Not being a scientist of any kind, I fully believe it is fossil fuel emissions, mainly from autos.
When I was very young, where I lived, a city of 100000, I would say less than 50% of the people there drove plus most worked in the city they lived in. Now, almost every household has at least 2 autos and most drive at least 10+ (16km) miles to work.
But, I also wonder if this is tied to the general increase in cancers for people under 50.
Pollution was way worse in the past. Old pictures of american cities from 50 years ago look like Beijing. We hadn't yet offshored heavy industry by that point and like you said, a larger percent of the metro was living closer to it. And whatever you saw outside was actually better than your air quality inside where these pollutants would accumulate and mix with Dad's cigarette smoke.
This was the air you were breathing back then (1, 2, 3).
I know no one's ever going to change their ways cause of the increasingly evident ravages of climate change but I swear I feel like throwing rocks at the big SUVs rolling by with exactly one person in them during the heat domes here in NYC.
Just, so, gross.
And it truly is the _vast majority_ of cars going by with exactly one person in them. So wasteful, so much pollution, so hot... frustrating.
We really like our station wagon. Well, in principle at least. We won't get into the details of keeping a 12 year old German car going.
It's fuel efficient. It's not big. It's a decent people mover. It has more cargo space than many SUVs that are larger. Is low enough the roof racks are easily accessible. Added a hitch, mostly for more cargo space.
I'm starting to wonder if I've done more "truck things" than many of the people with trucks in the neighbourhood at this point. If I ever need to haul more, I'll just rent a truck/van for that moment in time. I'm not going to buy one to drive to the office.
When I had a Honda Fit I hauled a TON of cargo in it. A friend borrowed it to pick up a full-sized pinball machine from the next state over. I moved half of a 5-bedroom house (except for big furniture) across town in my Fit.
You don't need a gigantic beast. A kei truck is more than adequate for the vast majority of what people use pickup trucks for.
I love when people bring up the kei truck argument. If all you do is haul mulch around town from Home Depot, by yourself, and you already have another car, sure, go for it. But pretty much nobody owns a key truck as their only car. There's little crash safety, your knees are the crumple zone, they're not designed to go on 70 mile interstate highways, you usually can't transport many people. I would feel uncomfortable transporting friends/relatives more than a few miles on low speed roads in a kei truck, because they're 25+ year old designs focused on size rather than safety.
A kei truck is a supplementary vehicle at best... so you'd still want a car, and then you have two vehicles. Lots of people don't want two vehicles when a single vehicle that covers both use cases exists.
Sure, nobody needs a gigantic beast, but for people in lots of parts of the country, the downsides to owning a larger vehicle aren't that big. Why buy a smaller pickup truck when a full size truck is just a few thousand dollars more (in a country where the average new vehicle sells for $50k), gets similar fuel economy figures, and has more room in general?
Even my old Integra had a ton of trunk space when you fold down the seats. It was almost like a small pickup truck. I think a lot of people would get by with a sedan but it seems like the seats no longer fold down on a lot of smaller cars like that.
I get it. My wife drives a big SUV. She is a small lady, and says the car let's her see the road better and overall feel more safe.
Back when SUV's started to get popular, this was a trend they noticed as well. Back then, it was met with a lot of guffaws about yuppie housewives and all that. (This was before the term Karen had been coined)
But she's making everyone else less safe by driving in her tank-mobile. Those are much more deadly to pedestrians, cyclists, and those in smaller vehicles.
It's also an arms race where everyone buys bigger cars to see over all the other giant cars on the road. SUVs have been shown many times to be less safe, even for their drivers, but they give a feeling of safety which matters more than actual safety to buyers.
And for every comment screeching about pedestrians and rollover safety there's another one screeching about occupant safety. You can't really fault people for picking the one that benefits them when confronted with roughly equal screeching in both directions.
You absolutely can fault people for taking the choice that makes them safer at the expense of others' safety. I don't know how it became such a popular idea that a moral imperative is only valid if it carries no personal cost.
It may be small in the grand scheme of things but it is wrong to do this, in exactly the same way, but a much smaller degree, it is wrong to shove a child out of your way to escape a burning building.
Another commenter mentioned failing to design cars for women (totally fair! Volvo famously had a botched attempt at this)
What I have come to appreciate is how vulnerable women feel in the world. It is hard to appreciate how that plays into car choice if you are a man. Most men will never be able to understand, imo.
Only 20 years ago used to be the "hairdresser car" meant a tiny little sporty coupe or convertible like a miata. I guess the marketing changed and cultivated a new generation with a new mindset.
Why does designing cars for women mean we need to turn them into main battle tanks? That's a false dichotomy. Women in cars are just as vulnerable as men in cars, just as female pedestrians are just as vulnerable as male pedestrians.
For a while, women in cars were more vulnerable than men in cars, in part because crash test dummies were sized to typical male proportions, and cars are built to pass crash tests rather than be as safe as possible for all occupants while still passing crash tests. This sometimes led to things like airbags being placed in locations that worked great for average height men but not as well for average height women.
I don't know if it's fair to say that women in cars are just as vulnerable as men in cars, the same goes for the pedestrian argument.
It seems like you're using "women" as a proxy for "smaller people". Children and small-statured men are just vulnerable as women in crashes. Regardless, we now do crash tests with a variety of body types.
A 5-foot man is just as vulnerable when being hit by a car as a 5-foot woman, and obviously children are much more vulnerable than grown women when being hit by giant vehicles.
You don't think that we as individuals have any moral choices to make, and we should defer to legislation? That's certainly a view, but I don't think it's the majority view.
I don't think you get it. And also this is an universal response from all women I ever talked about exactly this topic (and several guys too who had no idea about cars in general but knew about those famous football players or other celebrities who had suvs so they also needed one).
The root cause is plain and simple - your wife just needs to learn to drive better, then she wouldn't be scared regardless of her seating position. No amount of high position can compensate for overall crappy driving style and corresponding fear of driving and thus the 'need' for high SUVs. To keep her distance from car in front of her (which is basically why she feels the need to be sitting so high so she can anticipate braking earlier), and quick reflexes on the brake while 100% focusing on situation around her (which she should have anyway since there are other bad situations where higher positions doesn't give any advantage, in contrary).
I went the other way - very low-positioned bmws, with correspondingly much better and quicker handling, of course much lower consumption and much more rolling resistance. Its wagon so trunk space is massive and if not enough I can put on biggest Thule roof rack and still fit in our garage and low entry points like store garages (1.9m is the limit with it, never saw entry limiter lower than that). My wife learned to drive properly over time and has exactly same opinion, aka suv never ever because why.
Suvs and variants, at least those who don't go offroad (so most of them) should be reserved for physically challenged people due to easier entry/exit to/from vehicle. And that's about it for real objective advantages, the rest are just emotions which adults should manage to their advantage, not the opposite.
One thing I noticed as soon as I bought my large, offroady SUV (never having driven an SUV before) is that other traffic treated me much more respectfully. When I was in a compact sedan, traffic would swerve in front of me much more often, people would refuse to let me merge, drivers would ride my bumper, and so on. All of those things still happen, but much, much less frequently. For inattentive drivers, it's more difficult to ignore an SUV, and for angry drivers, it's more difficult to bully me around. And yeah, many of these bad drivers are in SUVs themselves, where it's easier to miss a nearby sedan.
Am I fixing the problem by driving an SUV myself? No, but I totally understand why people feel safer in them.
> The root cause is plain and simple - your wife just needs to learn to drive better, then she wouldn't be scared regardless of her seating position.
Correct, but unfortunately such arguments are like shouting into the wind. Bike helmets are the same. People just cannot be convinced that improving one's safety is 99% down to one's riding style and not a thin piece of padding on their head.
It doesn't matter how good a driver I, or your wife, or any woman, or any man is. That drunk driver who's also texting and just had a stroke and passed out from fentanyl could plow into you while you're innocently stopped at a stop light and you're being as defensive as possible. I don't see any way to change that calculus for the paranoid, unfortunately.
True, but false. Accidents that you can do nothing about are vanishingly rare. Even the situation you bring up is not one of them. When stopped/stopping you should be checking your mirrors to make sure the car behind you is at least slowing down.
On the other hand, the parent brings up a great example - following distance from the car in front. One of the most basic concepts of operating any vehicle and his wife is apparently incapable of applying it.
The overall point holds - people are irrationally worried about the 0.0000001% edge cases they can do nothing about anyway instead of trying to improve their chances in the 99.999999% of cases where it's their actions that matter.
It doesn't matter how rare the scenario is in reality, fear often isn't rational, but it makes us do things and we have no control over it. My point isn't that the fear is rational, it isn't. But unless you have a method to prevent people from assuaging their irrational fear by buying a certain vehicle, (or voting a certain way, for that matter), what is your proposal?
The method is obvious - adjusting the law so that such vehicles become way more expensive than the more reasonable ones. Don't ask me how to get that pushed through though.
So, yet another case of cars not being designed for women (for those that don't get what I'm going on about - crash test dummies are modeled after men, leading to significantly worse crash outcomes for women [1])... it's infuriating.
Even a "small" BMW i3, a car one might think to be suitable for people of lower height - my wife tried out one at carsharing, and even despite the seat being all up front, she was barely able to drive the thing. The Mercedes Sprinter we rented for our last moves? Once she understood how the dimensions of that thing worked, absolutely easy going.
I'm curious about what the peak potential is and how close (or far) we are from there, because even if all things were 100% equal somehow, in a serious crash women will always fair significantly worse due to less musculature, lower bone density, thinner bones, and so on.
I think you got downvoted for this but unsure why cause that's a great point that making one subway car that gets used daily to transport thousands of people vs creating a car per individual driven only for an hour a day is absolutely huge in terms of carbon and resource cost
I think people underestimate the impact of air pollution because it's so easy to get desensitized to it. Try wearing a respirator with good seal and filter in an urban area for 10 minutes or so. When you take it off you'll probably smell vehicle exhaust you didn't notice before. Human sense of smell tends to tune out constant low level background odors, but they can still be a sign of something harmful.
I think you grossly underestimate the degree to which cars (and industry that we had yet to kick out to China) were dirtier decades ago than they are today.
We're talking like literal orders, plural, of magnitude when comparing between the generally no cats automotive fleet of the 70s with anything since the advent of both cats and computerized fuel injection. Any old timer can tell you of the smog that used to be frequent in urban areas. These days it's mostly gone, at least when California or Canada (depending on where you live) isn't on fire.
(INB4 people who are a net negative to public discourse construe this comment as some sort of endorsement for everyone driving everywhere all the time)
Just look at old photos of city smog in the 1960s. It is night and day different compared to air today even with larger populations in these same metros in some cases.
In more ways than one. A lot of "poor" countries have life expectancies comparable to the US. The big difference is they don't have a culture of every single person needing to own a car that spray carcinogens all over the place.
Obesity, which is its own massive wrecking ball, is also significantly lower in these "poor" countries.
The arrogance of laughing at poor people riding bikes to work when that would create a drastically healthier society.
Imagine if you had a 4km x 4km city with no consumer vehicles ( emergency and delivery exempt). Just walking paths and bike lanes. The people living there would be drastically healthier.
Or hell, it might just be luck. A lot of smokers live until there 80s enjoying a fat cigar once a day
It's honestly such awakening experience to see videos or visit these "poor" low GDP, stagnant economy countries and see their streets are full of happy, healthy people out walking, talking with each other. Kids out playing on the street, old people dancing in the parks. And then see our rich cities where everyone sits in traffic scoffing McDonalds raging out at other people doing the same. Huffing in diesel exhaust and tire microplastics.
Have to wonder what happened differently between countries like China, Japan, and India. I'm not an expert but yeah there is something more to it. Better managed government perhaps?
Indian society is a non-homogenous mix of thousands of different coherent factions, with different languages, clear ethnic/genetic differences, identities, etc. all vying for control.
Many groups have tried to conquer and unify India over the millennia (Mughals, various Hindu kings, the British), but they always lose steam/interest before they can finish the job.
It is (in modern times) also an environment where you’re not allowed to murder your neighbor (generally) or the other factions will gang up on you.
It’s the perfect environment for backstabbing, corruption, and performative changes without actual changes.
No one has ever successfully forced a coherent unifying identity on India - the British just papered over things, and as long as they got paid, rarely attempted to exert more low level control.
China, in contrast, had the Qin dynasty/Qin Shi Huang, which not only did unify China into a coherent ethnic-religious state, but also had periods of clear ‘murder anyone who didn’t fit in exactly as the emperor wanted’.
This resulted in 90%+ of China being from a single genetic group (Han Chinese), having the same religious background (or lack thereof), and being used to being steered from a single central gov’t control point (the central Court in Beijing). The CCP only temporarily diverged from the same historic pattern.
China has a lot of ‘local control’ diversity on the ground (Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin are very different languages for example, and say to day life in Southern China vs Eastern or Northern China is very different), but is very used to the central gov’t coming in and stomping everyone into the ground if anyone messes with things the central gov’t cares about. And everyone is generally going to agree they are all Chinese first, instead of say Shanghainese.
Still not a trivial thing to ‘steer’, but China is more steerable.
Japan, being a relatively small Island that isn’t in the middle of any major trading routes or the like, has had even more extreme levels of ‘be like how I say or else’ applied over time, also from a central gov’t/emperor/shogun, and has a far more extreme version of ‘be like everyone else’ than China. They’re even more ethnically consistent - 95% ish.
To the point they seem to ‘lock in’ to one mindset even at a really extreme level, then ‘flip’ more in lockstep.
Either xenophobia, or conquering, or chill, or whatever.
Modern cars should be equipped with a catalysator, making the majority of pollution to be Co2, worsening the global warming.
To some extent heavy metals are being distributed in the air by the wheels in heavily populated areas.
This can be greatly improved by limiting traffic in heavily populated areas. Trump removed such a rule from New York City recently for reasons I can not comprehend.
Many european cities have improved air quality successfully and hence increased life expectancy by limiting car traffic.
The majority of air pollution of particles however, is caused by the industry (the companies making those cars, among others).
In fact, you are a worse polluter of the earth today if you buy a new Tesla than if you kept driving your 1980s gasoline car due to the amount of pollution created by producing a single vehicle.
Particulate matter is still a huge problem, mainly produced by tires and break pads, but also road abrasion. In terms of pure engine exhaust, catalysts don't do much here, you'd need a particulate filter, which not all cars have. So, cars still a problem wrt cancer, as particulate matter is carcinogenic.
European cities were especially bad because the EU pushed diesels while having significantly less emissions controls than gas vehicles until the mid 2000s. Most of the vehicles impacted by ULEZ are those same diesels.
When I was very young, where I lived, a city of 100000, I would say less than 50% of the people there drove plus most worked in the city they lived in. Now, almost every household has at least 2 autos and most drive at least 10+ (16km) miles to work.
But, I also wonder if this is tied to the general increase in cancers for people under 50.