Imagine yourself on your dream vacation. Perhaps it's a relaxing all-inclusive resort in the Caribbean or an excursion to a remote campsite. Or maybe it's an urban adventure to Paris or Barcelona. People have very different tastes in the places they like to go to relax and unwind. But many of the most popular vacation destinations have something important in common: When you get there, you don’t have to do much driving.
Indeed. The sting is in the quoted study:
This is definitely pretty counter-intuitive and a bit of a bummer. Turns out a very large part of particulate emissions comes from tires and brakes. I thought the regenerative braking used by EVs would help, but apparently not much. The reduction is surely bigger than 3% when compared to diesels, but still.
That still leaves the non-particulate pollution, including carbon monoxide and NOx, EVs have none of that. And almost no noise pollution either, at least at low speeds.
I have been to Shanghai and I can tell you that a city full of EVs is just much, much more pleasant. The air quality, the silence, it’s almost night and day. Replacing combustion cars with EVs is still a huge win, we should not lose sight of that.
But yes, it’s not the solution. The solution is less cars.
And less car (singular/measurement). Weight and size are multipliers to problems (including cost).
Sure E-bikes are better (bikes are better than that, and walking is the best especially for mixed transit), but there should be incentives to drive the smallest cars. And the giant behemoths we have in the US are like 3-4 classes up, these are a problem all on their own.
amen