"Small price to pay for the freedom to travel"
-An actual thing that's been said to me before when I brought up other environmental issues
Also the traveling part is generally tedious, uncomfortable and boring unless you have a super big luxury car. I'd much rather travel by high-speed rail.
I looove taking the train, I can stand up, move around, chat, eat and drink.
I was hanging out in the Cafe car a few weeks ago on a 9 hr trip playing video games on my laptop. Got chatting with some folks, 3 of us one by one broke out our respective liquors and made a party of it.
Can't do that on I-95.
I was hanging out in the Cafe car a few weeks ago on a 9 hr trip playing video games on my laptop. Got chatting with some folks, 3 of us one by one broke out our respective liquors and made a party of it.
Can't do that on I-95.
sure you can they just take away your driving license after
Small price to pay for the freedom to travel
my man you go to work and back again what travel
Yep. Whenever I travel I ask around my friend group if anyone is interested and those same people always have a list of excuses as to why they can't take a week to fuck off in NYC.
I really think alot of it is "I can't take my car 😭," cause I've gone with them to things all the time on road trips, but as soon as I'm taking a train the excuses roll in.
Plastic straws are still very harmful for many sea animals and are apart from that entirely unnecessary (unlike tires).
As I read on masto, we should replace the tires with steel to stop the plastic pollution.
Of course to protect the road that would also have to be steel. And we'd need to link all the vehicles together to make best use of the limited steel road surface.
(It's trains)
Steel dust quickly turns to iron oxide in the environment, which is a fairly common natural mineral (it's the reason red clay is red). To be fair, there might still be some slight negative effects to ecosystems which do not naturally have a lot of iron oxide at the surface, but that wouldn't even be a rounding error compared to the harmful environmental effects of tires and asphalt. Also, steel dust is very heavy so there's essentially no chance of it getting into the air and inhaled.
I struggle to think of a view where plastic straws are a no no (which I agree) but car tyres aren't. It's both convenience product.
In many places, cars are a necessity because of structural issues that we need to solve. They aren't innately required, but our world is built in such a way to require them.
I'm mostly going for the "entirely unnecessary (unlike tires)" thing, especially given consumption levels. I don't think I would've gotten through a single tyres worth of plastic in straws in my lifetime even if they weren't banned.
Like, sure, there is use cases for tyres even in utopia, hell, a tyreless bicycle sounds shit, but we're talking what, like a percent of what is currently used?
Some amount of inflatable tires will always be needed and used. Sure, the vast majority of them are also unnecessary, because most cars are, but humanity will obviously always need some vehicles that transport stuff efficiently without tracks. Bicycle tires also use similar materials.
Can we just get some real public transportation options in the USA? I've visited Washington D.C., Boston, and New York City recently, and I'm in love with the subway (etc). Where I live would still require a car, but afaik, none of the major cities around me have anything more than a lackluster bus system.
it would have to be on rails. Sure, buses have fewer wheels per passenger but they are also heavier so go through their tyres much faster. Its probably still a net benefit but it doesnt eliminate the problem.
Its probably still a net benefit
oh god imagine if the math works out that it isn't.
trains, bikes, and sailing ships only.
E-Bikes, maybe. There's argument to be made that given a typical western diet heavy on meat (and not changing that) it's better to just use electricity to power bicycles rather than meat filtered through humans
Sure, buses have fewer wheels per passenger but they are also heavier so go through their tyres much faster.
Per Passenger? A bus weighs like 40,000 pounds at most going by a quick google. The average car in the US weighs about 4,000lbs and the occupancy rate of cars is about 1,5, so 2,666lbs / passenger on a given trip. Every bus that has an average passenger rate of 15 and up beats that.
15 passengers on average seems way higher than most buses I've been on. Maybe during the very busiest times, but buses run all day. The many hours they spend with just four or five people aboard will really tank the average.
Buses also have more tires than cars – usually at least 6, but sometimes 10 or more. I still doubt they're emitting more microplastics than cars per trip but the math isn't so simple.
15 passengers on average seems way higher than most buses I've been on. Maybe during the very busiest times, but buses run all day. The many hours they spend with just four or five people aboard will really tank the average.
I don't wanna say there isn't busses that might producre more microplastic but an average of 15 passengers per bus isn't like some insane goal to achieve, even in the current world, especially once you factor in that there's also times that there's way more than 15 people on one for a given trip
You know, I'd say we had a good run but honestly I just don't feel like lying to make myself feel better. This shit sucks.
In the relatively short time humans have been on this planet, we've done an impressive job leaving a mark on this planet, pretty much exclusively in a bad way. If that's the goal, we achieved it.
That was always the thing I was wondering about. Where was the origin of these microplastics. Surely it wasn't all just those little beads that were in soap and shampoo
Some of it is due to washing clothes made of nylon or polyester, and of course that water eventually will go into the ocean.
The other source aside from tires and those beads is all the other plastics that we use. Especially when exposed to the elements, all(?) plastics eventually break down into tiny particles. This includes all synthetic fibers, by the way. I've seen studies that show how much synthetic clothes release microplastics each time we wash them.
That's a real bummer because lots of my clothes are synthetic fabrics and I really like them compared to cotton. Sigh.
Sorry to hear. I prefer natural fibers, so it doesn't affect me that much.
This reminds me of these wise words:
"A person who runs in front of a car gets tired. A person who runs behind a car gets exhausted."
:)
