131–140 of 336 posts
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Fall out of the air. Into the sewers. Then into the rivers, and then the sea, where they are broken up into microplastics and return in the food chain.
Rubber turns into microplastics?
Having lived next to a freeway, I found everything in my apartment covered with a sticky black dust that took hours to remove. I found embedded on books and other items years later. So, I think this has been true for a long time. What I didn’t find mentioned is these emissions were more or less localized to a small distance from the road. For example when I moved it went away. That said I’m sure it’s a nightmare for…
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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).
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Good tires driving on mostly paved roads should last at least 120k kms. In the US, you pay $120-200 per tire for those, but they also come with a warranty that will replace them for free if they wear out before the distance advertised.
That's not how treadwear warranties work. They're not "replace them for free"; they're pro-rated, and there are all kinds of restrictions and limitations. https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/tires/why-tread-life-war...
The mm^3 of rubber lost over lifetime (circumference * how wide the tire is * tyre tread depth) is approximately 2375922.431
Considering density of rubber at 650kg/m3, the weight lost over 30,000 miles is 1.54kg, which equates to 31mg/km and nowhere near 5g/km as claimed in the article. What am I missing?
> Using a popular family hatchback running on brand new, correctly inflated tyres, we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles. So this is based on n=1, very suspicious. If tires really were this big a source of PM emissions then how would levels in US cities gone down through vehicle pollution control measures. Something is not adding up here.
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…
This fact is especially pertinent when folks with their F150s demand that road bikes be taxed equally to use bike lanes.
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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.
Perhaps a inverse tax tied to economic output of that vehicle. The higher the economic contribution of the vehicle, the lower the tax. So a recreational cyclist pays more than a delivery truck because the delivery truck is contributing to the economy and not simply joyriding.
Besides, I think the economy would be much healthier if everyone was riding their bike recreationally (healthy bodies, healthy minds). And a much bigger boost to the economy than a delivery truck driving 10 miles to deliver a $2 package.
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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.
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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…
If you halve the capacity of the road, you're just going to spread the same cars (and congestion) among twice as many lights...and make traffic far worse.