171–180 of 188 posts
Brake dust is such nasty stuff, yet we place schools and homes right next to the rivers of pollution that we call highways. I'm hopeful that we will legalize the building of less car-dependent housing, but until then at least EVs will help.
Just adding: On highways, there will be less "breaking" vs. (e.g.) highly frequented intersections in cities.
> As it has become more and more untenable for anti-EV propagandists to deny the air quality benefits of EVs, a common refrain from them has become “but tailpipe emissions aren’t everything, what about brakes and tires, huh?!” What is this website? Tell me about the story, don't argue with imaginary haters and trolls. The writing is so poor there.
Used to see a bit of it on Twitter before it went downhill under Musk and I abandoned it, but its algorithm used to be better at keeping that kind of stuff mostly siloed so mostly people who wanted to see it would.
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There are plenty of these sorts of comments here on this post.
So that nonsense didn't even help? Great.
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So putting this aside, the elephant in the room is still the weight of the EVs, tire wear is one thing but the roads are also being worn at a much faster rate due to the weight of the cars. When EVs do have to brake and regenerative is not enough it needs to stop more inertia due to this high weight.
A Tesla 3 is 5% heavier than a BMW 3. First generation ICE conversions were heavy. Cars properly designed from the ground up for EV aren't as much.
I'm a huge proponent of biking and electric bikes but there is too bad infrastructure, storage, safety concerns etc that are not being addressed properly. For instance I wish I could buy a Cargo bike and use that for grocery shopping and most other transportation of my kids but I don't have room in our bike storage (where I've had two bikes stolen) and I don't have room in our storage room and live in an apartment. The cars parking take up more square meters than the squaremeters of the building or close to it while the bike storage is a fraction of that.
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It is amazing how much concern trolling there is about EVs on a site like this.
One has to wonder who creates a fresh account just to troll against EVs. Fossil bots perhaps.
Still you have a good point, one should be skeptical of what is written by bots.
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One has to wonder who creates a fresh account just to troll against EVs. Fossil bots perhaps.
I'm not a bot but I regret posting that as my first comment and to be honest I didn't read the article before it was just my thoughts from prior knowledge. I've been on Hacker News for many years but decided a week ago to make an account. Still you have a good point, one should be skeptical of what is written by bots.
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> If you think all truck owners actually need one, count how many of the ones you see are carrying some load and do the math. Okay, let's do the math. Suppose you need a truck once a week and it costs $100 to rent one. To rent one would then be $400/mo, which you haven't got. You could buy both a truck and a car and only use the truck once a week, but between payment and insurance then that's again several hundred a…
You forgot cost of fuel(this alone likely offsets your imaginary rental cost), higher insurance rates for trucks(they kill people in routine accidents), cost of extra tires(trucks eat through tires), and higher cost of ownership in general. If you're using a truck as a work truck it'll also need to be replaced much quicker, adding to the overall cost. Trucks are expensive for the owner and society. Also, the majority…
Does it? Toyota Highlander Hybrid gets 35 MPG. Ford Mavrick Hybrid, 38 MPG.
> higher insurance rates for trucks
This is a https://www.bankrate.com/insurance/car/truck-vs-car-insuranc...
> cost of extra tires(trucks eat through tires)
Truck tires and car tires last around the same amount of time.
> If you're using a truck as a work truck it'll also need to be replaced much quicker, adding to the overall cost.
In that case the car isn't even on the table.
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> If you think all truck owners actually need one, count how many of the ones you see are carrying some load and do the math. Okay, let's do the math. Suppose you need a truck once a week and it costs $100 to rent one. To rent one would then be $400/mo, which you haven't got. You could buy both a truck and a car and only use the truck once a week, but between payment and insurance then that's again several hundred a…
Nobody needs one once a week. Either you need for you job (and more than once a week), or you need it way less than that and renting becomes a viable option.
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You're supposed to do something about the traffic. Like build more housing so commutes are shorter distances.
More housing in _that_ model is more people with more cars on the road and needing parking spaces. The inevitable conclusion to such a model is cities like Houston, TX where everything is twice as far away because 50% of the city is just parking lot and another 25% just roads/intersections.
The existing model is already that everybody is driving everywhere, and then you need a parking space at every place for the number of people patronizing it during its peak hours. Building more housing doesn't inherently increase or decrease the number of parking spaces you need. You still need one for each car.
What it does is reduce the distance you have to drive, because then you don't have to drive through miles of low density suburbs to get anywhere. Moreover, with mixed use zoning, it puts more of the places you might want to go within walking distance, which does reduce the number of parking spaces you need at the destination.
> The inevitable conclusion to such a model is cities like Houston, TX where everything is twice as far away because 50% of the city is just parking lot and another 25% just roads/intersections.
The "problem" in Houston is that it's in Texas, which is big and susceptible to sprawl. Houston Metro has a population density of ~700/sq mi, compared to ~3200/sq mi for New York Metro. Then land is cheaper and therefore parking is cheaper and taller buildings are less economical. That's what causes everything to be more spread out.
But the problem in higher population density areas isn't parking -- when land is more expensive then you can justify building taller buildings and parking beneath the building or even multi-level parking garages to conserve space. The problem in higher population density areas is that building more of those things is now prohibited. You have a plot of land and you want to put a parking garage with 50 spaces on the ground floor, two shops on the second floor and eight condos on the third floor. You can't, because it's only zoned for a single-family home.
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The problem is this: If you try to allow a new dense development near the suburbs and make it affordable by not having minimum parking requirements, people object to it. Not because they want to live there and need somewhere to park their car, but because they don't want local housing to be more affordable or to have a bunch of young people with lower incomes move in and want to send their kids your school district.…
So, not stupid, instead only selfish. Much better.
You can't win if you're fighting the wrong fight.