I like my electric car, but the fact that I have to own a car, maintain it, and pay insurance on it is such bullshit when I'm only 4 miles from my job, and bus service doesn't run until 9AM. Fuck all this stroad BS bring back trolleys.
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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4 miles? As a dutchie I say: get a bicycle.
What annoys me about lacking public transit is that the problems caused by a lack of use and a lack of funding are always what the naysayers against public transportation point to as examples why it sucks.
It sucks because you dumbasses don't put money into it to make it not suck! (The "you" being a generalization of the people against public transportation)
people just shouldn't need to personally own a car unless they live in the middle of nowhere, anywhere vaguely densely populated you should have usable public transport and carshare systems so you can just book a car when you actually want to use it, and those times should be pretty few and far between (even going on a leisure ride every other day is way way way way less usage than we see right now)
Sad part is my area had a robust trolley network
no 'one thing' will 'save' us. not even transit.
better to have vehicle options that don't spew carbon monoxide
semi related surrealism:
Modern cars already don't spew carbon monoxide... Modern catalytic converter deal with that.
bzzt wrong. they deal with a portion of it, for the life of the catalyst in the converter. and a ton of other greenhouse gases.
but thanks for playing.....
I literally was CA SMOG trained. The catalytic converter should last the lifetime of the vehicle, it is a CATALYST after all, and the amount of CO coming out of a healthy cars tailpipe should be pretty small, around .1% to .5%. There are actually lots of cases where people failed to kill themselves because auto exhaust just isn't THAT acutely toxic anymore.
EDIT: I double checked my old memory, my memory switched 1/1000 with PPM for CO readings on gas analyzers, so it's significantly more than I remembered, but still significantly less than "spewing"
In case it was unclear, don't breathe car tailpipes, it's obviously still very bad for you
CA SMOG Trained - then you know a cat only removed @90% of that CO. for it's 10-15 year usable life.
life of the vehicle? guess that depends on how long you expect your vehicle to last. I have a 20 year old honda, expect to get 10 more years out of it. and that all is positing the cat's been treated decently, but you know (I mean, fuck, you're CA SMOG TRAINED! WOOHOO) or should know that excessive heat can seriously reduce the lifetime of the catalyst components.
why the fuck is this a conversation? assuming cat's clean 100% of the emissions is wrong, and you know it's wrong. pfft
it is a CATALYST after all,
how the fuck are you "CA SMOG TRAINED" and don't understand catalysts have a limited life, they're not eternal, fuck me....
Almost always when a catalytic converter dies it is because there's something wrong with the car that damaged the cat. I never actually worked in a smog shop so I can't give meaningful numbers but we had plenty of 20-30 year old test cars come through the school shop with original catalytic converters that still worked fine. And I was not claiming that no CO comes out of the tailpipe of modern cars, just not enough to be a meaningful issue, it's not a particularly persistent environmental gas outside of confined spaces. It's not a major smog component, it's just toxic if it's allowed to build up, and most modern cars aren't putting out enough of it for it to build up to dangerous levels without REALLY trying.
Almost always when a catalytic converter dies it is because there’s something wrong with the car that damaged the cat.
something like the o2 sensor reading incorrectly, or oil or coolant getting through the exhaust... or high heat...
well it's hot as fuck out there, and no car I know lasts forever. these things have a finite work life and then become markedly less effective, and they only capture a band of the problematic emissions. and not forever, just as long as everything is working well.
when they aren't stolen etc.
spewing CO and other pollution, when we have the tech to swap the vast majority of drivers to something markedly less polluting.
world's on fire yo, no reason not to just go electric for everyone that can.
I mean, you're preaching to the choir, I haven't owned an ICE car in about 7 years, and no car at all for about 4 years. I'm just trying to correct misrepresentations. Concern about CO emissions is a silly reason to be concerned about modern ICE cars, it's not a big issue really. Realities of fossil fuel dependence and use and its affects on the environment both locally and worldwide seem like the larger concerns by a large factor.
Electric cars burn less than ICE cars and ICE cars aren't too different from electric cars regarding material footprint.
The glory of public transport lies in its transformative function on urban and interurban lives. Cars build suburbanism or spatially crammed cities. That difference is where our propaganda should rely on, not this weak EV-bad.
The glory of public transport lies in its transformative function on urban and interurban lives. Cars build suburbanism or spatially crammed cities. That difference is where our propaganda should rely on, not this weak EV-bad.
well put
Cars and personal transportation will never go away as long as our society is stable. It's better to have electric cars than fossil fuelled cars. Electric cars and good public transport can coexist.
Cars will probably destroy US society before they go away, but either way there's a clear end point. I'd say fight like hell to get rid of cars so it ends on the best possible terms, but you do you.
Realities on the ground outside of the USA say otherwise. Here, for example, after a huge push toward ownership of individual vehicles, an ever-increasing proportion of those vehicles are permanently parked. Outside my window, for example, there's a square that is filled with cars parked bumper to bumper that haven't moved in the past year or two. Technically they're owned and would certainly be counted in ownership statistics, but it is physically impossible for any but the four cars at the end of the square to even be taken out of the lot.
Why?
Because the advantage of private ownership has been whittled away slowly but steadily over the past 20 years.
There was a time that a private vehicle was the only practical means to cross the two rivers (Han and Yangtze) that divide the city. Buses of the time were hideously uncomfortable, highly unreliable, and painfully slow. Going from my home to the then-largest park in the city (Zhongshan park) was a good 2.5-3 hour trip by bus. By car, even through traffic jams (which buses had to go through as well, obviously), it was 1-1.5 hours instead.
Today that same trip is slightly lower by car (cut off about fifteen minutes because of the Yangtze tunnel) but by metro it's about 25 minutes. And you don't have to hunt around for increasingly rare parking, then pay for that parking on top of it. And then repeat that when you get back home. More and more people aren't bothering to drive at all, leaving their cars in long-term parking "just in case" and that case never comes.
Personally I haven't owned an automobile since the second line of the Wuhan Metro opened, and the bus service got upgraded to serve it. There's no point. The rare times I need to use a personal vehicle in specific, taxi services are more than sufficient. For the price of a car I could use, after all, a taxi to go from one end of the city to the other and back every day. For two years. That very infrequent case of needing a taxi is a trivial expense compared to just the purchase price of a car (not including insurance, maintenance, fuel/electricity, etc. etc. etc.).
So "never" is a really long time that's ending as I watch.
Today that same trip is slightly lower by car (cut off about fifteen minutes because of the Yangtze tunnel) but by metro it’s about 25 minutes. And you don’t have to hunt around for increasingly rare parking, then pay for that parking on top of it. And then repeat that when you get back home. More and more people aren’t bothering to drive at all, leaving their cars in long-term parking “just in case” and that case never comes.
so you're successfully navigating the transition, that's great, to finally see the light at the other end.
the vast majority aren't anywhere NEAR this point, can't even see the dot at the end; much less daylight - so if we're going to have vehicles all over, wouldn't it be grand if they didn't spew pollution everywhere?
or is it: I got mine, FUCK YOU?
because you got yours, congrats, now the rest need to catch up, but having your smug ass looking down on people having functional transportation is kinda goofy.
I'm pretty sure that my point was clear: "never" is a very fucking long time when it is already happening.
But sure, go get your feelings hurt. Buhbye.
you got yours, what do you care?