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Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#401

Post by Saline9515 »

Agingcoder wrote: post #362
Saline9515 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the vote was pure communication by the mayor, it didn't have a budget, nor a list of the streets, nor any details. Paris' administration is rife with corruption and mismanagement, so voters weren't very mobilized for another PR coup.

Mismanagement is (very) well documented but corruption is a very serious accusation. Do you have examples ? ( that don’t go back to Jacques Chirac )

I would suggest to look into the various whimsical subsidies of the city hall, the very expensive procurement of useless products or the ruinous public housing policy, that all serve to help the friends of the mayor and the constellation of fake associations that support her. All has been also documented, and has been mentioned repeatedly by the press.

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#402

Post by Saline9515 »

SettembreNero wrote: post #367
Saline9515 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the vote was pure communication by the mayor, it didn't have a budget, nor a list of the streets, nor any details. Paris' administration is rife with corruption and mismanagement, so voters weren't very mobilized for another PR coup.

Informative panels about the vote where pretty much everywhere around the city.

And yet they couldn't even name one street that would be turned into a pedestrian one! Or give a budget! World class management right here heh?

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#403

Post by Saline9515 »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #305
Saline9515 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, however there is little urban planning for whole metro, and the administrative level we are talking about here is the intra-muros one. When the mayor decided to reduce the speed on the outer loop, she didn't notify nor discussed with the rest of the metro, for instance. And the measures discussed in the article are specific to Paris.

> Yes, however there is little urban planning for whole metro Paris biggest infrastructure project for the past 20 years is called "Grand Paris" and revolve entirely around the whole metro. Actually there is literally no urban planning not involving the whole metro. And yes, lowering the speed limit involved multiple consultations with the prefect and the region because it impacts the whole metro. Considering Paris w…

Le Grand Paris...mostly doesn't involve Paris, as it's a new metro loop around it.

Besides, what your say about the speed limit is false, the mayor didn't wait for the State's answer and decided unilaterally. The State and the region didn't agree with her: https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2024/09/09/anne-hid... https://www.lepoint.fr/politique/la-region-ile-de-france-ref...

You can consider as much as you want, it is not unified. The result is that Paris has an anti-car policy, but the neighboring towns are very pro-car, creating a system where Parisians can't own one, but have to bear their neighbor's who use them to get into the city.

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#404

Post by Saline9515 »

seszett wrote: post #315
Saline9515 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that, among casualties, you create an environment that is hostile for families and disabled people.

> an environment that is hostile for families I don't understand this part, I read it quite often but... well, we are a family with young children, and although we do have a car we only use it once a week to go to the grand-parents that live 100 km away from here. A city with less cars is great especially for families (though I would argue that cities themselves are not so great for children, but the comparison here…

I have very two kids, plan to have three. Cargo bikes are not practical, are easily stolen, and are not safe to transport children, especially under 6 years old. Besides, when doing groceries for 5 once a week, I regularly fill my 500L car boot, so an equivalent cargo bike with at least 3 seats and a large boot... would just be a car. Which you have, and use once a week.

Or when you need to go to the doctor. Or when your wife is sick. Or if you have an urgency. So, as a family, you still need a car.

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#405

Post by thehappypm »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #139
thehappypm wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“They weigh more” is something I kinda have a problem with. People act like EVs are these behemoths, but your typical EV is hardly an outlier. The Tesla Model 3, for example, weighs as much as a Honda CRV. Yes, that’s a different car class; but nobody looks at a CRV and complains about its weight and the environmental impact of that weight on air quality nearly the same way.

People who care about the externalities of unnecessarily large and heavy vehicles do complain about compact utility vehicles, aka “I want to sit higher up”. A model Y would be the comparison to a CRV (model Y is 400 pounds / 10% heavier).

I mean, I totally get the criticisms that you see of people having unnecessarily large SUVs, like really who needs an Escalade. But a CRV? Like a Model Y with one passenger weighs the same as a CRV with 3.

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#406

Post by verteu »

nashashmi wrote: post #387
davidw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that tires produce a lot of particulate matter, even EV's contribute to pollution significantly.

Wouldn’t that mean bicycles contribute to air pollution?

It's proportional to weight, so I imagine bicycles are negligible.

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#407

Post by TulliusCicero »

Saline9515 wrote: post #157
masklinn wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's the people who can't afford to live in the city who need them to get there. What are you talking about. Paris's public transport reaches out 60km away from the city, and that's not including mainline trains (including high speed). The people who can't afford to live in the city have taken public transport to get there for 50 years.

A lot of economic activity requires cars. Delivery, workers coming with equipment, waste management, and so on. Every construction worker in Paris will tell you that it's very difficult to work there, and that they have doubled their prices as a result.

Most of the cars are not people using them for "economic" reasons.

And even some of those can use bikes depending on the specific thing (some delivery workers).

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#408

Post by pbronez »

impossiblefork wrote: post #288
10-1-100 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also worth noting that with modern emissions standards (and transition to EVs), over 50% of handful particulates come from tires, brakes, road surface wear, and resuspended dust: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/non-exhaust-particulate... I don't think there's any healthy level of private cars coexisting with humans in a city, without even considering the more immediate harms from crashes, etc.

What if the cars were made really light? Four bicycle wheels, as many batteries as you can safely put on something supported by four bicycle wheels, an aerodynamic CFRP bubble for the driver etc? I think such a vehicle can be better than one thinks, with acceptable range, acceptable particle emissions, acceptable noise levels; and I think they could easily get to 80 km/h safely.

Aptera is shooting for 2,200 lbs with enough performance to handle highway speeds with two people and some cargo. It has three wheels and extreme aerodynamics.

https://aptera.us/article/how-does-the-weight-of-aptera-comp...

Looks like the Renault Twizy is only 990lbs with a 28 mph top speed, so a much smaller vehicle.

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#409

Post by AnthonyMouse »

rangestransform wrote: post #248
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even have to go to a different class. A Model 3 weighs about as much as a BMW 3 series and both weigh slightly less than the average new car.

This is as much of a criticism of bmw as a compliment to Tesla, the new M5 weighs more than a similarly fast lucid air

A lot of this is modern safety features. Crumple zones and stronger roofs add weight, more weight implies bigger engines, bigger engines require stronger frames, soon the average car is two tons. Volvo S60, Mercedes C class and Audi S4 are also a similar size and weight. The makes from the US and Japan are a little lighter but not dramatically lighter and their safety ratings are also a little worse.

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#410

Post by bcrl »

sightbroke wrote: post #338
bcrl wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you realize that one of the reasons for the swappable batteries on various Thinkpads is so that you can hot swap batteries without powering down or rebooting? I've never had an issue with the connectors for the batteries of the ThinkPad, and being able to swap in a spare fully charged battery has been very helpful many times when out doing field working all day long. What is an issue are the little plastic tabs on…

I could be wrong but the currents and voltages for EVs are rather bit more dangerous and taxing than that typically found used in laptops. Which I think the person you replied was partially attempting to point out.

My point is that hot swappable battery packs have benefits that outweigh the cost of the connectors for the people that have a use case that needs them, as the grandparent referred to in Thinkpads. Not everyone fits in the constraints of design space chosen for a given product. There's a reason virtually every modern computer has a means of adding expansion devices.

Making a high voltage connector is well understood problem space. Every electrical engineer knows how to deal with ramping up current when a power supply is plugged in or turned on (inrush current specifications are most definitely a thing), and the entire electric grid is based on sizing, insulating, spacing and switching conductors appropriately for the voltage and current being used. Moreover, high voltage battery packs tend to have switches / contactors on the battery pack that keep the high voltage off until the connection is securely made and enabled, hence why even Telsas require a functioning low voltage battery to start the system.

There are also certain use-cases that are likely best served by putting battery packs in a trailer. Take the trucking industry: going by the charging requirements of a Tesla semi (1MW for 30 minutes), replicating your typical truck stop turns into a huge problem for the grid -- you'd need upwards of 50MW of charging capacity to replicate the flow of diesel coming out of a bank of 10 fuel pumps (sorry, I ran the thought experiment on that one back when specs were first released). Having a battery pack attached to the trailer that gets charged at a more leisurely rate at the warehouse while it is unloaded and re-loaded over a couple of hours is far more scalable than charging the truck in a few minutes at a truck stop. Charging overnight while the driver sleeps is fine, but getting the 8-12 hours of runtime for a workday in a semi is a heck of a lot of battery.

The dangers can be mitigated -- that's the entire raison d'etre of the electrical engineering discipline! Otherwise you wouldn't be able to safely charge an electric car at a 350kW rate these days at charging stations all over the world with a connector that is deemed safe to be handled by random humans. It's not like the software industry where we throw half baked shit at the wall and see what sticks when users encounter it by running an A / B test in production....

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