[honkycat]

I suspect modern transportation infrastructure are going to be one of those things future generations mock us for.

We spend an insane amount of our private money on purchasing and maintaining personal vehicles, our public money on our road infrastructure, and our natural resources on building and driving the cars ( that smog has a cost even if everyone wants to pretend it does not. ).

They belch smog that poisons people and reduces their IQ[0]. They create trash and waste. Their production and transportation eats up our natural resources and pollutes our earth. Traffic makes cities miserable to live in. So much of the way we live in the United States has been dictated by the private vehicle.

0: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/27/air-poll...

[ianai]

We devote vast amounts of real estate to transportation too. The surface areas of just the on/off ramps of a highway blow my mind. Then there’s the road kill. I wish there was a better way.

[bmitc]

For some reason, we humans don't apply system design to all the systems we build. If we were designing a system from scratch, no one would choose only two primary modes of transportation, cars and planes, and then tack on the rest. Instead, we'd choose a variety of modular, de-coupled ways with flexible interfaces to get around: walking, biking, scooters/motorcycles, cars, buses, subways, trains, and planes. Yes, we have all these today, but they are not used. Cars and planes do everything from long distance to short distance trips. Bicyclists, motorcyclists, scooters, and pedestrians are, often literally, sidelined and treated as annoyances. Instead, we should be using the best tools for the job and designing cities to support these variety of ways.

In the U.S., we've given corporations such massive power and leverage that it breaks the system design process. Corporations aren't interested in building holistic systems. They want to build funnel systems that funnel people into their products, just as the car companies did back in the mid-twentieth century to kill off mass transportation methods to instead sell individuals and families the car.

The U.S. could choose to be a world leader in this if it wanted, but it doesn't want to.

[brailsafe]

Don't forget parking lots outside big box stores

[lazyjones]

> They belch smog that poisons people and reduces their IQ[0]

We'll have to stop equating cars with smog. Modern cars don't have exhaust pipes. So this can no longer serve as an argument against cars in general.

> Traffic makes cities miserable to live in.

Traffic is a function of the number of people who live in cities, it increases with population even without private car ownership. So you are essentially saying that people make cities miserable to live in (I agree).

[gsnedders]

> We'll have to stop equating cars with smog. Modern cars don't have exhaust pipes. So this can no longer serve as an argument against cars in general.

But:

> Data from the UK National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory indicate that particles from brake wear, tyre wear and road surface wear currently constitute 60% and 73% (by mass), respectively, of primary PM2.5 and PM10 emissions from road transport, and will become more dominant in the future.

In terms of local air quality, this will remain significant (tyre/road wear will get worse unless we manage to significantly reduce the weight of electric vehicles), and what little studies have been done tend to suggest this largely negates the gains from regenerative braking.

Essentially, we've _already_ substantially got rid of exhaust pipe smog such that other components create the majority.

[lazyjones]

> > Data from the UK National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory indicate that particles from brake wear, tyre wear and road surface wear currently constitute 60% and 73% (by mass), respectively, of primary PM2.5 and PM10 emissions from road transport, and will become more dominant in the future.

So how much does road transport contribute overall?

EV brake less than ICE.

[gsnedders]

Road transport is 11% of PM2.5 primary emissions and also 11% of PM10 primary emissions.

Domestic combustion (i.e., wood (primarily) and coal fires in domestic settings) is the top category of PM10 (44% of total) and second highest for PM2.5 (27%), after "industrial processes and use of solvents" (32%).

Notably, the resurgence of wood-burning fires in domestic settings has substantially increased emissions from that category over the past two decades (more than doubling it at a time when most other sources have been decreasing), and worse that's disproportionately in urban areas.