversation saying you couldn't understand how people could live without cars, and I and others have explained it. I can only assume by all the pushback you've given that you aren't actually interested in understanding.
Maybe. I do love my car(s) and have no comprehension of living life even in a city without one. I lived in a city of 1.2 million for 25 years and out of all of our friends and neighbors I knew of only one person who biked to work, even in the summer. Even in a car it was at least a 45 minute drive from one side of the city to the other on a good day. It would take several hours on a bike. But then again there weren't many bike lanes back then and you took your life in your hands biking along busy roadways on a bicycle. I suppose if a city were reconstructed from scratch with lots of bikeways and safer streets I might think differently but they just dont make sense where I live and lived.
You got it! That's basically what a lot of the people here are commenting they want out of their cities.
So I think I can I say that people in US are car centric because US government is prioritizing cars, especially considering you said you lived in a city and even there it didn't have enough public infrastructure for public transport and bikes.
Actually I USED to live in a city. Now I live in the boonies, in northern Canada, in a rural area. There's a town about 20 minutes away but since we have lots of things to haul/carry/tow, we now have 5 vehicles, everything from a tiny electric car to a massive 40 ft diesel motorhome - but vehicles have been my hobby for 40 years. But I know very few people who dont own at least two.
Well, yes, it's limited of course. And I did write "the primary transport for many people". I could have qualified that with all kinds of caveats; there are plenty of instances where some other transport is necessary. But, how often do you pull a camper trailer for five? How often do you take all that to the mountains .. go to the lumber store .. carry an air compressor/mower .. etc.? Your life might not fit a bike, I guess, but I'd like to think people are becoming kinder to our planet, and more willing to live lightly.
Archive/non-paywalled link.
Electric vehicles, often touted as a cleaner alternative to gasoline-powered cars, introduce an additional pollution issue just as the solve the one we're most familiar with. Unfortunately, while EVs shift us away from burning fossil fuels in the transportation sector, they have one important thing in common with internal combustion engine vehicles:
They have rubber tires.
...
Tire pollution is difficult to measure, which is probably why it's not discussed in the news media. But it's a very real problem: potentially comprising up to 28 percent of ocean microplastics. According to the article, microplastics originating from tires could be sources of "respiratory problems, kidney damage, neurological damage, and birth defects."
So what's the solution?
There's only one: reduce car dependency through infrastructure and policy changes and reduce vehicle miles traveled. Luckily, there are lots of specific plans we can make to make this a reality. Examples of policies that could directly or indirectly reduce this major pollution issue include:
This is a complex problem and not every potential solution will be applicable to every municipality in the country. However, we need to address the root causes of pollution instead of chipping away at its downstream implementations. That starts by recognizing, philosophically, that we have to change our attitude toward internal combustion engine cars: the issue isn't just the engines, it's the car altogether.
It just isn't.
EV's are awesome for car companies. They suck for the environment and very little is going to change that. Taxes won't help as it'll just be factored into the price of ownership and the same issue goes round and round.
Electric Public Transport (Trains, Trams, Buses) should be default. Roads need to be re-prioritised into bike lanes and substantial shared transport networks. To compensate, we need more amenities to allow for you to safely store bikes and other such devices.
Cars in general need to be massively scaled back in both size, weight and sheer damn amount of them.
Bikes: My commute is the most dangerous part of my day, and bikes would only make that much worse. Not to mention exposure to the elements (biking in heatwaves sounds great!).
Mass transit: my commute is already taking up too much of my day and interfering with work:life balance, and mass transit would make that worse by 50-100%. Waiting for it to arrive, being at the whim of breakdowns and schedule delays, waiting for all the other stops, riding alongside unstable people, having to walk the last mile - my mental health could not take it.
That's why you give them dedicated infrastructure. You take it away from cars and give it to people who aren't taking up huge amounts of space.
Not shared resource, dedicated resource.
Then your public transport is setup awfully. It's designed and setup like that so you'll go and buy a car and have the 'sheer convienience of paying the deposit, monthly payments, MOT, registration...'
Public transport should be (and in many nations/cities/towns) easy to access, use and get around with.
There are exceptions. Being out in rural New South Wales or something. Makes sense to have a truck, Roo's suck to hit and everything is 10's+ kilometers away. But counties like the UK/Western Europe & the US? Absolutely not.
I live ~20Km away from a largeish city in Germany. I have no options to get to work via public transport - there are two busses per day, and it's a Bus -> Train -> Bus (or walk ~3Km) situation that would take about 3 hours just because of the timings.
The big companies will have company transport (think BMW, Audi, etc), but that's just for their own people.
In-city transport is much simpler - you can get from essentially anywhere to anywhere (at most with 1 change) within ~40 minutes... but it's less of an option if you're outside of the city.
I have an electric bike I use as much as I can, but it's not always an option
Aye. It's a similar problem when you pop into the UK outside the cities.
It's a good identification of public transport that has actually failed if that's the case.
Some areas are also just too rural for a public transport system to make any sense.
Yeah pretty much. But those areas contribute so little (in transport) that I'd expect electrification to be beneficial towards machinary, rather than just cars. I.e. farm equipment.
The thing is though, the further you live from work the more miles you drive every day. So there’s this odd thing that happens where the more rural you are, the more you drive. Most people living in cities end up driving very little.
In order to reduce total miles driven, you have to push public transportation infrastructure into areas where it might not be that efficient. Building it out only in the very populous areas only does so much.
Which I think is an absolutely fine thing to really do.
Public Service doesn't have to be profitable. It's there as a service to be used.
Then I think the govt should consider some financial aid to help people move closer to the cities. Cas, fuel should be taxed heavier and that would be a price to live in a countryside and produce more pollution. So one could move nearer city with govt financial aid or stay on the countryside, knowing their resposibility for pollution.
I think it's just something that hasn't caught up to the state of the world in general - I can't afford to live near my work (I'd pay almost twice what I currently pay for a space half the size...), so I moved further away. The places further away from the larger cities are seeing a lot of development and population growth, and the public transport infrastructure isn't getting any changes to cope, party because there's no demand - everyone has cars already...
I don't have the education or experience to even picture how it would look for it to be a good option over private vehicles. Having busses run empty would be a waste (there are a couple of lines in the city that you need to call when you want to get to a couple of the furthest stops during the week)
Yup. The housing crisis sure as hell doesn't help.
There's lots of interconnected systems that need to be complimentive, but traditionally that's just not been done.
Public transport is a service, not a profitable private company. It is not built to be profitable. If public transport was decent, people would get back to it.
I myself own and drive a car but every time I argue with people I'm so against car centric environment, also I vote for politicians who want to change it and make areas pedestrian friendly. I would love to get rid of my car, it costs a lot, it needs repairs, space, I drive according to the law which gets many drivers mad, I just hate drivers for this, most of them seem very selfish piece of human. Yes, it gets me to the place, but at the same time I know that there are places with decent pubtransport and I know how convenient it can be.
I live in a medium sized town in the US, and when I was in college I used public transport for just about everything, driving < 1000 miles per year. Now as a middle aged adult with a kid I can tell you that it's 100% impossible for me to function without a car. Taking a two year old on an hour+ bus ride with multiple transfers to get within a half mile of their daycare only to hop back on the bus to go to work wouldn't let me get to work by 8am even if we left at 6am.
For what it's worth, the public transport in my town is the best of any non major city I've lived in. The bus is free and can get you just about anywhere in the city limits, but it is slow and inefficient time wise. As a single student with no kids it didn't bother me since I could read or whatever on the bus, but when we make arguments like these it's important to acknowledge that a big chunk of the population in cities with decent public transport cannot rely on the public transport for most of their needs.
My morning drive is ten minutes to the kid's daycare then twenty minutes to my work. I'm working 60+ hour weeks and simply couldn't come close to this level of productivity or safety (walking down major roads with a reluctant two year old isn't fun or safe) without driving my daily route.
As a transit and cycling advocate, I want to emphasize that this is bad transit. This is the result of a system that has for decades, almost a century, designed the entire built environment around cars. I'm not trying to detract from your experience that the bus sucks, but I just want to emphasize that it doesn't have to be that way. When I lived in a college town, our bus system was only 10-15% than driving, it was frequent (with 15 min headways being the worst case scenario), and convenient.
In Japan where lots of children ride the local bus system, dense areas have 2-3 min headways, and smaller towns have buses with 5-10 min headways to hubs which are walkable to schools, restaurants, and businesses.
Transit doesn't have to be the way it is in the US and the longer we dig our heels into the current form of car-oriented development, the harder it becomes to dig ourselves out of the unsustainable hole we're in. In the meantime, maybe an eBike will help reduce your vehicle miles?
I grew up in Las Vegas, and I can tell you from my experience with their bus system that one hour rides were blessings. Most bus lines ran at 30 minute intervals when everything was working perfectly, and it never ran perfectly. So if you wanted to go anywhere that was not on the street you were on, you would need to take at least one transfer and that would mean anywhere between 20 minutes to an hour just waiting for the bus to arrive. This wasn't in the boonies, either; this was almost exactly in the center of the city. It's also very different than the touristy areas like the strip, where there were actually multiple routes going through it that could have busses coming as often as once every 5 minutes between the routes. One of them was an express bus that would visit every third stop so you could get there faster.
Biking also wasn't really a very good solution because the vast majority of the city didn't have bike lanes and, being a desert, the heat made it unbearable for most of the year. It actually made it unbearable to even go outside long enough to be picked up by the bus in Summer. I wish that ebikes were affordable when I was there because that would have made it much more viable of a solution, though because the place wasn't really bike friendly an ebike would have been a much bigger target for thieves since most businesses didn't have places to chain up your bike.
There's a great book called Invisible Women that touches on how shocking some bus routes can be (Even in great Public Transport cities like London). It talks about the very thing you're talking about.
Public transport has some frustrating legacy issues in that it's usually designed around a guy going to work in the centre of a city... rather than actually being helpful to people for the sake of getting around. That's what you're experiencing.
Like I've said elsewhere, that's a failing of the system of public transport that needs to be addressed, rather than an assertation that a car is easier/better/faster/what have you.
I've had a few notices about new bus routes through my door today. Both of which completely miss my little suburb of London spectacularly. It's left me very bemused by it, but definitely not dismayed by the notion that Public Transport is perfectly viable providing it's designed as a Service, and not purely for the sake of profit.
i live in the American west and i've been to NSW. i struggle to see how you can put a distinction between them in terms of distances and fauna road hazards.
I did miss "cities" as a reference, apologies.
There are definitely very rural areas where it kind of doesn't make sense. But the reality is... those areas are actually probably better as self-sufficient. There are swathes of open land that have more land than some nations and less people than those nations smallest villages.
I mean do you have any experience with what that would actually be like in practice? Basically have you ever lived in the Netherlands or Copenhagen? Several of the problems you listed out are primarily a problem if you're dealing with underfunded poorly implemented versions of these.
Good public transport is regularly quicker and less stressful than driving and generally able to get you much closer than a mile.
Dedicated bike infrastructure similarly makes a big difference as far as safety and overall pleasantness goes. I don’t ride bikes particularly, except when I’m in Copenhagen where it really makes the most sense and is pleasant.
Of course no one is planning to mandate that you stop driving instead the idea is simply to allow for some actual real alternatives. So that not everyone is forced to drive. Though you might be surprised at the ways it could end up being good for your mental and physical health.
And on the other hand our car centric attitudes are contributing to the destruction of ourselves and the world we live in.
While correct, I feel like this argument really ignores the massive undertaking it would be to make retrofit public transportation like you're talking about. I live in a city in the midwest of the US that has a little under 300,000 people, and currently the only public transportation we have is a very sparse bus system. You'd have to entirely rebuild the infrastructure of the entire city to get the kind of coverage you're talking about. That's a project that takes billions of dollars and probably decades, assuming you could drum up the public support for them. Which you absolutely couldn't.
Electric cars, on the other hand, are a drop in solution that wouldn't change peoples day to day lives in any meaningful way. So unless you're going to argue that electric cars are overall worse than ICE cars, I think these kinds of insistent conversations are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. It would be great if public transit were more of a realistic option for more people and that is absolutely something we should work towards. But that is a long term change, and we need to continue to make short term changes to buy time to make the long term. It isn't an either/or proposition.
I can't comment on public support, but the money exists, it just goes to car-centric uses of roadways. Strictly speaking, there isn't any reason your city can't at least build rapid bus lanes when it resurfaces its major arterial roads. The cost of this would be relatively minimal (the road is being resurfaced anyway). Buses and stations cost money, but so do highway expansions and ridiculously complex interchanges.
Most significant infrastructure funding comes from the federal government anyway. Your city probably wouldn't end up spending that much. For example, the Department of Transportation recently announced grants of $17 billion to go to local zero-emission bus services in cities across the country. If your city didn't apply for a grant, that's a problem to take up with your local councilors!
Infrastructure projects are always going to cost billions and take decades. The distinction is that if we adopt a pessimistic, "it's impossible" attitude toward public transportation... then of course it isn't going to happen. The key here is to not consider EVs "environmentally friendly." They aren't. They're just a little bit better than ICE vehicles. That's a philosophical change that we have to recognize.
You're right that this isn't an "either/or" proposition, but we can't be complacent about switching to EVs and calling it a day. We have to switch to EVs, but we simultaneously have to reduce car dependency. That means banning ICE vehicles while also disincentivizing personal vehicle use in general via better rail and bus alternatives.
But it isn't that simple, is it? It isn't a matter of just taking one lane away and making it a bus only lane. For a city to make the kind of changes you're talking about, it would require a complete redesign of the way a city is laid out. If you expect people to be able to travel by bus to wherever they want to go, the bus has to to go everywhere. You could probably change one lane of a main road to bus lane, but the majority of the roads in my city are only one lane either way. So now you're talking about either widening them or completely stopping car traffic on the. And the bus has to start where people live. So now you're talking about either expanding bus service into the suburbs or moving the people into the city. Neither of which are as trivial as just marking out a bus lane where there is already a road.
My city actually applied for those grants and I am pretty sure they got them. I've seen the plans for what they plan to do with that money. And while it is a step in the right direction, it is a drop in the bucket compared to what you'd need to even get into the same ballpark as what you're talking about. Even if that was a sufficient amount of money, there are 125 cities in the US with a population over 200,000, so giving them all 17 billion dollars would be 2.2 trillion dollars. Significantly larger than the largest infrastructure invest ever made.
And again, the doesn't even address the public support. Support that these kinds of arguments are only going to hurt. Talking about banning cars is only ever going to get a politician laughed out of a room, because the average American understands for that that to even begin to be a reality will take generational change. We are only just getting people on board with electric cars, a huge leap forward from an ICE vehicle. And we need to focus on that because that is a change that is actually possible in a time frame to make a difference.
The grants are not $17 billion to each city. The most any particular city got was a little over $100 million. It does not cost $17 billion to develop a bus rapid transit network, nor anything remotely close. A very expensive subway line may cost that much, but easily recoups the cost in social benefits. You can expect a short but effective starter light rail line to cost perhaps $100 million on the low end, or closer to $1 billion in a large city, depending on how much tunneling is required, how many stations there are, the rights of way required, etc. Larger projects obviously cost more money, as we've seen in many cities.
The annual spend on highways and roads in the United States by states and local governments is over $200 billion, of which ~$51 billion was allocated through the federal government. In contrast, the Federal Rail Administration requested $4.66 billion in federal funding for 2023, already higher than in the past. This isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, but it demonstrates that we are overspending on one area of inefficient area of transit and underspending on an efficient area.
Again, the money is there. It's all there. It just has to be allocated in a more effective way. The recent I-95 collapse in Philadelphia was attended to in a matter of weeks, but the Hudson River Tunnel has been in a state of dire repair for over a decade, since Hurricane Sandy severely damaged it. There isn't a great reason for this discrepancy, even though the NEC is critical to transportation. In this case, the project is only now seeing work due to a series of past underinvestments in the region for state political reasons (cough Access to the Region's Core cough) as well as a recent presidential administration that has personal beef with the city of New York. Very unprofessional on either account, but if the public better recognized the utility of these transportation projects (and particularly of the harm caused by the alternative of exclusively funding car-centric infrastructure), they would be more likely to hold politicians accountable for underfunding them.
You don't need a bus lane on every street, you just need them within walking distance of where people live, work, and want to go for leisure. Streets don't have to be widened and buildings don't have to be demolished. A narrow one-lane street is not where you'd put a bus lane. And if a two-lane street with parking is an important enough corridor to warrant a bus lane, you can take away parking from one side. The number of cars that can fit on a particular block is laughably small relative to the number of passengers who would be served by almost any bus line. There isn't a shortage of parking in this country, not even in urban areas! Anyway, most arterials within cities feature at least two or three lanes in each direction. There's more than enough space.
BTW, stopping personal car traffic on select high-priority streets so that they can become bus-only (or tram-only, or both) rights of way is actually a completely legitimate practice. This is commonplace in many parts of the world. It generally has more benefits than drawbacks. You can alternatively prioritize transit on certain streets, allowing local traffic but banning through-traffic, as in Toronto's King Street. You have to plan this out carefully, but it's not as difficult as you're making it out to be.
I will note that "where people live" is where density is (by definition). The suburbs are, by definition, not urban and therefore not nearly as dense. Suburban express buses are important to a region's use of public transit, but a city's internal bus network can and will operate by itself as long as it connects valuable locations within the city to each other. Implementing suburban bus lines isn't trivial, but it isn't particularly complicated either. Outside of dense urban areas, congestion lessens and space becomes less of a concern on arterial roads. Small bus stations are not particularly expensive: the only infrastructure to speak of that they require is a shelter and potentially an island, if the street redesign includes a bike lane. The island may be raised slightly to provide level boarding to riders, or the bus may be able to lower itself to do that. Either way, we aren't talking enormous investments here. It's extremely possible.
Indeed, local infrastructure and traffic routing is complicated and requires planning beforehand. For an extreme (and non-local) example, the NEC Future Tier 1 Environmental Impact Statement took about five years to clear environmental review (in 2017), and the Tier 2 statement has still not been released six years later. But that's a planning process spanning seven and a half states in the densest part of the country. It also features the country's most complex single piece of rail infrastructure (or perhaps any infrastructure). Any particular city is not facing a planning process this complicated for a bus line. The timeline is going to vary, but again, it's extremely realistic to implement better public transit in a small city.
Many cities have been able to successfully implement bus networks. Many cities have been able to successfully implement tram and other light rail networks. Many cities have been able to successfully implement heavy rail in the form of subways or elevated rail. Honolulu, HI recently opened its newest metro. It took years, but they did it, and the benefits outweigh the drawbacks by an enormous margin. Spokane, WA just launched a new bus rapid transit system, and Oklahoma City, OK is in the process of developing its own. Obviously, so are all the other 130 cities who just received grants from the federal government!
It's not unreasonable, it's not unrealistic, it's not too expensive, it's not too difficult, it's not too unpopular, and it's not impossible!
I never suggested that cars be banned as a form of transportation. Manufacturing of ICE engines is already on schedule to be banned in multiple states within the next two decades. Politicians are hardly being "laughed out of the room" for suggesting such things.
Manhattan's recent congestion pricing plan has passed environmental review and will be implemented next year. That doesn't ban cars from the island, it just makes them a less attractive form of transportation, thereby encouraging more efficient use of public transport.
There are many areas of cities that do ban car traffic in select areas, though. Sections of Broadway in Manhattan are an example, though plenty of cities have this sort of thing for their main streets. On the whole, car-free zones demonstrate incredible economic and social benefit to their local communities.
Sure, these things take a while. But I'm not going to wait 25 years to start talking about changes that we need to have begun planning 10 years ago. Because infrastructure takes a while to develop, it's important that conversations like this are happening early on.
I’ve lived in Helsinki, and unless you live in the peninsula or are lucky and live close to a daycare, once you have two or so children you’ll end up moving and buying a car. That’s what most families end up doing - it is too much work to take two kids to daycare vis public transport - even when it works at world class levels.
I don't think myself or anyone else is really arguing for the complete banning of cars. Simply for the enlargement of other options. And the comment I was replying was talking solely about commute options for a single person to and from work. Obviously if you have a multiple young children and a house in the suburbs or further afield things get more complicated. But there's no reason why that means that everyone else should absolutely have to rely on a car.
so your advice is to turn the American west into the Netherlands or Denmark. ok
More bikes and fewer cars would make everyone's commute safer, not less dangerous. Changing city infrastructure to be less car centric includes adding additional tree cover and reducing heat islands - like parking lots - so biking in a heatwave wouldn't be as bad. There would also be fewer heatwaves if we can do enough to reduce climate change, although that seems unlikely.
Mass transit also doesn't have to be that time consuming and unreliable. I moved from an extremely unwalkable city in Florida to a small but very walkable town in Sweden. Most bus trips take me 5 minutes longer than it would take by car, because I have to walk to the bus stop. The walk to the bus stop is always pleasant and mostly under trees. There are dedicated bus lanes so they don't get stuck in traffic. The busses come very frequently and several lines go to the same places. Even with shutdowns there's never more of a delay than a traffic accident on a major highway would cause. Not even close. Also on a bus, your commute doesn't require a much of your attention, so you can reclaim that time for you in a lot more ways. Reading a book, watching a movie, or just texting a friend.
It wouldn't be easy to make cities less car-centric, and different locales will have different challenges, but your problems may have solutions that you haven't heard of.
Some thoughts on reducing car dependence:
My work has a shower facility and I love it - the ability to bike in to work, hose off, then change into dress clothes is a game changer!
If I ever switch to another job, having a locker room or shower available is absolutely going to be something I ask about.
Probably. I was thinking about charging stations on the highway. I don't know how it would work in homes. That's an engineering challenge I'm not equipped to personally answer at this time.
At a population-wide level, noise is not the #1 barrier to urbanism: cost is, followed by transportation. However, I agree that noise pollution is an under-recognized problem. Personally, this has always been one of my priorities. Most noise in cities is generated from vehicles. Electric engines tend to be quieter than ICEs, which is nice, but at speeds above ~20mph, most of the noise originates from the tires. There are ways you can engineer tires to be quieter, though there's only so far you can take it. It's better to limit local speeds to ~20mph under all circumstances (except, obviously, emergency vehicles). This requires greater use of bollards, speed humps, and other traffic calming measures. I agree that better soundproofing between units would also be useful.
I agree with that as well. I would support bike infrastructure one way or another though. Being able to easily and safely bike to the store to get groceries instead of driving is really nice.
For whatever reason, I find traffic noise (assuming no sirens or horns) to be less disruptive to my sleep or, especially, concentration than the human noises of daily living. As soon as I'm reminded that there are others around who might interrupt me, my focus is gone.
This is the second time I've seen a news article about this subject and I've looked both times, and it's possible I just skipped over it so if I'm wrong please someone correct me, I have yet to see any actual hard numbers. I get very weary when I just see percentages You would think if the difference was so acute that the numbers would just speak for themselves but yet here for a second time they're nowhere in the article. I always get the impression that when people write articles like this they already know the agenda they want to push and cherry pick numbers to prove their point. It would be refreshing if someone just laid out the facts and let me make up my own mind.
I think youre correct in that if they've only used percentages then they're not entirely convinced by the numbers themselves.
When I've written reports in the past, if I've wanted to hammer home a point and make it fully understood, I've started with the value, and then reiterated the point by adding the percentage difference. Adding the percentage only almost adds a level of obscurity.
The other comments about having to reduce our use of all cars in general are right on in my opinion.
But even if we are just comparing ICE cars to EVs I'm pretty skeptical that the tire pollution is that much worse. EVs are typically heavier all else being equal. I have the EV6 which they mentioned in the article. It weighs just over 4500 lbs, which is heavy, but about normal for a midsize SUV.
Also it does not go 0-60 in 3.5, I wish. That's the special high performance GT model which they only made 2500 of. It seems misleading to use that stat. The dual motor models are the fastest of the normal production cars and their 0-60 times are around 5.0.
Even then that only affects the tires when you are actually using it. My wife primarily drives the EV6 and I don't think she's ever had the accelerator more than half way down.
It's interesting to think about tire pollution. I'd love to see some more actual data about it. I would guess driving habits and cars traction/stability control has a bigger overall effect than ICE vs EV. I would also guess if we found it was a serious issue car manufacturers could tweak those control systems to dramatically reduce it. probably running in Eco mode already does that since it reduces acceleration.
Until I see data that proves otherwise I'm assuming tire pollution is a problem that EVs fail to address, but aren't significantly making worse.
In the end it's less important than greenhouse gas emissions. And I feel like this article is being deliberately provocative without any data to back it up.
I was hoping for more data as well, though I shared the article with the intention of informing/reminding people that EVs are not "environmentally friendly," they're just less worse than the alternative.
The research appears to suggest that it's very challenging to study tire pollution because of the way microplastics ("MPs") from tires are inherently hard to study (being so tiny, I assume).
Kim et al. 2022 state in "Toxicity assessment of tire particles released from personal mobilities (bicycles, cars, and electric scooters) on soil organisms" that:
They also state that:
I don't have enough context to know exactly how I should react to these numbers, but my impression from the statements in these articles is that it's significant.
Research into tire plastic toxicity leaves a lot to be desired, but there are apparently clear indications that these particles are toxic to organisms, both plant and animal, because of the way they leech into groundwater and soils. Air pollutants don't seem to be a focus of this particular study, but they also exist.
Selonen et al. 2021 reach similar conclusions in "Exploring the impacts of microplastics and associated chemicals in the terrestrial environment – Exposure of soil invertebrates to tire particles."
...the article continues with a shocking number of references to the likely negative health effects of tire particles on organic life. But also:
Emphasis mine. It seems that this is a significant issue. And as the article states, heavier vehicles do induce more tire wear than lighter vehicles. As I understand it, more force is being applied to the tires to move an EV (because they're heavier) and so tires are pressed more harshly against asphalt and wear down faster. Even with a fairly light vehicle, tire microplastics are a problem.
Van den Bossche 2018 seems to indicate in "Electric cars compared to ultra-light electric vehicles and global warming" that a sufficiently lightweight electric vehicle design "has also effect on the indirect CH4 emissions in electricity, but also at tire dust, which might be even the biggest source of particulate matter PM10-PM2.5." i.e. yes, heavier vehicles contribute significantly to this problem.
Singer et al. 2021 seem to indicate in "Tire Particle Control with Comfort Bounds for Electric Vehicles" that over time "the impact of particulates, in particular from tires, will become larger, due to both the weight of these vehicles and the torque profile of electrical machines." i.e. yes, vehicle weight contributes significantly to this problem. They investigate some solutions but I can't read the article.
Obereigner et al. 2021 state in "Active Limitation of Tire Wear and Emissions for Electrified Vehicles" that:
Emphasis mine. I can't read the article, so it's unclear to me how much these engineering possibilities can solve the issue (though it's good that there are potential solutions) or if manufacturers would actually implement these changes voluntarily. My guess is that it would be possible, though relatively difficult and expensive, and that governments would have to legally mandate manufacturers to create better tires like this. Hopefully we can reduce tire wear through various means, but unless we find ways to develop and mandate hyper-lightweight vehicles as described by Van den Bossche 2018, tire pollution is here to stay. For the good of society and human health, I think engineering research like this is best done in tandem with re-evaluations of car-centric urban design in order to reduce car dependency and therefore unnecessary use.