This article discusses the pollution caused by the erosion of automobile tires against road surfaces. In short, cars pollute in lots of ways, but one of the ones we almost never hear about — tire...
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This article discusses the pollution caused by the erosion of automobile tires against road surfaces. In short, cars pollute in lots of ways, but one of the ones we almost never hear about — tire debris — is only now being formally acknowledged by regulators, even after years of scientific studies pointing it out. While most transportation pollution research focuses on gaseous emissions, which are primarily an issue with ICE cars, tire particle debris is a fundamental problem with automobiles, including EVs. Tire particle debris is likely toxic to living creatures.
Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency formally acknowledged the ecological damage wreaked by tire pollution. The agency announced that it would investigate the toxicity of 6PPD, a necessary step toward a potential ban on its widespread use in tire manufacturing.
What we know so far about tire particles, which are a kind of microplastic, is deeply concerning. A 2021 study by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that tire compounds account for more than three-fourths of all microplastics in global oceans, threatening zooplankton that undergird marine food chains.
In a bombshell 2020 study, University of Washington researchers directly tied 6PPD, a chemical in tires intended to prolong the products’ life, to the collapse of coho salmon populations in Puget Sound. 6PPD reacts with air to become 6PPD-quinone, a compound so toxic that exposure to even tiny concentrations in water can induce “acute mortality” in fish, according to the study.
Should the EPA prohibit 6PPD, the environmental benefits could accrue quickly. Since most car owners replace their tires within five years, virtually all tires constructed with 6PPD could be retired within a decade of a ban. But that doesn’t mean that the hazards of tire pollution will have abated. New chemicals could take the place of 6PPD, and then there are the hundreds of other, currently used ones whose individual and collective environmental impacts remain largely unknown. As Susanne Brander, an ecotoxicologist at Oregon State University, recently told the Associated Press, “My concern is we’re really focused on this one chemical but in the end, it’s the mixture. It’s many different chemicals that fish are being exposed to simultaneously that are concerning.”
A white paper issued earlier this year by Imperial College London suggested that tire chemicals may be linked to ailments including kidney damage, birth defects, and respiratory problems. The European Union is poised to issue its first tire regulations as part of Euro 7, an upcoming package of vehicle emission rules, but no similar move is on the horizon in the U.S.
My takeaway is that 6PPD is probably toxic, and should probably be banned, but that's only a first step toward solving the broader problem, which is tire pollution in general. That is, car use in general.
See here for more academic reading on tire debris particulate pollution, including some engineering measures that could partially alleviate it. Note that the only way to fully eliminate microparticle debris from tires is to use a vehicle that does not produce it. While there is probably some ability for regulators to demand the elimination of certain toxic chemicals from tires, this is no guarantee that the replacement will be any better, and all replacements will almost necessarily be microplastic-prone. "Biodegradeable tires" are not something that exist, and probably not something that makes sense.
Realistically, the best way to avoid emitting particulate matter from tires is to not use a vehicle with tires. The most environmentally sustainable alternative for medium and long distances is more rail-based transportation. This has other added benefits, such as fundamentally better fuel efficiency (there is almost no friction along rail tracks), a smaller physical footprint (rail lines can offer more throughput at less width, and while using fewer and more permeable construction materials), and safety improvements (statistically, automobiles kill far more people per vehicle-mile traveled than trains). The best alternative for short distances is walking and cycling more; the extremely lightweight frames of bicycles and their small tires means that they produce a negligible amount of particle debris compared to cars. If you can find a way to get around without driving, do it. (If you can't, look for one. Or create one: talk to your neighbors and local government about improved public transit, expanding sidewalks, and protected bike lanes.)
While improvements to automobile components must be made, because some number of cars will probably always exist, the long-term solution is sustainable transportation in general. The EPA should ban the use of toxic chemicals in tires, but the federal government should also de-incentivize automobile travel when there are usable alternatives, and provide funding to rail services and "complete streets"/walkability measures to ensure that more such alternatives can exist.
I feel like rubber tires would be less-bad if they were only ever used on unpaved roads. I have no evidence to back this up other than that asphalt is much harder than dirt. I very much like the...
I feel like rubber tires would be less-bad if they were only ever used on unpaved roads. I have no evidence to back this up other than that asphalt is much harder than dirt.
I very much like the idea of automobiles relegated to being a thing for rural folks for whom it is grossly uneconomical to provide public transport.
Anecdotally, unpaved gravel roads seem to wear my tires down just as fast because all of the sharp rocks slowly knock tiny chunks out of the rubber over time
Anecdotally, unpaved gravel roads seem to wear my tires down just as fast because all of the sharp rocks slowly knock tiny chunks out of the rubber over time
That makes sense, I was mostly thinking proper dirt/mud/forest floor. Gravel roads are like the worst of both worlds. They serve a purpose, but especially for large-gravel, it's a mess.
That makes sense, I was mostly thinking proper dirt/mud/forest floor.
Gravel roads are like the worst of both worlds. They serve a purpose, but especially for large-gravel, it's a mess.
This just won't work in the US with so many people living in the suburbs. No one will want to take a bus to the grocery store. They'll need to come up with a different solution. No one will adopt...
This just won't work in the US with so many people living in the suburbs. No one will want to take a bus to the grocery store.
They'll need to come up with a different solution. No one will adopt that much of an inconvenience to save the planet, say least not in material numbers. The solution will need to be something that has minimal impact to the end user around the same cost as today to have any adoption rate worthwhile.
Plenty of people do this already, including in the suburbs, I think you are just not one of them. In any case the bus is not the only preferred way to make local trips involving carrying a lot of...
No one will want to take a bus to the grocery store.
Plenty of people do this already, including in the suburbs, I think you are just not one of them.
In any case the bus is not the only preferred way to make local trips involving carrying a lot of items. That is the perfect use-case for a cargo bike. Personally, though I live in a city right now, I take my bike a fair distance to get most groceries: about 2.2 miles for my regular store, or 3.0 miles to my second-favorite. In many suburbs people wouldn't even have to go that far. Occasionally I take the train or bus to these stores or a different one if I have some reason not to cycle. (There is a grocery store on my block, it's just upscale, and I'm cheap.) The most recent time I lived in the suburbs, I typically carried groceries by hand or took a foldable grocery cart on wheels with me. It was fine.
They'll need to come up with a different solution.
I would like to gently clarify the issue at hand. The problem is excessive use of automobiles to take local trips: they are environmentally unfriendly, dangerous to pedestrians, cause traffic (cars are traffic), and are problematic for urban planners for various other reasons. The goal is to reduce automobile use for local trips; that is, to increase modal share by walking, cycling, or public transit. The way we achieve that goal is by:
Building light rail systems along medium-use transportation corridors. These used to exist in every single American suburb, but were intentionally (and unnecessarily) destroyed in the mid-20th century. At the time, they were called "streetcars" or "trolleys," though today they are also called "trams." Some such systems still exist in surburban areas, including the 101 and 102 trolleys going between Philadelphia and suburban Delaware County. Many cities are in the process of restoring their light rail networks to their former glory.
Building dedicated bus lanes along arterial roads to get them out of car traffic. This is a necessary component of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). Painting these lanes red makes them visibly separate from car lanes; this is becoming common in many cities and suburbs. Studies show that dedicated bus infrastructure, which is quite inexpensive, can significantly improve travel times.
Enforcing bus lanes with camera-based ticketing systems, as New York and Philadelphia have begun to do. Car drivers should not feel entitled to park in bus lanes. If they choose to illegally block obvious public transportation rights-of-way, they need to be severely ticketed.
Building fully protected bicycle lanes on basically every street that would realistically be used as a transportation corridor (of course excluding some very low-traffic local streets). Modal use studies are quite clear that people will happily cycle places if they can easily do so. Sharing space with drivers is not fun for cyclists or drivers, nor is it safe, so bikes should get their own lanes. "Full protection" means concrete/metal bollards or a contiguous concrete curb, not plastic flexposts.
Giving pedestrians, bicycles, and buses signal priority in crosswalks/dedicated lanes. This is much safer for pedestrians than crossing at the same time vehicles are making turns, and significantly improves public transit travel times by keeping them on-schedule. Waiting five extra seconds at a light does not significantly negatively impact drivers either. Signal priority is common in Manhattan and many European cities, and becoming more common in various other cities and suburbs in the US.
Improving pedestrian infrastructure/access and making walking dignified. This means more sidewalks, wider sidewalks, adherence to ADA regulations, and more convenient/safer crossing infrastructure that makes walking pleasant and fun, not something to dread. If people want to walk, they will: and you can make them enjoy it more by making the walk safer, quieter, and more pleasant. That may entail planting more street trees (shade and aesthetic quality), some utility relocation, signal timing changes, road diets for cars on roads that don't need so many lanes (which is to say, quite a lot of them), traffic calming measures including speed reductions on many roads, pedestrian-only connections between culs-de-sac and arterials, and other matters.
De-stigmatizing the use of alternative modes, and educating people about how to take them. Where I grew up, the bus was "for poor people" and not something ever considered an option by most people, even if they could have benefited from it. This is obviously a problem. Additionally, that bus system was indecipherable and the few times family members tried to take it, they had a lot of difficulty finding schedules and paying. This can be solved with better online websites/apps and a smart card reader for payment (rather than only accepting cash).
With the exception of rail, which has huge benefits but typically requires a lot of money for the right-of-way, these changes are not actually that difficult or expensive for towns and cities to implement. The reason they are not already implemented is usually because uninformed residents complain about infrastructure improvements that they do not understand or whose objective benefits they do not recognize. Local officials also give these complaints too much credence. It behooves both transit agencies and transportation advocates like ourselves to do our best to inform neighbors of beneficial infrastructure changes and challenge unproductive and misleading criticism of those projects.
A truly multi-modal transit system is totally possible in suburbs. Even if some people decide to walk or cycle only in the summer and not in the winter, they can take the bus or tram at other times. Even if they decide to drive when the weather is particularly nasty, that's still a major reduction in automobile use.
Look, I grew up on the bus. I am very pro public transportation. Every city of a sufficient size in the world, or at the very least in the nations that aren't impoverished, should invest in enough...
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Look, I grew up on the bus. I am very pro public transportation. Every city of a sufficient size in the world, or at the very least in the nations that aren't impoverished, should invest in enough public transport to allow its carless citizens to move, work, and play throughout the city as they live their lives. It would be an economic force multiplier for those cities; New York is a great example. Except New York has been investing since the 1800s to get to what they have now. And most cities are starting almost at zero since they haven't invested anything of real note.
But the things you're clearly in favor of are HUGE investments at this point for many cities. Certainly many American cities, which is a large nation with a lot of people conducting a lot of daily trips.
The change you want is not "let's get serious for a couple of years" investment. It's an enormous upheaval in how already existing cities are laid out and maintained. Generational investment. Meaning kids being born today, if a magic wand got waved and all the major cities began seriously investing in building up bus and rail networks that actual work, might come of drinking age by the time those networks are usable. That's a long, long time for a politician, and a lot, lot, lot of money to spend.
I want to point something out up front, before the rest of it. If the goal is to lower environmental impact, industry and power generation are where to be focusing. Because when I look online, apparently industry is about a quarter of all emissions, and power generation is about another quarter. A third quarter is transportation (which presumably includes cargo transportation, but even so).
It's a much, much more manageable task to focus on getting industries and utilities to become more efficient than it is to convince an entire nation of citizens to give up their cars. Much. Considerably much more. Cutting half off industry and power would be more environmental savings than what regular people put out with their personal vehicles.
So let's talk about the issue with wanting to eliminate cars.
American cities are sprawls for the most part. The biggest, where the best environmental gains could be realized by switching to public transportation, cover hundreds of miles. The fiscal outlay to build up bus routes alone is enormous. Putting in trains or trams is exponentially moreso.
This is a nation that is allowing its existing infrastructure to crumble. Politicians don't get lauded for maintaining bridges and roads; they want ribbon cutting on new things. New gets them reelected.
But the new has to be affordable. It can't be new ten or twenty years from now after a third or more of the city's, county's, or state's budget is continually sunk in with a promise of the other side being wonderful. New has to be in time for the next election, so the politician can use it to get reelected; not new two decades from now, after that politician has been replaced by someone else who delivered something shiny quicker.
America is also a nation captured by corporations and the rich. It's a democracy only in name, and that name is used as a facade to allow the unwashed masses to think they're still living in democratic America rather than the oligarchy it actually is.
Rich people want shit that helps them get richer, and they make sure the politicians who technically have the power to pull levers and push buttons pull and push the ones that help rich people. Money calls the shots, and the rich have it so they do the calling.
Rich people aren't interested in public transportation. Societal efficiency isn't a corporate buzzword. Profit is. Market growth is. Opportunity is.
Some Googling tells me the GDP of the automotive industry in America is about three percent. That's a lot of money, with a lot of rich people sitting on boards and in CEO offices who will pick up the phone and start levering and button pushing politicians that try to shift the nation over to a carless society.
Because that's what your position wants. A society where cars are very, very rare. You're not even complaining about fuel usage or the impacts of obtaining and refining it; you're upset about the wear of the wheels. How would any vehicle that doesn't fly avoid wheel wear? Tires are, by design, a wear item. They're between the ground and the vehicle, and just like shoes they're designed to wear because friction is unavoidable.
Not putting lead in gasoline was an "easy" fix except for how the automotive industry wanted the higher profits from simply adding lead. They fought to have their way for a century as we now know. For a hundred years they resisted not having lead atomizing everywhere simply because they made more money with leaded gasoline. For that entire time, ten-ish decades, they diverted some of their profits from cars and leaded gasoline into making sure nothing changed. They fought the government tooth and nail to avoid having to stop using lead.
Requiring vehicles to not have tires is like demanding everyone stop breathing openly. And we just went through that one with the pandemic. All people had to do was wear a filter mask, and they pitched a fit about that. Just ordinary non-rich people opposed that simple change. What happens when cars aren't supposed to have tires anymore? Do we convert our whole civilization over to wooden wheels that are replaced monthly, and cities turn back into scattered little villages since no one can travel at more than fifteen or twenty miles per hour?
My point is tires might be "bad", but ... how bad compared to the deep, widespread level of change you're demanding? Lead was fucking bad and it still took a century to reverse the addition of it to fuel. Vehicles need tires, because gravity is a bitch and always gets its way; one cannot run a vehicle across the ground without touching the ground absent flight. And we're not up to flying cars yet (though I live in eternal hope, because the Jetsons society would be a better world to live in than this one, for sure).
People don't take to change well. Rich people especially don't. And rich people (corporations) are in charge.
I'm not even sure how to calculate a realistic estimate of how much it would cost to convert every major city over to actual working public transit. Or even to cover 90% of the needed weekly trips by transit. More Googling tells me, in America, there's almost twenty thousand incorporated cities, and three-quarters of those are below 5K population. More than three hundred apparently have populations north of 100K.
Even if you only focus on those three hundred, how much money is that? How many people is that? Because it's not just spending two decades building bus and train stations, buying buses and trains, laying tracks, building tram lines, or whatever else. It's convincing millions and millions of people to give up their cars and go wait for the bus or train.
Some cities in America have four to six months of freezing weather. Others have six or seven months of boiling temperatures. How do you convince tens of millions of people that wading through snow or sweating through their shirts on the way to work is a good thing, just because it's more efficient for society. Let's ignore errands entirely; just the work is going to be a huge sell.
Because that's what this change is about. It's about collective efficiency, not personal efficiency. It's about getting most of those people to agree that, yes transit is going to add 60 to 120 minutes to their daily travel times (by not having a personal vehicle, in cities and regions designed for personal vehicles), but that sacrifice is one they should be happy to make because collectively we'll all somehow be better off.
America is a nation that lets people die in the fucking streets because they can't afford to pay for medical care. This isn't a nation that's become so outraged over it that they've risen up to demand nationwide medical coverage be made available to its citizens. And that's something that would personally affect them in a good way ... except for how a lot of them think they're better off without it since they've (currently) got money and can pay for care (on their credit cards) without needing to deal with everyone else also having access to that care.
People are selfish and greedy. It's an integral human trait. Selfishness is a survival trait. I hate greed. I consider it the worst evil in the world. Most "bad things" track back to greed when you go looking. But greedy is what people are. They have theirs, and fuck you for wanting it. We kill each other over greed. Not just individually; wars are fought over, and over, and over due to greed. A greedy leader, a greedy prophet, a greedy someone or group of someones who wanted something and decided the others who had it didn't really need it as much as the greedier and more powerful do, so they start killing until they die or get what they wanted.
And usually they go looking for something else they then want.
So tens of millions of people, who already have cars, need to be convinced to not have cars anymore. In exchange, instead of sitting for forty-five to sixty minutes in traffic twice a day, they'll get to spend ninety-ish minutes twice a day sitting on the bus/train.
How do you sell that to that many people? Because pointing to science about how tires might be bad is all fine and well, sure. But to get to where a conclusion that agrees the tire thing isthat bad you have to convert tens of millions of people to agreeing to give up one to two hours out of their day five days a week. And turn their weekend errands into what will probably be an all-day affair as they ride transit around to do stuff on their day off.
Again, I am pro public transportation. But I like to be realistic, because I'm too old to dream anymore. I used to dream of flying cars, still do. I used to dream of universal healthcare, still do. I used to dream of living on the moon, still do.
These days, I realize they're dreams. Because richer people with more power than me just want more money. And flying cars, a healthy citizenry, and cities on the moon, all sorts of things that might be good for society, none of that makes the rich richer. So the rich oppose it all. Selling SUVs makes them more money. Selling parts and services for those SUVs makes them more money. That's what they want; more.
They don't care what I think. They definitely don't care what environmentalists think. And most people in most big cities absolutely don't care about the collective good if it means their eleven hour days (work plus to-and-from time) are now going to be twelve hours.
The money is one thing. But even if most cities find it in their budgets, along with the will to see the investments through across twenty years, the other problem is shifting the populace away from cars. That's the other problem. That's not a science problem; that's a people problem. And people are greedy.
Until someone who wants to do away with cars knows how to convince all those people it's a good idea, they're just dreaming. It might be fun to dream about, but the reason we read about exceptional people in history books is because of how rarely they come along. It would take a historically exceptional person to be able to convince the world, the entire world, to stop using personal vehicles.
Even "way back in the day" if you had a horse and cart you were much happier with your lot than if you just had your feet. People don't want to give up mobility, which means they want to keep their cars unless they can be absolutely certain they'll still have all that mobility. That's what you're contemplating if you want to do away with personal vehicles; the desire to have mobility at your beck and call. A desire that most everyone on the planet has; to be mobile at their own discretion.
And, oh yeah, rich people want to keep selling cars. So it's two historical miracles that have to happen, not just the one. The problem isn't science, it's people. Focusing on the science ignores the real issues that have to be dealt with to get where you want everyone to be.
It's like the water problems in California (among other places). All the cheaply available water is used up, most of it by industry, but ordinary citizens are browbeaten about taking shorter showers and not watering their gardens. Meanwhile industry is sucking the aquifers dry and paying off politicians to keep pointing fingers at suburbs instead of industry.
Want real, meaningful, manageable environmental change? Point the finger at industry and utilities. Zero-emission power generation will do basically everything eliminating cars would, and you'd only have to shift an industry rather than billions of people's desire to be mobile. Knocking fifty percent off industrial emissions through lower pollution processes (where they exist) does most of what eliminating cars would, and again would be easier than convincing most of the planet that walking and freezing in the cold or baking in the sun while trying to get to work is a good thing.
But it's easier to browbeat poor people than go head-on against rich ones. The rich ones have politicians in their pockets. The rest of us have to put up with constant badgering about how long our showers are. And now, apparently, the fact that we should be ashamed at having a car.
I see what you are saying, and I appreciate the effort you have put into this comment, but I think you are being a little more pessimistic than I tend to be. Specifically I think you are also...
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I see what you are saying, and I appreciate the effort you have put into this comment, but I think you are being a little more pessimistic than I tend to be. Specifically I think you are also making a lot of assumptions about the way the universe works that lead you to ignore very actionable solutions to problems that exist.
It's an enormous upheaval in how already existing cities are laid out and maintained.
None of what I suggested necessarily requires an enormous upheaval of civil infrastructure or layout. A highway through an urban area does, and the United States built hundreds of them in the 20th century. The changes in the comment you are replying to do not have anything to do with demolition and are only a paradigm shift in the sense that streets are being optimized for safety and flexibility. The actual operational procedures of a city agency running a "complete streets" program are not completely different.
Light rail is the most expensive infrastructure upgrade I mentioned. There are various ways to implement it, some of which are expensive and politically challenging (dedicated rights of way, maybe demolishing structures depending on the route, etc.) and some of which are not really so tough (utilizing existing rights of way, street-running tracks). Many over-wide arterials actually benefit from having a separated rail median because it means that oncoming traffic cannot cause collisions. Light rail is considerably more affordable than heavy rail. State and federal funding can cover enormous portions of projects: see the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as a recent example.
Dedicated bus lanes are just lanes that cars don't drive in; at the very most they may have an extra curb, but that is a small amount of material on a relatively small number of roads (you would only ever operate BRT on an arterial). Most of the time, they do not have an extra curb, but may have paint. This is an expense, but it is not a groundbreaking one by any means. Sometimes, a BRT lane will coincide with a road resurfacing, but that resurfacing is not strictly a cost of BRT, it is something that has to happen anyway.
Dedicated bicycle lanes are narrower than bus lanes and similarly require little infrastructure. Curbs also cost money, and separated bike lanes require curbs. But it is a relatively trivial cost compared to serious infrastructure projects and can easily be done during road resurfacings, as with dedicated bus lanes. Bike projects become expensive when they require land acquisition for network connections, but this is almost exclusively a problem for off-street circuit trails. In the United States, almost 100% of streets are publicly owned, so this is not a relevant expense.
Signal prioritization requires a very minimal amount of infrastructure. Much of it already exists, including for pedestrians, it just requires tweaks to timing software.
Adequate pedestrian infrastructure like ADA-compliant sidewalks are mandated by law and their absence in most municipalities is a matter of being "grandfathered in" or from local negligence. What I am proposing is to work a little harder to make walking safe and pleasant, beyond those regulations. Some of the most important measures include: building sidewalks where they do not exist (safety), reducing street width at crosswalks to reduce crossing times (safety), removing parking immediately adjacent to intersections to provide better visibility (safety), installing traffic calming measures in areas where pedestrians are expected to go to stop drivers from killing them (safety), and a bunch of other very specific things in the vein of "stop maximizing automobile throughput at the expensive of human life." An example of a city that has done this very effectively is the small city of Hoboken, NJ, which has not seen a single pedestrian traffic death in four or five years now, almost exclusively because of its infrastructure efforts. All the way at the bottom is making some aesthetic improvements to the area to make walking trips a little nicer (which, in the case of trees, is a little more involved, but is not unheard of).
If the goal is to lower environmental impact, industry and power generation are where to be focusing.
And, not or. I do not accept this line of reasoning. There is no reason, and has never been a good reason, to completely ignore significant problems with our society just because other problems also exist. And 29% of emissions is an astronomically large portion (people quote this figure to me often, making this same point, and I think they do not realize how large that is for a single sector). Ocean shipping does not account for a large portion of this. The vast majority of transportation-related emissions are from automobiles (81%). Additionally, the manufacturing process associated with automobiles (which is not completely covered by GHG emissions), and electric cars in particular, is significant.
The externalities of automobiles are innumerable and go beyond environmental concerns. This is ~enviro, but I am about equally invested in infrastructure improvements that limit automobile dominance because the machines are fundamentally dangerous to human beings. They are hazardous to human health both from emissions and because they physically crash into fragile walking skeletons all the time. Other concerns exist, including their negative impact on municipal budgets, but are mostly out of the scope of this comment.
Decarbonizing transportation (necessary to reduce emissions that have major health impacts on people) means more electricity demand in the transportation sector, so indeed electric grid improvements are relevant, but the best way to reduce emissions from electricity generation is to reduce demand. Even supposedly "green energy" has serious environmental impacts (to suggest otherwise is wrong), and that includes electric vehicles. Pretending that transportation emissions are irrelevant just because they are not the only source of emissions ignores the purpose of net-zero goals, which are to stop emitting massive amounts of greenhouse gases in the first place. That requires effort in all sectors, not just electricity generation.
The pivot to renewable energy already has significantly more social buy-in and political inertia than the pivot to multi-modal transportation OPTIONS, and for that reason, I am interested in highlighting transportation-related solutions to environmental and social problems caused by automobiles. That doesn't mean I am not also interested in talking about energy sources too. The way scientific and technological advancement works, you have to start talking about solutions to problems before those problems become so massive that they are unsolvable... there is nothing wrong with investing now into infrastructure, policy, and research that will improve transportation emissions in the future.
convince an entire nation of citizens to give up their cars.
My goal is to advocate for a reduction in automobile use on the basis that it is meaningfully harmful to the environment and to society relative to other modes at the rate that it currently dominates the transportation sector. I would also like to see fewer automobiles in general, but nowhere did I say that cars should not exist altogether or that individuals should not be permitted to own them.
This is a nation that is allowing its existing infrastructure to crumble.
Please see the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. Indeed there has been great neglect of public infrastructure for the past several decades, especially when a certain political party has been in power. Certain other political parties have made, and will continue to make, substantive effort to fund infrastructure. But taking it as fact that the United States "does not care about its own infrastructure" is misleading and unconstructive. It does care about its infrastructure, it just cares too heavily about car infrastructure, which is more expensive to maintain than it can actually afford. Strong Towns, Donald Shoup, et al. have various remarks on this matter on the local level, but the point in general is that the inefficiency of automobiles at transporting a given number of people for a given number of miles, and their physically destructive tendencies, does not lend them to prosperous human existence. Most trips, especially within and between urbanized areas (that is, the majority of vehicle miles traveled), have more efficient alternatives: both from an environmental and budgetary standpoint.
America is also a nation captured by corporations and the rich. It's a democracy only in name
I recognize the importance of addressing income inequality and elite capture, but I think that this is not a statement you can use as an axiom for much of anything. It is quite an exaggeration.
You're not even complaining about fuel usage or the impacts of obtaining and refining it; you're upset about the wear of the wheels.
I have complained about this to such great extents on ~enviro and ~transport that I am surprised any frequenters of the categories have not already blocked posts from this user profile. Actually, I am surprised no one has asked me to stop talking so much about greenhouse gas emissions and other such things.
This thread is about an almost completely unrecognized, but still significant, problem with automobiles, whose precise scope is not completely understood. But unless you do not believe that microplastic is an issue, I fail to see why it is not worth discussing. It is one additional problem to add to the rather large pile of problems with car-centric culture and infrastructure. To repeat myself: "and, not or."
Requiring vehicles to not have tires is like demanding everyone stop breathing openly. [...] What happens when cars aren't supposed to have tires anymore?
I think you have misread my comment if that is what you think I said, or maybe I said it in a confusing way. I did not suggest that cars use wooden wheels or magically levitate. It sounds like you are just frustrated but I am not sure this is a useful set of remarks.
I will clarify again that I am not against the existence of all cars, nor would I like to ban them in suburbs. I am just interested in inducing a modal shift away from automobiles where there are more suitable options (which there often are, and more often could be with a bit of infrastructure). In very urban areas with extremely high pedestrian activity, cars should generally not be permitted on city streets (or at least through-traffic should not be permitted), but this refers to a pretty small physical area of human habitation.
In other comments I have shared on this website, including the link I provided in the top comment, I have lightly investigated specific engineering processes that could be adopted by industry to minimize the effects of automobile tire particle debris. From what I have ascertained, it is not likely that this matter can be completely resolved, which is why I think that in addition to engineering better tires, it is worthwhile to find methods of transportation that do not emit as many toxic microplastics to begin with. This is still an area that we are learning about, myself included, so I do not have a magnum opus. I decided that elaborating on these matters would be out of scope of the top comment because this is not ~engineering.
cities turn back into scattered little villages since no one can travel at more than fifteen or twenty miles per hour
In urban and suburban areas, it might be slightly radical to say that cars should not be allowed to go more than 20 mph, but only because the status quo accepts that traffic throughput is worth human fatalities. I have written a considerable amount on the dangers of fast speeds in areas where pedestirans are present. Scientific studies are quite clear that speeds above about 35 mph in particular result in collisions where pedestrians have virtually no chance of survival. But even above 20 or 25 mph, death occurs (especially for older and disabled people) and severe injures are common.
I am not anti-transportation or anti-access in general. I am not sure what gave you that impression. Actually I think your remark here speaks to the implicit understanding you appear to have of cars as equivalent to inter-city transport; that somehow limiting speeds within urban and suburban areas is equivalent to making it impossible to travel. No serious transportation advocate will ever say this unironically, or without immediately regretting it, because it doesn't make sense. In fact, the goal of urbanism is not to compress humanity into a single point: polycentric layout patterns are probably OK as long as they are densely polycentric; that is, have dense cores rather than universal low density. For this reason, urbanists acknowledge the relevance of having people in different places. For that reason, long-distance transportation is important. Highways will probably always exist in some form, and that is OK for uses where they are really necessary. High-speed rail (HSR) is also one of the things I am most interested in. My comment also spoke quite a lot about Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), which can be inter-city.
Even if you only focus on those three hundred, how much money is that? How many people is that?
Personally I don't find it useful to generalize cost estimates because the projects that will actually be useful in a particular city vary so obscenely from place to place that the answer to your grand rhetorical questions, even if they were not rhetorical, would have error bars the size of the moon.
What I can say is this: it would cost a lot of money to do transformative things absolutely everywhere. It would cost considerably less to do transformative things in the most important places, and merely incrementally good things elsewhere. But you do have to shoot for the stars if you want to end up with a reasonably good end product.
Alon Levy has a lot of academic commentary on the high cost of transit in the US. The US is uniquely bad at spending money on infrastructure projects, for reasons that are completely solvable. I recommend reading their work if you are interested in transportation costs. Also check out the Transit Costs Project and the Effective Transit Alliance, who have some great reports on this subject. It's a complicated problem, but the takeaway is that if the US had infrastructure costs more similar to somewhere like Spain, even accounting for localized cost of labor and other such things, we would be able to build more than an order of magnitude more transit than we currently can.
How do you convince tens of millions of people that wading through snow or sweating through their shirts on the way to work is a good thing, just because it's more efficient for society.
I addressed this clearly in my comment: even a partial modal shift in times when it is convenient for people to walk or cycle would benefit society. Also, fast and frequent public transit does not expose you to the elements in the way you describe.
As for getting beyond a partial modal shift and to a mostly-full modal shift, the answer is "I don't know, it depends on a lot of things." I am not super interested in talking about edge cases here, because the amount of effort it would take to resolve 100% of edge cases is beyond what I care about personally.
It's about collective efficiency, not personal efficiency. It's about getting most of those people to agree that, yes transit is going to add 60 to 120 minutes to their daily travel times
No, that is not what it is about. There is no reason that transit has to take longer and be less convenient than driving a personal vehicle for most people in most cases. In many cities, it already is not, which is why people often choose not to drive. For some trips, including commutes, it is physically impossible to get to your destination faster in a car than in a train. For example, commuting from Philadelphia to New York City (which many people do). The train reaches speeds of 150 mph (soon 160 mph), and that isn't even that fast for HSR. The travel time by train approaches half the end-to-end time you would spend driving and parking, and could be significantly less. As for more typical commutes, in much of Manhattan, and in many other urban areas all over the world, a subway ride can be half the time it takes sitting in traffic to get to the same location. In many suburbs, taking the train into the city for work is about as fast as driving, and that is despite less-than-optimal track geometries and alignments. Some NY examples would be taking the Metro-North, LIRR, NJ Transit, or PATH into New York City.
In many suburban places, there is no technical reason that public transit cannot be time-competitive with personal automobile travel for a large portion of common trips.
I wrote an extensive comment earlier this week about the ways in which what you are implying as a "downgrade" can and should actually be an "improvement." This is a casual set of observations, but I recommend you read them as well as more academic content about transportation travel times. I think your axiom that transit = necessarily/universally longer commute times is not true.
But it's easier to browbeat poor people than go head-on against rich ones.
Respectfully, I resent this remark. I am very interested in equitable solutions, social equality, and policy approaches aimed toward those who control the means of production. I appreciate it when people point out specific ways in which a policy I float is inaccessible for financial reasons. (I will also note tangentially that the group of people who own automobiles is relatively advantaged and wealthy in society.) This thread is about a government entity regulating manufacturers ("rich people") to not produce something that is toxic to consumers ("poor people"). I recognize that not everything I have ever said is workable or absolutely optimally equitable, but I think you are yelling at someone who is not here, or at least who is not me.
I mean, now that cars have 'average speed' calculations, we can see that the rough average speed through any area in Philadelphia hovers between 10 and 15 mph. It turns out when you need hundreds...
cities turn back into scattered little villages since no one can travel at more than fifteen or twenty miles per hour?
I mean, now that cars have 'average speed' calculations, we can see that the rough average speed through any area in Philadelphia hovers between 10 and 15 mph. It turns out when you need hundreds of stoplights and stopsigns that it doesn't matter if the speed limit is 40mph cause you only get up to 20 mph before you have to slam the brakes.
On the main highway (76) the effective speed is 25 mph more often than not due to traffic and idiots going too fast and killing themselves.
The problem isn't 20mph in cities. The problem is that some cities were designed completely around automobiles and are thus are so spread out its impossible to use anything but a car.
If you dropped the speed limit to 15mph in Philadelphia, replaced most stoplights and stopsigns with roundabouts with halt-traffic buttons for pedestrians, I'd wager the average throughput of traffic increases.
Oh I am aware it would take a massive cultural shift. There's too much stigma about public transport, and inadequate funding (and neglect of other public facilities/services) makes taking the bus...
Oh I am aware it would take a massive cultural shift. There's too much stigma about public transport, and inadequate funding (and neglect of other public facilities/services) makes taking the bus needlessly bad.
It's not hard to carry a reasonable amount of groceries on the bus with a small cart, like this. We always called them schlepalongs.
Added bonus you can take a nap to/from the grocer.
That's an interesting conjecture. Intuitively, I know that dirt roads require drivers to go at lower speeds, which probably reduces tire wear. Dirt is softer than asphalt, but might contain...
That's an interesting conjecture. Intuitively, I know that dirt roads require drivers to go at lower speeds, which probably reduces tire wear. Dirt is softer than asphalt, but might contain sharper rocks that could create more friction and potentially increase tire wear; gravel more so.
This article from Lowne 1971 discusses the matter, but I can't access it. All it says in the introduction is that "Increase in roughness of the surfaces was found to have a relatively small effect on wear, the major factor being surface harshness."
A typical passenger car emits about 120 micrograms of rubber per meter but the exact current value depends on a multitude of influencing factors and varies greatly. [...] It is concluded that generally subjecting tires to milder usage conditions can reduce tire wear by substantial amounts. Reducing vehicle speeds is identified as the most effective general measure.
So speed and surface material are probably relevant to the amount of tire microplastic emitted into the environment. I think that higher speeds cause more wear, as do rougher roads, but I'm not sure how much. Theoretically, if the data shows that speed has a dramatically higher impact than the roughness delta between a paved and unpaved road, then unpaved roads (with their lower speeds) probably cause fewer tire particle emissions. But if these two factors are approximately equal in significance, unpaved roads are probably not any better at avoiding microplastics, and might be worse. And it very much depends on the road material.
This may depend on the dirt road. I live in an area with a lot of dirt roads, and they come in two flavors: Very rough "roads" (they are usually just called tracks) that are rarely used and barely...
This may depend on the dirt road.
I live in an area with a lot of dirt roads, and they come in two flavors:
Very rough "roads" (they are usually just called tracks) that are rarely used and barely maintained. These can be very rocky, and likely very tough on your tires — not to mention your wheels, suspension, etc.
Smooth roads used frequently by smaller vehicles, such as in residential locations, which are properly engineered (e.g., shaped to shed water into ditches running along both sides) and get regular maintenance. These have two subtypes—of which a given road can be one, the other, or a patchwork of both: those surfaced with sand that has been trucked in and those made by thoroughly compacting soil, similar to how the ground is prepared at a building site. I don't care for the sand roads because they are dusty and are too easily damaged by heavy vehicles, but the compacted soil roads are my absolute favorite of all roads: they are luxuriously smooth and quiet to drive on, and they don't seem to form potholes nearly as fast as other roads do (including sealed roads). But I think they are only feasible in places that have the correct soil type.
This article discusses the pollution caused by the erosion of automobile tires against road surfaces. In short, cars pollute in lots of ways, but one of the ones we almost never hear about — tire debris — is only now being formally acknowledged by regulators, even after years of scientific studies pointing it out. While most transportation pollution research focuses on gaseous emissions, which are primarily an issue with ICE cars, tire particle debris is a fundamental problem with automobiles, including EVs. Tire particle debris is likely toxic to living creatures.
My takeaway is that 6PPD is probably toxic, and should probably be banned, but that's only a first step toward solving the broader problem, which is tire pollution in general. That is, car use in general.
See here for more academic reading on tire debris particulate pollution, including some engineering measures that could partially alleviate it. Note that the only way to fully eliminate microparticle debris from tires is to use a vehicle that does not produce it. While there is probably some ability for regulators to demand the elimination of certain toxic chemicals from tires, this is no guarantee that the replacement will be any better, and all replacements will almost necessarily be microplastic-prone. "Biodegradeable tires" are not something that exist, and probably not something that makes sense.
Realistically, the best way to avoid emitting particulate matter from tires is to not use a vehicle with tires. The most environmentally sustainable alternative for medium and long distances is more rail-based transportation. This has other added benefits, such as fundamentally better fuel efficiency (there is almost no friction along rail tracks), a smaller physical footprint (rail lines can offer more throughput at less width, and while using fewer and more permeable construction materials), and safety improvements (statistically, automobiles kill far more people per vehicle-mile traveled than trains). The best alternative for short distances is walking and cycling more; the extremely lightweight frames of bicycles and their small tires means that they produce a negligible amount of particle debris compared to cars. If you can find a way to get around without driving, do it. (If you can't, look for one. Or create one: talk to your neighbors and local government about improved public transit, expanding sidewalks, and protected bike lanes.)
While improvements to automobile components must be made, because some number of cars will probably always exist, the long-term solution is sustainable transportation in general. The EPA should ban the use of toxic chemicals in tires, but the federal government should also de-incentivize automobile travel when there are usable alternatives, and provide funding to rail services and "complete streets"/walkability measures to ensure that more such alternatives can exist.
I feel like rubber tires would be less-bad if they were only ever used on unpaved roads. I have no evidence to back this up other than that asphalt is much harder than dirt.
I very much like the idea of automobiles relegated to being a thing for rural folks for whom it is grossly uneconomical to provide public transport.
Anecdotally, unpaved gravel roads seem to wear my tires down just as fast because all of the sharp rocks slowly knock tiny chunks out of the rubber over time
That makes sense, I was mostly thinking proper dirt/mud/forest floor.
Gravel roads are like the worst of both worlds. They serve a purpose, but especially for large-gravel, it's a mess.
This just won't work in the US with so many people living in the suburbs. No one will want to take a bus to the grocery store.
They'll need to come up with a different solution. No one will adopt that much of an inconvenience to save the planet, say least not in material numbers. The solution will need to be something that has minimal impact to the end user around the same cost as today to have any adoption rate worthwhile.
Plenty of people do this already, including in the suburbs, I think you are just not one of them.
In any case the bus is not the only preferred way to make local trips involving carrying a lot of items. That is the perfect use-case for a cargo bike. Personally, though I live in a city right now, I take my bike a fair distance to get most groceries: about 2.2 miles for my regular store, or 3.0 miles to my second-favorite. In many suburbs people wouldn't even have to go that far. Occasionally I take the train or bus to these stores or a different one if I have some reason not to cycle. (There is a grocery store on my block, it's just upscale, and I'm cheap.) The most recent time I lived in the suburbs, I typically carried groceries by hand or took a foldable grocery cart on wheels with me. It was fine.
I would like to gently clarify the issue at hand. The problem is excessive use of automobiles to take local trips: they are environmentally unfriendly, dangerous to pedestrians, cause traffic (cars are traffic), and are problematic for urban planners for various other reasons. The goal is to reduce automobile use for local trips; that is, to increase modal share by walking, cycling, or public transit. The way we achieve that goal is by:
With the exception of rail, which has huge benefits but typically requires a lot of money for the right-of-way, these changes are not actually that difficult or expensive for towns and cities to implement. The reason they are not already implemented is usually because uninformed residents complain about infrastructure improvements that they do not understand or whose objective benefits they do not recognize. Local officials also give these complaints too much credence. It behooves both transit agencies and transportation advocates like ourselves to do our best to inform neighbors of beneficial infrastructure changes and challenge unproductive and misleading criticism of those projects.
A truly multi-modal transit system is totally possible in suburbs. Even if some people decide to walk or cycle only in the summer and not in the winter, they can take the bus or tram at other times. Even if they decide to drive when the weather is particularly nasty, that's still a major reduction in automobile use.
Look, I grew up on the bus. I am very pro public transportation. Every city of a sufficient size in the world, or at the very least in the nations that aren't impoverished, should invest in enough public transport to allow its carless citizens to move, work, and play throughout the city as they live their lives. It would be an economic force multiplier for those cities; New York is a great example. Except New York has been investing since the 1800s to get to what they have now. And most cities are starting almost at zero since they haven't invested anything of real note.
But the things you're clearly in favor of are HUGE investments at this point for many cities. Certainly many American cities, which is a large nation with a lot of people conducting a lot of daily trips.
The change you want is not "let's get serious for a couple of years" investment. It's an enormous upheaval in how already existing cities are laid out and maintained. Generational investment. Meaning kids being born today, if a magic wand got waved and all the major cities began seriously investing in building up bus and rail networks that actual work, might come of drinking age by the time those networks are usable. That's a long, long time for a politician, and a lot, lot, lot of money to spend.
I want to point something out up front, before the rest of it. If the goal is to lower environmental impact, industry and power generation are where to be focusing. Because when I look online, apparently industry is about a quarter of all emissions, and power generation is about another quarter. A third quarter is transportation (which presumably includes cargo transportation, but even so).
It's a much, much more manageable task to focus on getting industries and utilities to become more efficient than it is to convince an entire nation of citizens to give up their cars. Much. Considerably much more. Cutting half off industry and power would be more environmental savings than what regular people put out with their personal vehicles.
So let's talk about the issue with wanting to eliminate cars.
American cities are sprawls for the most part. The biggest, where the best environmental gains could be realized by switching to public transportation, cover hundreds of miles. The fiscal outlay to build up bus routes alone is enormous. Putting in trains or trams is exponentially moreso.
This is a nation that is allowing its existing infrastructure to crumble. Politicians don't get lauded for maintaining bridges and roads; they want ribbon cutting on new things. New gets them reelected.
But the new has to be affordable. It can't be new ten or twenty years from now after a third or more of the city's, county's, or state's budget is continually sunk in with a promise of the other side being wonderful. New has to be in time for the next election, so the politician can use it to get reelected; not new two decades from now, after that politician has been replaced by someone else who delivered something shiny quicker.
America is also a nation captured by corporations and the rich. It's a democracy only in name, and that name is used as a facade to allow the unwashed masses to think they're still living in democratic America rather than the oligarchy it actually is.
Rich people want shit that helps them get richer, and they make sure the politicians who technically have the power to pull levers and push buttons pull and push the ones that help rich people. Money calls the shots, and the rich have it so they do the calling.
Rich people aren't interested in public transportation. Societal efficiency isn't a corporate buzzword. Profit is. Market growth is. Opportunity is.
Some Googling tells me the GDP of the automotive industry in America is about three percent. That's a lot of money, with a lot of rich people sitting on boards and in CEO offices who will pick up the phone and start levering and button pushing politicians that try to shift the nation over to a carless society.
Because that's what your position wants. A society where cars are very, very rare. You're not even complaining about fuel usage or the impacts of obtaining and refining it; you're upset about the wear of the wheels. How would any vehicle that doesn't fly avoid wheel wear? Tires are, by design, a wear item. They're between the ground and the vehicle, and just like shoes they're designed to wear because friction is unavoidable.
Not putting lead in gasoline was an "easy" fix except for how the automotive industry wanted the higher profits from simply adding lead. They fought to have their way for a century as we now know. For a hundred years they resisted not having lead atomizing everywhere simply because they made more money with leaded gasoline. For that entire time, ten-ish decades, they diverted some of their profits from cars and leaded gasoline into making sure nothing changed. They fought the government tooth and nail to avoid having to stop using lead.
Requiring vehicles to not have tires is like demanding everyone stop breathing openly. And we just went through that one with the pandemic. All people had to do was wear a filter mask, and they pitched a fit about that. Just ordinary non-rich people opposed that simple change. What happens when cars aren't supposed to have tires anymore? Do we convert our whole civilization over to wooden wheels that are replaced monthly, and cities turn back into scattered little villages since no one can travel at more than fifteen or twenty miles per hour?
My point is tires might be "bad", but ... how bad compared to the deep, widespread level of change you're demanding? Lead was fucking bad and it still took a century to reverse the addition of it to fuel. Vehicles need tires, because gravity is a bitch and always gets its way; one cannot run a vehicle across the ground without touching the ground absent flight. And we're not up to flying cars yet (though I live in eternal hope, because the Jetsons society would be a better world to live in than this one, for sure).
People don't take to change well. Rich people especially don't. And rich people (corporations) are in charge.
I'm not even sure how to calculate a realistic estimate of how much it would cost to convert every major city over to actual working public transit. Or even to cover 90% of the needed weekly trips by transit. More Googling tells me, in America, there's almost twenty thousand incorporated cities, and three-quarters of those are below 5K population. More than three hundred apparently have populations north of 100K.
Even if you only focus on those three hundred, how much money is that? How many people is that? Because it's not just spending two decades building bus and train stations, buying buses and trains, laying tracks, building tram lines, or whatever else. It's convincing millions and millions of people to give up their cars and go wait for the bus or train.
Some cities in America have four to six months of freezing weather. Others have six or seven months of boiling temperatures. How do you convince tens of millions of people that wading through snow or sweating through their shirts on the way to work is a good thing, just because it's more efficient for society. Let's ignore errands entirely; just the work is going to be a huge sell.
Because that's what this change is about. It's about collective efficiency, not personal efficiency. It's about getting most of those people to agree that, yes transit is going to add 60 to 120 minutes to their daily travel times (by not having a personal vehicle, in cities and regions designed for personal vehicles), but that sacrifice is one they should be happy to make because collectively we'll all somehow be better off.
America is a nation that lets people die in the fucking streets because they can't afford to pay for medical care. This isn't a nation that's become so outraged over it that they've risen up to demand nationwide medical coverage be made available to its citizens. And that's something that would personally affect them in a good way ... except for how a lot of them think they're better off without it since they've (currently) got money and can pay for care (on their credit cards) without needing to deal with everyone else also having access to that care.
People are selfish and greedy. It's an integral human trait. Selfishness is a survival trait. I hate greed. I consider it the worst evil in the world. Most "bad things" track back to greed when you go looking. But greedy is what people are. They have theirs, and fuck you for wanting it. We kill each other over greed. Not just individually; wars are fought over, and over, and over due to greed. A greedy leader, a greedy prophet, a greedy someone or group of someones who wanted something and decided the others who had it didn't really need it as much as the greedier and more powerful do, so they start killing until they die or get what they wanted.
And usually they go looking for something else they then want.
So tens of millions of people, who already have cars, need to be convinced to not have cars anymore. In exchange, instead of sitting for forty-five to sixty minutes in traffic twice a day, they'll get to spend ninety-ish minutes twice a day sitting on the bus/train.
How do you sell that to that many people? Because pointing to science about how tires might be bad is all fine and well, sure. But to get to where a conclusion that agrees the tire thing is that bad you have to convert tens of millions of people to agreeing to give up one to two hours out of their day five days a week. And turn their weekend errands into what will probably be an all-day affair as they ride transit around to do stuff on their day off.
Again, I am pro public transportation. But I like to be realistic, because I'm too old to dream anymore. I used to dream of flying cars, still do. I used to dream of universal healthcare, still do. I used to dream of living on the moon, still do.
These days, I realize they're dreams. Because richer people with more power than me just want more money. And flying cars, a healthy citizenry, and cities on the moon, all sorts of things that might be good for society, none of that makes the rich richer. So the rich oppose it all. Selling SUVs makes them more money. Selling parts and services for those SUVs makes them more money. That's what they want; more.
They don't care what I think. They definitely don't care what environmentalists think. And most people in most big cities absolutely don't care about the collective good if it means their eleven hour days (work plus to-and-from time) are now going to be twelve hours.
The money is one thing. But even if most cities find it in their budgets, along with the will to see the investments through across twenty years, the other problem is shifting the populace away from cars. That's the other problem. That's not a science problem; that's a people problem. And people are greedy.
Until someone who wants to do away with cars knows how to convince all those people it's a good idea, they're just dreaming. It might be fun to dream about, but the reason we read about exceptional people in history books is because of how rarely they come along. It would take a historically exceptional person to be able to convince the world, the entire world, to stop using personal vehicles.
Even "way back in the day" if you had a horse and cart you were much happier with your lot than if you just had your feet. People don't want to give up mobility, which means they want to keep their cars unless they can be absolutely certain they'll still have all that mobility. That's what you're contemplating if you want to do away with personal vehicles; the desire to have mobility at your beck and call. A desire that most everyone on the planet has; to be mobile at their own discretion.
And, oh yeah, rich people want to keep selling cars. So it's two historical miracles that have to happen, not just the one. The problem isn't science, it's people. Focusing on the science ignores the real issues that have to be dealt with to get where you want everyone to be.
It's like the water problems in California (among other places). All the cheaply available water is used up, most of it by industry, but ordinary citizens are browbeaten about taking shorter showers and not watering their gardens. Meanwhile industry is sucking the aquifers dry and paying off politicians to keep pointing fingers at suburbs instead of industry.
Want real, meaningful, manageable environmental change? Point the finger at industry and utilities. Zero-emission power generation will do basically everything eliminating cars would, and you'd only have to shift an industry rather than billions of people's desire to be mobile. Knocking fifty percent off industrial emissions through lower pollution processes (where they exist) does most of what eliminating cars would, and again would be easier than convincing most of the planet that walking and freezing in the cold or baking in the sun while trying to get to work is a good thing.
But it's easier to browbeat poor people than go head-on against rich ones. The rich ones have politicians in their pockets. The rest of us have to put up with constant badgering about how long our showers are. And now, apparently, the fact that we should be ashamed at having a car.
I see what you are saying, and I appreciate the effort you have put into this comment, but I think you are being a little more pessimistic than I tend to be. Specifically I think you are also making a lot of assumptions about the way the universe works that lead you to ignore very actionable solutions to problems that exist.
None of what I suggested necessarily requires an enormous upheaval of civil infrastructure or layout. A highway through an urban area does, and the United States built hundreds of them in the 20th century. The changes in the comment you are replying to do not have anything to do with demolition and are only a paradigm shift in the sense that streets are being optimized for safety and flexibility. The actual operational procedures of a city agency running a "complete streets" program are not completely different.
And, not or. I do not accept this line of reasoning. There is no reason, and has never been a good reason, to completely ignore significant problems with our society just because other problems also exist. And 29% of emissions is an astronomically large portion (people quote this figure to me often, making this same point, and I think they do not realize how large that is for a single sector). Ocean shipping does not account for a large portion of this. The vast majority of transportation-related emissions are from automobiles (81%). Additionally, the manufacturing process associated with automobiles (which is not completely covered by GHG emissions), and electric cars in particular, is significant.
The externalities of automobiles are innumerable and go beyond environmental concerns. This is ~enviro, but I am about equally invested in infrastructure improvements that limit automobile dominance because the machines are fundamentally dangerous to human beings. They are hazardous to human health both from emissions and because they physically crash into fragile walking skeletons all the time. Other concerns exist, including their negative impact on municipal budgets, but are mostly out of the scope of this comment.
Decarbonizing transportation (necessary to reduce emissions that have major health impacts on people) means more electricity demand in the transportation sector, so indeed electric grid improvements are relevant, but the best way to reduce emissions from electricity generation is to reduce demand. Even supposedly "green energy" has serious environmental impacts (to suggest otherwise is wrong), and that includes electric vehicles. Pretending that transportation emissions are irrelevant just because they are not the only source of emissions ignores the purpose of net-zero goals, which are to stop emitting massive amounts of greenhouse gases in the first place. That requires effort in all sectors, not just electricity generation.
The pivot to renewable energy already has significantly more social buy-in and political inertia than the pivot to multi-modal transportation OPTIONS, and for that reason, I am interested in highlighting transportation-related solutions to environmental and social problems caused by automobiles. That doesn't mean I am not also interested in talking about energy sources too. The way scientific and technological advancement works, you have to start talking about solutions to problems before those problems become so massive that they are unsolvable... there is nothing wrong with investing now into infrastructure, policy, and research that will improve transportation emissions in the future.
My goal is to advocate for a reduction in automobile use on the basis that it is meaningfully harmful to the environment and to society relative to other modes at the rate that it currently dominates the transportation sector. I would also like to see fewer automobiles in general, but nowhere did I say that cars should not exist altogether or that individuals should not be permitted to own them.
Please see the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. Indeed there has been great neglect of public infrastructure for the past several decades, especially when a certain political party has been in power. Certain other political parties have made, and will continue to make, substantive effort to fund infrastructure. But taking it as fact that the United States "does not care about its own infrastructure" is misleading and unconstructive. It does care about its infrastructure, it just cares too heavily about car infrastructure, which is more expensive to maintain than it can actually afford. Strong Towns, Donald Shoup, et al. have various remarks on this matter on the local level, but the point in general is that the inefficiency of automobiles at transporting a given number of people for a given number of miles, and their physically destructive tendencies, does not lend them to prosperous human existence. Most trips, especially within and between urbanized areas (that is, the majority of vehicle miles traveled), have more efficient alternatives: both from an environmental and budgetary standpoint.
I recognize the importance of addressing income inequality and elite capture, but I think that this is not a statement you can use as an axiom for much of anything. It is quite an exaggeration.
I have complained about this to such great extents on ~enviro and ~transport that I am surprised any frequenters of the categories have not already blocked posts from this user profile. Actually, I am surprised no one has asked me to stop talking so much about greenhouse gas emissions and other such things.
This thread is about an almost completely unrecognized, but still significant, problem with automobiles, whose precise scope is not completely understood. But unless you do not believe that microplastic is an issue, I fail to see why it is not worth discussing. It is one additional problem to add to the rather large pile of problems with car-centric culture and infrastructure. To repeat myself: "and, not or."
I think you have misread my comment if that is what you think I said, or maybe I said it in a confusing way. I did not suggest that cars use wooden wheels or magically levitate. It sounds like you are just frustrated but I am not sure this is a useful set of remarks.
I will clarify again that I am not against the existence of all cars, nor would I like to ban them in suburbs. I am just interested in inducing a modal shift away from automobiles where there are more suitable options (which there often are, and more often could be with a bit of infrastructure). In very urban areas with extremely high pedestrian activity, cars should generally not be permitted on city streets (or at least through-traffic should not be permitted), but this refers to a pretty small physical area of human habitation.
In other comments I have shared on this website, including the link I provided in the top comment, I have lightly investigated specific engineering processes that could be adopted by industry to minimize the effects of automobile tire particle debris. From what I have ascertained, it is not likely that this matter can be completely resolved, which is why I think that in addition to engineering better tires, it is worthwhile to find methods of transportation that do not emit as many toxic microplastics to begin with. This is still an area that we are learning about, myself included, so I do not have a magnum opus. I decided that elaborating on these matters would be out of scope of the top comment because this is not ~engineering.
In urban and suburban areas, it might be slightly radical to say that cars should not be allowed to go more than 20 mph, but only because the status quo accepts that traffic throughput is worth human fatalities. I have written a considerable amount on the dangers of fast speeds in areas where pedestirans are present. Scientific studies are quite clear that speeds above about 35 mph in particular result in collisions where pedestrians have virtually no chance of survival. But even above 20 or 25 mph, death occurs (especially for older and disabled people) and severe injures are common.
I am not anti-transportation or anti-access in general. I am not sure what gave you that impression. Actually I think your remark here speaks to the implicit understanding you appear to have of cars as equivalent to inter-city transport; that somehow limiting speeds within urban and suburban areas is equivalent to making it impossible to travel. No serious transportation advocate will ever say this unironically, or without immediately regretting it, because it doesn't make sense. In fact, the goal of urbanism is not to compress humanity into a single point: polycentric layout patterns are probably OK as long as they are densely polycentric; that is, have dense cores rather than universal low density. For this reason, urbanists acknowledge the relevance of having people in different places. For that reason, long-distance transportation is important. Highways will probably always exist in some form, and that is OK for uses where they are really necessary. High-speed rail (HSR) is also one of the things I am most interested in. My comment also spoke quite a lot about Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), which can be inter-city.
Personally I don't find it useful to generalize cost estimates because the projects that will actually be useful in a particular city vary so obscenely from place to place that the answer to your grand rhetorical questions, even if they were not rhetorical, would have error bars the size of the moon.
What I can say is this: it would cost a lot of money to do transformative things absolutely everywhere. It would cost considerably less to do transformative things in the most important places, and merely incrementally good things elsewhere. But you do have to shoot for the stars if you want to end up with a reasonably good end product.
Alon Levy has a lot of academic commentary on the high cost of transit in the US. The US is uniquely bad at spending money on infrastructure projects, for reasons that are completely solvable. I recommend reading their work if you are interested in transportation costs. Also check out the Transit Costs Project and the Effective Transit Alliance, who have some great reports on this subject. It's a complicated problem, but the takeaway is that if the US had infrastructure costs more similar to somewhere like Spain, even accounting for localized cost of labor and other such things, we would be able to build more than an order of magnitude more transit than we currently can.
I addressed this clearly in my comment: even a partial modal shift in times when it is convenient for people to walk or cycle would benefit society. Also, fast and frequent public transit does not expose you to the elements in the way you describe.
As for getting beyond a partial modal shift and to a mostly-full modal shift, the answer is "I don't know, it depends on a lot of things." I am not super interested in talking about edge cases here, because the amount of effort it would take to resolve 100% of edge cases is beyond what I care about personally.
No, that is not what it is about. There is no reason that transit has to take longer and be less convenient than driving a personal vehicle for most people in most cases. In many cities, it already is not, which is why people often choose not to drive. For some trips, including commutes, it is physically impossible to get to your destination faster in a car than in a train. For example, commuting from Philadelphia to New York City (which many people do). The train reaches speeds of 150 mph (soon 160 mph), and that isn't even that fast for HSR. The travel time by train approaches half the end-to-end time you would spend driving and parking, and could be significantly less. As for more typical commutes, in much of Manhattan, and in many other urban areas all over the world, a subway ride can be half the time it takes sitting in traffic to get to the same location. In many suburbs, taking the train into the city for work is about as fast as driving, and that is despite less-than-optimal track geometries and alignments. Some NY examples would be taking the Metro-North, LIRR, NJ Transit, or PATH into New York City.
In many suburban places, there is no technical reason that public transit cannot be time-competitive with personal automobile travel for a large portion of common trips.
I wrote an extensive comment earlier this week about the ways in which what you are implying as a "downgrade" can and should actually be an "improvement." This is a casual set of observations, but I recommend you read them as well as more academic content about transportation travel times. I think your axiom that transit = necessarily/universally longer commute times is not true.
Respectfully, I resent this remark. I am very interested in equitable solutions, social equality, and policy approaches aimed toward those who control the means of production. I appreciate it when people point out specific ways in which a policy I float is inaccessible for financial reasons. (I will also note tangentially that the group of people who own automobiles is relatively advantaged and wealthy in society.) This thread is about a government entity regulating manufacturers ("rich people") to not produce something that is toxic to consumers ("poor people"). I recognize that not everything I have ever said is workable or absolutely optimally equitable, but I think you are yelling at someone who is not here, or at least who is not me.
I mean, now that cars have 'average speed' calculations, we can see that the rough average speed through any area in Philadelphia hovers between 10 and 15 mph. It turns out when you need hundreds of stoplights and stopsigns that it doesn't matter if the speed limit is 40mph cause you only get up to 20 mph before you have to slam the brakes.
On the main highway (76) the effective speed is 25 mph more often than not due to traffic and idiots going too fast and killing themselves.
The problem isn't 20mph in cities. The problem is that some cities were designed completely around automobiles and are thus are so spread out its impossible to use anything but a car.
If you dropped the speed limit to 15mph in Philadelphia, replaced most stoplights and stopsigns with roundabouts with halt-traffic buttons for pedestrians, I'd wager the average throughput of traffic increases.
Oh I am aware it would take a massive cultural shift. There's too much stigma about public transport, and inadequate funding (and neglect of other public facilities/services) makes taking the bus needlessly bad.
It's not hard to carry a reasonable amount of groceries on the bus with a small cart, like this. We always called them schlepalongs.
Added bonus you can take a nap to/from the grocer.
That's an interesting conjecture. Intuitively, I know that dirt roads require drivers to go at lower speeds, which probably reduces tire wear. Dirt is softer than asphalt, but might contain sharper rocks that could create more friction and potentially increase tire wear; gravel more so.
This article from Lowne 1971 discusses the matter, but I can't access it. All it says in the introduction is that "Increase in roughness of the surfaces was found to have a relatively small effect on wear, the major factor being surface harshness."
Pohrt 2019 writes:
So speed and surface material are probably relevant to the amount of tire microplastic emitted into the environment. I think that higher speeds cause more wear, as do rougher roads, but I'm not sure how much. Theoretically, if the data shows that speed has a dramatically higher impact than the roughness delta between a paved and unpaved road, then unpaved roads (with their lower speeds) probably cause fewer tire particle emissions. But if these two factors are approximately equal in significance, unpaved roads are probably not any better at avoiding microplastics, and might be worse. And it very much depends on the road material.
Sci-Hub Link ft. two pages of pictures of gravel
This may depend on the dirt road.
I live in an area with a lot of dirt roads, and they come in two flavors: