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Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

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Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#101

Post by read_if_gay_ »

seattle_spring wrote: post #97
iso947 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxing by fourth power axel weight per mile sounds good $10 for a bike doing 1000 miles a year, so 1 cent a mile. Gross axel weight about 100lb. So axel weight of 1000lb would be $100 a mile. F150 at 2500lb would be $4,000 a mile. I suggest putting the first year on the sale price, so that $200 bike costs $210, and the $60k f150 costs $60 million.

Yep that's usually the response I give to folks in my neighborhood FB group. They are conspicuously absent to the conversation after that.

Well maybe because it's a total nonsense argument? Unless you actually want to kill all road transport and everything reliant on it, which is effectively everything, in which case I also think it's clear why you're not getting any replies.

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#102

Post by nitrogen »

seattle_spring wrote: post #97
iso947 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxing by fourth power axel weight per mile sounds good $10 for a bike doing 1000 miles a year, so 1 cent a mile. Gross axel weight about 100lb. So axel weight of 1000lb would be $100 a mile. F150 at 2500lb would be $4,000 a mile. I suggest putting the first year on the sale price, so that $200 bike costs $210, and the $60k f150 costs $60 million.

Yep that's usually the response I give to folks in my neighborhood FB group. They are conspicuously absent to the conversation after that.

If everyone switches to bikes, then weathering will be the primary form of road wear. It might already be so in harsh climates with freezing wet winters and hot desert summers (not sure though).

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#103

Post by tomohawk »

_Microft wrote: post #32

Maybe offtopic but a surprising bit of extra information regarding wear and vehicles: Road wear scales with the fourth power of axle load, so heavier vehicles do much more damage than one might expect. Take a 40t truck with 5 axles vs. a small car with a weight of 1t and two axles (e.g. VW Polo, maybe an older VW Golf might only weigh 1t as well): (8t axle load / 0.5t axle load) = 16^4, i.e. the truck puts 2^16 (6553…

A family member was a civil engineer in the Federal Highway Administration for many decades, specifically in concrete pavement design, and remained an a technical career path the whole time.

He had many war stories to tell related to the trucking industry. In one, they had developed a scale that could measure the weight per axle of vehicles on the roadway without requiring the vehicles to slow down. They wanted to embed these in a few places to prove how bad things really were with overloaded trucks.

The trucking industry bought off some congress critters who would only allow them to put the scale at one clearly marked location on an interstate, in one lane. The lane next to the scale lane was crushed by all the trucks driving in that lane to avoid the scale.

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#104

Post by logicallee »

_Microft wrote: post #32

Maybe offtopic but a surprising bit of extra information regarding wear and vehicles: Road wear scales with the fourth power of axle load, so heavier vehicles do much more damage than one might expect. Take a 40t truck with 5 axles vs. a small car with a weight of 1t and two axles (e.g. VW Polo, maybe an older VW Golf might only weigh 1t as well): (8t axle load / 0.5t axle load) = 16^4, i.e. the truck puts 2^16 (6553…

>Road wear scales with the fourth power of axle load

Could you explain why? (I can't view the Google books link.)

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#105

Post by agoodthrowaway »

I used to live about 4 blocks from CA-17 (a 6 lane freeway) and when we’d leave the windows open a layer of black soot would form on the window sill after a few hours. I always thought that this soot was a combination of rubber from tires and diesel soot. When we moved away, we can leave our windows open and there’s no black soot. I’ve always felt like living near the freeway was like living next door to a heavily polluting factory.

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#106

Post by aembleton »

taneq wrote: post #61
furtive808 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that rate you would burn through the whole set of tires in less than 50,000km, so how is it possible? Could it be those nubs on new tires are accounting for a majority of the waste up front?

Do most people’s tyres last longer than 50k kms? Maybe I’m doing something wrong...

I've done 60k miles (96 kms) on my current Michelin Cross Climate tyres. The front ones are going to need replacing soon; but the rear ones are still good.

That is on a 2008 Toyota Prius so not the lightest of cars.

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#107

Post by SilasX »

iso947 wrote: post #78
seattle_spring wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This fact is especially pertinent when folks with their F150s demand that road bikes be taxed equally to use bike lanes.

Taxing by fourth power axel weight per mile sounds good $10 for a bike doing 1000 miles a year, so 1 cent a mile. Gross axel weight about 100lb. So axel weight of 1000lb would be $100 a mile. F150 at 2500lb would be $4,000 a mile. I suggest putting the first year on the sale price, so that $200 bike costs $210, and the $60k f150 costs $60 million.

Obviously you would try to saturate such tax revenues at the actual cost of road maintenance, so you wouldn’t actually collect $4000/truck mile, but yes, that’s the approximate ratio the taxes should be relative to each other.

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#108

Post by agoodthrowaway »

hootbootscoot wrote: post #89

PARTICULATE pollution. big difference. CO2 and methane and unburned hydrocarbons are not particulates. this article is playing fast and loose with terminology and math. (1000 times worse, they claim...)

Particulate pollution has a big impact on human health and children in particular.

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#109

Post by SilasX »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #101
seattle_spring wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep that's usually the response I give to folks in my neighborhood FB group. They are conspicuously absent to the conversation after that.

Well maybe because it's a total nonsense argument? Unless you actually want to kill all road transport and everything reliant on it, which is effectively everything, in which case I also think it's clear why you're not getting any replies.

Per my other comment [1], it’s nonsense to actually collect $4000, but it’s not nonsense to have the ratios work like that.

Such a tax would eliminate marginal uses of trucks but not eliminate trucks entirely (since it would be a higher but not ridiculous tax).

It also works as a reductio against any wear-based tax on bikes, since it would imply an absurd tax on trucks.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22519021

(Edited over past hour to fix numerous typos.)

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#110

Post by londons_explore »

_Microft wrote: post #32

Maybe offtopic but a surprising bit of extra information regarding wear and vehicles: Road wear scales with the fourth power of axle load, so heavier vehicles do much more damage than one might expect. Take a 40t truck with 5 axles vs. a small car with a weight of 1t and two axles (e.g. VW Polo, maybe an older VW Golf might only weigh 1t as well): (8t axle load / 0.5t axle load) = 16^4, i.e. the truck puts 2^16 (6553…

I'd be interested to know how wear scales with tyre pressure.

The tyre pressure exactly matches the pressure on one spot on the road surface, so if pressure is higher, a smaller area of the road receives more downward force, causing it to bend and flex, and eventually break up.

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