It makes sense now why they burn cars every protest (besides being fun). Pollution for a day, clean air for a lifetime
I don't view terrorism as fun. I guess other people differ.
Burning an unoccupied car is vandalism I think.
Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic
411–420 of 595 posts
Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not inherently heavier. They're only heavier if you put a long-range battery in them, even then it's not by very much, and even that may not persist as higher energy density batteries are developed. Or to put it another way, the difference between a small car and a large SUV is far greater than the difference between an electric car and a gasoline car.
A Tesla Model Y is 30% heavier than a Honda CRV. They have alot of other advantages, and are about the same weight as a three-row SUV and lighter than a Tahoe on a truck frame. We shouldn’t be singling out EVs if we suddenly care about tire wear… it’s pretty ridiculous.
The lightest current Tesla Model Y is ~25% heavier than the lightest current Honda CR-V. The heaviest current Model Y is ~12% heavier than the heaviest current CR-V (hybrid). A Jeep Grand Wagoneer is ~280% heavier than a Nissan Versa.
Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's really only a difference of a few cars then there should be a dozen other ways to get a similar effect without enacting a regressive tax. Meanwhile doing it through financial deterrence requires that someone is actually deterred. And then is that going to be poor people and small businesses or rich people and major companies?
It's not a regressive tax, and it primarily assists commuters and small businesses, and I've already explained how.
> It's not a regressive tax
It's a compulsory fee charged by the government not based on income/consumption. That's the most regressive tax. Even sales tax is less regressive than that.
> it primarily assists commuters and small businesses
Relative to any alternative that reduces congestion without charging fees, it doesn't. Even relative to doing nothing, the people being deterred are the ones paying the cost, and the people being deterred are the most price sensitive ones, i.e. the poor.
Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
These are little bit different than than what a swappable system would entail, aren't they?
> 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.
Okay maybe I miss read the initial premise but I took it as a home user swapping in-and-out modules themselves.
That would appear to me to be a significantly different engineering challenge and safety issue than what's currently deployed in consumer market EVs...
I'm not even sure the small upside here would justify the added costs and complexity either.
Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
In modern cars, including EV, polution and noise come from weight and tires and breaks; the polution levels are a sharp funxtion of speed, but the speeds at which they dont matter much, dont offer benefits either. If we had magnetic/levitated cars maybe some simple solution could be found, but with the current designs where the tires hit the asphalt it seems hard to make things environmentally friendly in a city othe…
This is a bad-faith fallacy. We had cars that emitted X amounts of tyre/brake particulate and 10X amounts of combustion residue, we got rid of the combustion part, and now we hear "OMG! 100% is tyre particulate!!!" Sure, but people won't stop moving, and there's no vacuum, you should compare brake particulate to whatever else people would use if cars didn't exist.
Hi Stavros. I would never say OMG—dont believe in deities—and I feel sorry that it came out that way. I was commenting on the GP, which was suggesting alternative ways to get similar effects to those of car-free cities, but in alternative ways. Of those possible ways, to my suprise, the large conveyor belt seemed an interesting possible next step. EVs are not reducing polution in modern cities, unfortunately. They are still way better than gas burning vehicles for a lot of reasons, including CO2 reduction, but as per studies by the Economist they are currently worse on air pollution in cities, unfortunately, due to their typical extra weight, so once we optimize life in cities, we probably want to find ways to reduce their weight and speed, and currently the straightforward solution is to reduce their numbers. As people start obsessing with detecting microplastics in the next decade, these types of changes in city life vs rural life exposure might become even more dramatic.
Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic
#416Cars in cities, let alone designing cities around cars, is one of the greatest tragedies of modern life.
It is, though the problem predates the cars. At the time cars were seen as a huge win over the vast piles of horse poop. Cities do need to be reconsidered for more public transit and more opportunities to walk, but other issues (delivery, emergency, disability, etc) have to figure in.
They were also seen as a safety win [1][2]. Horses and horse drawn carts were a lot more dangerous than most people here probably think they were.
From the second link:
> It is easy to imagine that a hundred years ago, when cars were first appearing on our roads, they replaced previously peaceful, gentle and safe forms of travel. In fact, motor vehicles were welcomed as the answer to a desperate state of affairs. In 1900 it was calculated that in England and Wales there were around 100,000 horse drawn public passenger vehicles, half a million trade vehicles and about half a million private carriages. Towns in England had to cope with over 100 million tons of horse droppings a year (much of it was dumped at night in the slums) and countless gallons of urine. Men wore spats and women favoured outdoor ankle-length coats not out of a sense of fashion but because of the splash of liquified manure; and it was so noisy that straw had to be put down outside hospitals to muffle the clatter of horses’ hooves. Worst of all, with horses and carriages locked in immovable traffic jams, transport was grinding to a halt in London and other cities.
> Moreover, horse-drawn transport was not safe. Road traffic deaths from horse-drawn vehicles in England and Wales between 1901 and 1905 were about 2,500 a year. This works out as about 70 road traffic deaths per million population per year which is close to the annual rate of 80 to 100 deaths per million for road traffic accidents in the 1980s and 1990s, although we must not forget that many people who died from injuries sustained in road accidents in 1900 would probably have survived today thanks to our A&E departments.
> Motor vehicles were welcomed because they were faster, safer, unlikely to swerve or bolt, better able brake in an emergency, and took up less room: a single large lorry could pull a load that would take several teams of horses and wagons – and do so without producing any dung. By World War One industry had become dependent on lorries, traffic cruised freely down Oxford Street and Piccadilly, specialists parked their expensive cars ouside their houses in Harley and Wimpole Street, and the lives of general practitioners were transformed. By using even the cheapest of cars doctors no longer had to wake the stable lad and harness the horse to attend a night call. Instead it was ‘one pull of the handle and they were off’. Further, general practitioners could visit nearly twice as many patients in a day than they could in the days of the horse and trap.
[1] https://legallysociable.com/2012/09/07/figures-more-deaths-p...
[2]https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/31/cars-and-horse...
Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic
#417Worth noting that 50-60% of passenger cars in France are diesel, but Paris have been gradually banning older higher emission diesels (Crit’air 3, 4, 5) from Paris. Banning cars outright also works, of course, but I suspect a lot of the reduction can be attributed to getting particularly bad diesel cars out vs. the limited areas where cars are entirely restricted.
Have other cities with similar rules seen as significant pollution drops?
Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
But this also means that almost all of the wear is from trucks. This whole meme comes from junk science ( https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/pollution-tyre-wear-... ) > we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles. 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. They took plas…
That doesn't pass a sniff test; emitting 5 grams of tyre rubber per kilometer, a 12Kg tyre would be completely vanished in 3000km but really they can last 60,000km with only the tread worn down beyond safe levels and the bulk of the tyre still there.
Looks like mg was changed to a g, though I'd suggest even then the estimate is too high (but probably to the correct order of magnitude).
Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
Massive strikes that are hard to contain got use the 8 hour work day, weekends and a lot of labor rights. Civil right movements won only because a huge portion of them were militant (back then even the National Rifle Association supported banning guns). A violent status quo necessitates violence to achieve change.
Do you perhaps see a difference between "massive strikes" and "destroying your neighbor's property?"
I don't think the massive strikes were as peaceful as you imply.
Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can. Slowly over time we need to raise awareness of the benefits of this.
Just tax road consumption so people who use the roads actually pay for them. It is amazing what this has achieved in Manhattan.
This is a bad approach. At least if its only that.
In Manhatten this works because there is already a decent public transport, already a culture of waking and an established culture of biking.
You can just force people into better cities with punishing taxes. You actually have make the roads safer, provide alternatives and so on. And this is easier said then done, almost all cities in the US have zoning codes and other laws that make it completely impossible to build decent urban infrastructure. And the traffic standards are literally 100% backwards to providing safety.
In fact, because the traffic standards are so bad that less cars actually kill more people. This is because a lot of traffic slows down vehicle speeds on avg.
So basically, if all you are doing is forcing less people to drive, without doing anything else, you are just gone make the roads unsafer, and not improve the city or the lives of most people.