9 ms·

In other news: water linked to wetness. EVs are so much more pleasant to be around for both acoustic and particulate emissions. Anyone who's dined outdoors next

In other news: water linked to wetness. EVs are so much more pleasant to be around for both acoustic and particulate emissions. Anyone who's dined outdoors next to a busy car intersection in an ICE-centric location knows this. And it is easily 10x worse to me in places that have a lax approach to auto emissions and safety. Where I live now there are zero safety or emissions inspections for auto vehicles (zero!) and it feels like every tenth car going by on the major roadways has an absurdly loud modified or damaged exhaust system. I yearn for the day I can eat outside at the restaurants in my neighborhood without that disturbance. At the current rate of social change in this US state I will probably be very old, or dead before then.

freezedryCS 4y ago
I cackled at water is linked to wetness
melling 4y ago
Strange, only 8 days ago I was told this on HN “Most emissions from modern vehicles these days comes from things like tire dust rather than tailpipe. What would be best for local street level pollution would probably be something like a lightweight rickshaw over a multiton EV.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540177
- Xylakant 4y ago
  There’s nothing strange about it. EVs are better than IC cars but still not good on all metrics.
- blamazon 4y ago
  That is not a discordant take. Pedestrians and cyclists are obviously the most pleasant transportation option to be around in an urban space acoustics/particulates emissions wise. Unfortunately, some places have gone all-in on cars and it is literally impossible to live a full life without using one. This is where EVs slot in nicely. Further, EVs that fit into the micromobility space are an excellent option for many places-- e-bikes, scooters, Renault Twizy, etc. (Which aligns with what you were told above)
- hedora 4y ago
  That’s only true for particulate emissions. ICE cars produce much nastier stuff than particulates, and EVs eliminate those classes of pollutants. On the particulate front: EV’s greatly reduce brake dust, but increase tire wear. The market will partially address the latter. Tire wear on my EV costs $0.15 per mile, and I’ll certainly be taking that into account when I buy my next car!
  - nickysielicki 4y ago
    That can’t possibly be true. A new set of all season tires is like $2000. You are going through a set of 4 tires every 13k miles?
    - blamazon 4y ago
      $2000 for a set of all seasons? I thought I was spending a lot of money when I dropped $1100 on a new set for my Model X. That works out to about $0.024 per mile for me if they last as long as the last set of the same make and model. (About 48k) So, maybe that poster meant $0.015 per mile, not $0.15?
      - nickysielicki 4y ago
        CrossClimate2s or don’t even bother. ;) https://youtu.be/PT2odY3C6Og https://youtu.be/PT2odY3C6Og
        piperswe 4y ago
        What tire sizes are you buying? My CrossClimate2s were less than $1k for a set of 4
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      Depends on size. R14 garbage is still under $75/tire. Some fat R19s for your 'vette, yeah those will cost you.
  - dangrossman 4y ago
pengaru 4y ago
> And it is easily 10x worse to me in places that have a lax approach to auto emissions and safety. What surprised me was how noticeable the difference in emissions were even ICE vs. ICE, just getting around by bicycle all summer visiting family in Illinois vs. what I was breathing riding in traffic once back in California. IL exhaust is noxious in comparison. Then when Russia invaded Ukraine I learned CA fuel is an entirely different blend from the rest of the nation targeting better emissions with lower sulfur and particulates. So apparently CARB and all those frequent smog tests and spending more on gas actually makes a QoL difference, surprise! I fully expect many confirmations of auto emissions-caused disease/death once the nation pivots to electric. It can't happen soon enough. I don't even care if the electricity is produced via fossil fuels away from where people live. Having such large numbers of ICEs constantly spewing exhaust adjacent to where we breathe is categorically DUMB. And we sure have far more ability to clean the exhaust in a large-scale immobile power plant installation than little portable ad-hoc propulsion-as-a-30%-efficient-byproduct rube goldberg machines.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > Then when Russia invaded Ukraine I learned CA fuel is an entirely different blend from the rest of the nation targeting better emissions with lower sulfur and particulates. So apparently CARB and all those frequent smog tests and spending more on gas actually makes a QoL difference, surprise! I recall reading somewhere that California's geography means they have to be super-diligent about emissions or their major cities will have a severe smog problems. I think it was something about mountains trapping the emissions and keeping them concentrated.
  - blamazon 4y ago
    Los Angeles in particular is really bad. You've got like 20 million people (a number higher than the individual populations of 45 US states!) all living in flat area mostly hemmed on 3 sides by mountains and on the fourth side by the ocean. Winds tend to blow in from the ocean, and don't tend to pass over the mountains. This tends to trap a pocket of air over the city. This wouldn't be so bad if car usage wasn't so necessary to get around there, however car ownership in the LA metro is something like 80-90 percent, with around 1.6 cars per household on average. (Compare to about 32% and 0.45 per household in Tokyo, a very similar place in terms of geography and population) EVs represent about 1% of those cars, so, conservatively you've got about 15 million cars filling up that one air pocket overhead with combustion byproducts. It gets worse! Traffic in Los Angeles is so bad that a lot of those cars are in stop and go hours-long commutes every day which is a particularly inefficient regime for fuel use and emissions. On top of that this bad traffic has an interesting side effect: over half of all car trips in Los Angeles are less than 3 miles. This is also bad for emissions because the catalytic converter may not get to heat up and achieve full efficiency.
mark-ruwt 4y ago
An Urbanist credo: Cities aren't loud. ICE cars are.
- amalgamated_inc 4y ago
  False; most modern cars aren't very loud. At city speeds, the loudest part is the tire noise. At highway speeds, the wind noise. You only really hear the engine in ICE cars under heavy acceleration or if the car is designed to be loud (e.g. a sports car).
  - dangrossman 4y ago
    I've certainly heard modern ICE cars where the engine noise was minimal. At the same time, I can scarcely recall sitting in a drive-through fast food line with my window open to order and NOT being annoyed at the level of engine noise from other cars making it harder to hear and be heard at the speaker. It's definitely not tire or wind noise when we're all just idling in line.
    - amalgamated_inc 4y ago
      Yea, that's true. But I can walk around plenty of cities with cars driving within feet of me and not hear much noise besides the road noise at all. I suppose the design of the city makes a difference, e.g. are there sound-reflecting bare concrete walls everywhere (like many drive throughs).
  - karmelapple 4y ago
    At the 10:15 mark in this video, different types of vehicles are measured for noise output. It would be pretty amazing if we could get around on e-bikes a lot more than we could today. Quiet, easy to ride… but in places that are not hospitable to bike riders, less safe than a car, which is likely why they won’t be adopted en masse. https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8 https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8
    - amalgamated_inc 4y ago
nickysielicki 4y ago
The fundamental problem is that people conflate air quality and carbon emissions. It’s two separate problems with two separate solutions. Diesel emissions cause cancer, but burning those emissions off takes additional energy. If you have a semi-truck without a diesel particulate filter going down I94 in rural North Dakota, getting 15-20% better fuel economy than if it had one, there’s an argument to be made that this is a net positive for the planet overall. Nobody is getting cancer from the long-haul semi trucks that spend most of their time on the interstate, and the reduced consumption is a better deal for the planet. Even with the NOX. (Citation needed). Likewise, a semi truck that exists doing short runs in urban Illinois, sitting next to a coffee shop waiting for his trailer, probably should have a DPF. The main problem I have with EVs is that we’re forgetting reduce-reuse-recycle. A 2005 Corolla is safe, it’s production emissions are already accounted for, and gets decent fuel economy even by modern standards. The correct choice for someone that cares about the planet isn’t to buy a luxury EV (and they’re all luxury cars), it’s to live a simple life and to make the least consumptive choice you can. There’s a total lack of nuance when it comes to climate change.
- dangrossman 4y ago
  Is anyone advocating for nation-scale forced replacement of 2005 Corollas with EVs? Most of what I see are pushes, starting in the 2030s, to limit the sale of new gas/diesel cars, not to force anyone to replace one they already have. The gas/diesel cars will continue to be used until they reach their end of life, which is typically once they hit the point that they cost more to repair than they're worth.
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    Some European cities have announced plans for this. Paris and Amsterdam have announced that from 2030 onwards, only zero-emission vehicles will be allowed to drive in those cities. Depending on your definition, Paris is a nation-scale settlement. (The population is larger than many countries.) Petrol/diesel vehicles will be traded away from such cities as time goes by, and their resale value will decrease. This is already happening for the largest goods vehicles and buses in similar European cities. Mostly, older large diesel vehicles have been banned from large cities, but this gradually extends to all large diesel vehicles, then diesel vans, etc. https://urbanaccessregulations.eu/ https://urbanaccessregulations.eu/ lists many of these restrictions, but it's not the easiest site to navigate.
StreamBright 4y ago
You are assuming that every city allows cars into dining areas. There are many examples in Europe where this is not the case. The whole electric vs combustion car argument is predicated on the fact that we need cars in inner cities at all.
- blamazon 4y ago
  Mmmmm, I don't think I assumed that. I'm pretty sure I described my current scenario, and the scenarios of others who live in similar places. I know how loathsome this scenario is because I have lived and traveled in those places in Europe you mention. The sad reality is that cars are so thoroughly stuck into the urban areas in so many places and it will take longer than my lifespan to unring that bell here in America and fix mobility in urban centers. However, we can potentially unring some smaller bells a hell of a lot sooner with EVs. It's a really valuable transitional tech in that regard, in my eyes. I don't think ICE will ever truly go away, due to the huge power density of the fuel. But, if we just replace say, half of the passenger fleet within say, 10-100 miles of american cities with EVs as they age out by like 2035, life will be much better here from that point until I die. Of course if we can increase the portion of those cars that age out and are not replaced, especially in a 1 mile radius of the city center, that's a much larger win than swapping an ICE SUV for an EV SUV.
ecf 4y ago
> I yearn for the day I can eat outside at the restaurants in my neighborhood without that disturbance. I had the unfortunate displeasure of eating at a downtown restaurant in California’s Central Valley during a family visit on a Friday evening and every 5 minutes conversation would be interrupted by a lifted diesel truck revving their engines while they cruise up and down the streets. Same trucks. Up and down the street. All dinner long. It’s an impossible situation that will only be solved by these individuals being treated like the children they are and having their vehicles impounded until the modifications are scheduled to be removed.

freezedryCS 4y ago

I cackled at water is linked to wetness

melling 4y ago

Strange, only 8 days ago I was told this on HN “Most emissions from modern vehicles these days comes from things like tire dust rather than tailpipe. What would be best for local street level pollution would probably be something like a lightweight rickshaw over a multiton EV.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540177

Xylakant 4y ago
There’s nothing strange about it. EVs are better than IC cars but still not good on all metrics.
blamazon 4y ago
That is not a discordant take. Pedestrians and cyclists are obviously the most pleasant transportation option to be around in an urban space acoustics/particulates emissions wise. Unfortunately, some places have gone all-in on cars and it is literally impossible to live a full life without using one. This is where EVs slot in nicely. Further, EVs that fit into the micromobility space are an excellent option for many places-- e-bikes, scooters, Renault Twizy, etc. (Which aligns with what you were told above)
hedora 4y ago
That’s only true for particulate emissions. ICE cars produce much nastier stuff than particulates, and EVs eliminate those classes of pollutants. On the particulate front: EV’s greatly reduce brake dust, but increase tire wear. The market will partially address the latter. Tire wear on my EV costs $0.15 per mile, and I’ll certainly be taking that into account when I buy my next car!
- nickysielicki 4y ago
  That can’t possibly be true. A new set of all season tires is like $2000. You are going through a set of 4 tires every 13k miles?
  - blamazon 4y ago
    $2000 for a set of all seasons? I thought I was spending a lot of money when I dropped $1100 on a new set for my Model X. That works out to about $0.024 per mile for me if they last as long as the last set of the same make and model. (About 48k) So, maybe that poster meant $0.015 per mile, not $0.15?
    - nickysielicki 4y ago
      CrossClimate2s or don’t even bother. ;) https://youtu.be/PT2odY3C6Og https://youtu.be/PT2odY3C6Og
      - piperswe 4y ago
        What tire sizes are you buying? My CrossClimate2s were less than $1k for a set of 4
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    Depends on size. R14 garbage is still under $75/tire. Some fat R19s for your 'vette, yeah those will cost you.
- dangrossman 4y ago

pengaru 4y ago

> And it is easily 10x worse to me in places that have a lax approach to auto emissions and safety. What surprised me was how noticeable the difference in emissions were even ICE vs. ICE, just getting around by bicycle all summer visiting family in Illinois vs. what I was breathing riding in traffic once back in California. IL exhaust is noxious in comparison. Then when Russia invaded Ukraine I learned CA fuel is an entirely different blend from the rest of the nation targeting better emissions with lower sulfur and particulates. So apparently CARB and all those frequent smog tests and spending more on gas actually makes a QoL difference, surprise! I fully expect many confirmations of auto emissions-caused disease/death once the nation pivots to electric. It can't happen soon enough. I don't even care if the electricity is produced via fossil fuels away from where people live. Having such large numbers of ICEs constantly spewing exhaust adjacent to where we breathe is categorically DUMB. And we sure have far more ability to clean the exhaust in a large-scale immobile power plant installation than little portable ad-hoc propulsion-as-a-30%-efficient-byproduct rube goldberg machines.

tablespoon 4y ago
> Then when Russia invaded Ukraine I learned CA fuel is an entirely different blend from the rest of the nation targeting better emissions with lower sulfur and particulates. So apparently CARB and all those frequent smog tests and spending more on gas actually makes a QoL difference, surprise! I recall reading somewhere that California's geography means they have to be super-diligent about emissions or their major cities will have a severe smog problems. I think it was something about mountains trapping the emissions and keeping them concentrated.
- blamazon 4y ago
  Los Angeles in particular is really bad. You've got like 20 million people (a number higher than the individual populations of 45 US states!) all living in flat area mostly hemmed on 3 sides by mountains and on the fourth side by the ocean. Winds tend to blow in from the ocean, and don't tend to pass over the mountains. This tends to trap a pocket of air over the city. This wouldn't be so bad if car usage wasn't so necessary to get around there, however car ownership in the LA metro is something like 80-90 percent, with around 1.6 cars per household on average. (Compare to about 32% and 0.45 per household in Tokyo, a very similar place in terms of geography and population) EVs represent about 1% of those cars, so, conservatively you've got about 15 million cars filling up that one air pocket overhead with combustion byproducts. It gets worse! Traffic in Los Angeles is so bad that a lot of those cars are in stop and go hours-long commutes every day which is a particularly inefficient regime for fuel use and emissions. On top of that this bad traffic has an interesting side effect: over half of all car trips in Los Angeles are less than 3 miles. This is also bad for emissions because the catalytic converter may not get to heat up and achieve full efficiency.

mark-ruwt 4y ago

An Urbanist credo: Cities aren't loud. ICE cars are.

amalgamated_inc 4y ago
False; most modern cars aren't very loud. At city speeds, the loudest part is the tire noise. At highway speeds, the wind noise. You only really hear the engine in ICE cars under heavy acceleration or if the car is designed to be loud (e.g. a sports car).
- dangrossman 4y ago
  I've certainly heard modern ICE cars where the engine noise was minimal. At the same time, I can scarcely recall sitting in a drive-through fast food line with my window open to order and NOT being annoyed at the level of engine noise from other cars making it harder to hear and be heard at the speaker. It's definitely not tire or wind noise when we're all just idling in line.
  - amalgamated_inc 4y ago
    Yea, that's true. But I can walk around plenty of cities with cars driving within feet of me and not hear much noise besides the road noise at all. I suppose the design of the city makes a difference, e.g. are there sound-reflecting bare concrete walls everywhere (like many drive throughs).
- karmelapple 4y ago
  At the 10:15 mark in this video, different types of vehicles are measured for noise output. It would be pretty amazing if we could get around on e-bikes a lot more than we could today. Quiet, easy to ride… but in places that are not hospitable to bike riders, less safe than a car, which is likely why they won’t be adopted en masse. https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8 https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8
  - amalgamated_inc 4y ago

nickysielicki 4y ago

The fundamental problem is that people conflate air quality and carbon emissions. It’s two separate problems with two separate solutions. Diesel emissions cause cancer, but burning those emissions off takes additional energy. If you have a semi-truck without a diesel particulate filter going down I94 in rural North Dakota, getting 15-20% better fuel economy than if it had one, there’s an argument to be made that this is a net positive for the planet overall. Nobody is getting cancer from the long-haul semi trucks that spend most of their time on the interstate, and the reduced consumption is a better deal for the planet. Even with the NOX. (Citation needed). Likewise, a semi truck that exists doing short runs in urban Illinois, sitting next to a coffee shop waiting for his trailer, probably should have a DPF. The main problem I have with EVs is that we’re forgetting reduce-reuse-recycle. A 2005 Corolla is safe, it’s production emissions are already accounted for, and gets decent fuel economy even by modern standards. The correct choice for someone that cares about the planet isn’t to buy a luxury EV (and they’re all luxury cars), it’s to live a simple life and to make the least consumptive choice you can. There’s a total lack of nuance when it comes to climate change.

dangrossman 4y ago
Is anyone advocating for nation-scale forced replacement of 2005 Corollas with EVs? Most of what I see are pushes, starting in the 2030s, to limit the sale of new gas/diesel cars, not to force anyone to replace one they already have. The gas/diesel cars will continue to be used until they reach their end of life, which is typically once they hit the point that they cost more to repair than they're worth.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  Some European cities have announced plans for this. Paris and Amsterdam have announced that from 2030 onwards, only zero-emission vehicles will be allowed to drive in those cities. Depending on your definition, Paris is a nation-scale settlement. (The population is larger than many countries.) Petrol/diesel vehicles will be traded away from such cities as time goes by, and their resale value will decrease. This is already happening for the largest goods vehicles and buses in similar European cities. Mostly, older large diesel vehicles have been banned from large cities, but this gradually extends to all large diesel vehicles, then diesel vans, etc. https://urbanaccessregulations.eu/ https://urbanaccessregulations.eu/ lists many of these restrictions, but it's not the easiest site to navigate.

StreamBright 4y ago

You are assuming that every city allows cars into dining areas. There are many examples in Europe where this is not the case. The whole electric vs combustion car argument is predicated on the fact that we need cars in inner cities at all.

blamazon 4y ago
Mmmmm, I don't think I assumed that. I'm pretty sure I described my current scenario, and the scenarios of others who live in similar places. I know how loathsome this scenario is because I have lived and traveled in those places in Europe you mention. The sad reality is that cars are so thoroughly stuck into the urban areas in so many places and it will take longer than my lifespan to unring that bell here in America and fix mobility in urban centers. However, we can potentially unring some smaller bells a hell of a lot sooner with EVs. It's a really valuable transitional tech in that regard, in my eyes. I don't think ICE will ever truly go away, due to the huge power density of the fuel. But, if we just replace say, half of the passenger fleet within say, 10-100 miles of american cities with EVs as they age out by like 2035, life will be much better here from that point until I die. Of course if we can increase the portion of those cars that age out and are not replaced, especially in a 1 mile radius of the city center, that's a much larger win than swapping an ICE SUV for an EV SUV.

ecf 4y ago

> I yearn for the day I can eat outside at the restaurants in my neighborhood without that disturbance. I had the unfortunate displeasure of eating at a downtown restaurant in California’s Central Valley during a family visit on a Friday evening and every 5 minutes conversation would be interrupted by a lifted diesel truck revving their engines while they cruise up and down the streets. Same trucks. Up and down the street. All dinner long. It’s an impossible situation that will only be solved by these individuals being treated like the children they are and having their vehicles impounded until the modifications are scheduled to be removed.