yeah and tyre abbrasion correlates with weight, which given the current trend of “Same car but now EV = lots heavier” that one’s just gonna get worse, same for brakes. Pretty much just trading exhaust particles for more particulate dust from tyres and brakes
@showmustgo@Masimatutu I wonder if the tires edison invented that were made from golden rod would have been any better. it was more profitable to make tires how we've been doing it for 80 years.
Not by choice 😂 I’m lucky to be retired early and have a bus system that gets me where I need to go. I’ll get another car when I can but I plan to still bus around for some stuff if I do.
We recently got amtrak back where I live, booked ahead of time (prices increase as the train fills up) I can DC for $30 round trip and nyc for $60 round trip. On my last nyc trip coming back, I was set up in the Cafe car on my laptop and chatting with people - one by one 3 of us busted our respective liquors out offering them around and made a party of it.
@Franzia@Facebones I have only driven three times in the past 13 years. It's one of the benefits of having lived in cities where you don't need a car to survive (Bogotá, Colombia; Genoa, Italy; and NYC). I wish your city can become like this soon, and you don't have to drive ever again!
That’s still much better though. Lots of people die from lung cancer and other lung related illnesses due to pollution in cities. Also, if emissions are concentrated somewhere else it’s more economical to treat them, instead of being spread out in an urban area.
This whole crap that something has to be 100% perfect to be a proper solution has to end. I’m against the use of cars, but let’s be seriously, they will never go away.
Exactly, also electricity from fossil fuels is still cleaner, the process at the plant is way more efficient and way more scrutinized (check every car and every producer and every user or check plants, which works best?)
They eliminate a part of the emissions, since one big engine (like a power plant) can be run more efficiently than many small engines (in individual vehicles).
Similarly, transporting electricity through wires creates less emissions than transporting fuel with trucks. Both serve the purpose of refueling other vehicles.
Even coal powered EVs are better than gasoline cars.
I feel the most consequent stance is to demand all the things. Not to reject all the things except for the one pure solution.
As long as ICE vehicles are still sold, even make up the most of the sales, supporting EVs is moving in the right direction. At the same time, even better solutions can be demanded and supported.
The point is that electric cars are shit, have never been a solution to anything, and that they shouldn’t be presented as one, doubly so when as a technology, public transport exists.
We will get public transportation from one million people city to the next in billionaire tubes. And exploited drive-app drivers will drive people around inside them, because public transportation isn’t flashy or profitable enough without the vacuum and the time savings.
I’m not unsympathetic to the fuckcars movement, but I have to ask about the road salt. When it snows and the roads are icy, what’s supposed to happen? What’s the plan for getting around, for getting to work, for getting to school? We can be using beet juice and other less impactful de-icing brines, but you still need the cars to get people where they need to go. Is the argument that people should stay home? Are we suggesting that colder climates just shouldn’t be populated? Busses need the road salt, too. Trains and trolleys de-ice their tracks. Even urban areas where you can walk everywhere need to salt the sidewalks.
This incidentally is why used school buses from Colorado are highly desirable in the skoolie community (a skoolie is a used school bus converted to a motorhome). In addition to the generally high-quality transmissions and retarders (essentially for handling mountainous terrain), the “sand” you use doesn’t promote rusting-out of the bus bodies like road salt does. In a sense, though, this is still bad for the environment: the extended lifespan of these vehicles keeps them on the road spitting out carbon dioxide longer then they otherwise would.
Where I live it’s common to spread gravel on the snow to increase grip. And then, of course, it is expected that everyone has the appropriate shoes and bike tires to not slip.
And even when salt is used, cars need a lot more salt per person than other modes of transport does.
If it’s cold enough to freeze the ground, I’m not riding my bike. First, having the right tires is one thing, but black ice and surprise potholes will eat your snow tires. Second, it’s going to be too cold to be out in the cold air for the several hours you need to bike to school or work.
Busses require the same amount of roads as cars. So you’re going to need the same amount of salt for busses. You might need less for sidewalks, but that’s only because people cannot walk as far as they can drive.
If everyone who normally takes the car would switch to taking the bus, all of a sudden you’d only need one lane in places where you previously needed two or three, because cars are very space-inefficient, so that makes a big difference.
Also, it’s not quite true that they’d require the same amount of roads. I don’t know about where you’re from, but where I live buses use about a quarter of the roads and you can still easily get anywhere by bus.
Additionally, salt isn’t used for rail vehicles at all.
I think public transit is important, good for the environment, and should be a much larger budget item everywhere.
But your math simply isn’t true everywhere. You can’t take 20 cars off the road and put them all on a bus, because those 20 cars aren’t going to the same place at the same time. Urban areas that already have busses blanketing the city and running constantly, the math works and you just need additional busses to up capacity. But for where I live, on the edge of suburban and rural areas, you’d need a thousand more busses on the road to cover every route and destination. And these are places where most roads are only one lane in each direction. The major highways would still need several lanes because of the additional busses to fill demand for additional routes, and smaller roads would need to be widened in many places to allow for the larger turning radius of a bus.
So you need the same amount of salt to cover the same amount of road. Maybe some areas could recapture a lane or two for bike lanes and pedestrians, but you still need to salt those, and they won’t have the benefit of being driven upon, which crushes ice and moves it out of the way. One or two slip and fall lawsuits later, and municipalities are just going to close them any time there’s a little snow.
Once again, I’ll say that the argument against cars is compelling. We should work to provide more public transit, because it is better for society to have reliable public transit. We should protect bike lanes, because it is better for our health and the environment, and encouraged freedom and development for adolescents. We should make more residential areas walkable because it is better for communities to be walkable. It fosters relationships among neighbors, encourages the support of local businesses, and improves the health and wellbeing of everyone who lives there.
Those are the arguments that get you there. Talk about the good it does, not the bad it doesn’t. People who don’t already agree with you will pick the one thing that doesn’t ring true and key in to ignore and dismiss the rest.
And even when salt is used, cars need a lot more salt per person than other modes of transport does.
Can I get a source on this? I’m not even sure what you mean by it, because salt clears active roadways as much as it does backroads, so how is this being measured “per person”?
Where I live it’s common to spread gravel on the snow to increase grip. And then, of course, it is expected that everyone has the appropriate shoes and bike tires to not slip.
You’re talking about pedestrians, but what about non-pedestrian traffic? The roads are more than just avenues to get to the grocery store, they’re also how the grocery store gets stocked with goods for rising out storms. It how the ambulance gets to you.
And what about the disabled or elderly? Can you get a wheelchair across the gravel?
For pedestrians and bikers, you need a lot less surface to deice, plus the lower speeds means it is not quite as vital to see all the snow gone directly. And yes, you will need roads for different purposes, but you would need a lot fewer of them, and with fewer lanes, if everyone wouldn’t take the car. Also, for supplying stores, a lot of the things trucks do can easily be done by trains.
Here in Canada there are definitely de-icing/ snow removal machines used on the tracks. Large propane heaters keep switches clear of ice so they can operate. Hi-rail trucks will go ahead of trains through the mountain passes to ensure the way is clear. During particularly bad snow storms they can use machines like this to clear the snow.
The trains will also release gravel on the rail to improve braking times.
When it snows and the roads are icy, what’s supposed to happen? What’s the plan for getting around, for getting to work, for getting to school? […] Are we suggesting that colder climates just shouldn’t be populated?
This line of questioning is really important, and it’s why I think there’s no addressing our devastation of the environment without digging deep into the assumptions of our society.
Society, as we understand it today, requires all of us going to work and school every day, no matter the weather, otherwise it doesn’t work. We can’t live like that. It just doesn’t work. We exist in the world, and our attempts to pretend like we are somehow apart or above it, that our daily lives shouldn’t be impacted by it, are destructive. We just can’t be in such a hurry all the time.
So yes, when the weather is bad, we need to slow down, focusing our efforts on our highest priority infrastructure, like ambulances, with everyone else taking a beat, or even pitching in. To do that, we need to rethink our society, because as things stand now, I agree with you, that’s not really possible.
This is why I think degrowth and socialism are the only human way through the climate crisis. Capitalism is a death cult of infinite growth that forces each of us to contribute to our own destruction every day because we have to get to work to live every single day.
Yeah, I think the argument is that you shouldn’t need the cars to get people where they need to go. This can be addressed two ways: either we don’t use cars or we don’t need to go (as far).
People should be able to travel with other modes that require less salt to deice, and cities could be built to not require cars for most trips. Salting sidewalks and bus lanes is better than salting those things plus roads and highways.
It’s also worth considering that yes, people should be able to just stay home. People shouldn’t be at risk of losing their job/home because they couldn’t safely make it into work. Parents shouldn’t have to rely on school as daycare.
I’d be curious to see if urban heat Island affects salt use. Maybe if we build dense enough, we don’t even really need salt to cover 99% of the population.
So…the issue isn’t cars, it’s capitalism? All we need to do to get rid of cars and all their negative effects is rearrange our country on a socioeconomic level?
Yes, capitalism is the root problem. Some people argue that you cannot overcome climate change under capitalism (and neoliberalism, specifically).
But I think it’s unlikely we’ll be able to change the underlying system without society collapsing in some way. Or a revolution.
However, I don’t think you have to get rid of capitalism to reduce cars and make a positive impact. Climate change is a scale: the more we do now, the less bad it will be in the future. So doing something is still better than nothing, even if it doesn’t solve the problem entirely.
Reducing cars (and therefore emissions) can be helped by improving public transport and increasing the number of options for transport. In many places, cars are the only way to get anywhere, especially in countries that focus on car infrastructure. Having the options to bus, train, bike, walk, or drive will reduce the number of drivers. In the case of bike lanes, at least in my country, there is evidence that adding bike lanes increases the number of cyclists (and therefore decreases the number of cars on the road). “Build it and they will come,” if you will.
I have a car, but I most often bike or take the bus. We can’t get rid of cars entirely; there are reasons people need them (tradies needing vans with their equipment, certain disabilities needing customized transport options, courier parcel delivery, etc.). But reducing the number on the road at any time is helpful.
It also destroys the very infrastructure that it’s trying to clear snow from. We eventually need to recognize that rubber wheels on asphalt simply isn’t a very efficient or durable method of moving large amounts of stuff long distances. Steel on steel is superior in both efficiency and longevity.
The reverse is also a thing, btw. Though it still uses special rail. But some Russian evil geniuses have made a road drive-able train before, and nobody even knows what for.
Which is why the real solution is PUBLIC transit, not private motor vehicle ownership of any kind beyond small electric personal mobility like an e-bike or scooter.
We eventually need to recognize that rubber wheels on asphalt simply isn’t a very efficient or durable method of moving large amounts of stuff long distances.
I disagree here, there’s in here for cars that’s hard to do otherwise. I think the problem is more that that is also not at all what cars are primarily used for. Like even in the US 60% of trips are under 6 miles and average occupancy rate is 1,5 persons. That’s a bike ride.
Funny thing about horses - apparently when cities moved over to cars from horses they became safer. Because horses spook: and one spooked horse can spook the rest and you get a stampede.
Personally I’d rather be riding my horse from village to village over the hills - and I’m lucky enough to have had need to do that in real life. And I would prefer a city of bicycles to a city of cars. But my point (albeit meant casually) is that most of our solutions have downsides too, even the better-looking ones.
Funny thing about horses - apparently when cities moved over to cars from horses they became safer. Because horses spook: and one spooked horse can spook the rest and you get a stampede.
You seem cool enough / not carbrained that I’d like to suggest you to take a closer look at this. The perception of “horse -> car” as per transportation is pretty prevalent but it doesn’t really hold up in the sense this fun fact is often touted, it’s born out of a car based status quo applied backwards to horses mostly.
I’m happy to merit your insufficient-car-brains certification :-)
What quite do you mean? That horses weren’t used in the same way or for the same demographic as cars are now? Sure, and you also don’t refill them every 200 miles from the nearest highway hay-station. (Well, kind of…) But there were still horses clustered in many cities for a lot of the time, right? Where now there are cars? And as transport such as did use the one mainly transitioned to the other. I don’t suppose there’s hard, quantitative data on car-induced vs horse-induced deaths/injuries within cities at certain eras, but maybe someone has that data somewhere!
Actually, to go another step from your point: I suppose if cars, in their same number and usage, were traded for horses, then besides the epic problem of feeding them all, many cities would be far more dangerous now from the great horde of horses marching through every day!
I suppose if cars, in their same number and usage, were traded for horses, then besides the epic problem of feeding them all, many cities would be far more dangerous now from the great horde of horses marching through every day!
I’ll start off here: eh, maybe. Certainly a lot more full of massive amounts of poop everywhere, that was a common problem even with not every man, woman and child a horse, it’s where we got sidewalks from - so you could walk in not-poop.
Sure, and you also don’t refill them every 200 miles from the nearest highway hay-station. (Well, kind of…) But there were still horses clustered in many cities for a lot of the time, right? Where now there are cars?
Yes, but nowhere near the same extent. Check out old city street pictures from the 1910 and 1920s. Sure, you’ll see cars, they had been invented and hell, you still see horses, except pretty much all of them barring the ones with cops on it are pulling some thing or another. And also there’s trams and also there’s just a buttload of people walking - which is what most of them did.
The point I’m getting at is the notion that we basically just replaced horses with cars, for the most part, but that’s ahistorical. We’ve replaced horses and trams and walking and cycling - all of which were done a lot - with cars. People used and could use a variety of options, now, eh, not so much, they’re not really viable for a lot of people.
But then that’s not because cars are so inherently great for any and all transporation, it’s just we’ve built cities to accomodate cars first, foremost and nigh exclusively, to the detriment of everything else. You wouldn’t find me arguing to bring back the horses, but trams, cycling, walking? Absolutely.
Because we have pretty much gained nothing from cars. People still have roughly the same commute as before - they just live further away and travel the same time, except now the societal cost of doing that is 10x the price per trip. People have a time budget for travel, not a distance budget, and that’s stayed pretty much the same.
the notion that we basically just replaced horses with cars … We’ve replaced horses and trams and walking and cycling - all of which were done a lot - with cars.
Fair point
we have pretty much gained nothing from cars.
I don’t think that’s true, though. Cars bring a lot of utility; even the opportunity to live further from the workplace is not ‘no benefit’. After all, bicycles were hailed as the liberators of women, for much the same reason: ordinary women could have the freedom to travel further. I think what’s happened is that every gain is an opportunity for benefit; but also an opportunity for the greedy and powerful (not to mention lazy, deceitful, foolish, or any combination of the above) to take advantage of other people (and themselves) through. So (for example) cars bring the opportunity to work further from your house; and now many people are forced into living further from their work because employers/infrastructure expect it to be possible. Cars make it much easier to visit far-away relatives for festivals; now Americans must line up every year on Reddit to moan about Thanksgiving politics.
I will agree with you it’d be better if we restructured most transport away from cars and that we have - in principle - the options for a good solution (trams, bicycles, better-arranged-cities, etc). Still, what would the American dream be, without driving to your gym every week so you can run on the treadmill for half an hour ;-p
I’m certain dense human populations are better for the environment than non-dense human populations, because dense human populations need to be moved around less.
You’re basically advocating for human extinction in this comment.
…was pretty fucking scary. So was not being able to shoot after getting pepper spray in my eyes
Now is a good time to learn from the misfortune of others: if you’re armed at a protest, then you’ve taken on the responsibility of protection, either just for yourself or for others as well. It is therefore your duty not to be disabled by something as common as pepper spray. Get some goggles and don’t go up front without em.
Not the OP, but since the post is a picture I’m going to make a guess that the meant they couldn’t shoot pictures, not shoot a firearm. Given the fact they’re calling the vehicle a ute and it has non-US plates, I think I’d go further and say that it’s extremely unlikely that the person is armed with a firearm.
So, I think it’s kind of naive to believe that we can solve everything tomorrow/very soon with public transportation. It’s pretty easy to believe that if you define the rural/urban divide to include a lot of suburbs as urban, which sort of, gets away from the bleakness of the situation a little bit, I think. I think I remember somewhere around a third being split between each form, with a little less being in the suburbs compared to either rural or urban, so it’s pretty evident that, even of a portion of the people that work in cities, live just outside cities, those people live with untenable densities for public transportation. I think that’s solvable, right, in the long term, by local municipalities, over the course of the next 40-50 years give or take, because infrastructure gets decroded, needs to be replaced, and you can replace it in the meantime just by reworking the standards, something which is generally self-evident to voters as a better solution and creates a positive feedback loop as long as people aren’t completely propagandized to.
The only problem I think you might encounter with this is that it’s very hard to get this going in a place that doesn’t already support it at all. It’s much easier to create public transport if you have somewhere to go, if you’re already on the outskirts of a large city. If you make a walkable place in the midst of a collection of townships and municipalities which don’t support that, you’ve become less permeable to cars, and those other municipalities need to provide public transport that goes to your town where they can spend money on your goods and stimulate your local economy, and that doesn’t strike me as something likely to happen. This is the structure of lots of shitholes in america already, because the lack of density kind of lends itself towards a fragmented series of municipalities joined together with dogshit social services rather than a singular contiguous government.
But, then, I also think it’s kind of insane the level to which we accept cars and car-centric infrastructure as inevitable even within this context. If you want to slowly increase density, I think there’s really a lot of progress that could be made, not specifically by the technology of EVs, but just by making cars smaller. Like, we already see that in europe, japan, whatever. EVs have bigger batteries on average, sure, but you’re not going to see people get up in arms about the increased pollution that E-bikes cause, and that’s the same fundamental technology of a battery electric vehicle in a different form factor. I feel like the first and most obvious step towards a solution would be decreasing the absolutely extreme size of cars in the US, in any case. You can still be compatible with your 15 mile city outskirts shithole suburb while driving a car that’s the size of a geo metro or smaller. It’s worked so far for me, anyways. Decreasing size totally strikes me as a bigger win than transitioning to EVs, a higher priority, maybe, though, they’re not really mutually exclusive in any way. Smaller lighter cars can be safer in crashes because of the decreased mass, decreased need for stopping power, they can be more gas efficient, possibly much more gas efficient, especially with hybrid technologies. It strikes me as a much simpler solution, one that legitimately requires less production to solve the issue, is more efficient.
Definitely so it’s not a binary all or nothing - one way or another. It needs to be governments putting their fingers on the scale and pushing development in a way that lowers CO2 emissions, energy use, reliance of fossil fuels etc. I think some countries like the US are too far hooked on cars to think they’ll change over night to optimal urban designs, so even pushing people to use EVs, install solar on their houses etc. is a positive over what exists now. Perhaps in due course, they’ll change but it needs political will - to increase urban density, change building codes, create hubs etc.
I see them as “diet” cars. Similar to if someone is trying to cut back on sodas, switching to diet sodas is a net benefit. That’s not to say diet sodas are good for you or remotely healthy, they’re just less bad than the alternative.
Yeah, except the sweeteners they use to make diet sodas “diet” make those sodas just as bad, if not worse, than the originals. Which also works for the car analogy given the source of the energy most EVs use :/
Source? Because from what I’ve learned, they’ve studied aspartame so much now it’s almost silly, and it has never been proven to be “worse than sugar”. Though the sugar industry is really happy you believe otherwise.
A profoundly filthy coal power plant has multimillion dollar filtration the size of your damn apartment. That gross coal is scrubbed more than the gasoline from any vehicle possibly could be.
In a first world country it’s not possible to have an electric car as dirty per joule as a gas vehicle.
Further, the powertrain is direct and therefore dramatically more efficient, so on a distance basis you get an additional multiplier. That’s where the EPA MPGe comes from - total energy content of 1 gallon of gasoline, converted to range on the electric vehicle.
That’s about 33 kWh in one gallon, which is about half the total storage capacity of my Bolt EUV 2023 (65 kWh) which has about 240mi of range on a full charge, which is why the MPGe is ~120mi/gal, which for an equally polluting power source as a personal gas vehicle, is 5-6x cleaner. Public DC fast chargers are frequently exclusively renewably powered.
It’s impressive because literally every possible angle of your statement is hilariously incorrect.
Transportation (28% of 2021 greenhouse gas emissions) – The transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation primarily come from burning fossil fuel for our cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes. Over 94% of the fuel used for transportation is petroleum based, which includes primarily gasoline and diesel.2
To further break it down:
The largest sources of transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions include passenger cars, medium- and heavy-duty trucks, and light-duty trucks, including sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks, and minivans. These sources account for over half of the emissions from the transportation sector.
So the idea that transportation emissions from regular people is totally negligible compared to corporate excesses isn’t actually realistic. It’s a major chunk of it.
Exactly. Corporations ABSOLUTELY are a problem we NEED to fight. But its also not an excuse to pretend we’re all completely blameless. People get furious when you tell them we cant sit around and wait for climate change to magically fix itself or billionaires to magically become good and stop. But that WE are going to have to actually make changes and put our money where our mouths are
To be clear this isn’t quite my own argument; even though I am saying that transportation emissions are too substantial to be ignored, I am skeptical of “personal responsibility” type solutions. I think it would be better to approach this with stuff like taxing companies based on employee commutes, taxing oil, urban planning and improved public transportation.
Even those require individuals to do something though. Since the government and basically every corporation is entirely opposed to this. You still have to march and protest and call your representatives and fight for it. There’s no reality where this ever changes with no one doing anything beyond an occasional Facebook post. However, even if suddenly our politicians and billionaires all had a change of heart, the necessary changes to effectively combat this environmental catastrophy would mean a complete upheaval of our lives. Cars and animal products either cease to be made or are so expensive barely anyone can afford them. We’ll be using public transportation and bikes and eating mostly vegan diets and bringing our reusable bags to our zero waste grocery stores. Itd force people to do all the things that various groups are already trying to get everyone to do (and to be clear im not sitting on my high horse claiming i already do all that, because i dont) There’s no way through this where we solve the problem and it doesnt require all of us to change our own habits
the necessary changes to effectively combat this environmental catastrophy would mean a complete upheaval of our lives
Yes. But that doesn’t mean it makes sense to frame things as being about who is ‘good’ and who is to be blamed, or that the impetus for change should be personal initiative to adjust away from unsustainable lifestyles. What’s needed is uncompromising policy solutions, and ones that are designed by experts to actually have a direct impact. People often get confused about what matters and what doesn’t, and proportionality. For instance restrictions on plastic bags at grocery stores is totally negligible for climate change, and arguably makes the situation slightly worse. Meat consumption has a significant impact globally, but in a first world context is relatively insignificant compared to the other things we do to create emissions. The problem isn’t that people aren’t choosing to live virtuously, since even if they did many attractive definitions of virtuous would not produce the needed results, and realistically that is not a viable way for human behavior to be adjusted anyway. The problem is that the circumstances around us shape our lives, and impel us to live in an unsustainable way, and that is what has to change.
Basically I think it just has to be more things like, accepting that deliberately high gas prices are a necessary sacrifice for the wellbeing of humanity, rather than asking everyone to choose to drive less and pat themselves on the back when they manage it and feel shame when they do not.
Or we could, you know, follow previously established methods of building vehicles that make pedestrian death and dismemberment less likely.
No, no, no. Americans need them this way apparently for some inexplicable fucking reason.
So instead of just designing them with pedestrian safety in mind to begin with, we are just gonna slap on more fucking band-aids (like cameras) that do fuck-all.
fuck_cars
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.