cooker

Agreed, in the case of those Chinese cities much of the pollution is not due to cars, but it's not due to density either - as I mentioned earlier cities are also affected by regional pollution, in this case due to industry and coal fired electric plants nearby.

McBTC

I think you just have to have to use common sense. If its 1876, taking an express train from NY to San Francisco in 83 hours makes more sense than saddling up a horse if you've got classes starting next week. It's even quicker nowadays... but, it'll still take days-- most folks would go by air. A bike would be out of the question whereas once school starts, a bike from a beach apartment to classes 6 miles inland in less than 30 minutes wouldn't be bad in the spring. But, if you're holding down a job to pay for your education along with working and going to school on different days and same days and some nights and some days, you'd probably need a car. After getting that worked out and there's some extra time to kill, playing mind games about global warming and dying polar bears as Al Gore takes a private plane to Cancun to sip margaritas with Hollywood swells makes perfect sense.

Mobile 155

Mobile 155

Also the city of Xingtai does check off a lot of the boxes of a living car free dense solution. https://www.google.com/search?q=Xing...w=1138&bih=526

However if you look at the chart I posted from Forbes you will see that if no one in any of the cities listed for the U.S. drove a car it would hardly make a dent in the amount of pollution produces in the cities posted in China. Also looking at population growth China, India and Africa will produce the total population of the U.S. in as little as ten or 20 years, all the while increasing their production of airborne and water pollution. As Maelochs pointed out pollution doesn't stop at borders.

My philosophy is we can try to make living as painless and comfortable for the people around us now. Technology will either come up with a solution for the other things or the earth will shake us off. Either way each of us has to decide what is best for ourselves and worry less about what that is for the other person.

cooker

Who says it isn't working? If cities in those polluted regions were more spread out and had more driving, they would be worse off. We got into this sub-thread discussion because Maelochs suggested places dense enough to have with public transit can't be associated with a "pollution minimal" lifestyle, but the alternative is actually worse. If people don't live densely they create more pollution, unless they have a low standard of living and don't participate in modern life.

Mobile 155

You see it as working? You see Bakersfield that is very spread out and no mass transit worth speaking of with just over one percent of Xingtai's pollution as worse?
That is what makes this philosophical I guess. I simply don't agree the high rise buildings, walk-able streets and mass transit as pictured in the link as working. At least not enough to make me or anyone in my family care to try it. That is what makes us a great nation, we are free do do what is best as we see it not as others see it.

Maelochs

And your claim is that that six-mile/day difference makes all the difference? Why don't Orlando and Houston have tremendous smog problems like LA? Do a little Unbiased research, please.

Unsound reasoning. Most fo the start fo the frereway system was built before people understood or much cared about air quality, and the idea that people would go back and spend countless billions remaking a city for environmental and health oncerns ... nto sure that has ever happened anywhere. Michigan couldn't even get clean water to Flint.


come on.

I have a TON of respect for you (sorry if that doesn't come through in posts ... I tend to be more curt and direct online) but when you start claiming people use Smaller Cars in one city than another ... Based on What? That is pure BS.

Yo are surprised at the number of miles New Yorkers drive because you Wahnted to believe that because of population density, peoplpe there woudl drive less and confirm your theroy.

Your theory was Disproved by your research.

As a good scientist, you don;'t religiously cling o your theory, you seek a better understanding.

Or ..... As a Committed Believer, you make up crap to support a theory you yourself discredited.

Please face the very facts You researched: There is no discernible connection between air quality and population density in Big Cities. Orlando doesn't have bad air. DC isn't too bad. Jax stinks because of the paper mills sometimes. Beijing stinks And has bad pollution. New York just stinks. LA I have never been to, but the whole "false dawn" phenomenon, where the sun lights the smog layer long before it appears in the sky, has been noticed going back sixty years at least.

Airflow makes the difference.

I suspect New Yorkers don't drive personally, but they travel a Lot in cabs ... because for all its availability, mass transit is not as convenient, and it is not as comfortable by a long shot.

I have sampled mass transit is several cities in a few different countries ... and the new York subway is Not pleasant at a lot of times of day. Hot, sweaty, crowded .... worse tha Boston or DC, IMO.

Plus, people don't always want to walk to the nearest train and then from the train to wherever they need to be and back. Don't know if you have ever been to NYC, but a lot of downtown traffic is cabs.

KraneXL

Just take the number of people using trains and buses and add that number in cars on the road instead. There you should have your answer. Every motorist who encounters a cyclists on the road should say thank you.

Maelochs

How's this: I have no science to prove that cities produce more per-capita pollution than rural regions, and no one has any science showing otherwise, either. So we cannot really debate those matters. We have differing perceptions, but no facts.

We can see that population density and driving are not directly related to pollution, because some cities with high density and low driving are very polluted, some with high density and high driving are less polluted ... but then, we have to ask how "pollution" is being defined and measured? Is it air quality, water quality? Are we talking smog, toxic chemicals in the water supply, are we talking the effluent of specific factories (if certain factories vent pollutants into the atmosphere the immediate neighborhood might be very toxic but ten blocks away it might all have dispersed, so where one measured would matter.)

On another hand, it isn't so bad living right next door to a toxic waste incinerator ... because the plume of incredibly toxic effluent rises up due to extreme heat, hits the upper atmosphere and cools, and settles down in a ring around the incinerator, but not right on it. Again ... where one measures makes all the difference.

Not trying to stifle debate, but I do want to calm things a bit before we all get too far into supporting our biases.

I think a dispersed population with much more localized production of food is probably "cleaner" overall than cities, where pollution is concentrated and all goods and necessities have to be shipped in .... but a lot of that depends on what shipping methods are used, and how and which technologies are employed, and All of it is speculative.

Cooker (pardon if I mis-state, no offense intended) seems to think that a technologically advanced city would be cleaner than a more rural but equally technologically advanced society ... but the fact is, some people Want to live in cities, some like suburbia, and some want to be so far from the nearest neighbor they practically don't have one.

Unless you intend to run a police state … people want freedom, and are happiest when they have some freedom to find their own best situations. I don’t see any point of having a world of seven billion miserable, self-destructive, hate-filled people all living in perferct harmony with the environment … because you would see all kinds of crime and destruction among those people.

I hate to say this… but if we are going to have a Human society, we need to maximize it for humans. If we cannot reach a survivable compromise between well-being and environmental impact, we cannot survive, but at some point we have to accept that while we need plants, we also need happy people. If we design a green society where everybody hates living we have failed.

The key is a Sustainable, sensible society where people can live with some measure of satisfaction and so can the next several dozen generations. Only fanatics want everyone to go back to a primitive existence for the good of the rest of the world … and they are sheer lunatics, because barring catastrophe, such a thing is simply impossible. People might choose a little less convenience, but no one is going to choose suffering.

This is a Huge part of the answer, sadly. We are always ******ing (slowing, in case the auto-censor won’t accept the proper and grammatical use of “r-e-t-arding”) the implementation of cleaner, more efficient tech because business concerns are more important than environmental concerns right now. Companies getting rich on legacy technologies do not want advancement because they would lose their income streams … or rather, lose some of their ridiculously huge profits as they adapted to the better ways.

There is No way for people to live completely in balance with nature beyond living as animals, with zero technology, surviving and dying as food was available and as climate and predation dictated.

Once humans developed enough to start modifying the environment deliberately the idea of “perfect balance” was gone forever. (Of course, animals “modify” their environment … but they also die off when they do too much harm, and their environment reverts. They do not overpopulate because of disease and starvation … things humanity sees as ‘bad” (and I do too.))

Once people started healing the ill, building long-lasting shelters, growing plants deliberately ….. then we needed to learn to manage our environmental impact—and so far, we haven’t even learned to care, by and large.

We still crap in our food supply, so to speak. Any animal knows better … but humans are "smart.”

There is no way I can see where seven-to-ten billion people are going to be able to live on this Earth in peace using our current technology and our current views and values.

We have to remember that a lot of the rest of the world wants a life like most of us find minimal—running water, indoor toilet, heat and air conditioning, a stove and oven, lights, refrigeration and freezing to store food …. And some more also want the higher tech, like entertainment/communication tech.

And people want vehicles. We are so used to having options, we have no clue what it is like to have to walk long distances everywhere, or what it is like to see a simple wagon or trailer as “wealth.” But most of the world think it would be wonderful to be able to hop into a car and drive somewhere, and want that option.

And even those of us who have mostly given up that option, have done so because we still, indirectly, have that option. I can call an Uber or a cab (I cannot because of where I live but most people can) or I can call a friend with a car. I can call an Ambulance. We can (some of us) Choose to be car-lite or car-free … mostly because we don’t have growing children ….

A lot of the world is Forced to be car-lite or car-free, and they don’t like it any more than most of us would if we didn’t have any options.

I might be fine with just a bicycle … but what would I do if I needed to take my wife to the hospital for emergency treatment to save her life? Yeah, the car-free folks I guess, would just let her die and put their energy into digging a grave, right? No ambulance for those folks.

Fact is, people want the choices and opportunities we take for granted. And given the amount of energy consumed (and mostly wasted) and the amount of pollution produced and resources consumed (mostly wasted) we do not Now live a sustainable lifestyle … and if everyone else were to copy us we would see that Right away.

Unless a Lot of things change a Lot for the better … a lot of things are going to change a lot for the worse.

Packing people into cities won’t affect the Consumption end of things at all. And it is consumption which drives all the rest—getting raw materials and getting them to factories, distributing the products to stores and then to homes, disposing of the waste of production and use, all the transport to get the workers to the factories and the buyers to the stores and home again ….

If we keep using so much, and everyone else starts using this much, or even if they don’t … we will find out what “unsustainable” means.

cooker

This is way too long to respond to paragraph by paragraph, especially on my phone. So just some points:

Let's distinguish the production of pollution and it's location. LA people produce 25% more automobile exhaust than New Yorkers (fact) and I admit I was surprised it wasn't an even bigger difference, but it's still large. It's too bad, because the LA region also tends to retain more of it.

Chinese cities are polluted because China is the world's cheap manufacturer of choice and there are dirty industries and dirty power plants all over the place. They have to clean it up and perhaps we have to stop buying so many cheap, dirty goods from them, but that is is a separate issue from what urban/exurban style of development is most energy efficient or "green".

There absolutely is science showing that urban density is an environmental good. Here's one example: Environmental Impact of Urban vs. Rural Settings #ColgateScene

Maelochs

What's the density? LA is a lot physically larger than NYC

Science cannot prove that anything is "good." I will read the study and see what it says ... but maybe you want to go back and state the study's actual conclusions and not your conclusions about the study's conclusions.

Maelochs

So ... read the study (which isn't a 'study" but a magazine article ... the person read a few studies but doesn't even cite them.

Also, even with "resource use" there are some glaring oversights ... for instance,. gridlock is a huge waste of fuel and a huge generator of pointless pollution and it Only happens in cities.

otherwise ... the paper only lightly touches on the environmental impact of cities versus rural areas .... I was pretty disappointed. if there had been some hard info and much more extensive examination ... Also, the issue of water quality and the negative impact of cramming too many people together are both glossed over.

Sorry, that magazine article doesn't qualify as 'science" supporting your point ... but you wrote the article pretty well. Entertaining reading, just didn't address the right points in enough depth.

cooker

Are you sure you read it? Its a scientist summarizing his own and other scientists' work. You said you didn't think there was any science on the topic.

CliffordK

Not quite as simple of a relationship. If you're alone at a bus stop, then the bus has to stop and start which uses fuel. Idling when you load your bike?

Also, while one person may not impact the buses much, if there were 10x as many passengers, then the city would have to buy more bigger buses. If there were 1/10 as many passengers, they would likely trim bus routes or use smaller buses.

The nearest bus stop to my house is about 5 miles away for irregular service, and 8 miles away for regular service. While in theory I could bike to the bus, it doesn't fit into my lifestyle. If the community expected more riders in my area, they'd expand services.

Schools are unique in that they have a captive group of non-drivers that all commute at about the same time.

tandempower

Exactly. Stopping and starting wastes energy, brake pads, suspension parts, pavement, etc. The most efficient use of any vehicle is to keep it running without stopping and starting because that takes advantage of momentum as a free source of motion. So if everyone only used buses for longer distance travel and walked/bike for short distances, buses could stop less frequently and waste less; but that is an ideal and as we should understand, reality deviates vastly from ideals in numerous ways along numerous axes of deviation.

True, it should in theory be possible to adjust the size and routes of transit vehicles to fit demand thus minimize waste. However, what happens in practice I think is that transit systems create fixed schedules and stick to them for the convenience of commuter planning. Then, if that means buses run empty at various times, they just do because if they didn't, less people would take the bus because of less freedom to go places at all hours.

I don't like biking to the bus because I don't want to leave my bike at a bus stop for hours. More bus stops should have bike-share bikes for this reason, imo.

School bus routes can be quite inefficient because of where people live and special programs that require buses to drive long distances to pick up students here and there to bring them all to a special program.

tandempower

You can control your own actions but not others'. In light of this, I view the use of personal choices to take social-environmental responsibility in terms of living according to a model that doesn't exist and may never exist, but one which you consider conscionable. So you can think about the ramifications of your choices in terms of what would happen if everyone made the same choice you do, even though in practice you have no control over that and people will tell you it's 'unrealistic' to even pretend like your choices matter in the grand scheme of things. E.g. ask yourself what if everyone would forego biking to ride buses instead? Would people be healthier? Would the environment benefit from having all those cyclists in buses instead of riding bikes? I don't think so.

I think it would be better if more people rode bikes for short and medium distances and used buses for longer distances. Buses would stop less frequently and thus be more efficient, and people would have more autonomous control over their schedules and routing than by using transit. All the drivers who refuse to take the bus are what makes it difficult to achieve efficient bus transit. If all those drivers would take the bus, the buses would be full and it wouldn't matter if people chose to ride bikes instead of taking the bus.

CliffordK

Yes and no. They have to have some regularity, otherwise nobody would ride. But, there are also adjustments made for expected passengers, so a city might have more frequent service from 7am to 9am and 4pm to 6pm, and infrequent service after 10pm.

The stop that is about 5 miles from my house has 4 buses a day each direction. More than I thought, but it means one can't just arrive at the stop expecting a bus to be past shortly. Still it would be good for people who lived closer to the stop, or further away along the route.

That bus is also something to keep in mind for the best local hill-climb bike rides. About 140 miles RT to the top, just pushes the limits... but the bus could drop me off near the bottom of the hill.
Most buses allow one to take a bike on the bus. No need to chain up at the bus stop.
Tell me about it... Our local community decided to close many of the rural gradeschools, then transform them to special needs schools. There is one at the end of the road here. So, now the various local schools send big 40 foot buses to the school carrying 1 kid each (somehow they haven't figured out how to get more than one kid on a bus).

Generally for normal routes, they're designed to circle around until the bus is filled, then head off to school with a bus full of kids. Perhaps that breaks down for the evening "activity bus" which never is quite packed. I suppose I haven't noticed evening buses, perhaps they got cut with budget cuts.

If adults could ride the "school buses", they could increase access, at least during certain periods of the day. It isn't uncommon to see kids using public transportation in NYC, but it just isn't the thing here.

Maelochs

I see no cited studies so I have no way of knowing what was actually measured, and as I pointed out (and you ignored) what was measured was limited ans specific, but not necessarily germane to our discussion and how would we even know because the author only made claims.

"Science" is to do actual tests, experiments, and such, and report results, not to draw conclusions according to one's won biases.

For instance, where is the "science" proving that cars sitting for hours in gridlock is a more 'efficient' use of infrastructure than cars proceeding unimpeded down a suburban road? I do know there have been a lot of studied about how much time and how many gallons of gasoline are wasted by cars stuck in traffic every year ... and you know almost all those gridlocks are in cities. "Traffic" at the busiest time of day where I live means, "I had to sit through a whole cycle of the traffic light."

Yeah ... that was a magazine article by some guy expressing some opinions. That is not "science." If you think any scientific journal would have published that ... maybe as an abstract explaining his actual work. but he was just saying,
"Hey, I had some ideas that i wasn't sure were right, and I think a lot of other people do, so i looked at some stuff ... " He didn't even poll people to see if they believed the things he starts out claiming people believe.

No ... i don't know what is what up in the Land of the Maple Leaf, but in the civilized world, that is a opinion article in a general-reading magazine.

tandempower

Or they haven't figured out how to alternate between the bigger buses for larger loads and smaller vehicles for smaller numbers of students. Sometimes it feels unfair if your kid gets a smaller and less-safe vehicle just because they are on a less populous route than other kids. Generally there is a lot of waste built into society because of fairness and equality concerns, as well as personal liberties taken without concern for social-environmental responsibility.

Yes, I've thought of that but it is unlikely because of security concerns. In general the problems of inefficiency would be solved quickly if there just wasn't, say, enough fuel available. At that point, people would choose where they want to be and move there; and those who didn't would have to make do with what they have available within walking/bike distance. People would survive. They'd make the best of it. Surprisingly innovative solutions would emerge, then they'd become the subject of worship, and 50 or 100 years later they would be social patterns generating lots of waste again because of all the people who insist on maintaining them despite them having transformed from an innovative solution to a cause of problems. Such is culture and the human mind.

tandempower

What's inefficient is the cultural/psychological resistance to escaping/ending gridlock by simply switching from driving to another mode. The movie, Falling Down, is one cultural example of how crazy it seems for an individual to choose to escape gridlock by going car-free suddenly and without warning by simply abandoning his car in a traffic jam. The problem is it takes so much change to alter ones lifestyle from driving to LCF that most people just give up and choose to continue with the status quo. Then you have so many people preaching against the change to reinforce and validate their submission to that automotive-centric status quo.

Rollfast

It's not philosophical, you're just bummed about being broke. You're going to college however...study hard and then adapt whatever totally unrelated thing you likely end up doing for a long time looking for that career you wanted. Thus is life and pollution is weighed against efficiency.

By those standards a freight train is model.

Mobile 155

I tend to agree with most of this. I also tend to believe we have already reached a point past our righting moment at least from a regional perspective. I do agree no one is going to sacrifice themselves for the good of someone else. If it isn't a universal effort it is doomed to failure. And there is the rub. A goodly portion of the world realizes the west has reached level 9 in the video game of human existence. They know we are at or past the tipping point but they feel they are at level 3-4-5 and want to get to level 9. If we are at the tipping point, and remember I believe we are past it, but if we are there letting the ones at 3-4-5 catch us we will capsize the whole deal and pretty quickly. If you look at all of the proposed solutions from places like the UN they are saying the West needs to sacrifice starting now and maybe, jut maybe we will not capsize. Ideally maybe we should all think we are in the same boat. At least that is the perception I get looking at the world. Help who you can now, today, because you don't even know if there will be anyone to save things for in the future. JMHO

McBTC

What I see is a 'philosophy' of demonizing products to justify higher and higher taxes on users. If not for the taxes generated by the sale, repair, maintenance and fueling of vehicles, there would be a big hole in government 'revenues.' California's raising taxes on diesel fuel, for example, is simply raising the price on all goods and services. Gas taxes in California are the highest in the nation. Why? Because the state is run by a bunch of Leftists who get elected to spend someone else's money.

KraneXL

A lot of people don't get this. But all our good are transported by truck (also locomotives use diesel), so when diesel goes up, everything goes up.
To be fair, one could argue that the reasoning behind it is to lessen the proliferation of single passenger automobiles on the road. But fat chance of that working in the auto capital of the nation.

cooker

Car drivers underpay for road access. Raising fuel taxes is a way of reducing the socialist subsidies car drivers receive, which is the kind of fiscal rationality I would have thought you would be the first to endorse. But I guess when people are confronted with the true cost of the government services they take for granted, they all turn out to be 'leftists'.