261–270 of 524 posts
They should make pedestrian-only streets in most dense places of Manhattan and use these money to improve public transportation. Even just a few blocks of no cars would make a huge difference for livability of the city center.
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> though diesel engines spit out a bunch of bad stuff. Exactly. The noxious tailpipe emissions in a city are usually from diesel trucks, small vehicles like motorcycles (small or absent catalytic converters), modified vehicles (catalytic converter removed or diesel reprogrammed to smoke), but not modern gasoline ICE vehicles. The love for diesel engines in many European countries was always confusing to me. PM2.5 is…
When I was at the military they told us that in case of war the government would start appropriating diesel cars, since those are compatible with the fuel the military uses and that there were ancient incentives to buy this type of car to make sure there were enough of them.
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and would it be true to say that regenerative braking on electric cars reduces significantly this dust?
I recall a discussion on HN explaining that while true, this might be offset by the higher average weight of EVs, leading to more dust from the tires and the road. Again, no easy solution unfortunately, just trade offs.
One thing that irks me about these schemes is that they often ignore cities role as regional hubs -- i.e. many cities became cities because they serve as geographical gateways interlocking the surrounding region. They are happy to take the benefits of being at the hub, but (increasingly) adopt a nativistic dialogue with the rest of the spokes. I get that no one likes highways running through their communities, but wh…
This is a fixable problem. I'm still waiting on someone to do it though. NY is mostly interested in corruption from their preferred interests. (which is why they are working on a law to require a conductor on all subways instead of working to eliminate all that extra labor, instead of fixing their system so it is fast and reliable and then covers more area)
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Also noise pollution, and above ground trains are hella loud. (Or at least CalTrain and BART are...)
This is a widely debunked bad faith NIMBY talking point. A train, even at high frequencies, is less noise pollution than a highway or major road.
I'm curious how congestion pricing became a national issue. The strength of conviction people have about this policy–almost either way, but certainly among those against–seems to scale with distance from the city. Nobody in Idaho gets uppity about New Jersey's tolls. But they have strong, knowledge-free, almost identity-defining opinions about congestion charges. Is it because it's a policy that's worked in Europe an…
Probably very clear-cut, right? "No parking, no business" never made sense, but it makes even less sense in a city where cars are involved in less than a third of all trips Especially considering that * Congestion is an opportunity cost in itself already, which is paid in wasted time by all road users, impacting mostly those who spend a long time on the road, which is busses, taxis, professionals and delivery drivers…
I'm curious how congestion pricing became a national issue. The strength of conviction people have about this policy–almost either way, but certainly among those against–seems to scale with distance from the city. Nobody in Idaho gets uppity about New Jersey's tolls. But they have strong, knowledge-free, almost identity-defining opinions about congestion charges. Is it because it's a policy that's worked in Europe an…
"We should toll roads". This will reliably produce "we should all contribute through tax to the maintenance of roads and they should be considered a public good".
"We should have land value taxes". This will reliably produce "we should not have to pay rent to the government for something that we own".
A simple self-interest model will capture all participants in this discussion. This is why economically optimal policies have such opposition. People don't want to pay the price for their actions. They're ideally hoping to have someone else pay it. It is just as common for a position like funding for SF's Muni.
Propositions J and K made it clear. One said "let's raise Muni spending". The other said "if we raise sales tax, that will go to Muni spending. If we don't, the Muni spending proposition dies". People voted for the first and against the second. Pretty straightforward position: "We should spend more money but from a place that is not me".
The way welfare is organized in the US also shows this. Welfare is the largest sector of the US federal budget, and the ideal is to tax all productive capacity to pay for the aged. This aligns with the increased vote share from the aged. The classic two wolves and a sheep at dinner.
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Diesel looks good if you are focusing primarily on fuel economy (mpg / L/100km), and when companies cheat the tests on other emissions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal When you remove the cheating and give adequate weight to those emissions, diesel for passenger vehicles makes a lot less sense.
Diesel is less fuel efficient than regular gasoline except when you measure by volume. It gets fewer miles per unit of energy in the fuel.
I suspect that modern (last five years) turbocharged gasoline engines are probably approaching diesel thermal efficiency, but I don't think that it's correct to say that they generally surpass it. The gasoline Ford EcoBoost is 33% thermally efficient while a BMW N47 turbo-diesel is 42% thermally efficient, as an example [2].
[1] https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/properties [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-specific_fuel_consumptio...
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How do EVs fare in this regard? Brakes are used significantly less, but the additional weight from the batteries chews through tires faster.
I'd gonna guess "worse" Brake dust is mostly some iron, carbon, silica. Not great to ingest but very much recyclable by the environment, unlike rubber. And possibly much easier to greatly reduce (just build some shielding around the brake to catch most of the dust) than the tyre
But tire dust is definitely now the worst of the two, by far. 6-PPD alone.