this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Turns out most car pollution is actually from rubber tires flaking off and putting microplastics in your lungs.
This gets worse the heavier the car is, and because electric cars are heavier, theres a chance that EVS could actually be worse for particulate emmission than moderately efficient regular cars.
Wear is nonlinearly dependant on number of cycles, materials, and load. I've not seen anything in the litterature that indicates rubbers can maintain safety while decreasing their amount of particulate pollution. In fact, ive seen that they are a direct trade with one another.
Lighter cars being forced to drive slower, would do something about it. Also, simply restricting the number of cars in a city the same way we restricted the density of coal burning power plants in a city would also solve the problem in the exact same way.
Non-rubber materials such as steel do not have this problem, which is why trains are good.
Oh that's excellent news. I hope this won't be used an excuse to neither lower vehicle speeds nor improve the places that we live. I also don't know if this will offset the doubling or tripling of the average automobile in terms of weight that is happening. Also, I fear that if these tires are even slightly less profitable to create, they will not be adopted, rendering fixation on them worse than useless.
It's also a massive issue that some tires and asphalts are far quieter than others, which makes the people forced to live near high speed car infrastructure substantially less miserable. Noise induced stress is one of those health effects that I'm personally too anxious to read in detail about, as it scares the hell out of me. It'd be wonderful if quieter asphalt and tires were also the same kind that were less polluting, but I have learned that tech brained ideas pitched by car companies claiming to solve their massive problems rarely do.
Also, perhaps "EV magazine" has a vested interest in portraying inherent problems with automobiles as non-inherent?
I don't want less car induced lung cancer, I want no car induced lung cancer.
Halving vehicle weights or ranges or top speeds would also nonlinearly decrease tire wear while also decreasing vehicle cost and danger to others, but here in the US none of those things are happening. Instead, every possible negative attribute is worsening, along with corresponding fluff pieces and propoganda to convince truck owners that they aren't doing the harm that they are doing. I also feel terrified that these fluff pieces are poisoning wells of activism around the world, harming the entire human species rather than just the imperial core.
It's true that smaller, two wheeled vehicles are drastically better for the environment, and the fact that so many cities in europe and southeast asia are able to exist with so few "cars" is a disagreement I have with your last, excellent sentence. I very much wish I posessed the intelligence to separate Private automobile ownership from Commercial automobile ownership, but I forget to most of the time. I do genuinely believe that private automobile ownership should be as rare as policy can make it, just like it is (kind of) for airplanes in the US.
Thank you for the excellent link.