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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?

#121

Post by rcpt »

nightski wrote: post #80
ghouse wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except no. The heaviest Tesla Model 3 weighs 4,100 lbs. The heaviest Ford F-150 (the most popular vehicle in the US) weighs 5,600 lbs.

Right but people buying F-150s are not buying Teslas. The use case is quite different. My Subaru Outback (a rather large car in comparison to the Tesla) is 3,600 lbs. But I doubt the increase in weight is a huge factor in environmental concerns.

> The use case is quite different.

If you want to make this argument you should account for the weight of a loaded F150

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

#122

Post by read_if_gay_ »

SilasX wrote: post #116
read_if_gay_ wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing that the cost of bike lanes isn't just in constructing and maintaining them. Adding bike lanes in cities means dropping car lanes because there's not enough space. That ends up creating potentially huge opportunity costs.

I wasn’t missing that, I just wasn’t addressing it; I was just addressing how to assess maintenance taxes. If there are other costs of having the road there, like its real estate usage, I agree that’s another factor to consider.

Okay. If we're just talking maintenance taxes then I agree the idea isn't nonsense. Excuse the misunderstanding.

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

#123

Post by Retric »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #113
SilasX wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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=225190…

You are missing that the cost of bike lanes isn't just in constructing and maintaining them. Adding bike lanes in cities means dropping car lanes because there's not enough space. That ends up creating potentially huge opportunity costs.

Bike lanes can handle more traffic per surface area than car lanes. Utilization is unfortunately low in most areas, but capacity wise it’s a clear net gain for city centers.

Oddly enough, sidewalks are the most efficient use of space, but require good public transportation and extreme density to reach that threshold.

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

#124

Post by Sam777666 »

abyssin wrote: post #37
_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 remember a hitchhiking ride in France with a man working in the building and infrastructure industry telling me about these figures, and the intense lobbying against transporting goods on rails...

In January there was this report: Microscopic pieces of plastic have been discovered in the most remote locations, from the depths of the ocean to Arctic ice. Another place that plastic is appearing is inside our bodies. We’re breathing microplastic, eating it and drinking plastic-infused water every day.Plastic does not biodegrade. Instead, it breaks down into smaller pieces, and ultimately ends up everywhere, including in the food chain. Pieces that are less than five millimeters in length, around the size of a sesame seed, are called “microplastics.” https://graphics.reuters.com/ENVIRONMENT-PLASTIC/0100B4TF2MQ...

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

#125

Post by dragontamer »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #113
SilasX wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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=225190…

You are missing that the cost of bike lanes isn't just in constructing and maintaining them. Adding bike lanes in cities means dropping car lanes because there's not enough space. That ends up creating potentially huge opportunity costs.

Not quite IMO.

Anyone who has done any amount of virtual traffic engineering (aka: Factorio, City Skylines, OpenTTD) knows that intersections are where the bottlenecks are.

Its incredibly difficult to design a max-throughput intersection. Roads have a huge amount of throughput, most "traffic" just gets stuck at offramps and traffic lights.

Narrowing a road to make room for bike lanes is a lower cost than people might think. If you're all going to get stuck at the next intersection anyway, it doesn't matter if you're a 2-lane, 4-lane, or 8-lane road.

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

#126

Post by dhimes »

a3n wrote: post #63
_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…

> Take a 40t truck with 5 axles vs. a small car with a weight of 1t and two axles ... Truck driver. Not quibbling, just adding nuance. For your typical 40t scenario, allowed max weights are: 12,00 pounds on the front steering axle. It has one tire at each end. 34,000 pounds total on the two tandem "drive" axles on the truck. There are two tires at the end of each axle, so four per axle, eight total at the drive axles…

So it would be better to have a bunch of smaller trucks moving cargo. And that means a lot more work for truck drivers.

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

#127

Post by xiphias2 »

perlgeek wrote: post #10

Worse for what? For the humans nearby? For climate change? It would be nice if such articles stated their premises.

I have a respiratory illness from air pollution, and never had problem with tire pollution created by electric vehicles. Even with LNG vehicles I feel somewhat better.

Tires may create big particulates, but they are easy to filter. The small molecules that I am sensitive to are extremely hard to filter from the air.

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

#128

Post by chiefalchemist »

_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'll take your off-topic a step further ;) A couple days ago on one of the NPR shows they interviewed a long-haul truck driver. At one point he said (paraphrasing), "If you bought physical goods, it was transported by truck."

Given the amount of consumption (of physical goods) that's a significant amount of tire wear.

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

#129

Post by _0w8t »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #113
SilasX wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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=225190…

You are missing that the cost of bike lanes isn't just in constructing and maintaining them. Adding bike lanes in cities means dropping car lanes because there's not enough space. That ends up creating potentially huge opportunity costs.

In Oslo, Norway the city builds a lot of bike lines . It narrowed streets for cars or removed parking places. I talked with a few folks with cars in the city and their typical response that it made them to get work faster with a car. Surely they have to walk more to a parking spot, but after that they drive faster through the city. Apparently street parking creates a lot of congestion.

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

#130

Post by richk449 »

dhimes wrote: post #126
a3n wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take a 40t truck with 5 axles vs. a small car with a weight of 1t and two axles ... Truck driver. Not quibbling, just adding nuance. For your typical 40t scenario, allowed max weights are: 12,00 pounds on the front steering axle. It has one tire at each end. 34,000 pounds total on the two tandem "drive" axles on the truck. There are two tires at the end of each axle, so four per axle, eight total at the drive axles…

So it would be better to have a bunch of smaller trucks moving cargo. And that means a lot more work for truck drivers.

True, reducing the cargo would require more trucks to carry the same load, increasing demand for truck drivers.

On the other hand, wouldn’t reducing the amount of cargo a single truck can carry makey individual truck driver less valuable?

The end result would probably depend on a lot of other factors, including the supply and demand curves for alternative forms of transportation (trains, boats, investment in autonomous solutions), as well as the supply and demand curves of the goods being transported (because if the cost goes up to pay for more truck drivers, maybe people will just stop buying that product).

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