Yeah tires is probably one of the worst inventions ever. It spreads microplastics everywhere. The main purpose is traction.
Tarmac is bad too. Roads as a whole is a pretty bad solution.
It's almost as if railways had everything right from the start.
The following is me ranting about a rather obscure theoretical idea, so please bear with me, or quit while you can.
Now, if we were to reinvent the entirety of transportation. Let's imagine we rewind time to just before cars, but keep our current knowledge, are cars really the way to solve transportation? No. Just no.
Imagine landing on a pristine foreign planet and the first thing we do is to pollute everything just to pave a road for transportation that also requires more pollution to use said road. It is just not right.
The idea of "road' comes from the predecessor of cars, carriages, and people sort of took that idea for granted and developed from there. I don't even blame them.
Let's go back to the imaginary planet, and rethink it without the idea of "road'". How would we solve transportation? By redesigning the wheel.
In order to make a wheel that could drive over off-road, we basically need something a lot more solid and durable than rubber. And we'd need engines that could easily and swiftly apply the correct force to the drivetrain to circumvent the uneven terrain.
With current technology that would be solvable.
Guess what the first cars were? Electric and with huge solid wheels.
The paved road and rubber tires are the result of a push towards combustible engines made by the oil industry. The 1800s electric car manufacturers were actually on the right path, they just didn't have the technology or money to do it.
What are you talking about? A solid wheel would perform horribly off road or on road in a gas or electric vehicle. You need some sort of tread and deformation to get any grip off road. And rubber is used because it deforms to the road and gives you a larger contact patch which gives you more grip. If you put solid wheels attached to a motor it wouldn’t take much effort to get them to slip in anything but the most ideal conditions. That’s why when people go off roading they get monster tires on tiny wheels and air them down until they’re ready to fall off.
In a horse drawn wagon solid wheels make sense because the wheels aren’t driving the carriage the horse is. The horse can step over bumps and put its hoof on solid ground. A wheel can’t do that, so it has to comply to the road. The up side is the solid wheel has a lot less rolling resistance. Early EVs had solid wheels because that’s just what we had.
That's pretty much the point. We could've had vehicles that could drive over rough ground, but they opted to make flat roads and rubber tires, both of which are causing issues environmentally and congestion.
My whole thought experiment is : If you were to settle a brand new world, would you repeat the concept of roads and rubber tires?
We wouldn't bother with independent motorized transportation. It would be trains for between cities and public transit so ubiquitous that bikes would be exiled strictly for rural exploration outside of cities.
Early EVs and horse carriers had large wheels because the roads and paths where dirt or cobblestone.
My point is that, if they had simply said "okay, that is the condition that we need to accept, adapt to and solve" like we do today with tarmac roads taking for granted, they could have developed a vehicle to do that.
It would probably have larger wheels and soft suspension, but the only reason cars are shaped as they are today is because they didn't solve it back then.
What happened instead was that low torque combustible engines were subsidized and rolled out on the condition that tarmac roads were also provided by the state. This was largely due to bitumen being a biproduct from petrol production. The oil industry pushed for both combustible engines and tarmac because they could supply both.
My previous rant is basically just entertaining the idea of what we'd do today if posed with a similar challenge. Roads are absolutely taken for granted and tmwe will never be able to undo that. It might be relevant if we ever inhabit another planet, but the last I read was that road planning had already begun on the moon..
Large flat roads are also more efficient. Have you ever driven down a bumpy road? That shit aint efficient. All of your horizontal speed gets turned into vertical speed in a jarringly unpleasant way. That's part of why trains are so efficient because their tracks are so smooth.
Large wheels have nothing to do with a vehicles ability to go off road/on bumpy roads, if anything they're counter productive because you want large soft tires and small wheels for that scenario.
Are you seriously suggesting that more advanced propulsion and suspension systems would eliminate the need for traction?
Have you ever ridden a bike on just the rims?
It sucks. And I don't mean just in terms of comfort. There's a reason mountain bikes with the most advanced suspension systems still need soft knobbly tires in addition to their suspension systems to do what they do.
Trains and trams are far more efficient large scale transport options, but cars and smaller personal transport options like scooters and bicycles have their place, too. Despite our current over-reliance on them, they aren't useless. There are use-cases where they are the best option. The same goes for the tire.
The compliant tire is the best option for an off-rails vehicle. No, suspension cannot replace it, not in terms of cost (and I don't mean money, I mean materials and energy) and especially not in terms of functionality.
That's not how wheels work.
You can't just ignore traction and claim you can make an effective vehicle of any kind with materials that don't wear if only sufficiently advanced propulsion and suspension were applied.
Even on skateboards, warehouse vehicles, and similar, the wheel isn't just a solid cylinder of metal or some other non-compliant low-wear material.
It's a hard hub, wrapped in plastic, or rather, polyurethane. A compliant grippy material that serves a very important purpose in improving the performance of the wheel. You can't replace a compliant wheel material with somehow better suspension. You still need it for grip, even on perfectly flat surfaces.
Trains make up for their low traction (and therefore high efficiency) with slow steady acceleration/deceleration and extreme weight. Their design principles cannot be applied to personal vehicles, which do serve their own purposes.
@bstix@PanArab why roads at all? Rails for all bulk mechanical transport.
Tyres for tractors (on farms), push/electric bikes, and personal mobility devices. And probably forklifts. Everyhing else is hard wheeled (trains and indoor trolleys).
Watch out, my Brit friends. The language here in the states takes hold subtly. If you post that to other sites you'll get these (serious) reponses
Why were they in the street?
Where were the parents?
The driver can't help it if they run in front of it
There is zero remorse or compassion from drivers - and it's well known the larger the car the less compassion they have for a vehicle death. They see it as unavoidable that if a child is in the road that they are in an accident. They shouldn't have been there. There's nothing that could be done. The parents should have been there to stop it. This rhetoric is coming for your country too. After all, the car companies love these arguments.
@scrubbles@mondoman712 Car company propaganda 100 years ago started these arguments. Prior to the invention of “jaywalking,” there was broad consensus that streets were public spaces for civic life including children’s play and motorists who barreled through them with entitlement to kill whatever got in their way were the bad guys.
Cars are the only weapon in the world where you could injure or kill a few dozen people "by accident" and be let off without being held responsible. And it happens all the time.
Even when someone is charged with anything, it never accounts for a loss of human life. It's always some BS traffic violation that might as well be a parking violation.
We live in a car cult with auto impunity. If you want to kill someone and get away with it, run them over.
On the other hand individuals often have no way to escape car dependency. The crimes of individuals are nothing compared to the unpunished crimes of the auto/oil cartels.
Honestly, there are now lots of eye tracking software that can be used to check if someone is looking where they're supposed to. I'm pretty sure it's going to be common in the near term as we're forced to look at ads...
Oh yeah, completely agree as long as it's done by the car with no telemetry or anything. When it comes to features like this my big worry is always privacy. The safety is a good thing.
What is it with this world that we protect car crimes so much like nothing else gets consistent protection in western countries. There is nothing blocking vision here no loose surfaces he could have seen them for a mile which only leaves the driver at fault even if unintentional you have a social responsibility for the safety of others when you're in public. It's pretty obvious he did something that negated this.
Riding with cameras is becoming as mandatory as a helmet these days
“[The evidence] just wasn't there. It's heartbreaking and it's unsatisfactory but it is where we are at right now,” she said to ABC15 in November after she told victims she wouldn’t file felony charges. “It's a collision where we cannot show with the evidence that there was a conscious disregard of a risk that this individual made.”
Why is it that someone can run into over a dozen cyclists, killing some, but also not have made a "conscious disregard of risk"? If it's true that the driver was not consciously disregarding risk, but we still got this outcome, it's absolutely true that the process for obtaining a permit for his vehicle and/or speeds is way too lenient.
One of the problems of car centric society is that the process for licensing almost has to be too lenient, because it causes major issues with people not being able to get around unless almost everybody can get a license, which means that regardless of safety, the bar has to be set low.
It's absolutely this. Let's say that you wanted to make sure this never happened again. You could use the Police playbook, "more training," "better roads," "more awareness," "people centric design,"an unlimited number of buzzwords. But the only solution that would help is fewer cars and fewer roads for them. Non-car infrastructure must be developed, and unfortunately it IS zero-sum as space is finite and valuable.
I was all ready to rant about the problem of new developments being built before public transport infrastructure, but I checked the map and there are two railway lines in the vicinity!
Excuse me? Over what, having to yield for 10 seconds to someone else? Fucking children.
Try living in an older section of my city, where all residential roads are all effectively narrower than these NIMBY childcare center candidates are whining about. Forget getting in a fight, yielding and learning how to negotiate with cars, bikes, peds, and muni vehicles is called life. If you get upset about it here you're clearly not a native to city life, and it shows.
Wow, that's some terminal right-wing privatization going on there. Government not only completely shirking its responsibility to build a public street, but even abdicating its authority to ensure that the developers it delegated the job to did it properly.
"However, council cannot force landowners to develop their property."
Asked if council could force developers to build two sides of a street, the spokesman said it could not.
Motherfucker, what part of "eminent domain" do you not understand?! Building a public street is exactly what that power is for!
That said, everyone involved also deserves a bitch-slap for their failure to comprehend the concept of one-way traffic circulation.
Fuck Cars
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