Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 595 posts

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#501

Post by pluc »

globular-toast wrote: post #474
pluc wrote: post #38

Don't have to ban cars - the UK has adopted a speed limit of 20/30 mph in cities and I'm sure it helps. Surely helps with the noise and the safety

In the UK people consider "speeding" to be going 10mph or more over the limit. So 20/30mph really means 30/40mph, and in addition there are still many places with 40mph (50mph) roads going through. Speed limit signs don't work. People will drive at whatever speed feels right and this is usually way above 20mph. What works is narrowing the roads. When the carriage way is barely wider than your vehicle it magically mak…

Maybe it's just me but every car I've rented while traveling through the UK for the last 3 months starts beeping when you go over the limit. Really helps keep you under it by annoying the shit out of you.

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#502

Post by saltysalt »

sensanaty wrote: post #498
saltysalt wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why judge others for how they live, when you don't even know their circumstances?

Didn't really intend to be judgy, but are you not doing the same when calling out the "Young single urbanites who work from home/downtown"?

I'm not judging them for choosing to use public transport or bicycles, that's their right. They should not judge car drivers, but they often do and want them banned.

The secret to successful urban living is tolerance, but sadly that is in short supply.

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#503

Post by [deleted] »

bcrl wrote: post #280
rangestransform wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a stupid idea because you’d have to make fasteners and high voltage interfaces that can survive an order of magnitude more cycles than they have to for a fixed pack. It would also be significantly more difficult to use the pack as a stressed member of the car structure. It’s better to just have less batteries and use them more efficiently through weight savings.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#504

Post by sriacha »

jjav wrote: post #478
impossiblefork wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What if the cars were made really light? That is the best answer. For a little while in the 80s (remnants of the fuel crisis of the 70s) this was the trend. Go light and then efficiency is guaranteed. Combine with a small efficient engine and that's the optimal solution. A CRX HF from 1988 could do 44 MPG, with an engine that compared to current fuel injection technology is very crude and inefficient. I want to buy…

And then as cars get heavier and heavier you also have people scared to drive smaller/lighter ones for fear of safety.

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#505

Post by sokoloff »

illiac786 wrote: post #285
dboreham wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't be.

Low effort reply, really, try to put in some arguments at least. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Both upthread replies seem to evidence approximately the same level of effort to me; "It won't be faster" isn't wildly less effort than "what if it will be faster?"

Nio has fewer Nio battery swap stations operating in the entire world than just the state of New Jersey has filling stations (not dispensers, entire stations).

Nothing in the video above made me think "oh wow, that looks like that process will be a lot faster than filling up!" and several segments made it seem like there would be more time involved in just getting the car into and out of the battery replacement service bay than filling up takes. (Nio's claim of a 2.5-3 minute battery swap seems to be measuring only the swap time while the car is stopped in the bay.)

That's all before we consider the travel time to one of the stations (which is unlikely to be as close to your trip as a typical filling station because of the rarity of stations), time waiting for the car [or cars] in front of you to complete their swap (which if Nios ever became popular would likely be longer than waiting for one of the typically eight or more dispensers to free up at a filling station), nor to account for the "all long range batteries are out of stock at this location, because it's the Friday before Christmas and everyone is road tripping to visit family" NACKs that are liable to occur in a Nio-only battery swap system.

For me the killer line in the video that will make it hard for Nio to solve all of these is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w&t=270s : "Building these stations is incredibly expensive and it's no secret that Nio is losing a staggering amount of money right now..."

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#506

Post by mtalantikite »

flomo wrote: post #320
mtalantikite wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I look around on the subway here in NYC I see every type of person imaginable. There are wealthy people going to work and unhoused people and everyone in between. There are certainly transit deserts and I have friends that live in them who do have cars -- largely out in Queens, East New York, etc -- but many of the people I know in the city with cars are financially doing just fine. It's also important to note t…

True, I'm an old urbanite/suburb-hater. But because of ppl like me, I don't think there's any place left in the USA which has 'good' transit and isn't expensive. (And solutions like congestion tolls only work because of the boogieness.) What's done is done.

Yeah, agreed. We built the country for the car and there’s no easy path out of that. Every time I’m in LA I think “man we could have had a city like Barcelona” and get bummed it’s just a sprawling car dependent amalgamation of suburbs. There’s clearly demand for more cities like NYC in the US, but we’re not going to get it.

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#507

Post by sriacha »

flomo wrote: post #466
cycomanic wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chicago has a density of 4500 people per sq km compared to Bogota at 4100 so Chicago is denser? That said I actually meant Medellin not Bogota which is significantly denser. However Medellin topology makes it extremely challenging to build infrastructure, the central valley floor is more than 1000m lower than most of the suburbs. Moreover the GDP of Medellin is 70 billion compared to a GDP of Chicago of 800 billion a…

Genuinely curious, do you have a good article about Bogota? Because your entire demeanor is acting like you have some "gotcha", without advocating for anything concrete. For example, from my brief perusal of Google Maps, it looks like they have some sort of growth boundary, because it goes from dense city to farms in a sharp line. For historical reasons, America is not organized that way. (And Chicago is fucked-up, s…

Bogota is interesting for their bus rapid transit (dedicated bus lanes), which as far as I know was built out for a fraction of the cost of a metro system.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/07/headway/bogot...

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#508

Post by inglor_cz »

Kuinox wrote: post #290
ahaucnx wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that there has been fundamental mistakes and overstatements in the amount of particles from brakes in much of the secondary research in the last decades. Details: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.4c00792

Then from what the pollution in the subway come from ?

Depends on where you live. There is barely any pollution in Prague metro.

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#509

Post by inglor_cz »

thelastgallon wrote: post #500
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.

We need to start taxing vehicles based on the damage they are responsible for. The 4th Power Law is a principle in road engineering that states that the damage a vehicle causes to a road surface is proportional to the fourth power of its axle load. This means that even small increases in axle load can cause exponentially greater damage to the road. A Prius causes about 50,000 times more damage than a bicycle. A truck…

"The solution is to tax trucks 31,000 times more than cars."

OK, so what about consequences of that solution? With such taxes, I would expect the count of trucks to drop to ~ zero. Which, for many places in the world, means an abrupt cessation of any large-scale logistics.

Maybe big trucks could be replaced by a huge fleet of smaller trucks, but that also means 20x as many parking spots, drivers (there is a shortage of professional drivers almost everywhere) and much more congestion on the highways.

There aren't that many places that could shift their entire logistics onto rail. Even here in Czechia, where the rail network is about the densest in the world, we don't have much free capacity left on the main railway lines, and existing trains are chronically delayed.

Re: Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

#510

Post by [deleted] »

bcrl wrote: post #496
sightbroke wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

> These are little bit different than than what a swappable system would entail, aren't they? From an electrical point of view, swapping batteries is fundamentally the same general problem regardless of whether they are large or small: you want to avoid arcing when the connector is plugged in, and you need to avoid exposing the user to stray voltage. Sure, there's added complexity to achieve that in a safe and cost e…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN