Study supports link between traffic-related air pollution and mental disorders | Hacker News Reader

Study supports link between traffic-related air pollution and mental disorders

kcl.ac.uk

Think this is bad? Does it raise a concern in you? Well, let me remind you of leaded gasoline and how it used to convert people in post apocalyptic savages taken right from a Mad Max movie - scientifically proven.

Electric vehicles can't come fast enough. We desperately need a battery tech revolution!

PM2.5 pollution, mentioned in the article, comes from tyre and brake wear.

And you’re going to get a lot of that with 2 tonne EVs compared to lighter ICE cars.

You can fit particulate filters to the exhaust to capture the tiny particles there. Gonna struggle with the tyres. Make them harder and then braking distances increase and the car will struggle to turn(efficientcy will go up though) , chance the compound so they come apart in bigger chunks then the tyres won’t last as long and you’ll end up with loads of rubber in the drains.

You also have to generate the power to charge those vehicles. Better batteries aren't going to provide that.

You can always throw more nuclear reactors this problem :) . The only thing that practically stands in the way is the elusive battery that can be charged quickly without becoming a galaxy note 7 grenade.

Exactly. Notice though how strong the resistance is to recognizing nuclear power as a viable option. It's literally a win-win for people concerned about climate change and those concerned about crippling the economy. Everything comes with a trade-off.

> Electric vehicles can't come fast enough

They've been around for 120+ years and carried hundreds of billions passenger very safely and a high speed.

Look for a pair of rails.

> We desperately need a battery tech revolution

No, we desperately need to abandon the car culture.

Lets not play semantics, shall we?

And "car culture" is a misnomer. There's no movement or force that enforces cars on everyone to call it culture. Cars are exceptionally convenient things that arose from the need to have them and the only way to abandon them is to come up with star trek teleportation. Good luck with that.

Do some more research on the topic. From the legal system to land use, transportation funding, and corporate handouts the United States undeniably has an active car culture.

Receipts? Here's one after a second of Google searching: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/03/06/heres-how-driving-is-...

Well, yeah, because cars became such major part of life, systems were made around them. Cars aren't enabled by those systems, it's the other way around. Same can be said for every other major form of transportation in human history. You sound like a hippy.

Ad hominem isn't helpful. This entire thread is providing you with original research and facts that doesn't support your argument. You can choose to read them or attack others and you're choosing the latter.

All these "original research" and facts does nothing but state the after effects of the invention of cars and them becoming the dominant form of transportation. While the original post i replied to believes that if somehow this "car culture" phenomenon disappeared, people will stop using cars and everyone will ride bycicles like a happy hippy nation. That won't happen, because, like i made it clear, everything gravitates around cars, not the other way around.

Your research is therefore irrelevant to the base issue.

What i choose is to use reason and make a simple link between cause and effect.

Between free curbside parking, the amount of government budget given to maintain roads compared to the amount for rail, the term “jaywalking” (an invention of car manufacturers), it sure seems like cars are enforced on everyone. Take those away and then how convenient are cars?

Railroads dominated and had superior budgets. Then cars showed up and turned everything around. People wanted them, got them. Infrastructure had to adapt to cars, because they became the dominant transportation form.

Going by your logic, i can say that email is enforced on me and that makes me angry. But that hardly makes any sense, does it?

> There's no movement or force that enforces cars on everyone to call it culture.

The movement has won and is now ingrained into some societies:

> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States.

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic

* https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/10/17/peter-norton-we-can-l...

Various parking requirements in zoning:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking

See also the wailing and rending of garments when a city tries to put in bicycle lanes or make a street pedestrian-only.

People loved the idea of the car and stuck with it right from the start. There's always someone that will resist anything, and society at large will take its time to reorganize and adjust itself that change. But the people that support the change itself are the driving force of it, not the "interest groups." If nobody liked cars to begin with, cars wouldn't have gained any momentum regardless how much someone tried to force them on people.

I’m in the “fewer cars camp.” But I entirely disagree with your dismissal of car culture. Cars aren’t just necessary in American culture due to our car centric infrastructure, we have car clubs, car enthusiasts, and hobbiest. People race them for fun. There are art cars, and cars used as status symbols. Cars take lead rolls in our films, art, and music. Car culture is alive, well, obvious, and huge. If you want cleaner electric cars, you gotta build them with respect to the culture. Tesla is doing a good job of that. Just look at the Cyber truck. It’s a big ass overpowered truck, just how truck owners like their trucks.

*Added: I can imagine a conversation in my old home town of a Cyber truck owner saying, “yeah my truck is quite, but the glass is bulletproof!”

Anything that has some significance to it, chances are that it has some kind of fan club behind it, it's probably turned into sport, art things are made for it, statuses are based on it. But it's an after effect of said thing, not a precursor to it.

If you ban for ex. cars from all those examples you gave, guess what - people will still drive them, because cars are not enabled by all those things you listed, it's the other way around.

For electric cars to take over, all it takes is a battery that can be charged as fast and as reliably as a gas tank. Nothing else. It will take over like a hurricane.

The decision of the government to build roads and communities to be planned around car-based transportation (as opposed to walking, bicycling, or public transit) is absolutely car culture

That decision came after the fact of the popularity of cars. The infrastructure adapted to cars after cars came about and started taking over, not the other way around as you make it seem. People walked, cycled, rode horses way before cars. Then someone invented cars and everything else became a hobby.

> There's no movement or force that enforces cars on everyone to call it culture.

HAH! When entire cities in a country are designed to be car-accessible only?

Please learn about walkability and access to public transportation and how sprawls are downright hostile to people without a car.

Then go visit Tokyo.

Of course cities (and countries) will be designed to accommodate the most dominant form of transportation of modern civilization... If you come up with something superior, perhaps a star trek teleportation thingamajig, i assure you everything will be reorganized to fit it.

Job applications to any company can be said to be downright impossible via a postal pigeon. Are you going to hippy out on using email or will you accept the reality of it?

public transport, unfortunately, has been set back years by covid.

Makes sense I remember reading a study in the Netherlands that people next to a busy road had polution level that were equivalent to smoking a pack a day. Also the constant sound lowered life quality substantially. That’s why they put up these sound barriers in the Netherlands. With more efficient cars I wonder if it got any better.

Noise pollution is surely a contributor to mental and perhaps even physical problems, but it seems to be very low priority. Also, I would assume that people who are exposed to higher air pollution from vehicles are likewise exposed to more noise.

Personally, stupidly loud motorcycles driving through my village make me want to hurt the riders, and I'm normally a gentle person. Thus, noise pollution greatly contributes to mental disorder for me!

It could just as well be some other environmental factor causing mental disorders that correlate with pollution, such as living in a densely populated area.

I'm always amazed that any person who grew up in the Bridge Apartments could ever possibly a functioning member of society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Manhattan_Expressway#/me...

I would like to see how they controlled for economic status. Polluted areas are noisy and not desirable. If you don’t have a disorder you are likelier to be able to afford a better spot.

Room air is much more polluted than outside air. Room air filters are more common in Europe. But pretty easy to find. I saw one at costco last month.

Planting more trees would also help.

It is not as simple as the amount of dust/dirt in the air.

Studies have found those living close to a highway or busy street have an increased chance of dying. The type of particulate becomes heavy more deadly.

I suspect the same effect is happening here.

I read before that tires actually degrade and that contributes to pollution. I mentioned room air filters, because that seems like it would be a wise investment for people that live close to highways, or people that spend a lot of time in indoors like programmers.

So that maybe someone with a room air filter can comment on which ones are worth getting.

I saw and posted a link to a paper that discussed where automotive particulates come from, with estimates for each. I think brakes and tires account for 5-10% each. Most of it comes out the exhaust pipe. Also seen some articles that say that cooking with natural gas creates a lot of indoor pollution.

Say to me getting rid of gasoline and diesel cars will help a lot. Also getting rid of gas stoves and furnaces would also help.

One thing I don't see talked of much, driers. The exhaust from gas driers to me seems like something really dodgy.

> Room air is much more polluted than outside air

On the contrary, particulate "nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and oxides (NOx), ozone (O3)" is at its maximum around busy roads.

In a room it decades quickly if you block airflow.

I have a PM detector and I can see that every day.

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