Car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment. Urgent action is needed
Car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment. Urgent action is needed
Every year, billions of vehicles worldwide shed an estimated 6 million tons of tire fragments. These tiny flakes of plastic, generated by the wear and tear of normal driving, eventually accumulate in the soil, in rivers and lakes, and even in our food. Researchers in South China recently found tire-...
Electric cars are not THE solution.
I've been saying this for a while. Not only that, but electric cars are substantially heavier than their ICE-powered equivalents, meaning both tires and roads wear out more quickly. Plus, there's a ton of pollution and other environmental damage caused by battery production that at least partly offsets the lack of tailpipe emissions.
As loathe as I am to admit, because I'm a car enthusiast and I enjoy driving, cars cannot be the default mode of transportation everywhere indefinitely; they will always need to exist, but should mostly be for small centres with no capacity to implement transit infrastructure and last mile type of things.
Yet another example of how pretty much every problem is, at its heart, a zoning problem:
- Microplastics? Too much driving, because trip origins and destinations are too far apart to be walkable.
- Greenhouse gas emissions from cars? Too much driving because not enough walkability.
- Greenhouse gas emissions from housing? Poor efficiency because too many single-family homes exposed on all sides instead of high-density housing with shared walls.
- Greenhouse gas emissions from concrete production? Using way more of it than we really need to build huge amounts of unnecessary parking (and much wider streets than we'd need for bikes + transit + only delivery vehicles).
- High housing prices? Not enough housing density.
- Obesity? Sedentary lifestyles, i.e., not enough gym of life.
- Racism? Redlining.
- Wealth inequality? (Among other things), protecting rich landowners from market forces by eliminating competition from multifamily developers that would build out the land to its highest and best use.
See also, this video: The Housing Crisis is the Everything Crisis. He almost gets it, but fails to connect that very last dot, which is that the housing crisis is itself caused by bad, density-restricting zoning!
There is no alternative suggested. The purpose of this movement is to tax heavy EVs. I think that makes it distraction.
The smaller the EV the more range per kwh, and so smaller batteries are needed which makes them more affordable. It is not unreasonable to tax heavy vehicles, but the punch line that motivates this piece is "EV's bad". They could have recommended micromobility for example.
fuckcars
Ban tires!
The American auto industry
Lobbyists
Conservatives
The existence of hundreds of thousands of miles of asphalt paid for by the American taxpayer
Oh, right. Well, I'll just wave my finger once a year and... die, eventually.
The other day I was wondering how miraculous tires are - fucking balloons lifting the heaviest vehicles on land.
We need a clever solution to this problem, because our govts are unlikely to solve this through new infrastructure or policy changes.
I’ve been reading about this topic for a while now, and I always thought the tech these guys invented was worth further investment: https://smarttirecompany.com/
How can you not own a car while living in a city with >1m population, are you mad? /s
We need miracle battery technology. And we need miracle wheel technology.
Ohh almost as if everyones been saying how electric cars arent the solution...