Remember that car tire degredation is a significant portion of microplastics in the environment. Investing in mass transit is as imperative as it was to move away from leaded gasoline.
And we need more lightweight cars , not heavier, since tire wear is proportional to vehicle weight to the fourth power. Ironically, CAFE regulations and EV incentives both did the opposite
I'm not sure why you're being down voted for suggesting a practical and fact based solution. The USA is, regrettably, not making a pivot towards public transportation anytime in the near future. So, lighter cars are one way to address this issue.
You didn't expound upon your point about the unintended consequences of CAFE standards but they're very real. Instead of making smaller and more efficient sedans per the guidelines, car makers opted start making all of their vehicles "light trucks" -- 80%+ of new vehicles are SUVs or bubbly looking "crossovers" -- which are not subject to the same demanding standards. Small sedans also cost less and would require ongoing R&D to continue to meet the CAFE standards. The end result, as this thread is interested, is heavier vehicles with bigger tires and more plastic in the environment and our brains.
Los Angeles is one of few US cities that is managing to build at least some new transit lines. Increasing density in desirable cities is actually pretty easy, all you have to is make it legal (by-right zoning) and then the market will do the immensely productive and profitable thing.
I find it interesting that at a certain time in Los Angeles, a segment of society could afford a craftsman cottage house, but not afford an automobile. This was the prime era of the Pacific Electric streetcar suburb, say around 1890-1920. Today, obviously, anyone who can afford a house anywhere in the country can afford an automobile.
The end of the Pacific Electric system was not a conspiracy theory by tire companies or anything like that; the price of the cars dropped and that's what consumers preferred, i.m.o.
From an infrastructure perspective building out instead of up is incredibly expensive. Not just transport but also water, sewage, electricity and internet.
I should specify: it's more expensive for the developers and their home-buying customers to build up instead of out.
All of that stuff you listed comes from tax dollars, and people ultimately care less about that than what's coming out of their pockets for a home purchase. Well, until it's unsustainable, anyways.
Yeah, I’d expect EVs to get lighter over time as technology progresses. Car bloat is a much bigger problem. Totally insane that little practical city cars like the Honda Fit have gone practically extinct in the US in favor of bigger, heavier cars that don’t even necessarily bring improved cargo capacity for all that extra bulk.
I have a 2018 Fit and it's a fantastic car. It gets 36 MPG and has much more interior space than it would seem. I've had taller people ride in it comfortably and its crowning achievement was fitting a hot water heater in the cargo area with the rear seat split -- without having to remove the child car seat on the other side. Pair a roof rack and you really don't need more -- especially day-to-day.
It's a crying shame that they've stopped selling them in the US. Marketing (the real men need their Rams, thank you very much!) and the CAFE loophole seem to have won the day, though, and we're all worse off for it.
Marketing does seem to work, especially over generations. I think the main reason trucks/SUVs were marketed so much was because of a 25% tax on imported light trucks and not cars. The so called "chicken tax"[1] was imposed on light trucks in 1964 and is still with us today.
It really is difficult to imagine a better vehicle for suburb/city usage than the Fit, unless you have a bunch of kids/people to move in which case I’d skip crossovers/SUVs entirely and go straight to minivans (which are also better than SUVs for most peoples’ needs).
Roads and road standards are a tragedy of the commons. People keep buying bigger cars and demanding more, wider lanes and parking spaces because they don't take any of the burden individually - it's the taxpayers as a whole that foot the bill.
Paradoxically most of the 'small government' types are often the biggest road users.
The solution to tragedies of the commons is to internalize externalities. Tax should scale with carbon use, congestion contribution, and microplastic emission.
> tire wear is proportional to vehicle weight to the fourth power.
Does this mean that a bus that weighs 10 times as much as a small car will produce 10000 times as much tire dust? If it does, I'm not sure if investing in buses will reduce tire dust at all. A bus can replace a lot of cars, but 10000 is a stretch. We need more trains.
I think the root observation here comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law which really talks about the inferred stress to the road for given weight on the axle, not tire wear based on vehicle weight. The above seems to be using a simplification based on passenger cars staying with 4 tires across 2 axles but how this relates to tire wear is going to be a bit more complicated when you start talking about vehicles which can have more axles, more tires per axle, and significantly larger tires.
I'd believe buses have a lot of tire wear compared to an individual car but I wouldn't use that relation as proof of just how many times so.
trams were popular in tons of places before, I understand they improved traffic significantly compared even to today, and they'd still have a positive effect now, I think. But most places shifted towards a car centric focus and we lost those.
Do you have a citation for the vehicle weight to the fourth figure? There is about a 2X variation in the weight of the vehicles I’ve owned, but even accounting for differences in tire size, I can’t come up with a 16x difference in how often I change the tires.
Thinking about it a different way, there isn’t much difference in recommended tire pressure among the autos I’ve owned. That means that the pressure between the road and the tire is relatively constant but the surface area of contact is directly proportional to vehicle weight. For a fixed contact pressure, I am struggling to imagine a physical process by which the rubber loss is not proportional to the contact area.
The fourth power law is usually applied to deformation of asphalt roadways (here's a citation for that: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maxwell-Lay/publication...); I haven't heard it applied to tires before. If I had to guess I'd agree with you - I would expect a smaller exponent, particularly if the tires are designed for the given load.
This Engineering Explained video seems pretty thorough. The short of it is that your intuition is in the right direction, its definitely not to the fourth power of weight. Vehicle weight does contribute to wear but according to Continental its less important than driving style and road curviness.
Most studies I've seen on this topic agree that the amount of pollution created is not linear, and this also makes intuitive sense. The heavier your vehicle, the wider and/or larger diameter your tires need to be to give it the required amount of grip. If those bigger tires wear out in the same time as your smaller vehicle tires, you've already created considerably more pollution.
I know this figure comes from road wear. I don't know if it applies to tire wear, and indeed I suspect it doesn't, if only because tires tend to scale with vehicle weight as you mentioned. I think road wear may be associated with structural cracking of the road which may not change significantly with tire area.
Tire wear is caused by the surface of the tire being rubbed off through contact with the road. Most tire replacements happen because too much rubber has worn off of the contact surface.
While that happens some in the other direction, that’s not what usually causes road failure. You can tell this because pot-holes and other road failures have abrupt edges - they are not the road material until nothing is left but the earth beneath.
Roads also wear by being elastically deformed by the weight of the vehicles upon them. Eventually this deformation leads to failure of the road material, and it breaks away from the rest of the road, creating cracks and pot holes and so on.
Because the cause of failure is different, I don’t have any reason to expect the effect of vehicle weight to be the same. Moreover, unlike tire wear, its easy to hypothesize a physical reason that heavier vehicles will disproportionately wear the road: heavier vehicles will cause more deflection, and every material I have experience with will fail from repeated deflection faster if it’s deflected more.
Also motorcycles/scooters. Unless you have children or live in a place with serious snow a motorcycle and a car sharing app/rentals for when you need to haul a sofa or something is a great combo.
Cheap, easy maintenance, good fuel economy and speed, traffic jam immunity..
None of these things are going to happen. Voters keep voting with their votes and their wallets that they want bigger cars and don't care about climate change. Meanwhile reactionary billionaires have hijacked most of our mass media as we blow by the 1.5°C Paris agreement and Trump dismantles our science institutions.
EV/hybrid only "zones" in Europe are crazy to me because the electric cars leech more tire carbon into the air anyway. Some regulation seems intelligent on the surface, but the devil is in the details.
Solid/particulate pollution from tires is definitely a problem, but in terms of carbon specifically isn't it many orders of magnitude less than the carbon from gas engines or electric power plants?
> These particles can include synthetic rubber, plastics, carbon black, and trace metals (like zinc)
you're correct. I mistakenly thought it was only carbon coming off the tires. So yeah, EVs have a significantly lower carbon output that ICE vehicles. My point still stands but thanks for the callout.
EV/hybrids also have regenerative brakes so emit less brake dust. Between emissions, tires, and brakes I'd be curious to see how it balances out.
But really cycling and transit are the way to go to make cities more liveable. Personal cars take too much space in a city and ruin the built environment for everyone not in one.
These zones are generally densely populated areas, and in Europe they usually have low speed limits, and roads design to encourage driving at low speeds.
To think that the minuscule difference in tire dust is significant at all, compared to the pollutants that EVs completely eliminates, is absolutely ridiculous.
The devil is in the details, yes. Have you considered that the policy makers have actually looked into the details? Have you looked into the details? Have you read any detailed reports about tire wear or did you just make up a problem based on your own intuition? Because I’ve seen reports from EV fleet operators that indicate that they see no difference in tire wear. Most likely the added weight (which isn’t all that much for modern, smaller EVs.. you know, the ones that people actually drive in urban/suburban areas in Europe) as a factor is drowned by other larger factors.
And we’re not that far away from EVs with the same or lower weight than their ICE counterparts, so getting these kinds of policies in place has some forward-looking aspects to them as well.
Excessive NO2 emissions spewed by diesel engines not meeting regulations very literally removed years from our collective life spans in city centres across the world.
Despite their own health hazards no amount of tire particulate from EV's can achieve that level of widespread public health impact.
Perhaps you're thinking our body is at equilibrium with the amount of plastic in our environment, but the reality may be that our body accumulates microplastics from the environment and they become concentrated over time. Kind of like how we can't get rid of heavy metals from our body, so eating lots of fish accumulates mercury to toxic levels. But eating fish is a conscious decision whereas microplastic exposure is an unavoidable fact of life now.
You can probably reduce microplastic consumption, but it is quite a pain and more expensive. Try buying everything at the store not wrapped/bottled in plastic. This does not even work as well as you might think as many things are wrapped in plastic and then presented as if they were not. For example, breakfast sausages in the meat display at my local Whole Foods are wrapped in paper when they give it to you, but come to the store in ~1lb plastic wrapped packages.
Or one could just mandate that tires contain only biodegradable ingredients. That seems an inevitable step since wheel isn't going away no matter what the level of public transportation is. Some public transit, like busses and some subways, use rubber tires today.
Do you consume drinks? Meat? Produce? All these things are chock full of their own micro plastics. It's unavoidable. We can probably reduce contamination but our children's children's children won't be free of it, not until organisms evolve to efficiently eat it. Then we'll have whole other sets of problems.
Do I consume drinks? No, except water and instant coffee, no soda, no beer. Meat? Yes in small quantities and much of it comes from the local environment. I grow most of my own produce, with RO water.
Yes they are unavoidable, just the plastic containers etc probably give some and I do eat candies and imported bananas and bread etc. But pretty sure I get a lot lower dose than most people.
However I'm not sure it matters that much until a mechanism of actual damage is established.
> However I'm not sure it matters that much until a mechanism of actual damage is established.
This is the thing about all the microplastics articles I see popping up: they rarely include any description of harm. If they even mention it, it is only speculative, as in this article. Until I read a scientific article about real harms, I am going to regard most of the microplastics news as fearmongering. Humanity has been surrounded by vast quantities of plastic for decades; if there was a big effect, wouldn’t we have seen it by now? If it has big effects, those effects would be surprising, which means that the evidence would have to be strong. I don’t see a lot of strong evidence.
If anyone reading this has a paper like this, please share.
Imagine a grocery store that is within a short walking distance, such that you don't need to haul a weeks worth of groceries but can get fresh food every single day.
US supermarkets are massive, take forever to buy small amounts of groceries, and even the walk to and from the car is long.
A better world is possible! (If better grocery stores constitute a "better world")
> you don't need to haul a weeks worth of groceries but can get fresh food every single day
I lived that life in my 20s
Turns out I don't actually want to go to the grocery store every day. I want to go once a week and stock up, which I can do thanks to inventions like the refrigerator and the automobile
no judgment on you in particular, but i’m not a fan of this thought process. I believe it’s a major cause for why americans (statistically) are so obese. and i say this as an american that lives in a city but has family in the suburbs.
running errands with your own two feet every day by walking, cycling, etc keeps people healthy and lean. this country has a major car problem. it’s sad.
of course one can go to the gym to stay lean and healthy, but that’s even more time consuming than stopping by the store for 5 minutes on the way home, and it requires extreme motivation. Hardly an improvement i’d say.
> running errands with your own two feet every day by walking, cycling, etc keeps people healthy and lean. this country has a major car problem
I did live this exact lifestyle in my 20s. I was definitely more active but my diet was way worse. I was closer to a lot of restaurants, and I was closer to a lot of bakeries and convenience stores and such as well.
A healthy lifestyle also requires a healthy diet and city living gave me far too much easy access to snacks and junk food. A lot of "it's only 5 minutes to go buy a snack". Daily stops for coffee that often included a pasty
Yeah, the walkable city does mean people are more active
It doesn't necessarily mean they are much more healthy. It still requires other forms of self control (which I admit, I struggled with)
I don't believe it. If you lived right next door to the grocery shop would you still only go once a week and stock up?
Nobody wants less flexibility, rigid plans and higher maintenance costs. I think what you really want is a big house with lots of space away from other people and since you can't have your cake and eat it too you've sacrificed everything else.
I actually did live in an apartment a block away from a grocery store and yes, you're right. I would not trade my current house for having a grocery store that close
Because living in apartments sucks
But even if I did live in my current house with a grocery store right next door, I still would prefer to go as few times a week as possible. Planning ahead and limiting how often I am at stores helps me tremendously with sticking to a budget, which is also something I place a lot of value on
When I lived close to a grocery store not only did I spend more because the prices were higher, I also made more frequent trips for things on a whim, like snacks and treats. It was a much more expensive lifestyle
Maybe other people don't have that same struggle with convenience, but I do. By making the barrier higher, my life is more affordable and I eat less junk food for sure
Well good news, nothing is stoping you from bringing home a full cartful of groceries that walking distance either. You just have more options.
Now, if you are really attached to your car and are only open to using your car for groceries, stay in suburbia, it's oversupplied through centralized planning and not at risk of going anywhere!
> Well good news, nothing is stoping you from bringing home a full cartful of groceries that walking distance either
Dunno about you but I only have two hands and can only carry so much at one time
I could have bought and brought a wagon or something I suppose, but that presents its own problems.
Where do I store the wagon in my tiny apartment?
What do I do with it when I'm actually in the store shopping, to make sure no one steals it while I'm in the store? I can't bring it into the store, it's too bulky for narrow urban grocery store aisles
How do I get my wagon full of groceries to my apartment, with no elevator?
Actually how do I get my empty wagon up to my apartment even, it's not going to manage narrow stairwells very easily even empty. So even if I leave it at the bottom and carry my groceries up by hand, I still have to get the wagon itself upstairs somehow
And then I also own a wagon that takes up my limited apartment space, which I only use to get groceries and provides no other utility for my life.
Unlike a car which I use all the time and only one of those uses is getting groceries
Not only that, but if you're close to a road at all, you'll intake the micro-plastics and nano-plastics.
So you really need to move away from roads. That's possible, but it's really hard to do in most developed nations. Just moving away from a city won't get you to where you need to be. Even when you get there, you have other issues. Like, food, energy, water/sewage treatment, etc.
I don't think people realize how difficult it would be to get away from this particular pollutant in our environment. I mean most of us don't own 500 acres in the Brazilian, Namibian, or Ghanaian countryside that we can retreat to. Even Brazil may be too far gone at this point to be honest. And Brazil is enormous. A lot of space. The number of tolerable nations that would have unaffected areas is decreasing fast. This really is a global problem.
ETA: Some remote parts of Canada and Alaska might fit the bill? Assuming you're not big on quality of life.
You can have really very good quality of life in remote areas. You just might die before you get help if you have a heart attack or something. But the rest of the time it's great!
My grocery store is literally in another town 20 miles away. I have an EV but apparently those are even worse for microplastic generation. Am I screwed?
An EV is objectively not worse for the environment. And virtually all vehicles contain large amounts of plastic (eg PVC). I recently heard model year 2024 vehicles are ~30% plastic by weight.
I’d wait until somebody can clearly state what the demonstrated harms of microplastics are before you conclude that there’s nothing you can do. An EV reduces emissions that we KNOW are bad, and over their lifetimes, the reduction is huge compared to an ICE vehicle. If you’re worried, though, walk or bike whenever you can.
Biking to grocery store is not an option for you, but you can still make a difference if you think about it. Eg, go to the store less frequently. Switch to a chest freezer for perishables. And so on. Draw up an energy budget and do the math.
There is a cost to human life, sure. But you can make it work if you really care enough. You are definitely not screwed.
"Microplastic Free", no, there is no such thing right now. But I'm very far from any major roads/interstates and hundreds of miles to any big city. I didn't move out here to avoid microplastics though, it just (maybe) turned out that way.
I'm actually not terribly afraid of microplastics at all, I just don't like urban environments.
I make at least trip one trip a week. Why would I need to go every day?
I may stop by a store again during the week for a smaller trip if there's something I really need, or pop to a corner store if I need to grab something like drinks for guests, but it's not out of my way.
It's really not a big deal. Bike panniers can hold a ton.
Trivial if you leave near a grocery store. If you live in most US cities, much more the suburbs, then being dependent on your vehicle to do literally anything is part of the problem. In very few places in the US can you choose to do otherwise.