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You can smell car exhaust even when there's not many cars on the road; if it's bad enough you can virtually taste it. Sitting at the lights is the worst. All th

• aeternum 6y ago
  >We're going to see a diaspora out of the city and into the countryside I think that instead we will see cleaner air in cities since the economics of electric/hybrid cars will win, especially in city traffic. This trend can already be seen in SF where zero-emission hybrids and electrics make up a decent percentage of the traffic.
  • ImaCake 6y ago
    You talk about these things like they are the future. But western cities are already much much cleaner than 40 years ago. The move to electric cars and more livable cities is just the continuation of a fight that has been going on at least since the industrial revolution and adoption of hygiene.
    • jdsully 6y ago
      Long before the industrial revolution. Horse manure and slaughter runoff were huge sources of disease in cities even before coal smoke took over the air.
  • kqr 6y ago
    As others have mentioned, personal automobiles are the problem, not the fuel they run on. Modern engines run rather cleanly. Noise, safety, rubbers and other particulates are also ruining the local environment.
    • speedgoose 6y ago
      Come on, they run not clean at all. Have you smelled a brand new diesel engine during winter? Or even a bad self-polluting hybrid? Personal automobiles are part of the problem. Perhaps not the biggest problem but a big one in cities.
      • fileeditview 6y ago
        I am not really disagreeing with you but one should add that bad smell is not necessarily a good indicator for what is unhealthy.. there are many poisonous gases without any smell (also emitted by cars).
      • rtx 6y ago
        Breaks are the biggest source of pollution.
        • reitzensteinm 6y ago
          Regenerative braking helps with pollution, since you're not wearing a brake pad, just running the motor in reverse.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
      • Klinky 6y ago
        Diesel is pretty bad, but a modern gas engine after warming up with leaner fuel mix and catalytic converter heated up has pretty tame emissions.
  • vosper 6y ago
    I hope we will see cleaner air in cities! But the time it takes to replace a country’s vehicle fleet is sometimes measured in decades, and no-one is even starting on a project of massively reducing fleet emissions. I think / hope you are right in the long term, but I think I am right in the short-medium term :)
  • michaelbuckbee 6y ago
    Or in China where they have nearly half a million electric buses - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-15/in-shift-to-electric-bus-it-s-china-ahead-of-u-s-421-000-to-300 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-15/in-shift-...
  • jhoechtl 6y ago
    > I think that instead we will see cleaner air in cities since the economics of electric/hybrid cars will win Citation needed. The whole economic and environment footprint of electric vehicles in relation to their efficieny is rather bad. The future would the CNG but something is holding it back.
    • aeternum 6y ago
      https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1352231019302183 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522... https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/26/electric-cars-lower-carbon-emissions-gas-climate-knobloch-study https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/26/electric-cars-lower-ca...
  • lowercase1 6y ago
    Note that as much as 30 percent of car pollution is not from the fuel and would remain.
    • Falling3 6y ago
      What is the cause of that ~30%?
      • nkingsy 6y ago
        Brakes/tires
        • karakot 6y ago
          it's nowhere close to true. otherwise you'd have to change your tires and brakes each time you visit a gas station.
          • Fezzik 6y ago
            It may be you who are mistaken: “...particles from brake wear, tyre wear and road surface wear directly contribute to well over half of particle pollution from road transport.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48944561 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48944561
            • trickstra 6y ago
              Notice how they specified "particle" pollution. That's a subclass of the general pollution. Small subclass.
              • Fezzik 6y ago
                Particle pollution, if they are using it correctly, which I think they are, includes exhaust and pretty much every post-production pollutant produced by a car (before it is scrapped I guess). See: https://www.epa.gov/pmcourse/what-particle-pollution https://www.epa.gov/pmcourse/what-particle-pollution
• oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
  According to Wikipedia it's the biggest environmental health risk factor that may kill 8.8 million people annually (March 2019), which definitely puts it up there, but hypertension probably still kills more people (9.4 mil, 2010). It's hard to compare an environmental risk factor with actual diseases, but I don't think you can really argue that it's the biggest "health crisis" by any metric. Anxiety for example is still the most debilitating disease worldwide. It's still pretty bad though, which I didn't realize before looking into it, but the usual suspects are still worse in terms of health.
  • sjg007 6y ago
    Well air pollution causes pulmonary hypertension.
• dan-robertson 6y ago
  There’s plenty of air pollution in the countryside too from eg muck spreading or turning industrial compost heaps. It’s not really clear how bad they are
  • dashundchen 6y ago
    Not to mention, in the US, a large amount of people "moving to the countryside", usually results in that countryside turning into polluted auto-dependent sprawl with 6 lane roads and a ton of traffic. At least in the city you have constraints on how much traffic can fit and alternatives to driving.
    • frabbit 6y ago
      It's not just the US. It's everywhere. I have seen quiet country roads perfect for relaxed cycling and walking turned into dangerous, loud irritations by people who claim to 'love the countryside' as they drive their mountain bikes and backpacking poles to ever dwindling quiet places.
      • dan-robertson 6y ago
        Oh my god the poles. I think if you go to just about any moderately popular walking spot in the uk with steep stony parts, you will see just about every rocky step is covered in the scratch marks from the feet of the poles. One wonders if they are really effective if they can’t get a good grip on the more difficult terrain people presumably get them for help with.
        • frabbit 6y ago
          whoah! I didn't mean this to turn into a Brexit, get rid of the immigrants thing!
• amake 6y ago
  > We're going to see a diaspora out of the city I’ve never seen “diaspora” used this way, and dictionaries at hand don’t support it. Did you mean “migration” or “exodus”?
  • netmare 6y ago
    Diaspora comes from the Greek "διασπορά", which literally means dispersion of any kind, not necessarily ethnic or cultural. It may sound OK to native Greek speakers (like me), but the English meaning in a bit different. I believe "dispersion" would better denote a natural consequence and "exodus" would put more emphasis on intent.
• tamirzb 6y ago
  To be fair traffic is not the only factor in Delhi's pollution. Another thing is crop burning in Punjab and Haryana, which some people even claim is the biggest cause for the pollution. You can see it has an effect as Delhi's pollution drastically differs between different times of year, which generally correlate with the time of crop burning.
• ta17711771 6y ago
  If you can smell exhaust with windows shut multiple times per week, please have your car's exhaust checked, it may be harming you daily.
• derefr 6y ago
  > literally - I did not truly get how bad it is in Delhi until I went there, even having seen photos There's obviously no economic incentive to do this, but I'd love to see a travel-agency-alike business offer a sort of "atmosphere simulator" that sets up the same composition of air pressure, heat, humditiy, and VOCs that the destination is going to have. It'd be great as a pre-test for people with lung conditions, to see if they would truly be okay with spending a vacation there (without needing to buy a plane ticket and waste days going there just to find out and immediately turn around.) > We're going to see a diaspora out of the city and into the countryside... for the people who can afford to do that Or we'll see the development of new coastal cities, and the redevelopment of existing coastal cities, to favor clean air over industry or (non-EV) cars; with the expectation that the city will be able to make it up in taxes (incl. estate taxes) from a large residential tax base of people who still want to live in cities, but also want clean air. Coastal cities that already have such policies (and so little pollution) are clearly seeing hypergrowth in residential real-estate speculation, above-and-beyond what you'd expect from current global market forces. Vancouver BC, for example, is getting its real-estate markets pumped way beyond those of neighbouring Seattle WA. (I say coastal cities here, because being near an ocean means having access to trade winds to sweep some amount of produced pollution away. An inland city has to work a lot harder—i.e. to strangle its industrial capacity much more thoroughly—to achieve the same effect.)
• Causality1 6y ago
  You don't realize how adjusted to it you may be. I've had rural friends come to my small city and say the air quality is bad, and I in turn found my nose and throat burning when I visited New York City.
  • kqr 6y ago
    I live in a relatively unpolluted city, but often when I've been out walking, I notice what feels like a thin layer of very fine dust on my hands. It never happens when I'm in rural areas. My friends don't have this problem and fail to understand why I feel a strong urge to wash my hands as I get inside. At first I thought it might be because they're adjusted to it, but as I type this I realise it might also be because my hands produce slightly more sweat than the average hand (not excessive amounts, just a tiny, but noticeable bit more) which maybe gets absorbed by this particulate and that's why I can feel it? No idea if the science checks out. So maybe the ability to feel pollution in your airways is also something that might differ from person to person? I sure have never felt it, but then again, I live in a relatively unpolluted city.
    • emj 6y ago
      I get that during alder and elm pollen seasons, but usually around eyes and mouth where I sweat a lot. I'm not allergic but I do feel a constant need to wash my face that I never feel. Elm and alder pollen range from 15-50µm, I do not know how much/big pollution particles there are compared to that, but they usually measure PM10 and that is under 10µm, and in really badly polluted areas it is probably alot worse than pollen.
• Barrin92 6y ago
  >and it has been a problem for decades try centuries. Cities used to be population sinks sustained by migration because people kept dying so fast. During the heyday of early industrialisation the life expectancy in Liverpool[1] fell to 25 years. London periodically experienced infamous smogs, the one in 1950 killed about 12000 people.[2] No matter how bad it is today, it was even worse in the past. Electrical vehicles and better public transport and much more awareness and historical trajectory if anything though suggest that things are getting better, not worse. There's not going to be anyone fleeing from the cities, economics opportunities are going to outweigh pollution, as it did in the past. [1]https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-living-standards-improve-during-the-industrial-revolution https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-livin... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London
• dagmx 6y ago
  Delhi air truly is horrific, especially in the winter. I spent the first half my life there, but literally could not breathe without having migraines when I returned. When I left, my health also improved. Clean air truly is an underrated privilege.
• TameAntelope 6y ago
  Optimistically, we could flip this on its head and say that a marker of privilege will be driving an ICE vehicle. It'll become enthusiast-driven rather than necessity.
• dongvsascript 6y ago
  the air is fairly clean, and improving every year. whatever you think will be realized in 5 years has had 100 years to be realized, and has not been. there used to be no catalytic converters on cars. gas used to be leaded. factories woyld burn stuff and dump it into the air without a filter. diesel autos had no soot filter and ran lower temp for extra unburnt gas. we used to clean things with cfcs. right now, today, in the western world, is the cleanest it has ever been. in chicago, a hundred years ago, meat factories across the river where the irish lived simply burned leftover animal parts. it would rain ash, 24/7. when those living there crossed the river to the office area without the ash, they would throw up from the cleaner air. i have a feeling you are a millenial, and are just discovering a world of huge problems. what you don't realize is they are tiny, very ild problemq, that were huge and have been greatly and continually improving. you want to make changes to feel important, when the reality is, people have been working in this for a hundred years before you were old enough to notice, and what we have been doing is working quite well on improving things. right now, today's air pollution where you live is having the smallest effect in over a hundred years. this is like new adults screaming how bad trump is. because they don't remember bush, or clinton, or reagan, or nixon. and when they read about it, they think it's a story and can't imagine living through it. "we're literal nazis now!" yeah, cops used to kill people in a union on behalf of corporations. we locked americans in camos for having squinty eyes. we made weed illegal to stop white women from screwing black men. we had drafts for overseas wars where no one attacked us, forcing kids to go die for nothing. we had bush and mueller - the honest superstar trump-punisher lie to congress on tv saying he found weapons of mass destruction in iraq and start an insane war. billions of cash shipped there and not arriving. and that air problem in india? that used to be where you live now. it got better. the premium market for clean air you talk about? it didn't come when things were 10x worse. it's not going to come now, or in a decade when things get even better, as they have been. the cheap non-premium market with cleaner air is the suburbs. your problem was solved ages ago.