351–360 of 635 posts
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This is an interesting theory, but I'm not sure you can prove it. What's a way in which the USA "subsidizes" suburbs?
Roads, utilities, emergency services…
My suburban neighborhood also has a metro tax district that funds the roads sewers etc.
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This is two different things though. Road use tax is intended to be used to pay for road maintenance and infrastructure. It's why if you live on a farm you can get tax-free diesel that is dyed red. You aren't using the road/infrastructure, so you shouldn't need to pay the tax. If the goal is to reduce tire microplastics, the tax should be specifically based on tire lifespan, which is already well known. It's called U…
>Today we tend to conflate tax… Today we conflate supplying more of our earnings to the government and solutions to problems.
Which of the two seems more feasible? An outright ban, or an economic incentive that encourages consumers to choose lower particulate tires which thereby applies economic pressure to tire companies?
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I don't think it's broken. I think it's working as intended, but what it's optimizing for (people raising families) is perhaps not what you'd like for it to optimize for. Whether it's the right or wrong thing to optimize for is another conversation, but you may be surprised about what the collective political will of the US expresses. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a voting majority support for the idea that "…
American style suburbs are worse for raising a family than living in a city. Long commutes practically remove one or more parents from the equation 5 days a week. Long bus rides compromise sleep and exercise etc. All for a back yard that’s rarely used and worse in just about every way than a nice park. What they are is a cheap imitation of the wealthy enclaves near cities that only work because so few people can affo…
Has anyone here ever lived near a freeway or even moderately busy road? I made the mistake of renting next to the freeway. Noise was perfectly tolerable, but I could not use my back porch, because after just a few weeks, everything had a fine coating of black dust. I could not keep my windows open in the summer. I was certainly breathing this vile shit the entire time I lived there. This doesn't surprise me in the le…
It’s probably mostly soot from the exhaust. I’m few blocks away to railroad (caltrain) and the windows facing the tracks have same black residue
The windows on the railway side gained a gritty, black dust. On the road side it was an oily black film.
I worked on a phd for 4 years looking into this problem indirectly and for a decade at Ohio State they have had working solutions to the tire dust issue but it is IMPOSSIBLE to get funding. A Billion dollar industry and NO ONE cares about cleaning it up if it means increasing costs by 5% or more. It has been WELL KNOWN for 50 years! We are basically aerosolizing carbon in MASSIVE amounts right where we live and work.…
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> This sentiment is just contrarianism, I think. I really don't think it is. We're thrusting ourselves into just new problems. Yes, we move away from old problems that gas-powered cars have, but we move into new problems. For one, EVs perpetuate the idea of the car, which is perhaps the most dangerous part. Then, there's all sorts of new things like building out the infrastructure required for EVs and mining the new…
Cars are selling, despite their high economic price, because they're incredibly useful . Make competing modes of transit at least one of more useful at no more cost or no less utility but at a lower cost and people will switch incredibly quickly. That's a tall order, because the modern automobile is a wonder of transport speed, comfort, and convenience.
If I can send my car out to be a robotaxi while I'm at work and/or :^) asleep, then how much do I care that MY specific vehicle return to bring ME home, when I could just use any other robotaxi available? So then I don't own a car at all and ownership elsewhere falls and the number of total cars drops to the number needed to handle only the maximum number of simultaneous rides.
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“We” is not nearly as many as you may believe. I would say most people don’t want to give up their car. That’s why people spend so much time maintaining their cars, polishing them, buying nicer ones, etc. Some people want to give up their cars, but you need everyone to want this, and they don’t. A technical solution is more likely to work than a mass social upheaval.
yeah wow when the only option people have for getting around is to drive, most people will not want to give up their car our argument isn't that everyone should just stop driving, leaving everything else as is. that would, as you point out, obviously not work our argument is that there needs to be feasible alternatives to driving, which in many parts of the world is already the case and it works great (in fact, it wo…
This isn’t the end of car related issues. But we can and should address the engineering and technology addressable things, and concurrently with the social change. As you say it’s existential. There are a lot of other issues about car culture - the extensive use of land for car infrastructure for instance, that are important, but not existential. I even think making biking safer is important, but it’s absolutely not existential. A less car dependent culture is neither necessary nor sufficient to address the issues of tire microplastic, co2 release, etc, as we still have the use of cars as they exist pervasively for other reasons than going to the store.
My point though is that people like driving so they will drive even if it kills everyone. That’s abundantly clear. People move out of urban cores into suburbs partly because of the car culture is more to their preference. That’s not a new phenomenon and it’s not restricted to the US. Many friends in UK, Holland, Germany, etc, moved out of the cities for a more suburban car centric life. So, if you can’t easily change the behavior or preference (which I never see happening in a democracy), then why not address the ways in which cars destroy the earth? The logic doesn’t make sense to you because you posed a false dichotomy. The options aren’t “destroy the earth with cars or save the earth without cars,” because cars don’t necessarily have to destroy the earth.
As an exercise of the imagination, imagine hydroelectric charged hovering quadracopter electric vehicles. They no longer produce microplastics or co2. Their batteries are 100% recyclable. What specifically would the issue be then? Is it absurd to imagine such a thing? Given current technology, it’s absolutely NOT absurd. Given future technology it’s fully achievable. Instead of flying vehicles, maybe just not touching the ground is enough? Etc. This may not be how we solve the issues, but it’s a lot more plausible in my mind than convincing everyone to pack into an urban core and stop driving to Costco.
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If we means society at large that requires a large portion of society if not more than a simple majority. That doesn’t exist for ending the use of automobiles. If the goal is the reduce the impact of automobiles, assumed from the thread being discussed, it’s not sufficient to help those who want to walk to walk to the grocery store. That’s a wonderful thing to do. But to reduce the impact of tire microplastics, the m…
> car hostile environment wow, talk about orwellian language conditioning. other people take issue with me making needless trips in urban spaces with my multiton, polluting, dangerous, microplastics emitting private automobile... poor me i live in such a car-hostile environment... give me a break
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> the noise from cars is mostly friction and turbulence Agreed. I can't even hear the engine in my car on the highway over tire and wind noise.
People on the outside can hear it though.
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Cars are selling, despite their high economic price, because they're incredibly useful . Make competing modes of transit at least one of more useful at no more cost or no less utility but at a lower cost and people will switch incredibly quickly. That's a tall order, because the modern automobile is a wonder of transport speed, comfort, and convenience.
One application of (EV) cars is the robotaxi. Once this solution reaches critical mass, car ownership as we see it today will drop off. If I can send my car out to be a robotaxi while I'm at work and/or :^) asleep, then how much do I care that MY specific vehicle return to bring ME home, when I could just use any other robotaxi available? So then I don't own a car at all and ownership elsewhere falls and the number o…