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There will be mostly two kinds of response to this article. (1) Cars and trucks are evil, get rid of them. (2) Too bad, nothing we can do, get over it. Neith

There will be mostly two kinds of response to this article. (1) Cars and trucks are evil, get rid of them. (2) Too bad, nothing we can do, get over it. Neither is helpful. We're going to need lots of tires for a long time. Trains don't (and can't) go everywhere. Bikes can't carry everything, and any imaginable bike that could would have the exact same problem. Trucks of all kinds, and buses, are indispensable and need tires. The question is how to make the tires better. Fortunately-people are working on this. Bridgestone: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/04/eco-friendly-tires-bridgestone-goes-green-in-new-tire-test/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/04/eco-friendly-tires-brid... Goodyear: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/goodyear-unveils-90-sustainable-material-demonstration-tire-approved-for-road-use-301713430.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/goodyear-unveils-90... (specifically using soybean oil in place of 6PPD) What we need to do is not argue tires vs. no tires, but keep the pressure on these makers and others to continue developing less-harmful tires. And the best way to do that is with our wallets. If there's demand for less toxic and more sustainable tires, they're more likely to be made. We also need to reduce the average weight of passenger vehicles, and reduce the need for vehicular travel to accomplish daily needs. That includes everything from urban design to WFH, but those efforts are largely orthogonal to the issue at hand.

robertlagrant 3y ago
But I'm 23 with no family in Amsterdam with a remote role and I get around on a bike just fine?
- notacoward 3y ago
  How did that bike get to you? How did the food get to your grocery store before you rode there? (Hint: it's not trains and boats. Go watch the traffic on a highway some time and you'll be disabused of that notion.) How did all of the transport involved in your furniture's manufacture and final delivery occur? Even if we completely got rid of passenger cars, there would still be plenty of tires on the road and there would still be a need to make them more environmentally friendly. Your response is a non sequitur. I already said we need to reduce the need for vehicular travel to accomplish daily needs. What more do you want, that doesn't fall into the useless "get rid of them" bucket? And yes, I realize your comment might have been satire, but - as another commenter amply demonstrates - some people here say that kind of thing with no irony whatsoever. P.S. for the aforementioned un-ironic picador: As I already said, we should address this problem in many ways. "Reduce trips" is one part of the equation, but doesn't eliminate the need to make the trips that remain more ecologically benign. Suggesting that this is "don't address the last 1%" is a total strawman, more insulting to people's intelligence than anything I've said and more injurious to the curious conversation that the guidelines recommend.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Food largely gets to grocery stores on trains and boats and then to peoples homes in private vehicles. The last mails delivery from distribution centers to retail is a tiny fraction of overall transit. Saying we can eliminate 99% of pollution but that last 1% is hard therefore why bother isn’t a rebuttal, it’s just insulting the intelligence of your reader.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > some people here say that kind of thing with no irony whatsoever Well, if that person appears, then this would be a good reply to them. Well, actually it'd be pretty heavy-handed and unconvincing, but still. You know.
    - notacoward 3y ago
      At least I was trying to contribute something besides low-effort snark and insults.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        It was a small joke to pre-emptively showcase a classic counterargument's flaws.
  - timeon 3y ago
    > How did that bike get to you? Definitely not by everyone riding the car to workplace.
- hedora 3y ago
  So, add some kids, and send them to a good school and sign them up for some interesting extracurricular activities. Later, once the kids are gone, fuck up your knee (or back, hips, etc). Don’t get me wrong, I like city life, but it’s not for everyone and doesn’t eliminate all use cases for cars.
  - timeon 3y ago
    My parents did not have car when I was kid.
foxes 3y ago
Yeah because having some small passive argument is really going to change things? Yes it’s fairly obvious we need them in some situations (you carry equipment on a farm). But fixing the car problem is going to take proper activism and a greater push given it has such inertia and driving is so embedded. Not to mention corporate interests trying to preserve it.
- hedora 3y ago
  Also, we’d need to demolish lots of buildings, including whole towns. Buildings and construction have 2x the environmental impact of cars.
  - foxes 3y ago
    No, you need buildings to live in, cars are probably not necessary for the majority of the population w good infra.
    - notacoward 3y ago
      We need buildings to live in, but not the ones we have. To create places where people can walk or ride to everything they need in their daily life, many existing structures will need to be re-purposed. And it turns out that it's very hard to turn commercial into residential. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/office-space/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/office-space/ And that's just the building part. You also have to deal with the fact that cities are already overstressed, creating ecological disasters as soon as you go outside of the privileged core. Don't look at walkable Manhattan or Brooklyn without also looking at uber-ugly Bronx or Newark, which have to exist to serve those central cores. Or the dumps all over New York state. Or the toxic plumes in the air and water. The transit system, the water and sewage, trash removal, etc. would all creak under the strain of even more population, not to mention the problem of increased demand making housing even more unaffordable for all but the most privileged. Repeat for LA, Houston, Chicago, etc. No, "everyone move to the mega-city" is not the solution some think it is. The fact is that big cities aren't free of these problems; they just export them elsewhere. It actually turns out that it would be a lot easier to convert residential in commercial than the other way around, in suburbs and small towns where they are. There's still lots of complexity, of course. You have to fix zoning. You have to make that "good infrastructure" work in many places instead of a few. You have to convince people to pay for it, and yes, there will still be a lot of tearing down and rebuilding with all of the environmental costs that entails. As GP mentioned. It's not easy by any means, but creating less car-centric environments this way is more feasible than mass migration to cities and more sustainable too. Some day cars will not be necessary for the majority of the population, I really do hope we get there in my lifetime, but that day is not today and getting there will take orders of magnitude more effort than the "abolish cars now" crowd seems capable of imagining. Magic-wand thinking doesn't get us anywhere. Practical, incremental improvements do. And reducing particulates from tires is one of those.
Retric 3y ago
It’s not that we can’t quickly transition, it’s that this isn’t dangerous enough to force a rapid change. If this was killing millions of people we could do something extreme like rapidly swap to dual use vehicles with road tires that can operate on rails. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_track https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_track It’s worth remembering how quickly large scale shifts like using private cars and highway infrastructure happened in the first place. Core blocker for such change isn’t the inability to change infrastructure, its lack of urgency to change.
- hankman86 3y ago
  Tyres don’t last forever. With regulatory intervention in place, tyre manufacturers will bring products to market that lower or eliminate hazardous emissions. This problem could be solved in less than a decade.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Not without some major sacrifices. Rubber is about as benign as anything else that’s going to provide traction in a wide range of weather conditions on current roads. Steel wheels provide poor traction and lots of road noise, to get both grip and reasonable levels of durability you end up with some flexible solid that breaks apart into tiny bits that are hazardous to inhale. You need to change something more fundamental than the tire design to make dramatic improvements.
ryukafalz 3y ago
> Neither is helpful. We're going to need lots of tires for a long time. Trains don't (and can't) go everywhere. Bikes can't carry everything, and any imaginable bike that could would have the exact same problem. Trucks of all kinds, and buses, are indispensable and need tires. The question is how to make the tires better. Fortunately-people are working on this. As with many things, scale matters. You are correct in saying that bikes can't carry everything, but a significant portion of vehicle trips are private car owners driving alone (whether for shopping, commuting, etc) and over shorter distances bikes can serve a very similar purpose. Likewise, while nobody is seriously suggesting replacing (say) long-haul trucking with bikes, mail carriers have made good use of cargo bikes for last-mile delivery within cities. You are correct in saying that trains don't go everywhere, but they can go more places than they do now. (And in the US, they used to!) The discussion shouldn't be a binary choice between "eliminate cars and trucks" and "do nothing" - there's room in between those two for reducing our reliance on motor vehicles. To the extent that the problem of tire dust (among other things) scales with the number of vehicles on the road, reducing the number of vehicles on the road will help to mitigate it. And yes, we do also need to pressure tire manufacturers to develop less harmful tires. But I don't think the other concerns are as orthogonal to the issue at hand as you say they are.

robertlagrant 3y ago

But I'm 23 with no family in Amsterdam with a remote role and I get around on a bike just fine?

notacoward 3y ago
How did that bike get to you? How did the food get to your grocery store before you rode there? (Hint: it's not trains and boats. Go watch the traffic on a highway some time and you'll be disabused of that notion.) How did all of the transport involved in your furniture's manufacture and final delivery occur? Even if we completely got rid of passenger cars, there would still be plenty of tires on the road and there would still be a need to make them more environmentally friendly. Your response is a non sequitur. I already said we need to reduce the need for vehicular travel to accomplish daily needs. What more do you want, that doesn't fall into the useless "get rid of them" bucket? And yes, I realize your comment might have been satire, but - as another commenter amply demonstrates - some people here say that kind of thing with no irony whatsoever. P.S. for the aforementioned un-ironic picador: As I already said, we should address this problem in many ways. "Reduce trips" is one part of the equation, but doesn't eliminate the need to make the trips that remain more ecologically benign. Suggesting that this is "don't address the last 1%" is a total strawman, more insulting to people's intelligence than anything I've said and more injurious to the curious conversation that the guidelines recommend.
- Retric 3y ago
  Food largely gets to grocery stores on trains and boats and then to peoples homes in private vehicles. The last mails delivery from distribution centers to retail is a tiny fraction of overall transit. Saying we can eliminate 99% of pollution but that last 1% is hard therefore why bother isn’t a rebuttal, it’s just insulting the intelligence of your reader.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > some people here say that kind of thing with no irony whatsoever Well, if that person appears, then this would be a good reply to them. Well, actually it'd be pretty heavy-handed and unconvincing, but still. You know.
  - notacoward 3y ago
    At least I was trying to contribute something besides low-effort snark and insults.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      It was a small joke to pre-emptively showcase a classic counterargument's flaws.
- timeon 3y ago
  > How did that bike get to you? Definitely not by everyone riding the car to workplace.
hedora 3y ago
So, add some kids, and send them to a good school and sign them up for some interesting extracurricular activities. Later, once the kids are gone, fuck up your knee (or back, hips, etc). Don’t get me wrong, I like city life, but it’s not for everyone and doesn’t eliminate all use cases for cars.
- timeon 3y ago
  My parents did not have car when I was kid.

foxes 3y ago

Yeah because having some small passive argument is really going to change things? Yes it’s fairly obvious we need them in some situations (you carry equipment on a farm). But fixing the car problem is going to take proper activism and a greater push given it has such inertia and driving is so embedded. Not to mention corporate interests trying to preserve it.

hedora 3y ago
Also, we’d need to demolish lots of buildings, including whole towns. Buildings and construction have 2x the environmental impact of cars.
- foxes 3y ago
  No, you need buildings to live in, cars are probably not necessary for the majority of the population w good infra.
  - notacoward 3y ago
    We need buildings to live in, but not the ones we have. To create places where people can walk or ride to everything they need in their daily life, many existing structures will need to be re-purposed. And it turns out that it's very hard to turn commercial into residential. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/office-space/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/office-space/ And that's just the building part. You also have to deal with the fact that cities are already overstressed, creating ecological disasters as soon as you go outside of the privileged core. Don't look at walkable Manhattan or Brooklyn without also looking at uber-ugly Bronx or Newark, which have to exist to serve those central cores. Or the dumps all over New York state. Or the toxic plumes in the air and water. The transit system, the water and sewage, trash removal, etc. would all creak under the strain of even more population, not to mention the problem of increased demand making housing even more unaffordable for all but the most privileged. Repeat for LA, Houston, Chicago, etc. No, "everyone move to the mega-city" is not the solution some think it is. The fact is that big cities aren't free of these problems; they just export them elsewhere. It actually turns out that it would be a lot easier to convert residential in commercial than the other way around, in suburbs and small towns where they are. There's still lots of complexity, of course. You have to fix zoning. You have to make that "good infrastructure" work in many places instead of a few. You have to convince people to pay for it, and yes, there will still be a lot of tearing down and rebuilding with all of the environmental costs that entails. As GP mentioned. It's not easy by any means, but creating less car-centric environments this way is more feasible than mass migration to cities and more sustainable too. Some day cars will not be necessary for the majority of the population, I really do hope we get there in my lifetime, but that day is not today and getting there will take orders of magnitude more effort than the "abolish cars now" crowd seems capable of imagining. Magic-wand thinking doesn't get us anywhere. Practical, incremental improvements do. And reducing particulates from tires is one of those.

Retric 3y ago

It’s not that we can’t quickly transition, it’s that this isn’t dangerous enough to force a rapid change. If this was killing millions of people we could do something extreme like rapidly swap to dual use vehicles with road tires that can operate on rails. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_track https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_track It’s worth remembering how quickly large scale shifts like using private cars and highway infrastructure happened in the first place. Core blocker for such change isn’t the inability to change infrastructure, its lack of urgency to change.

hankman86 3y ago
Tyres don’t last forever. With regulatory intervention in place, tyre manufacturers will bring products to market that lower or eliminate hazardous emissions. This problem could be solved in less than a decade.
- Retric 3y ago
  Not without some major sacrifices. Rubber is about as benign as anything else that’s going to provide traction in a wide range of weather conditions on current roads. Steel wheels provide poor traction and lots of road noise, to get both grip and reasonable levels of durability you end up with some flexible solid that breaks apart into tiny bits that are hazardous to inhale. You need to change something more fundamental than the tire design to make dramatic improvements.

ryukafalz 3y ago

> Neither is helpful. We're going to need lots of tires for a long time. Trains don't (and can't) go everywhere. Bikes can't carry everything, and any imaginable bike that could would have the exact same problem. Trucks of all kinds, and buses, are indispensable and need tires. The question is how to make the tires better. Fortunately-people are working on this. As with many things, scale matters. You are correct in saying that bikes can't carry everything, but a significant portion of vehicle trips are private car owners driving alone (whether for shopping, commuting, etc) and over shorter distances bikes can serve a very similar purpose. Likewise, while nobody is seriously suggesting replacing (say) long-haul trucking with bikes, mail carriers have made good use of cargo bikes for last-mile delivery within cities. You are correct in saying that trains don't go everywhere, but they can go more places than they do now. (And in the US, they used to!) The discussion shouldn't be a binary choice between "eliminate cars and trucks" and "do nothing" - there's room in between those two for reducing our reliance on motor vehicles. To the extent that the problem of tire dust (among other things) scales with the number of vehicles on the road, reducing the number of vehicles on the road will help to mitigate it. And yes, we do also need to pressure tire manufacturers to develop less harmful tires. But I don't think the other concerns are as orthogonal to the issue at hand as you say they are.