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Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics

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Re: Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics

#411

Post by newsclues »

badtension wrote: post #249
mlsu wrote: post #166

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…

That's why so many people are cautious about "EVs to save us all", to put it mildly. We are so focused on climate change and greenhouse gases that we do not see a lot of other issues and may exacerbate some of them in the process of decarbonisation.

I wonder if heavy EVs cause more tire and brake dust.

Re: Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics

#412

Post by dragontamer »

swores wrote: post #129
Stinky_Lisa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last mile can be resolved with drones and bikes. I wouldnt even be opposed to consider going back to horses.

Are horses actually environmentally friendly? I know that having a pet dog can be one of, if not the most, un-environmentally friendly things a person can do due to the amount they eat, so I could imagine horses having the same problem and not being as good as electric cars yet alone electric bikes, but I don't know anything about horses so maybe they're very efficient eaters? I do know that back before cars, places…

Horses are far more inefficient at carrying than cars. That's why we switched to cars so quickly.

This caused a cascading set of improvement. Horses needed *literally* tons of horse-bread to function well. And those *literal* tons of horse-bread turned into *literal* tons of horse-poop.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-horse-bread

> According to some estimates, medieval horses consumed about 20 pounds of food per day.

Note: a "day" of travel was ~30 miles back then.

It gets worse: you need horse-bread (and the waste / horse-poop) to _move_ horse bread into the cities, where all the horses were.

Alternatively, consider that one-gallon of gasoline (~6 lbs) would also travel 30 miles today, but also carry far more load. What, our typical car is like 200 horsepower today? So one gallon of gasoline is roughly the strength of a 200-horse carriage?.

Its an absurd comparison point. We're realistically looking at 1-gallon of gasoline (and its associated waste product) vs something like 4000-lbs (ie: 2 tons) of horse bread (and its associated waste product/2-tons of horse poop).

------------

Gasoline, for all of its faults, largely turns into CO2. Which escapes into the atmosphere and floats away. But imagine that for every gallon of gasoline you used today you created 20lbs of horse-poop somewhere instead.

Horse poop is something you'd need to scrub out of the streets every night, and it would infect the local rivers each time it rained.

The idea of horses being more environmentally friendly is a laughable myth. They're incredibly dirty creatures, and the poop problem alone would cause a significant rise in infections above-and-beyond anything this microplastics problem has caused, I promise.

Re: Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics

#413

Post by dukeyukey »

CableNinja wrote: post #80
undersuit wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should walk as far as they are willing to walk.

As i mentioned in my other post. Thats not far for most people. More than 1/4 mile and people will not hesitate to get the car

Do people who are otherwise well genuinely take a car 1/4 of a mile?

Re: Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics

#414

Post by dublin »

jayd16 wrote: post #304
badtension wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why so many people are cautious about "EVs to save us all", to put it mildly. We are so focused on climate change and greenhouse gases that we do not see a lot of other issues and may exacerbate some of them in the process of decarbonisation.

This sentiment is just contrarianism, I think. I've lived in Los Angeles my whole life and the difference that clean air standards make is obvious. The black dust isn't just tire and brake dust. It's also soot and it used to be much much worse. Nothing is a silver bullet but I'll be much happier when we're done with ICE noise and exhaust.

Due to their vastly greater mass and torque, EVs produce far more tire pollution than ICE vehicles do. In addition to that, tire dust is a far larger part of the overall pollution from operating a car than even the emissions from an ICE car. "Research done by UK-based independent testing company Emissions Analytics showed that used tyres produce 36 milligrams of particles each kilometre, which is nearly 2,000 times higher than the 0.02 mg/km average from exhausts."

Article here: https://earth.org/tyre-pollution/ Research here: https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/tyre-emissions

Re: Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics

#415

Post by nicoburns »

valianteffort wrote: post #276
dlahoda wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EV bikes sure. price and weight of good EV bike dropped for last 5 years.

I don't know where you live but everything is too far apart in American suburbs. How you would fix that without tearing it all down? And it's totally impractical for transporting a family around. Road tripping. Visiting far away family. Day at the lake or beach. Going camping. How do you convince people to give all of that up and just be content with whatever is 15min away.

You don’t have to tear it all down. Just tear some of it down. For example, you could tear down a single house and replace it with a shop, and suddenly a whole neighbourhood would have a shop within walking distance.

Re: Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics

#416

Post by zbentley »

ip26 wrote: post #407
bmitc wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Your problem with EVs is that they don’t eliminate the idea of cars? Let me guess, your problem with the Impossible Burger is that it doesn’t eliminate the idea of eating meat? Entangling ideology with progress is a recipe for getting nothing at all. We see this consistently in climate activism and drug activism. If you try to use a crisis (say, global warming) as a wedge to force your ideology (say, austerity) on th…

That's a disingenuous response. The idea of cars and car culture have significant negative externalities (the tire pollution in TFA/GP, shitty urban planning, classism/marginalization of people who can't own cars, and so on). Those externalities might be worth it, or they might not.

But that's not "entangling ideology with progress", that's just ... pointing out the drawbacks of a progressive initiative (EVs).

Put another way, the idea of a burger decoupled from the beef industry has few negative externalities. The idea of a car decoupled from fossil fuels does.

Re: Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics

#417

Post by michaelmrose »

abecedarius wrote: post #382
bmitc wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robotaxis don't have anything to do with and certainly aren't dependent upon EVs. I highly doubt robotaxis ever make it. And at that point, why not invest in other infrastructure. It's pointless to have big vehicles carrying one or two people.

Once cars start being designed for robotaxi use, it makes economic sense to be much smaller: most rides are one-passenger. (Though who knows what crazy outcomes you end up with under the regulators.)

This is an excellent point here are a few more.

EVs are usually designed for consumers convenience insofar as being able to travel a substantial distance between charges to accommodate a minority of actual use when user may need to travel further than the average commute inside the city. A company that operates a fleet of taxis can purchase a very large number of short jaunt single/dual passenger EV and a much smaller number of large vehicles and task the former with the majority of rides either charging frequently when unused or hot swapping batteries when theirs get low. Therefore weight and ergo tire dust might be decreased even more so than one might imagine from size alone due to the reduced battery needs.

One might also suppose that in exclusively urban environments it might make sense to provide harder tires designed to produce less dust and less aggressive driving than human drivers to the same end.

Re: Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics

#418

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

abecedarius wrote: post #382
bmitc wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robotaxis don't have anything to do with and certainly aren't dependent upon EVs. I highly doubt robotaxis ever make it. And at that point, why not invest in other infrastructure. It's pointless to have big vehicles carrying one or two people.

Once cars start being designed for robotaxi use, it makes economic sense to be much smaller: most rides are one-passenger. (Though who knows what crazy outcomes you end up with under the regulators.)

Most car trips today are single person and yet cars are enormous and getting bigger all the time. It's not the regulators, it's the consumers that want the crazy outcomes.

Re: Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics

#419

Post by baggy_trough »

V__ wrote: post #369
baggy_trough wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to know why you think cars are not inherently better as it seems very obvious that they are. That is why people overwhelmingly prefer to use them.

People prefer a lot of things, it's almost never an indicator for what is better or worse. By most metrics, cars are a worse alternative. However, if the infrastructure has already been built around cars, it's hard to change that.

I very much doubt that cars are worse by most metrics, especially the metrics that count.

Re: Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics

#420

Post by bmitc »

abecedarius wrote: post #382
bmitc wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robotaxis don't have anything to do with and certainly aren't dependent upon EVs. I highly doubt robotaxis ever make it. And at that point, why not invest in other infrastructure. It's pointless to have big vehicles carrying one or two people.

Once cars start being designed for robotaxi use, it makes economic sense to be much smaller: most rides are one-passenger. (Though who knows what crazy outcomes you end up with under the regulators.)

I doubt that's the case. And how would that work?

If we look at the economics of Uber and Uber Eats, we see that they have shifted to ride sharing and also delivery sharing. In that, it makes more sense to bundle up multiple people and deliveries into one. Doesn't that sound a whole lot like buses?

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