With particulate counts from heating and car exhaust falling from better filters and increasing electrification, tyre dust is bound to get more spotlight in the coming decade. Especially in Europe and Asia where the inner city isn't just a place for poor people and offices with air filtration.
I daresay that the bigger problem with tyre dust is that lots of it gets washed into rivers and waterways whenever it rains. Some of the proprietary tyre chemicals (e.g. 6PPD) have been shown to be extremely toxic to fish, so this is yet another pressure that we're putting on our environment.
But we only care about that when it ends up in fish we eat. The fish are dying anyways from overfishing. And even when the fish we eat are full of microplastic we seem to be able to mostly ignore that. Eating fish is a personal choice and all that.
I wish we cared about the rivers and oceans, but as a group we seem to mostly hope that enough bacteria will evolve to eat that stuff. Getting people to do something about the air we breathe is a lot easier (and even then change is slow and with a lot of opposition)
I don't really see it as a choice between water and air as we're utterly dependant on both for the survival of humans.
I think we're behaving like a room full of monkeys that are just throwing shit around and hoping that not too much ends up on ourselves. We can't continue to do that forever.
Anecdotally if you are a lead footed driver switching to an EV can result in tires that last less than 5,000 miles (8,000km), even with "inexpensive" EVs like the Model 3 and Mach-E.
This is the sort of thing that can be alleviated with software, but that won't be satisfying to the people who like the sensation of being pressed into the back of their seat the instant the light turns green. At least with an EV it isn't accompanied by noise pollution.
> More weight and faster acceleration cause EV tires to wear out 20 to 50% faster than conventional car tyres, and even more sustainable tyres designed for EVs wear 26% faster than gasoline models.
Vehicle tires are a deep, integral part of daily economic and socio-economic activity.
Deeper than even cigarettes used to be (in North America). There was a time when people couldn't imagine a day without a cigarette. Now think about a future state where living without a personal motor vehicle is both a sane and practical choice.
It will similarly take a long time to combat vested interests and change consumers' habits.
> Vehicle tires are a deep, integral part of daily economic and socio-economic activity.
We should be careful not to let perfect be the enemy of good, such as mandates to reduce tire wear[1] and elimination / substitution of the most harmful tire additives.[2][3]
A lot of it is self inflicted wounds. Americans thanks to the car can live like 30-40 miles from work and have an acceptable commute. Thats hard to do in a timely fashion on public transit anywhere, which seems to work best up to a 5-15 mile radius or so. People have to be willing to live closer (and often it is cheaper to live close to the center of town as that is where the recent immigrant minority populations find their cheaper housing, than in the newer construction suburbs full of doctors and lawyers and private schools).
Rail suburbs do this relatively easily. The issue isn't distance; public transport can go faster than cars in any case - the issue is sufficient density to achieve a reasonable occupancy rate. Plenty of countries have commuter suburbs/towns that are dense enough to justify 35-40 miles of public transit at high speeds and that built it as a result, and there's quite a few places in the US that could justify it but don't.
Even if you started building it you pick winners and losers with which town gets a rail station. A dozen commuter lines extending out in a 35 mile radius would be seriously impressive as a new network anywhere in the world really, yet that only means a dozen towns 35 miles out see a connection, the rest don’t. This also demands high speed rail to compete with cars; a typical american commuter rail going 70mph top speed with a dozen stops of some interval including acceleration and decelleration plus a potential transfer to a local line or bus to get to work from that commute rail station is some serious time to make up, compared to the case in all but a handful of american cities where even during rush hour a more or less fully built out freeway dual ring and feeder network is flowing at 70mph with no stops in between.
Taxing the previously subsidized usage of those roads is a start. See NYC's recent starter congestion tax. It still has a long way to go, but we can certainly improve the world slowly!
People who are driving there are likely doing so in a way that allows them to either absorb costs or pass them on to others.
Kansas City, for example, does not have a workable public transit system. If you charge a congestion tax to reduce traffic on interstates, it means real pain because there is no alternative.
There are far more Kansas Cities in the US than there are New York Cities.
Yeah people seem to think that driving costs up for driving will change behavior and build infrastructure. The reality is it will just hook the local government or authority to the tax.
Well sure, if you're now sneaking in the qualifier that the costs are marginal. But obviously there is some price at which people do change their behavior.
Well, yeah. If magically people are going to change their behavior, marginal cost matters. If it costs me $10 to drive to a destination, and you introduce a tax that adds $5, there’s a $5 marginal cost difference.
For the commuter, there’s a few options in most places: take a bus if available and save money at the cost of time, wfh, complain and get the company to move, move to a closer locale, or pay. Making a fast convenient transit system is not happening in 2025, and most of the field of dreams thinking about bike lanes isn’t working.
In NYC, it’s a scheme to prop up the MTA, whose labor contracts consume all oxygen — the organization is broke after imposing a regional sales tax that affects people living as far north as Poughkeepsie. And frankly, as awesome as NYC is, it’s fucked long term - it’s no longer a diversified economy, and the biggest industry is slowly attriting away. You need transit, and everyone is priced out of areas that are transit accessible. Many buildings in Manhattan are essentially vacant today.
In my city, a $6M budget hole prompted a sudden concern for child safety. We lowered the speed limit to 25, 20 in school zones, and setup a network of cameras. The busiest corridor attracted 15,000 tickets in a week. Guess what else happened? People in that corridor made alternate choices, and three busy retailers in the strip announced they were closing.
The difference is elasticity - the marginal cost and hassle of getting a toll/ticket will lead me to another CVS. My office Christmas party can be outside of the city line. But my employer is more sticky.
> Now think about a future state where living without a personal motor vehicle is both a sane and practical choice.
I interpret this to mean "a future state in the US", since there are many places all over the world, where it is already sane and practical to live without a car or motorbike or similar vehicle.
American roads and streets are crazy wide, due to standards set in the 1950s. This created more sprawl. OTOH it also provides a lot of room for adding bike lanes. E-bikes can then replace most local driving.
Or it could be that people spend more time in their luxury vinyl planked house, vaping and having ingress air filled with formaldehyde from traffic
It'd make more sense and be less ethical to expose people to either formaldehyde or tire dust in a confined area, but that study is definitely not getting funded
Modern construction is insanely "tight" in the sense that most of the inside air stays in and most of the outside air stays out. Some of the most energy-efficient buildings need convoluted ventilation systems to prevent the humidity from getting out of whack and causing mold.
My older house might leak conditioned air like a sieve, but it's also venting away the various VOCs from whatever cheap crap I have recently brought inside.
AFAIK, the ventilation systems are only convoluted in the sense that they use a heat exchanger to minimize the temperature difference with the incoming fresh air. It’s not a hack or afterthought: The idea is that airflow is very important, but it needs to be controlled to maximize energy efficiency.
Relying on passive ventilation that wasn't designed as such is also not a good way to achieve removal of these nasties. You can see that if you open a window when you have high CO2 - it doesn't drop at any speed.
Relying is the important point. Sure, it may be fine, but it often isn't, and probably is uncomfortable in winter. And that's before we get to energy losses.
Is not just traffic, Biologists are exposed to formaldehyde vapors each day for example, and gloves don't remove it entirely so you end having skin problems.
