> What we need to focus on is infrastructure for walking, biking and public transportation.

And better tires.

> EVs have higher torque but that doesn’t matter unless to drive like a mad-man

Its not torque that matters. Its simply friction and normal force. And that's directly caused by weight. Tire Wear is something like (weight^4), so small increases in weight will have huge increases to wear-and-tear.

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I think the real issue is that 3000lbs to 4500lbs, while a significant increase in tire wear, is still small compared to the big 5000lb to 8000lb vehicles that people use in practice. I'm sure a 4500lb EV is bad, but I'd expect a 6000 lb SUV or Truck to be worse (and a 8000lb electric-SUV to be the absolute worst).

But beyond just consumer cars are semi-trucks, which almost certainly are the top tire-wear vehicles on the roads. I'd expect almost all of the plastic from "tire wear" to come from a semi-truck (again, weight to the power of 4), given their grossly increased weight.

> walking, biking and public transportation

Semi-trucks are replaced by trains. Not by walking and biking. I mean, I want more walkable paths and all. But this _particular_ problem is solved with freight trains.

Last-mile is difficult. Do we want 100-people in a neighborhood driving 100x cars to a store? Or would we rather have 1x large truck deliver a (heavier) package to 100x different people? We're screwed in both cases, and rail can't save us.

But trains don't use rubber and trains wheels / rails are made from steel. I'm sure some particles fly off as iron (or iron-oxide/rust), but surely much less than rubber given how much stronger steel wheels / steel tracks are.

>Do we want 100-people in a neighborhood driving 100x cars to a store? Or would we rather have 1x large truck deliver a (heavier) package to 100x different people?

Why can't the majority of the people walk to a store and the rest can be serviced by a smaller truck?

My overall point is that the "last mile" we're just screwed unless we fundamentally redesign our neighborhoods and shape of our cities.

Its pretty damn obvious that as the USA is laid out right now, we don't have any good last-mile solutions outside of 100x different people driving to the same store and picking up what they want. And its not like houses are going to pick themselves up and move to a store, and given zoning laws no one is going to move a store into a neighborhood either. (People won't like the crime that comes with it).

So whatever, that's that. I don't see this issue changing. But I do think that the truck/rail situation can change. Fewer people are in the decision-making process for train vs truck, and factories can be designed (and/or redesigned) to fit trains.

I'd assume that its easier to convince one or two factory owners to switch from truck-based to train-based logistics... rather than convincing 100x homehowners to vote at the next HOA meeting to start a city-campaign legal change to change the local zoning laws and possibly lower everyone's housing values by increasing crime in the neighborhood during this rise in shoplifting going on right now...

IIRC there is a push in some areas to switch to e-bikes; while they carry less, you also don’t need a CDL to ride a bicycle and there is a chronic shortage of CDL drivers.

There's no shortage of anything except training and wages/benefits. At some point, companies are going to have to bite the bullet and start training their own employees. The horror!

There is a legitimate lack, partially because the federal guidelines for holding a CDL rule out anyone who uses marijuana.

I somehow doubt that there is truly a lack of people willing to train to obtain a CDL who also don't use marijuana. Hell, I don't use marijuana and I'd gladly do it if I needed a job.

We know at the very least that marijuana requirements are taking out people who already have CDLs. https://www.marijuanamoment.net/tens-of-thousands-of-trucker...

> Data from DOT’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) shows that, since 2020, more than 100,000 truckers tested positive for cannabis, as Transport Topics first reported. Marijuana was by far the most common banned substance to come up in the drug screenings.

> Overall, there have been approximately 166,000 people who tested positive for some prohibited substance since 2020, according to a report that FMCSA’s Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse published last week. There is an option for those truckers to enter a “return-to-work” process that would require another drug test; however, the data shows that a large fraction of people are not taking the opportunity. About 91,000 of those 166,000 truckers who didn’t pass the drug screening have not enrolled in the process yet.

> This would be problematic from an economic standpoint in any industry, but it’s especially troubling in the transportation sector, which has been facing a significant labor shortage.

Trucking is not the best industry to be in and there are a lot of problems, but dismissing people who smoke weed, at all, is adding fuel to the fire.

infra is not going to change in the US. Too much individual ownership at stake.

For example I care about the environment but not enough to throw away a one million dollar suburban house for it.

Basically to fix this problem is essentially to cause current suburban housing to depreciate in value until the property has become essentially worthless. You see this kind of thing in Japan.

That being said in CA there are measures to combat this problem. ADUs and SB-9 to increase density, but adoption has not yet been that wide spread.

>>>Either way, this kind of thing has sort of already happened in Japan.

Can you explain?

In japan most physical houses are worth more than the property they stand on. That's why real estate prices in japan constantly depreciate.

The only place where this isn't true are big urban cities like tokyo near really good locations.

See source: https://japanpropertycentral.com/real-estate-faq/popular-myt...

Nobody really talks about why there's this dichotomy between Japan in and the US. The reasoning is multifaceted. One of these things is infrastructure. Japan cities have extremely good infrastructure and are super clean. Living in Tokyo is close to living in a futuristic utopian cyberpunk society. So people know that the urban way of life is 100x better.

The Western US is centered around suburban life where everyone drives cars. Property is spread out and not much is invested in cities on the west coast. People don't see the value of city life as much. The east side of the US is more hybridized where rural and city properties are valued for different reasons.

Much of this dichotomy between countries is driven by lack of land in Japan and a lowering population. However this just pushes japan ahead of the curve. As energy becomes more and more expensive all economies will inevitably shift to becoming more like japan where suburban properties become more and more worthless.

If people think grocery stores existing within walking distance of their homes will lower their home values, due to some rise in shoplifting in the news implying crime in their area, then the war for any sensible policy decisions is lost.

That's like ten carts before a horse or some brawndo has what plants crave shit. I can walk to the grocery store where I live -- my house is worth more because it has decent access to amenities.

> (People won't like the crime that comes with it).

Does crime come with it? I certainly wouldn't expect that.

People don't shoplift at their neighbors homes. They shoplift at grocery stores and whatever.

Crime happens at places of commerce. That's just... how it works. Places of commerce have both goods to steal (especially useful black-market goods, like Tide Detergent) and cash-registers to steal from. I'm not saying like "murders" or whatever, but when a neighborhood has +100 police reports in a month, the Real Estate agents notice that and home values drop.

That's just... how it works. Its not necessarily about "which crimes are actually dangerous" or whatever, people just pay attention to crime heatmaps and don't really look into the details.

You stick a store designed to sell to homes, that store _will_ have homegoods, including Tide Detergent, in stock. That Tide _will_ be stolen, its just so easy to steal, easy to sell in the black market. That stolen good will be reported on police reports (so that the store can get back its insurance, or write it off or whatever they plan to do accounting wise). That police report will drop nearby home values.

Can you quote actual statistics, not merely sensationalizing articles, demonstrating an increase in shoplifting? As far as I've seen there is no evidence to back up this common assertion. The narrative that is floating around is doing a lot of work to convince people it's true but where are the facts?

No.

Empirically, myself and my sister have witnessed shoplifters personally in recent months. I know this is anecdotal data, but anecdotes (especially personal ones) are enough for myself. At least in my area, it seems like shoplifters _are_ on the rise.

I don't need to prove it to other people on the internet. My own eyes with my own life is enough proof for me. If that's not enough for you, whatever. Seeing news reports that others are seeing similar rises matches my "gut check".

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Now people stealing food from grocery stores is... you know... the lowest level of shoplifting. These people aren't stealing like, luxury goods. They're clearly just trying to survive. Its not like a criminal gang or organized crime that'd be deeply rooted and/or difficult to deal with.

IMO, its weird that people would rather shoplift than to apply and/or use a WIC card (food stamps). So its a conundrum for another day in any case, its a crime (albeit relatively victimless. Sure sucks for the staff and the grocery store but I've seen worse...). But its still speaks poorly for neighborhoods and makes people feel less safe. So yeah, it needs to stop. But I can 100% believe that shoplifting is on the rise today. Anecdotally at least.

There's other low-level crimes, like obviously not-paying for the subway, that I think is on the rise by my eyes as well. These also make people feel unsafe and/or unappreciated (tax dollars wasted, etc. etc.) and is bad for our neighborhoods.

I do know that statistically speaking, the personal savings rate of people has declined, wages haven't kept with inflation, etc. etc. So these actions make sense in the greater economic situation IMO.

I don't necessarily want a police crackdown to throw all these people in jail. But we do need to do something, maybe make WIC cards easier to apply for (at every grocery store for example), or stuff like that. We literally have a food-stamps program, why aren't people using it? Why are they shoplifting instead?

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If I cared, I probably would start by interviewing / personally talking to cashiers at my local grocery store before I trusted online articles anyway. And I'd suggest you do the same if you cared about this issue. The internet is just not as good a source of information as the front-line workers here.

Every grocery store clerk has a feel. Talk with them next time you visit the store, don't be a political asshat about it but it wouldn't take more than 1 or 2 minutes to ask them if they've noticed more shoplifters. Obviously don't eat up all their time either (they're on the job after all). With luck, you might see a manager watching all the clerks who'd have more freetime to talk about shoplifters too.

Don't you think police would be jumping at the chance to show hard stats that your claims are true if they measured them? Why would it be so hard to find those things if police could use it to justify their policies and crackdowns?

I don't need to look up the stats. I already believe in them.

And I frankly don't care to convince you of the fact. I'm not sure if anything you'd say could beat out my personal methodology on this particular question. I actually wave / say hi / talk to the grocery store clerks (and their managers) on a regular basis, so I've got people I trust who can tell me about rising (or not) shoplifting. I really don't need the internet to tell me this.

I literally can just ask the manager (and I recognize him by face since we talk so often) at the store next time I see them. I'm not sure if you'd care on their response or not, but... I'd trust him more than anything you'd say or research. No offense to you personally, but I have my methods to gathering information that I trust more.

There's much, much simpler, and direct, ways of getting information than surfing online for a database... or engaging on internet debates over.

I would care about their response, I just wouldn't consider any single source to be the operational "truth". I know how limited personal perspectives can be and how skewed perceptions can get when fear is one of the emotions in the mix. I'd take everything everyone says and judge based on their likelihood to react to incomplete data based on emotions, what's in it for them to spread certain narratives, and what kinds of hard evidence they can summon to back up their claims. None of these are dealbreakers, all of them fit into the wider picture.

> Why can't the majority of the people walk to a store and the rest can be serviced by a smaller truck?

Single-use zoning. Most people in the US live in areas where you can't walk to a store.

Yes now, but I have to were talking about improvements and the future of "walking, biking and public transportation" since adunw started this thread with that sentiment.

A lot of people can't look beyond their own generation and if it's something that takes 20-30 years to realize they just simply think it's too difficult. I see this with my generation (Gen-X), newer generations and even older generations.

The nearest store is a 45 minute walk (one way) from my townhouse. I'm not in the US, but Canada. Driving drops that to 8 minutes.

The sprawl is real and I just don't always have 1.5 hours to dedicate to grabbing bread.

This kind of gets at the root of the problem. Take away cars, and the whole North American built environment is just not worth as much as the pyramid scheme of real estate we have in place of social safety nets.

> The nearest store is a 45 minute walk (one way) from my townhouse. I'm not in the US, but Canada. Driving drops that to 8 minutes.

Assuming an average adult walking speed of 3 mph, I'm guessing that's somewhere in the ballpark of 2.25 miles? So something like 11 minutes at an average cycling speed of 12 mph, yeah? The distances here don't feel insurmountable.

It isn't the distance that is insurmountable by bike, no.

Alone it would be fine, I know what I'm doing. If I add my children to the mix, it is a little sketchy due to what I'd consider tricky spots.

There are no sidewalks, no bike lanes, no curbs, a squeeze over a bridge where two cars won't fit around the corner simultaneously, and a couple of roundabouts that drivers just don't understand (one normal, one mini). I can't quite trust them to do the right things. The drivers or my children in this instance.

Sure, I don't doubt that the infrastructure is terrible for cycling. It is where I live in the US too. But I think it's worth calling out that the distances involved often are well-suited for cycling, even if the streets today aren't.

Where the distances are okay but the streets aren't, safer streets can make cycling feasible. Where the distances are too far for cycling, you need both safer streets and a shift in land use to get people out of their cars. Both are doable in the long term, but the former is much more tractable in the short- and medium-term.

For example, San Jose: https://youtu.be/SWtb3GsLrTI

I wouldn't mind walking to the store now and then but usually I make fewer trips for more than I could carry.

So you're going to drive a multi-ton vehicle instead of bringing a folding cart?

When it’s easier and (value of time) cheaper, why not?

You seem to have different issues than the person I'm replying to. Maybe your situation is different. If you nearest grocery store is 45 minutes away by walking maybe your situation requires a different solution than someone who has expressed interest to walk but stated that they might buy too many groceries to walk that home.

Nope. A car is convenient (the comment I was replying too) in both situations!

Weird, eh?

I find it convenient to walk to my grocery store. It's inconvenient to have too many groceries regardless of my conveyance home.

Too many groceries to conveniently carry by hand in one go != too many. For some of us, anyway.

Yes, because we're a wealthy and productive society and the fruits of human progress in the past 300 years have allowed us to build a civilization where nearly everyone can afford to use a multi-ton machine of nearly incomprehensible complexity and sophistication to carry them around, instead of pushing a cart like a peasant 5,000 years ago did.

Check out eg https://youtu.be/hmk5cxpAfcw where he’s flying by all the cars stuck in traffic on his human-powered peasant wheels.

Auto companies lobbied governments and put out propaganda to get cities to rip out street cars and rail in the early 1900s. They did this to sell more cars, so this is what we get.

If you want to ban cars from New York City, that's fine with me. Do you realize that NYC makes up 0.008% of the land area in the United States?

Your young and fit rollerblade dude doesn’t seem to be carrying much in the way of groceries.

What about the mother of three with a disability? Should she push a cart to the grocery store?

Why can't the majority of the people walk to a store and the rest can be serviced by a smaller truck?

Yes we can afford this now. In the context of "Tire Dust Makes Up the Majority of Ocean Microplastics" how long can we afford this? Just like dumping Freon, and CO2 into the atmosphere have long term consequences that require our society to change, how long can we go aerosolizing rubber?

I wonder how hard it would be to capture this with some kind of aero device in the wheel wells of vehicles. Given what F1 teams can do with aero, it doesn’t seem like a huge stretch to be able to suck up these particles at the source and pass them through a filter bag like a household vacuum or something.

That's a fascinating idea. I hope someone (you?) pursues it.

I think the issue is the particles are from the friction of the road and to effectively collect the particles it would drastically reduce tire clearance, not an issue for F1, but for the consumer market tire clearance is important, for some reason.

Governments have paid very little attention to this problem to date. It seems like regulation on chemical composition of tires might be warranted. I don't have a problem with that.

Unfortunately we have been pushing the costs onto everybody else: as evidenced by climate change and micro plastics. And now the bill is starting to come due.

I have a wheeled shopping cart thing (not sure what to really call it, but it’s the standard one). I can only fit some milk and a few things in there, it is no where near as capable as my car. I still use it, since I don’t like driving to the store (we live near 3 big grocery stores, and a soon to be closed city target), and it’s useful for getting snacks to school when it’s my turn, but I don’t see it as a car replacement.

How far do you think people should be willing to walk to a store?

People should walk as far as they are willing to walk.

As i mentioned in my other post. Thats not far for most people. More than 1/4 mile and people will not hesitate to get the car

I'm sure there are many people for whom that is true, but there are also many people who would laugh at the idea of driving two miles instead of walking, or laugh at the idea of driving six miles instead of cycling (even with a bag or two of shopping).

I think a lot of the difference between people comes down to their childhood - what they learned as default behaviour. Though obviously people can change as they grow up too, either personality wise or having health/physical reasons they either can't walk far or can't drive at all. But my point is that just because some people feel that 3 minutes is the maximum time for walking before a car should be used instead it doesn't mean that short distance is an immutable fact, and many people could get used to walking slightly further distances and discover that no only is it not the end of the world, but it's even a good way to stay or become a bit fitter and healthier!

I was just thinking - why don't they make electrified coin-operated shopping carts that you can take home and return when you're done with them? That would greatly extend the carrying capacity of a single person and maybe make car trips redundant.

Because nearly no-one wants to walk to the store, walk home, walk back to the store to return the cart and then walk home again.

I never drive to the store and I still wouldn't do that.

You'd keep the cart until next time you need it.

Thats just buying a shopping cart with extra steps

Then why don't we make the shopping cart carry people and suddenly its just a car with a lot of extra steps.

Like, a car _is_ your shopping cart you take to-and-from the grocery store. It also carries you to work and does all sorts of other things.

These "crappier than a car" solutions seem to be from people who haven't really thought this through IMO.

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The solution is to have a store walking distance from the house, meaning you don't even take large amounts of groceries home. Why buy a lot of groceries when whatever you want is within walking distance?

When I visited Manila, Philippines, my life was like this. Fresh bread? Just walk to the corner store, no reason to take extra home with me because tomorrow morning it'd be baked fresh again. Why should I spend on 2 pan-de-sal (great tasting Filipino bread btw) for today-and-tomorrow, when I'm planning to walk to the city-corner again to well... do anything anyway? The bus is there, the food is there, breakfast is there, everything is there. Its less convenient to even take anything home outside of eggs or other longer-term goods.

But you need to live _much_ closer together than what Americans are used to. And there needs to be a reason to go "to the corner" (ex: to take the bus or other public transit). Etc. etc. etc. This simply doesn't work in American suburbia.

American City centers, such as New York or Washington DC seem to have figured it out in my experience. But prices for this lifestyle are higher than just buying a car and living in suburbia. So yeah, Americans recognize the value of this lifestyle (despite all of our debate and complaints). But there's not enough space/housing in cities to have enough people live a car-free lifestyle.

Your solution is even worse! Not only it means opening stores everywhere, but you haven't even considered the fact that not everyone wants to go shopping daily. Buying in bulk is a thing, bc of time and money saved. Besides, I was thinking of something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Foldable-Lightweight-Shopping-Capacit... which is already popular with the old ppl in many countries in Europe.

I'd say most people in overly car-centric areas balk at walking from the far end of a Walmart parking lot.

Are you serious? That's 400m. One lap of the athletics track. Should take about 4 minutes at walking speed.

Aren't there shopping malls in the US longer/wider than this?

I think I walk further than that between buildings to get to the canteen at lunch time. I tell people I live "really close" to a metro station and it's 380m away.

I knew someone that drove their car to work every day… 100m away.

> Are you serious? That's 400m. [...] Aren't there shopping malls in the US longer/wider than this?

It's not like people go to malls as frequently as they go grocery shopping, so this doesn't really imply anything. Also don't forget you're carrying potentially heavy bags. Also don't forget not everyone is a fit 30yo.

Do people who are otherwise well genuinely take a car 1/4 of a mile?

My data point when I lived in SF is I would walk a third of a mile with two bags of groceries. But didn't really want to walk half a mile.

Back when I lived in San Jose I could also walk to the store because way back in the 1940's they put a pedestrian walkway between two streets which dropped the walking distance from my house to the shopping center from half a mile to again a third of a mile.

Which brings up something I think is over looked. Which is the layout of streets in post war housing tracts makes the distances you need to work twice are far as they could be. With zoning changes, money and some eminent domain we could make things better.

Housing density, and radius of "walkable" to the average human.

I live in a neighborhood full of small apartments, single level duplexes, and single family homes. What stores are walkable? The liquor store, and gas station, and if i really feel like it, dominos and 7-11, both of which are at least 1/4 mile one way. Most others in this area, dont get those even. Past that its about a mile one way to the actual grocery store. And then after all the shopping, i have to walk back, now with 50+lbs of groceries.

Honestly, all this we need more walkable cities stuff, i get it, yes, you should be able to get places by walking, but really, its just not even feasible most times if youre going to be buying something. Im not gonna walk home from best buy 4+ miles away heaving a huge TV on my back, no one will. We invented transportation that didnt involve humans using their legs because we are slow, and easily over encumbered when carrying things. Theres a reason we saw an explosion of carriages way back. Its easier to haul more, and much faster, than if a person, or even many people at once, were to do it.

Housing density is a huge factor in a lot of this, but having swaths of tall purely apartment buildings is also not the answer. People want single family homes and other styles for many reasons. They wont be going away anytime soon. And even if they did, the only answer is very mixed use zoning.

One of my favorite examples, in downtown Denver, there is a tall apartment building, stacked on top of a large chain grocery store, it includes parking for the store, and spots for the building, under the building too. This is what i would consider peak use, and what people complain about walkable cities really need to focus on. Having a city you can walk anywhere is great, but you need to be able to get to the societal needs without having to walk far. Of course the grocery store also serves for a large part of that neighborhood, and distance to the store is a variable, but this mainly serves multiple buildings in a small area. The big problem is all the space we waste dedicating to parking. It might be more expensive, but you can gain a lot more use if you force parking lots to have shops above/below them, and that reclaimed flat land can then be used for the mixed use building. Parking is also not going away, like i said, we invented carriages for a reason. Howwwweeeeevvvveeerrr all of this comes with a number of caveats, like the ridiculous price to lease a storefront, build the building, etc, and of course its just a feedback loop that gets worse as we waste more space, space becomes premium.

All of this is to sum up my point, walkability is variable by person, and changes greatly depending on if youre going to have to be carrying things, and theres never going to be good "walkable" cities, short of nuking a city and starting over, you wont make it vastly better, especially with the politicians and government we have now.

So people in your type of neighbourhood maybe can't start walking everywhere right away, but you don't need to also think "walking is out forever" - you can start lobbying your local politicians, and voting for the ones who want to improve things rather than sit in their 4x4 enjoying the status quo.

(And personally if I lived somewhere unwalkable I'd move home to address that, though I appreciate there can be reasons to either not want to move or to not be able to move.)

Though folks who prioritized that would probably not move to such a place in large numbers?

Unless they changed their mind to that state due to some major economic shifts after the move anyway.

A mile to a store is a very comfortable distance. I've lived in such situation for a couple of years and just walked to the store a couple times a week, hauling back a couple of kilograms of groceries in my backpack every time. I needed the walk and the exercise anyway, and this way I was killing two birds with one stone.

So no kids?

Nope. But it wouldn't be a problem to carry even 8-10 kg in a backpack instead of just 3-4 kg. In fact, it's a recommended form of cardiovascular excercise (it's called "rucking").

Definitely no kids.

And since when is rucking only 10kg? That’s just going for a walk?

Rucking has always been 40+ kg and involved some kind of serious terrain where I’m from?

That's for enthusiasts (super fit people)? From health benefits perspective for average person, what I've heard is that it's enough for the weight to trigger accelerated heart rate, breathing, sweating etc. when walking. 10-15 kg should do it for most people.

Re: the "with kids" perspective, my mother used to haul groceries from across half a town (from which store happened to have something stocked) during Communist Poland times. She, like most other people, did not have a car. It was all definitely doable, as evidenced by 35m+ million population of Poland at that time, most of whom was families with kids an no cars.

Ah, seems like the term is being co-opted for the general populace and is now trendy! We used to just call it backpacking.

Rucking originated as a military term for a long jog with a heavy rucksack (hence the name!) and was always pretty shitty because rucksacks suck and the military has no shortage of heavy shit to carry. I’ve heard stories of 80+ lb rucksacks and 8+ miles being the norm.

Weirdly, the military also coined ‘Vitamin I’ for ibuprofen. I wonder why?

Ah how the world changes. I can’t wait for it to mean going on a casual walk with a loved one while bringing along a nice meal and some wine. ;)

Thanks for explaining!

Why not ride an e-bike that one mile to the grocery store and go more often instead of needing to haul 50lbs in one trip.

Also, it’s the year 2023 it is easier than ever to get a tv delivered to your front door without you needing to haul it anywhere.

I’m ready for your excuses.

> Also, it’s the year 2023 it is easier than ever to get a tv delivered to your front door without you needing to haul it anywhere.

Is it really better for the environment to double-up on all the packaging and have an even heavier truck (that has worse emissions and even worse tire-wear / microplastic creation) than the car that weighs like 1/4th the weight of the truck?

That's what I mean by the "last mile" problem. The alternative, big trucks that consolidate deliveries, isn't a clear cut win either.

One heavy truck is still better in aggregate than many personal cars. I don’t have the numbers, but when transportation is the biggest cause of GHG emissions and microplastic pollution consolidating that transportation to as few vehicles as possible will always work out to less pollution than the status quo.

My Bolt EV has a curb weight of 3624lbs; there are examples of vehicles that could have dramatically lower impact, but it's frustrating that GM doesn't seem inclined to keep cars like this in production. (Yes, they're hinting at producing the Bolt EV in the future, it's unfortunate that they can't just keep producing the current Bolt until then)

The report they cite has a litte icon of a train in their solutions infographic section, page 89:

https://www.systemiq.earth/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Breaki...

I was in the market for a small electric city car and found out that we're not allowed to have small cars in the US. Europe and Asia have really nice small city cars under 2,000lbs but none of them are available here. I believe the smallest car sold in the US is the Mini Cooper around 3,000lbs. I actually ended up with a souped up street legal golf cart and it's worked out well for my purposes, though I'm in the Bay Area where the weather is not too extreme most of the year. I'm not sure why this market is neglected.

Doesn't really matter in any case.

The bulk of the problem is 5000lb+ vehicles. F150, SUVs like Suburbans, etc. etc. I'm not even sure if people are using these big vehicles to carry their families around, its probably just single-person drivers in most cases.

I'm not even sure how to approach the weight problem. We have plenty of cars in the 3000lb or 4000lb range but more-and-more people are pushing 5000lb+.

A tax during annual registration based on axle weight to the fourth power times the number of miles driven since the last odometer reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

There are some horrible states without annual inspections, but they should be federally punished until they comply. If we could force every state to have a drinking age of 21, using access to highway funding, then there's no reason the same thing couldn't be done for vehicular taxation. It would increase state tax revenue anyway...

The Mitsubishi Mirage is available in the US and comes in at just ~2100lbs, but it really ends up just serving the purpose of showing how huge of a gap there is in the American market. The fact that Mitsubishi can make a 4-door, 40mpg, 2100lbs car that passes US regs on a shoestring sale price shows that other mfgs could but just don't have the incentive to. You have the cancelled Chevy Spark at 2246lbs, the 2-seater Miata at 2,341lbs, and then the next lightest is a Versa with +500lbs on the Mirage.

The Honda Fit, which is very popular, isn't even sold in the US anymore. Curb weight is low 3000s, all of the passenger seats fold down, it parallel parks trivially, and it's fun to drive. It's basically a 90s Civic.

I'm angry about this often, as mine is over fifteen years old. If I had to release it with a new car, I'd want another Fit. The closest thing on the market is probably a hatchback Civic...and the whole reason for the Fit existing is because international pressure made the Civic too large and heavy for the desirable tax bracket in the Japanese market.

And it's not even small for the Japanese market, because they have the whole kei class, with strong incentives to drive smaller cars. Which is how it should work everywhere: severe tax penalties for larger cars, to promote public safety and fairly pay for the fourth-power law that affects road wear.

Last mile can be resolved with drones and bikes. I wouldnt even be opposed to consider going back to horses.

Are horses actually environmentally friendly? I know that having a pet dog can be one of, if not the most, un-environmentally friendly things a person can do due to the amount they eat, so I could imagine horses having the same problem and not being as good as electric cars yet alone electric bikes, but I don't know anything about horses so maybe they're very efficient eaters?

I do know that back before cars, places like NYC had many tens of thousands of horses working in the streets, leading to huge amounts of horse shit everywhere (so much so that even though it does have industrial uses, it's value was practically zero), plus something like half a dozen horses dying on the streets every day and being left to putrefy - so some logistical improvements compared to last time needed at the very least, though 120 years ago people weren't caring much about the fuel efficiency comparisons.

Yep, horses are massively expensive to own. Aside from required caloric intake, think living space, waste disposal, pests, specialized care (farrier), vet bills, tack, grooming. Ugh.

Horses are far more inefficient at carrying than cars. That's why we switched to cars so quickly.

This caused a cascading set of improvement. Horses needed *literally* tons of horse-bread to function well. And those *literal* tons of horse-bread turned into *literal* tons of horse-poop.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-horse-bread

> According to some estimates, medieval horses consumed about 20 pounds of food per day.

Note: a "day" of travel was ~30 miles back then.

It gets worse: you need horse-bread (and the waste / horse-poop) to _move_ horse bread into the cities, where all the horses were.

Alternatively, consider that one-gallon of gasoline (~6 lbs) would also travel 30 miles today, but also carry far more load. What, our typical car is like 200 horsepower today? So one gallon of gasoline is roughly the strength of a 200-horse carriage?.

Its an absurd comparison point. We're realistically looking at 1-gallon of gasoline (and its associated waste product) vs something like 4000-lbs (ie: 2 tons) of horse bread (and its associated waste product/2-tons of horse poop).

------------

Gasoline, for all of its faults, largely turns into CO2. Which escapes into the atmosphere and floats away. But imagine that for every gallon of gasoline you used today you created 20lbs of horse-poop somewhere instead.

Horse poop is something you'd need to scrub out of the streets every night, and it would infect the local rivers each time it rained.

The idea of horses being more environmentally friendly is a laughable myth. They're incredibly dirty creatures, and the poop problem alone would cause a significant rise in infections above-and-beyond anything this microplastics problem has caused, I promise.

Or people just get their groceries delivered. Way more convenient, not expensive anymore (I get unlimited deliveries for a fairly paltry annual fee), and saves on journeys as the truck just loads up on lots of people’s deliveries all at once.

It also scales better - if more people are having groceries delivered then each trucks stops become more closely clustered (unless the computers involved are just doing a poor job).

As the tire wear varies with the square of the weight we are comparing:

100x(car weight + grocery weight)^2 Vs (Truck weight + 100x grocery weight)^2

I couldn't find an empty weight for a box truck that could carry that much but assuming 10klbs total, and that grocery weight is negligible to the car, it looks like thebtruck is slightly better. It doesn't seem like a clear win.

> (car weight + grocery weight)^2

That's ^4 actually. Friction / Normal Force / Damage to roads is to the Fourth power law.

Yeah, the 100x lighter cars might actually be better in practice. That's what makes this last-mile problem so problematic. We're already (possibly) at the local optimum.

Honest question how does shear force proportional to torque not factor in? Coefficient of friction is shear over normal. Mechanical properties are a function of temperature and quick startups assuredly contribute to wear. An extreme example is drag racing. Cars are highway driving in steady state cruising for more miles and time but in the US around town driving has stop lights.

Even at steady state cruising the the tires are flexing and stretching with each revolution. Tires are round but a driveway is flat. If you look at the contact patch of the tire it flattens a bit to confirm to the driveway's shape. Now visualize with each revolution that flatten part of the tire is cycling around the wheel.

At a microscopic level there's a lot edges in the road surface that we don't fully appreciate which also contributes to tire wear. http://insideracingtechnology.com/tirebkexerpt1.htm

The important point is there are far greener alternatives than EV's. EV's cost a lot of resources to build, which means a lot of environmental destruction and carbon output. Plus as we see they still contribute to this tyre dust problem. They are not the holy grail. Rail, public transport, e-bikes and better city design is.

This argument about EV resource use for construction is fossil fuel industry FUD. The difference is outweighed within a year or two of driving versus an ICE vehicle.

It can be simultaneously true that EVs are absolutely a big improvement over ICE vehicles, and that switching all vehicles to EVs doesn't solve 100% of the problems - therefore it's good to both continue pushing to move to EVs, and to push for alternatives as suggested by GP.

Batteries are still heavy.

For instance, the VW id.3 (small-ish EV) has a curb weight 250-450kg (550-1,000lbs) more than my wife's gasoline VW Passat, a quite spacious estate wagon.

I doubt an ID3 weighs only half a ton. Probably at least three times that?

It is close to two tons, I was (clumsily, it appears, but English is my third language, so please bear with me) trying to state that an id.3 compact is 250-450kg (depending on configuration) heavier than a gasoline-powered estate.

Aaaah - gotcha.

>> more than

> Cars have been getting heavier long before EVs came around. One of the problems is that EVs are all new. Too many of them are bigger than they need to be. But that also goes for new ICE vehicle models.

I’m not too worried about the weight of EVs long term.

Given the rate of climate change / ecological damage, what definition are we using for "long term"?

That aside, you've might have buried the lede. The switch over to EVs should represent an opportunity to revisit and evolve what personal transportation could look like and should look like[1]. Instead we've taking the same *old* bigger, stronger, faster paradigm and replacing petrol with a plug. Humans' role in the bigger broader picture isn't changing. It's the starus quo with a solar panel.

There's a better than fair chance we're going to regret squandering this opportunity.

[1] Similar happened with the pandemic...an opportunity to revist and rethink was quickly swept aside for back to the status quo. ASAP please. That's great for the status quo but certain a concern for the long term.

> Fleet operators don’t see any significant difference in tire wear. EVs have higher torque but that doesn’t matter unless to drive like a mad-man. EVs also allow you to drive very smoothly with no sudden jerk in torque.

Time-to-replace-tyre is insignicant. If tyre manufacturer is tasked with making EV tyre with same durability as normal tyre they will just make rubber and grooves thicker.

Also technically heavier car on wider tyre might use them up at similar rate than lighter car on skinnier tyre (as load-per-cm2 would be similar) but obviously produce more dust.

> Cars have been getting heavier long before EVs came around. One of the problems is that EVs are all new. Too many of them are bigger than they need to be. But that also goes for new ICE vehicle models.

It took ~20-30 years for average ICE car to get ~30% heavier. EVs add another ~30-50% on top of that increase.

For any comparable ICE, EV will be heavier.

I think your final point is key. Apart from curb weight, the reason to emphasize EVs might be just to remind people that they're not a panacea for the environmental collapse we're speeding towards. Instead of inventivizing car-free and car-light living, policymakers would rather not distrupt anything, simply swapping EVs for ICE vehicles in the same miserable sprawl. Yale's findings underline that this can't happen.

> What we need to focus on is infrastructure for walking, biking and public transportation

And busses, light rail, intercity trains.

But America associates one-car-per-person with all kinds of twisted politics and self-esteem anxiety.

We need a psyops program to wean people off cars, and it will take a decade or more. Just look at the anger in any HN thread that is critical of cars, it runs deep.

> We need a psyops program to wean people off cars, and it will take a decade or more. Just look at the anger in any HN thread that is critical of cars, it runs deep.

That 10 billion of car ad spend per year adds up.

Be willing to enforce civility in public. In Japan 7-year-old kids can ride the subway; here we have junkies burning fentanyl, vagrants with pitbulls, and "showtime". Gee, why wouldn't I want public transit to be an inseparable part of my life?

You are conflating two vastly different issues as part of pro-car propaganda. There is a drug epidemic AND there is a homeless crisis.

Those have nothing to do with investing in public transportation.

Your agenda is showing, lay off the NewsMax, my friend.

No, I lived this. I want to live where I can bicycle entirely (and mostly did, because transit is often dirty). I'm working toward spending a few years in Japan and later the Netherlands. But only because we can't have nice things in the USA. I'm not going to live where junkies own all public spaces and kids get stuck on needles and die.

HN rule require we take our peers' comments at face value.

Assuming your anecdote is 100% absolutely positively true and not made up at all, and that you actually saw kids get stuck with needles and die, here's the rub: your anecdote doesn't matter.

Your argument is literally: the solution to homeless and drug addiction is ... better manners?

Do you expect people to take you seriously?

// But America associates one-car-per-person with all kinds of twisted politics and self-esteem anxiety.

America offers various lifestyles, from big cities like NYC, Boston, etc where a car is a liability, to near suburbs that are well served by transit (eg, NYC tri-state area) where you probably need a car but your daily commute doesn't involve it, to more spread-out and rural living where car is absolutely necessary.

This speaks to a trade-off between density and car-dependence. People across the globe face similar trade-offs (eg: 50% of Dutch persons own a car, 86% of French households do...)

But we can do better. 92% of Americans own a car, only slightly higher than the rate in France, but the average American drives twice as many miles in a year as the average French person does [1]. There are a lot of trips that will always need a car. Lots of people still want to own a car, even if they live somewhere with a good rail network. But they don’t need to drive it as much. It’s not that they’re being forced not to drive, it’s that rail is such a great option for getting around that there’s simply no need to use a car for most trips. That should be our goal in the US.

[1] https://frontiergroup.org/resources/fact-file-americans-driv...

> look at the anger in any HN thread that is critical of cars

On the other hand: https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckcars

> Fleet operators don’t see any significant difference in tire wear.

Larger vehicles have larger tires. The size of a tire on a Tesla is a lot bigger than on my small sedan. They may both go 150,000km but one surely pollutes more.

True, but you should be comparing like with like here. A similar sized ICE vehicle will have similar sized tyres to the Tesla.

A similar sized ICE vehicle by weight will be much larger in volume. I compare a Tesla sedan with an actual ICE sedan and not a 3 row minivan.

Comparing a Tesla sedan to common ICE sedans...

Tesla Model 3 uses 235/45R18 tires. The tires that come with the car have a treadwear of 500, so ~50k miles of use. Quite middle of the road in terms of treadwear, and you can get much stickier (and much lower life) tires such as the Pilot Sport 4S.

4 competitors for the sedan in the luxury class:

BMW 330i uses 225/45R18

Audi A3 uses 225/40R18

Lexus ES250 uses 235/45R18

Mercedes C300 uses 225/45R18

Tire size seems all nearly identical to me. Some small variance, but broadly extremely close.

The tire is actually quite large and it appears the s3 (lowest end tesla) still weighs approx 500 more pounds than the Audi a3 (trims vary a lot it seems). This is probably why the smallest Tesla (the model 3) is using 235 and not 225 like the A3. All things considered, wear is going to increase with load.

For equivalent sized vehicles, EVs are heavier, simply because current generation batteries still do not match the energy density of fossil fuels.

There is even discussions to start using concrete for roads to handle the increased weight of EVs.

A kia Nero EV is ~200kg heavier than the ice version. That's equivalent to two passengers. The weight delta of large vehicles is far more of an issue than drive train differences.

FWIW, chemical batteries won't ever match the energy density of fossil fuels.

Of course they don't need to, so it's not really an interesting comparison. The range/mass of the entire drivetrain is probably a reasonable comparison.

Exactly. Designing transit systems around cars was a colossal mistake. Now that the data are clear, it's time to rebuild. Over the next few decades, we need to tear down existing car infrastructure and replace it with walking/biking/transit.

A side benefit (aside from the particulate pollution, energy waste, noise pollution, high death toll, increased inter-destination distance, decreased QOL) is that it'll be like an order of magnitude cheaper. Cars are a rather expensive way to get around. The Netherlands actually considers biking to be +17cents per mile (as in, considered revenue), because of reduced healthcare costs.

Transit systems are designed around cars because people want to use cars. This idea that it was some kind of a massive conspiracy from the auto manufacturers is just bullshit.

Yes, cars are expensive. We can afford cars today. No one wants to get poorer and go back to walking.

The car shaming mindset makes sense if you live somewhere like Japan where transit is clean and fast, and you don't have problematic people who assault other riders and do drugs. As a family man living in a large American west coast city, there is no way I would ever give up my car lifestyle.

Cars are the leading killers of kids in America.

So? No matter what actions you take, _something_ is going to be the leading killer of kids.

> the focus on EVs is a distraction.

Indeed.

> EVs tend to shed around 20 percent more

... for the same capacity. Isn't it funny how people focus on per-vehicle numbers for one segment? There are more oversized gas-burning pickups and SUVs than electric anything, plus millions of diesel-burning vehicles that are even heavier. But somehow those all get left out of most stories on this topic. Truly a strange coincidence, everyone forgetting the same thing all at once.

Yeah this is something that probably will start outside the western world. In poor countries as solar and batteries keep getting cheaper we will start seeing new shapes for vehicles which wont look the same as cars of today. Such vehicles will have a hard time getting cleared for the streets in the developed world because of decades of laws and red tape.

Sounds like a lot of hand-waving to rationalize a downside of EVs: they are heavy and chew up tires.

The downside applies to "heavy vehicles" more generally, which includes most battery-bearing EVs in addition to most pickup trucks and SUVs driven in the US.

> Too many of them are bigger than they need to be. But that also goes for new ICE vehicle models.

That's a very American centric claim. The gap between ICE and EV weight is relatively much higher in many other places where smaller cars are more popular.

> the focus on EVs is a distraction

Tire particles have been a problem since forever but recently its a big concern now that EVs are rapidly dethroning combustion cars. I'm suspicious