Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic

In the UK about one third are automatic but make up three quarters of new registrations.

I don’t understand this concept. I would expect an ICE and an EV vehicle with the same weight, speed, deceleration, tires, etc to have the same wear on tires. The difference being the energy to stop an ICE being transferred to the brake pads and rotors, rather than recharging the EV’s battery.

What am I missing? Why wouldn’t the tires experience the same forces in both scenarios?

> because they're transmitting power both when starting and stopping, not just when starting.

For the tires it doesn't matter if the energy from stopping is transferred into brakes or back into a motor though?

It’s because they weigh more

They were for many decades…

Even if there’s 5% of vehicles that couldn’t use them, it would still be a large decrease in local particulates.

(I don’t expect this to happen, of course, absent draconian particulate emissions laws.)

Pretty much every EV does regenerative baking, because it (greatly) extends range. Even hybrids have done this since the very earliest mass-market models (the 1997 Prius has it). EV brakes see a lot less wear and tear than ICE brakes.

If you look at what cars of this type are produced and who drives them, it quickly becomes clear where the road is heading. Huge off-road vehicles, albeit with electric drive, are missing the mark. These things are advertised with sporty performance, comfort and so on. In my opinion, energy is being thrown out the window to satisfy the ego of the buyer. These people are buying themselves a clear conscience. Even if the cars are electric, where can they be charged? Not everyone lives in the houses you see in the advertisements. Not everyone can just go into debt for something like this. I drive an economical petrol car with 200k kilometers on the clock. I don't need to produce anything new or use any rare earths or energy. Even with electric cars, the plastic for the door panels has to be made from crude oil. The cost of installing all the electronics is also high. I drive this car until I can't drive any more, I mostly use public transport, but sometimes I have to use the car for the weekly shop. I'm also staying in the city because I'm getting older and I'm dependent on doctors and markets, at the moment I work outside the city, like many others, and people just need a car to park here. Not everyone has the same life as others.

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It is common for electric cars to use harder rubber compounds in their tires. Not because of particulates, but because tire noise is particularly noticeable in an otherwise quiet electric car, and because tire life is a concern for EV drivers.

Luckily, both reduced noise and increased life are fairly well correlated with reduced particulate emission.

A battery trailer might affect the speed limit your allowed to drive.

But it would be cool to just rent the extra 500km when needed :)

This is a stupid idea because you’d have to make fasteners and high voltage interfaces that can survive an order of magnitude more cycles than they have to for a fixed pack. It would also be significantly more difficult to use the pack as a stressed member of the car structure. It’s better to just have less batteries and use them more efficiently through weight savings.

NIO does battery swaps in minutes, in China and Europe. I believe you can also perhaps get different ranges but if not, would be great to swap between a 50kwh pack for normal use and say 100+kwh for your road trip.

Then again battery charging/weight tech is getting pretty good pretty fast.

I imagine semiautonomous trailers that would just tag along in the slipstream within cable range for distances beyond your daily. With computer-fast reaction to brake and steering inputs of the lead car. Those would universally be rentals that you change like the horses in pre-rail post networks.

It surprises me how much people are determined to use the "car" form factor when it's clearly not a good design for weight reduction and efficient transport.

If instead people consider EVs that are non-car-shaped then we get things like e-bikes and e-scooters. Both can feature easily swappable batteries as the batteries are so much smaller due to the reduced weight of the vehicle. Also, the problems around congestion can pretty much disappear when you get enough people to use an e-bike/e-scooter instead of a car. The tyre wear/pollution is minimised due to the reduction in weight and similarly the brakes.

Crash test ratings.

Maybe even some sort of pedal-powered contraption. Perhaps we could even build lanes for these bi-cycles instead of 22 lane highways.

While bicycles are quite convenient for commuting, I am not sure if there is a way for transporting groceries for an entire week for multiple people. Is there such a way? The only solution I see is doing groceries every day.

The French have got you covered there [0].

There's also plenty of other, more practical / affordable microcars [1] on the road around where I live, they're considered equivalent to mopeds in terms of legality / requirements but you don't need a helmet, they seat two people and some groceries, etc. They used to be mainly popular for elderly people but they seem to catch on to other people too. Great for local traffic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twizy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcar

I‘m delighted to introduce to you the amazing microlino.ch

+1 for Cargo bikes, but otherwise if your bike infrastructure sorta sucks, the Citroën Ami and counterparts from Fiat etc are pretty common in European cities… easy to park too.

If you like repairing the vintage Vespa, great project and that sounds fun. That’s worth a lot!

But I will curse at the stink of the exhaust from the crappy old motor when you ride by. Try an e-bike (you can get one built more locally surely), or an e-Vespa (or hell, make that your project to convert the vintage Vespa into a silent sleeper Vespa with crazy performance!). Electric is so, so much more fun.

Worrying about that small amount of “critical minerals” needed for a bike/Vespa is a conspiracy to distract you from the fact that oil is also extracted and has negative externalities, we just live with those already.

Not all folks can do it, but here in Oakland there are plenty of folks who could do it if we had better paths, but don’t because the roads are very dangerous for bikes and we have poor bike paths. This means we can get more people on bikes. Also I’m in favor of changing more than just bike paths - we could improve housing affordability so that people don’t have a 1.5 hour commute to their work. Also I have three bikes that are 15 years old. Buying a used bike uses even less resources than a used Vespa. I do have a newer ebike though. They’re really nice when you have more stuff to carry or longer distances to travel!

Wow, that is a lot of loosely connected nonsense.

> Think of blue collar workers that are hungry

The what now?

> exhausted

There aren't many jobs that physically exhaust you to the point of not being able to walk (biking is no harder than walking). Especially since leg muscles are super hard to tire out.

> people getting older

Pretty much the same as above. If anything, the elderly prefer biking to walking, it's easier on the joints.

> Its fucking annoying to wait for the bus that does not show up

Less or more annoying than waiting when your car breaks down?

> Electric bikes are no solution, the minerals and energy must be produced to transport people like me.

Right, manufacturing a 30kg bike has costs, unlike manufacturing a 1500kg car.

> No new vehicle was produced, no rare earth was needed.

That's not how the economy works. Also, buying used is better than buying new if everything else is equal (it's not in this case), but whatever vehicle you bought was produced at some point.

> Fuel is produced every day for the plastics of the EV and for many other things like pharmacy and so on.

Er, what? I guess you think your vehicle is made out of grass and runs on water or something?

> Sure you are right with vegan biking, but not all folks can do it.

Not all folks can do it, so let's stick with 99% of people using cars to get around :)

Nice try with the vegan rage-bait.

Are you sure about that?

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

They're not inherently heavier. They're only heavier if you put a long-range battery in them, even then it's not by very much, and even that may not persist as higher energy density batteries are developed.

Or to put it another way, the difference between a small car and a large SUV is far greater than the difference between an electric car and a gasoline car.

But the brakes don't get used 90% of the time,it's all regen.

EVs have very low brake wear because you simply aren’t using the friction brakes at all most of the time.

A lot of EVs even have smart “blended” brake pedals that preferentially apply regen braking when you press the pedal. Only in particularly hard stops will the friction brakes get used.

An easy way to test/observe this is simply to check for wear on the brake pads of EVs compared to combustion vehicles of similar mileage.

Tires, on the other hand, do tend to wear out quicker in an EV. Partly due to weight and also due to higher performance/acceleration compared to combustion models.

In the US, the average car weight and the average EV weight are basically identical. (4300 pounds vs 4400 pounds). When you compare similarly sized models the EV tends to be about 10% heavier, but gasoline cars tend to be larger than EV's.

My Volvo XC60 T8 is not even a full EV but after 5 years of ownership the brakes on this 2200kg, 400bhp SUV are only 10% worn - it's all thanks to regenerative braking with the EV motor. It definitely makes a massive impact on how quickly the brakes wear out(as in - much much much less than in a normal car).

It doesn't matter though? Less braking material used equals less particles emitted. So if we accept that brakes on EVs last longer (and are otherwise similar in size), then they pollute less.

The pads aren't any bigger. If they last longer then they're emitting less.

If you want to go into the details of this, for all the things people hve mentioned, you have to calculate the road wear done by trucks carrying fuels to stations every day. Electricity does not need the same regular road wear as ICE vehicles do.

It is in fact straightforward to assume EVs create way, way less brake dust, because of how much less often they need brake replacements than ICE vehicles with the exact same brakes.

Interesting. Looks like it the line isn't able to take the energy (I'm guessing voltage is already too high) they dump the energy into a resistive heater.

Makes sense, it's just going to be heat anyways. I wonder how often that happens vs the energy getting dumped into the line.

I found it:

https://economics.acadiau.ca/tl_files/sites/economics/resour...

" Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Economics Acadia University, 2013" biased and poorly balanced.

  As far as can be determined, no cost-benefit analyses of bicycle facilities have been carried out for locations in Canada.

Maybe says more about the searching skills author than the state of cost-benefit analysis in Canada - but it sounds bad.

  The daily benefits from one person switching from car travel to bicycle travel for commuting are estimated to be $2.14.

Most of that 2.14 "savings" is car ownership and maintenance costs, which is bullshit because they say elsewhere you need a car for the days your can't cycle. Nice double counting eh?

Plus the internal+external "health ben." added up to be about equal to vehicle ownership costs.

See the "analysis" bias?

Perhaps an Acadia University Honours in Economics is toilet paper.

Yeah: I'm totally not a fan of biased car shit either. Some of your examples seem like strawmen to me.

> complain about the cost

Bike lanes in my country are mostly paid for by taxes on cars and petrol. The costs/benefits are often justified by cherry-picked benefits (e.g. reduced car congestion, or reduced pollution). The congestion arguments anecdotally appear to be lies: low usage priority cycle lanes seem to cause extra congestion (through phasing of lights and islands and other traffic controlling features).

Try and fairly point out that the numbers are juggled and you'll get skewered by cyclist ideologues. Read my sister comment where I reference the thesis that was the basis for my original comment.

I have an acquaintance working in our council on improving bike lanes.

I'm not against bikes. I'm against badly biased reports : towards/against both cyclists or cars.

Balanced discussion seems so difficult.

… in the US and Canada.

when we lived in the suburbs my family and i spent way more time inside than we do now in a rural setting. i think maybe you got mixed up. rural people are generally very active.

The regulatory regime will take a minute to figure out, but with tiny vehicles like this + good transit + closing streets to regular big cars, we'll figure it out.

The basic ones (and things like the Citroën Ami) are more A-traktor than bicycle – there’s an A-traktor registered Ami in the next village along from me – but that’s typically a software limit. The Twizy could be bought in an 80km/h variant, and there are “remaps” that will take that version up to 110km/h.[1] I’ve seen them doing near that on riksvägar here.

[1] https://en.twizyx.com/

There was an article on the topic just today on the economist

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/04/11/...

Of course it's evil, it's just that historically that's what we've done and historically that's what effective.

It's largely good that we, as a people, have become more civilized and don't resort to that. The unexpected downside of that, though, is that we are much more susceptible to being exploited. It's a sort of naivety trade-off.

Cargo bike?

It's mind boggling to me that this is a genuine comment.

I suggest this yt channel as a start to open your eyes as to how yes, another world is possible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM

>A lack of foresight is also very human.

Let's call it what it really is. The stubborn unwillingness to consider scalability in our designs and planning — even in an era where a machine can do calculation for us.

Which doesn't exist and is hardly possible in Paris.

In Paris, 90% of the metro transportation system isn't accessible to wheelchairs and strollers. Buses are overcrowded and slow. Who doesn't enjoy to see someone cough on their newborn while fighting for a space for their stoller ?

Surprising, considering the NYC subway has been ignoring the ADA as much as possible.

Well, they aren't exempt. Many French greens will tell you anyway that having children is bad for the planet and that you should abstain. And, as our population grows older, the accessibility problem will be larger and larger.

Netherlands have as many cars as most the developed nations.

Well if you have less space for cars, parking spots are more expensive as a result. In Paris it's around a year of living wage. And currently, sidewalks are getting smaller due to the need to build bicycle lanes.

My initial post was that in Paris, they removed cars but did not improve public transports, so buses are overcrowded and hostile to strollers.

In the 60s, Dutch anti-car protestors had the slogan "Stop the child murder!". People were used to traditional cities where children could safely cycle around, but then cars came and started killing them.

I have very two kids, plan to have three. Cargo bikes are not practical, are easily stolen, and are not safe to transport children, especially under 6 years old. Besides, when doing groceries for 5 once a week, I regularly fill my 500L car boot, so an equivalent cargo bike with at least 3 seats and a large boot... would just be a car. Which you have, and use once a week.

Or when you need to go to the doctor. Or when your wife is sick. Or if you have an urgency. So, as a family, you still need a car.

A bus is the least radical thing IMO, but yeah it took too long in most of USA to get some mass transit better than streetcars.

The citation is every American transit system in the 1950s. Even SF only kept the streetcars where they couldn't replace with a bus line.

I think you're making a different argument, where trains attract a more well-heeled commuter. Which is why many cities have brought back LRT as part of a redevelopment plan.

So… it kind of made sense at the time (if you ignored a couple of factors which didn’t become obvious until much later, and which ultimately made it a disaster), and it’s not just an American thing. In 1928, Dublin had 28 tramlines. By 1950, it had zero, with the tram routes being replaced by bus routes (many older Dublin Bus routes basically follow old tram routes even today). It didn’t have trams again til 2004; today it has two lines.

But _at the time_, buses were very competitive with trams; there wasn’t all that much other road traffic, so they weren’t really slower (and they could use the tram lines, while they existed, as a right of way), the trams of the time were non-articulated, so buses had similar or higher capacity, and they were more flexible. It’s easy to see how it happened, and it only became apparent that there was a problem when it was far too late to reverse.

There are really two problems with buses vs trams; buses are slow when there is lots of other traffic, and, _with modern articulated trams_, higher total capacities are achievable (one of Dublin’s modern tramlines has trams that take over 400 people with a frequency of under 3 minutes between trams at peak, which is a level of capacity that you just can’t really get with buses). Neither of these were factors when the first-generation trams died.

Very few tram systems worldwide actually survived from the early 20th century to today; while there are lots of trams today, most are second-generation systems put in from the 80s on.

It's interesting, in San Francisco, the streetcars got too heavy for the old tracks so they replaced them with about 4 feet deep of concrete. That is actual infrastructure and not "fake". (along with all the stops and handicap ramps and etc. obviously, a paved street is going to exist either way.)

Bribes and the mafia may have been a factor[0], but that's how American cities do things.

[0] eg. https://www2.startribune.com/streetcars-buses-minneapolis-st...

As I said in another post, train tracks don't last forever and are expensive to replace. And trains really only benefit from dedicated ROW, a streetcar is worse than a bus in many respects. (Except appeal.) People back in the 1950s were not stupid or evil, they made a decision which made a lot of sense at the time.

That’s fine, take your private car and drive it away from the city.

> But you can't go everywhere at anytime

This is a solved problem in countries with modern public transportation. In Japan for example you can go across the entire country without needing a single car, and indeed it's both cheaper and more available than doing so while driving. If you need to go somewhere really far out of the way that is not reachable by foot or bicycle, then you can rent a car.

All of this results in a system that is far cheaper for you and far more open for the average individual.

Nothing says freedom like being required to spend thousands of dollars just to get around and participate in society. Imagine how "free" the roughly one-third of folks who are too young, too old, too disabled, etc. to drive a car feel when trying to go about their lives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0MVCyOjvtk

So the state of public transportation in your area is bad enough you have to own a car. Being forced to own one is freedom, and so is needing a government-issued driver's license and a license plate.

Anywhere where a road is. Or anywhere you could park a car. This means the car does not give you the freedom but the entire car transportation network. If instead there was no car infrastructure but only public transport you would say you can't go everywhere at anytime with a car.

I find it fascinating how the debate around cars in cities evolves. Initially counter arguments always are that reducing cars is not desirable "nobody wants less cars in cities, people need to do their weekly groceries, nobody wants to bike in bad weather...". Once these points are refuted it always evolves into "yes it would be great, but it can't be done, because it's too expensive, politically controversial...". It's almost like there is an irrational fear of less cars in cities.

Regarding it can't be done I encourage anyone to read up on how the investment into public transport transformed Bogota. Which is both much poorer and in a much more challenging geographical environment than most US cities. So if they can do it, why can't US cities?

Except that many European cities copied US cities in their development styles, and then later reversed them. So we absolutely do know how to reverse it.

> But it is nice to live in the Mission and take the techbus to Mountain View and handwave all the hard trillion dollar problems and say let the poors eat cake. Which is effectively how these discussions seem to go.

Every study shows that the poor are hurt the most because of car centric development.

Here is a guide on how to improve American cities that are surrounded by lots of suberbia:

- Remove/close all highways that go across the city, only keep the ring road. People will simple reclaim those space for recreational uses as soon as cars are gone.

- Increase price of parking space or eliminate them completely. Most parking in city is not used by residents anyway.

- Redo even if its with paint and few concrete bolders, the city streets according to Dutch street regulations. Massively increase safety for everybody.

- That frees up lots of space for bike lanes (as US cities tend to have far to many car lanes). This is actually a benefit to the history of US cities, we can't do that in some of the older dense cities.

- Change your zoning code and other access regulations, so proper urban development is actually allowed to happen. The US could adopt something like Japan zoning laws. A heavy use of mixed use and allow living in almost any zone. The US has a hilarious amount of commercial development land that completely underutilized. This also means no more minimum parking space and all that nonsense. See maybe like this: https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/news/land-use-zones-in-japa...

- This will make it so suburbs can go from single house only to a mix of single house, duplex, fourplexes, townhouses and so on. Like suburbs used to be. And it will make it so that light commercial developments can happen in subburbs. Meaning a single house can turn into small shops, coffees and such.

- In the city select a few core blocks in different places in the city, make those pedestrian only. Or like Montreal does, a whole long street. Each year add more of those pedestrian zone, improve walking infrastructure between them.

- Make it so subburban residents start to pay full price for their utilities including water and other infrastructure. New subburban developments are often hilariously subsidized, needing more water pumps and such.

- Redevelop current stroads into much fewer lanes and create separate access roads to the commercial developments. This improves flow on the stroads, reduce accidents and makes walking and biking along those stroads safer. Of course some of those lanes would turn into bike infrastructure.

- In the subburbs, also reduce road with, install protected cycle lanes. Break open the horrible cul-de-sac, the city can buy part of peoples garden to create cross connects between different cul-de-sacs and surrounding developments (cross connects for people and bikes, not cars).

- Make all the bus services public, heir a real transportation engineer to come up with a plan. Consisting of a few main routes, using the old stroads and highways, and smaller buses that serve as connectors to these major routes. Of course for that you would make some lanes on the highway, busways. Despite what some people in the US think, you can actually do decent bus service in suberbia. Combine that with public on demand service, that gets you cheaply to the next closes major public transport node. Maybe start planning a tram route along the major bus-routes.

- Look at your old rail infrastructure and develop a plan for a decent regional service. Develop a 50 year rail plan.

- The city can also simply buy up some cul-de-sacs that are strategically located and redevelop them into proper nice walkable neighborhoods. The city can even own the land and only rent half of the appartments, some at affordable price. This worked well in Britain and still does work well in Austria. And of course develop a transportation plan for those new neighborhoods. See an example, where old soviet style neighborhoods were developed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfonhlM6I7w

- Change your property tax into a land tax, or a property tax heavily focused on land. Or potentially do more with sales or what taxes, importantly, just don't do property tax.

- Like in Japan, require anybody that wants to own a car in a city, to first prove the have a private place to part.

- Make all car registrations based on weight, meaning you pay more for a heavier car.

- Focus development on the city and the first suburban ring around the city. Offer intensives for people in the outer rings to move into the inner rings. So for example somebody that owns a small house in the far outer ring of the city, could move into a duplex in the inner rings.

- If yours city has repair backlog (and most cities do) focus on the city core and the inner ring of subberbia.

- Do not develop more land, US cities already are far to wide spread. Simply announce no new infrastructure or roads. And not taking over into city property stuff that developers have built.

I could list more, pretty much all of these have been discussed in urbanism research.

Pretty much all of these have been done in different places at different times. And the all pretty much work. Doing them all together hasn't been done but there is no reason to believe it wouldn't work.

Of course this does not mean that for 1 day to the next everybody will go from suberbinate to die hard city person. But the culture after 1-2 decades of such changes will be dramatically different.

I also suggest to see this video about comparing two cities over time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uqbsueNvag

On what planet do you think that people living in company housing could afford cars? People living in company housing were the poorest of the poor.

Please just....stop. Stop trying to talk about how poor people lived or live.

Yeah, agreed. We built the country for the car and there’s no easy path out of that. Every time I’m in LA I think “man we could have had a city like Barcelona” and get bummed it’s just a sprawling car dependent amalgamation of suburbs. There’s clearly demand for more cities like NYC in the US, but we’re not going to get it.

You might be right, I was just sharing my experience and what I've heard from locals.

Anyway, there's an abundant literature that links inequality with transport opportunities.

But those topics are so touchy for you Americans tbh, it's like arguing about weapons, it's too heated of an argument for rational discourse.

Why judge others for how they live, when you don't even know their circumstances?

Read the article. It doesn’t debunk that assertion. It more or less confirms it.

Dutch people using bikes for everything is a meme, they have as many cars per inhabitants as most of the developed nations. Anecdotically, they are a small, dense, flat country, with an oceanic weather.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territ...

No, the vote was pure communication by the mayor, it didn't have a budget, nor a list of the streets, nor any details. Paris' administration is rife with corruption and mismanagement, so voters weren't very mobilized for another PR coup.

True, but the metro space is closed, so pollution can attain a very high level there.

I can insulate myself from these problems in a car with a hepa air filter

A lot of economic activity requires cars. Delivery, workers coming with equipment, waste management, and so on. Every construction worker in Paris will tell you that it's very difficult to work there, and that they have doubled their prices as a result.

The ones who live directly adjacent to a rail line weren't generally the ones in cars to begin with, unless they were the ones using a vehicle to actually transport something.

Not just Europe either. Tokyo was not named after the Tokyo Motor Vehicles Ltd.

> How specific am I supposed to be, do you want names, resumes, potential investors?

Names would be good, for a start. If you can’t name a single person, group, or entity whose opinion would satisfy you, it’s likely that no amount of evidence would change your mind. Which means that you’re not discussing this topic in good faith.

All human endeavors have human bias, in one direction or the other. If you’re waiting for a bias-free source of information, you’ll be waiting a long time.

> However, I no longer accept published reports at face value, unless I check who the authors are, and who funds them.

No, you use this as a cop out to deny results. In this case you have done this check and you have decided you do not want to believe the outcome so you wave around a vague charge of bias in a lame attempt to discredit it.

Please show me one single scientific report or conclusion you’ve accepted that passed this same “bias test”. Neither the authors nor their funding source may have a particular interest in the outcome. Any such example will do.

Right, right, you never said you disagreed. You’re “just asking questions”.

The messenger matters less than the data, the collection methods, and the approach to analysis. Bias can be a reason to more carefully examine a conclusion and the methods, particularly if a source has had quality issues in the past.

But simply throwing out accusations of bias in the absence of literally any other reason to doubt a pretty straightforward conclusion (removing sources of NO2 makes NO2 go down, shocking!) is not a meaningful contribution to a discussion. Every researcher is biased. Every source of funding is biased. Hell, you haven’t even shown that they’re significantly biased, the only thing you’ve pointed out is that apparently some of their grant funding came from the EU, as if that’s some sort of smoking gun.

Did their bias lead them to an invalid conclusion? Do you believe it did? Do you have a reason to believe it did? If so, state it. If not, what was the point in making your comment other than to sow doubt?

Of course I'd be skeptical. Skepticism is healthy, especially in your example. In that case, the most productive conversation to have would be examining (and either refuting or accepting) their evidence. So far you've refused to do either one here. Instead, you repeatedly engage in the genetic fallacy I linked to above, or insisting that we should consult some impossibly impartial oracle of objective truth instead.

That's your right of course. No one can force you to avoid using logical fallacies. But the longer you do that, the more it starts to look like you're avoiding or even conceding the real debate. It's up to you whether that matters to you.