261–270 of 336 posts
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> Road wear scales with the fourth power of axle load, so heavier vehicles do much more damage than one might expect. Yes. Electric vehicles with their heavy batteries also make things worse.
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.
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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.
Have you been to a Texas city? They're full of F-150s driving around a single person and an empty bed on paved roads.
Sure, farmers and contractors use trucks as trucks, but thousands of people use them as commuter cars. Most pickup trucks are used as trucks once in a blue moon.
This is the perfect opportunity to link people to Robert Heineken’s story: the Roads Must Roll. In it, there are a series of road towns, where roads are more like moving sidewalks. Very neat stuff, I read it as a teenager and then re-listened to a great audiobook version recently too (bundled with the man who sold the moon, which is the prophecy foretelling of Elon musk) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must…
One beer too many? Or an illiterate autocorrector?
Should be Robert Heinlein.
:-)
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That doesn't make sense to me either. Take a busy German highway (as I don't know the average load on US ones), easily 100k cars per day. There are parts of highways which don't get replaced for 20 years easily. Plus apart from tiny fraction of north europe (and maybe Canada?), nobody ever uses studs. Back of the envelope math tells me 1 km of highway would lose some 730 tonnes of asphalt, per year (so 14,600 tonnes…
People use studded tires the US, too.
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They're torn up from the road and rubbed off from the tyres themselves. The majority is obviously coming from the road. There's been studies done here in Sweden since we've banned studded winter tyres in some areas of Stockholm in an effort to reduce road wear and improve air quality. I don't know of any sources in English off the top of my head though. The last time I read an article about it though (2+ years ago, d…
If the particles were coming from the road then roads would wear in very visible ways. But we don't actually see that kind of wear. Roads don't typically have grooves on them where the cars go that are lower than the middle which doesn't have tires driving over it.
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Isn't one of the biggest reasons to drive a very large car safety? Unless everyone starts driving light weight cars, it seems to me that anyone who does would be putting themselves at risk in the case of an accident.
I think that's mostly a marketing pitch and an outdated one at that. Safety tech has come a very long way. It is true, but only marginally and mostly at very high speed, heavy impact collisions.
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> 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.
However, an even more material-efficient solution would be to use railways instead.
Hold on: The claim is this: > "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." It does not seem to be a mistake: > "Compared with regulated exhaust emission limits of 4.5 milligrams per kilometer, the completely unregulated tyre wear emission is higher by a factor of over 1,000." A tire might way up to 15 kilograms f…
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I think that's mostly a marketing pitch and an outdated one at that. Safety tech has come a very long way. It is true, but only marginally and mostly at very high speed, heavy impact collisions.
I'm not so much meaning safety technology as raw size. To give an extreme, in a collision between a full size SUV and a Smart Car I would expect the driver of the SUV to be more likely to survive.
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I cannot believe a studded shoe would have any impact whatsoever on a concrete pavement. Human weight is nothing compared to that of a car.
Weight of a masonry hammer is nothing compared to the weight of a human, yet it can destroy concrete with ease. I'd guess it depends on how and how much you walk on what kind of pavement with what kind of studded shoes. Damage can realistically be imperceptible or ugly.
The masonry hammer runs on much greater speed, with much more force, a lot more often then the human steps on the peace of concrete being taken apart.