Oh boy I can’t wait until all cars are electric, solving this problem once and for WAIT A MINUTE
Can anyone remind me, are heavy car batteries good or bad for tire wear?
It worse than that, electric cars have really fast tire wear because electric engines have so much more powerful initial acceleration
“high torque and high tare weight are all good because we removed all emissions!”
the humble mass production tyre:
Electrics are still phenomenonly better for a myriad of reasons but yeah, cars are inefficient and silly.
i did some write up once on air pollution concentration by geography in the he built environment and one of the heuristics i took away from it was not to live near industrial processes, combustion, or high traffic roads. and try to have lots of plants/trees around, because they filter and immobilize shit.
roads really stood out.
Just like the study in California that concluded the vast majority of microplastics in watersheds is tire particles.
Tire dust is also a neurotoxin for fish as it permeates the blood/brain barrier
The spongy material that most playgrounds and running tracks used is old tires too. A ton of kids are playing in tire dust every day by design
didn’t we already know this for a while?
I mean I always did
2/3 of 4% of measured particulates coming from tires doesn’t really match the headline? EVs are a gap filler that’s coming decades later than it should’ve and with none of the urban planning in the US to support winding down automobile use in general.
we should’ve converted the fleet to hybrids starting in the late 90s and done urban planning to reduce car dependence. A fuckload of the worst suburbs are less than 30 years old.
4% of the matter is the entirety of plastic in the air. Of which 2/3’s are from tires. I feel like the headline is very accurate? 2.66% of all particulate matter in the air is from tires. I don’t understand how EV’s would help either?
EVs are a gap filler
are you, by chance, interested in purchasing any number of bridges
how do you think construction works? especially in the united states? there are a lot of people living in the pits of suburban sprawl who cannot electively stop using cars tomorrow, and will not be able to electively stop using cars for years. they might as well be in electric vehicles rather than gas.
i love trains and bikes but the infrastructure doesn’t exist and we’re shitty at building it so I guess everybody in the lurch in the meantime is supposed to starve to death?
there are a lot of people living in the pits of suburban sprawl who cannot electively stop using cars tomorrow
We have overproduced living space just like we’ve overproduced everything else. There are 32 million empty bedrooms and this is a conservative estimate of housing usage. There are plenty of smaller cities/towns, empty units, vacant lots, and oversize houses such that you could easily fit everyone within a short bicycle ride of their downtown. For someone who has a car, and either isn’t trapped in debt or has reasonably okay job prospects, living in the suburbs is a choice.
People choose to continue living in suburbs partly because they’re constrained from imagining anything else, and partly because they swallow the propaganda that this is what a good life means.
We could take 70% of the cars off the road within a year and still be just fine. (We proved this, pretty conclusively, in a dry run 6 years ago.)
Anybody who has the ability to move further than a regular commute’s length has the prospects of living without a car, where 90% of what you need from a city is within a 30 minute bike ride and the rest is a 3-hour bus trip away, and where baseline costs (rent, water, electricity, phone bill, staple foods, produce) amount to 70 hours of low-wage work a month or less.
Most people (excepting those with chronic/acute illness) could live just fine on $30k USD per year. They don’t do this because they’re constantly chasing a bunch of optional things that you really don’t need. Not everyone is eager to shed their car dependency, but for those that do, there’s definitely a way.
there’s a ton of unexamined individualism and liberalism in this comment
I was split between making a point of living a “third-world” lifestyle, versus verging towards inviting people to come live the materially simpler life that I have, where I live and organize in accordance with the ends I want to see.
But sure, keep on saying “the poor, poor Americans are forced to live in their suburbs with 1000 square feet of building space and 0.2 acres of land per person”. I’m sure they can’t help it, if someone’s burning up the Earth’s resources at 1.5x the rate at which they’re replenished, maybe they just might be the real victim. Nothing can be done until we overthrow the whole thing; forget about intermediary steps; try not to think about the rate at which the country’s working class is moving toward revolution and how many lifetimes it will be until that happens.
housing units aren’t fungible. jobs aren’t necessarily where the housing is. A program of displacing people is not something i want the US government doing again.
none of the structure required to support what you want to do exists.
Most people in hyperexploited countries would have a
reaction to how people in this country live.The transition is not going to happen overnight for all suburban dwellers*, but an organized group of people can go live in high density (sometimes with roommates, the greatest fear of an amerikkkan that is having to share living space with someone they don’t have a chain of progenitors with) and orient around a new approach to settled places.
Jobs are largely a function of need which is a function of population; this has been the case since the dawn of civilization. Good Jobs are scarce and will get more scarce no matter what. As communists we know this, and we should also recognize that a Job is a means to making a living, and there have always been other means.
*At some point, though, we will run up against environmental or economic constraints that reveal living 10-40 miles away from all of your destinations to be futile and impractical, possibly by oil scarcity, possibly by supply chain shocks, or possibly by bankruptcy of municipalities.
We can either get ahead of the curve and live well, or we can wait until it hits us, but the exurbs are an ephemeral peculiarity of parts of the 20th and 21st centuries. One way or another, they are headed to the dustbin of history.
And I for one would love nothing more than to see the tears of the inheritance class and PMC ladder climbers when they no longer have the option to live in a McMansion.
how do you think construction works? especially in the united states?
It doesn’t, from what I can see. America only invests in more lanes. Nothing else substantial
i love trains and bikes but the infrastructure doesn’t exist and we’re shitty at building it so I guess everybody in the lurch in the meantime is supposed to starve to death
Obviously yes, unlimited genocide on all the KKKar DriverSS /s
The point is why would you stop building / inhabitating suburban sprawl if the electric car gets you there and back just fine? Like what changes here for it to herald the 2 decades of bike and rail construction?
unlimited genocide on all the KKKar DriverSS
This, but unironically
because living in the suburbs is miserable even with electric cars? we need government intervention and central planning for any of this anyway, it’ll take time and whatever you’re imagining instead would be more expensive.
optimizing for the end of suburbs as quickly as possible just because we hate suburbs isn’t the actual objective.
because living in the suburbs is miserable even with electric cars?
I certainly think so, but somehow those houses keep getting bought
we need government intervention and central planning for any of this anyway
True, I don’t blame people for buying EV cars. Either you save some money - which is good - or you pay more for the common good of reducing CO2 - also good!
EDIT: Just to be sure; doing the better thing but paying for it is bad, but like good on an individual levle
But like sticking to the US theme, the republicans aren’t going to do it and the last democratic president hooned an 8 ton E-Hummer around and then called it the future of transportation (when he wasn’t busy suggesting everybody not in a car would be required to carry a transponder so self driving cars could happen). So who enacts the change here? The suburbians sure won’t, everything is the same except their car goes MMMMMM instead of vroom now.
I certainly think so, but somehow those houses keep getting bought
a lot of that is equity firms, but we’re not building comblocks either so the alternative is legacy housing that’s unobtainably expensive or renting forever. Developers need to be prevented from building that shit, but people don’t have a lot of agency in housing, see tiny homes and van shit getting way more popular over the last decade.
there’s like a hundred things that need to happen all at once, very few US politicians are interested in making any of them happen, and in the meantime we might as well have electric cars instead of SUVs.
i’d love to ride my bike in the winter but the city doesn’t clear snow promptly enough or on sidewalks so i’d just die if i tried.
a lot of that is equity firms, but we’re not building comblocks either so the alternative is legacy housing that’s unobtainably expensive or renting forever. Developers need to be prevented from building that shit, but people don’t have a lot of agency in housing,
well, yes, again, but then also again: how do EVs change the equation here?
there’s like a hundred things that need to happen all at once, very few US politicians are interested in making any of them happen, and in the meantime we might as well have electric cars instead of SUVs.
there’s no in the meantime. All the needed changes I assume we agree on could be done in the now, but they won’t be, and they also won’t be once you exchange every ICE car for an EV because why would you? The system can keep on trucking fine with EVs instead of ICE cars, why change?
