As a German who never owned a car (have driver license 30+ years) and never will, hurray!
Next: Petrol cars please.
Costs for cities would decrease a lot [1], room for bicycles would increase, noise would drop to a level which can't believed, ambulances would be adjusted to walking persons instead of loud cars with their stereos on and air would be wonderful.
And the German economy would crash, but never mind that. Before you ban all petrol cars you will first need something that can replace them because not everybody is in a position to use public transport both due to capacity, speed and door-to-door elements.
As far as I know, no German city has ban any cars yet at a larger scale. Some have done so for their inner city.
This court ruling just allows German cities to ban diesel cars, so whatever a city decides to do, is possible as long as it isn't challenged by the public or there is a new law.
I go by bike to work every single day. It's 8.5 km one way, today morning was -9C outside and while my beard was full of ice, I biked my way to work. On the way to work, there was a sign: "Achtung, erhöhte Feinstaubbelastung!" - "Attention, high fine dust pollution!"
I don't understand why my health should be at risk for something I don't produce.
Regarding a ban of certain cars: I think German cities can still make it work. There is public transportation in most cities. It's also reasonable to allow trucks at least at certain times. It's also reasonable to allow diesel cars with 2 or more people inside or allow diesel cars at certain times.
This is a time to have a conversation about how we want to live in the future and every mayor has to think hard about what (s)he want for the citizen of her/his city.
I'm totally sympathetic to the end goal, I would just like to see a realistic approach and the GGP's call for an outright ban on vehicles in the present is not supportable.
The biggest problem I have with various 'green' parties is that for the most part their solutions are bordering on the militant and do not take in to account the various complications that will need to be dealt with in order to implement the final vision.
I cycle a lot, wear out a couple of bike tires in a year. I also drive a lot, live in a small town outside of Amsterdam. So I think I see the world from both sides and a life-long interest in green technology (windmills, solar) as well as electric vehicles has given me a pretty good ground level of knowledge about all this stuff.
There is one part of me that would very much like to see this car-free city of the future come to pass in my lifetime, I'd probably move there in a heartbeat if it were done properly. But if it were done improperly I highly doubt it would fly and it would likely end up being undone and that would cause a setback we can not afford.
So better to think really hard about how to make this work, prepare plans that are properly wrought through in such a way that they work for everybody and in ways that do not accidentally kill the thing they are aiming for.
Keep in mind that cars were not thrown into cities without reason, and that at the time they were invented the bicycles were already there as well. The car mostly displaced the horse because it was cleaner.
The time when things went wrong is roughly the 1960's (for Europe at least) when suddenly a car was within reach of everybody that wanted one and the cities were ill prepared to deal with that. By the 1970's the disaster was already complete and traffic became a mess. It's been downhill from there so we definitely will need to make changes.
In my experience to date it takes roughly as long to get out of a problematic situation as it takes to get into it. Any major changes on time-scales of less than a few years will lead to trouble, a realistic transition plan would probably run for a decade or more.
> ...and the cities were ill prepared to deal with that.
For all the faults around Europe with traffic, I think they did far better adapting to cars than the UK. Mainly by preserving some of the alternatives better.
The Netherlands has infinitely more sensibly integrated public transport, and provision for cycles than we will probably ever have. At least that's my perspective as an occasional visitor.
Postwar rebuilding here gave us internal combustion as the answer to all, leading to much, now regretted, removal of rail lines and trams. Not forgetting the many people-hostile choices like cutting communities in two (e.g. Mancunian Way) and giving residents a motorway right above the house (Birmingham, M6). Trying to undo those choices always comes with a bill in the £bns for the shortest length or rail or tram.
> provision for cycles than we will probably ever have.
I'd recommend a brief history of cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands. It was actually quite poor here, too. i.e., it wasn't culture naturally shaping a cyclist-first traffic regime throughout Dutch history, it were conscious policy decisions to uproot a car-friendly traffic regime and make a decades-long effort for change. The Dutch system sucked in the 50s and 60s and it changed its policies in the 70s, which took off only in the 80s.
I understand you and I have to say that there are more than only a few things politicians like to say that are absolutely not possible if you can calculate and know how to look up things in Google. The whole German "Energiewende" and electrical car thing is impossible to do. It's just a wishful dream.
What is absolutely possible is to ban cars from certain areas for certain times. And the thing is, VW and the other car manufacturers are the guys at fault. I'm pretty sure they will have to pay a big price for their downplay of the scandal.
VW just closed one of their highest quarters ever, the Diesel scandal seems to have not affected the brand much. This is not what I expected but consumers apparently care less than what you might think.
Politicians will say whatever they want to get people to vote for them regardless of whether or not their plans are actually realistic.
The electrical car is doable as a complete replacement, but not overnight. It will need a lot of work and time before this can be a reality, but step-by-step we might get there.
How many Tesla PowerWalls would you need to have Munich's power covered for one week? I'm really to lazy to translate it, so I just paste it from my email:
Laut Google hat ein 4 Personen Haushalt im Jahr einen Stromverbrauch von 4.000 kWh.
Ich rechne einfach mal mit 50 Wochen im Jahr, an denen so ein Tesla-Speicher verwendet wird. Dann benoetigt die Familie im Mittel 80 kWh pro Woche (Winter ist dabei schon nicht dabei). Bei 13.5 kWh, die so eine Tesla PowerWall speichern kann, braucht diese Familie also 6 Stück davon, um eine Woche von jeder Energiezufuhr abgeschnitten sein zu können.
Jetzt hat Muenchen aktuell ca 1 430 000 Einwohner. Man braucht als ca 2145000 von diesen Tesla Walls und dann ist vermutlich der Erdvorrat an Metallen, die man darin verwenden kann, aufgebraucht. ;-)
I wish we could replace them. I don't see it yet. I doubt it will be possible in the next 20 years.
The diesel scandal is the following: people like to drive big cars like SUVs. A car in the 90s weighed maybe 500kg. Now a new SUV weighs 3t. To drive this, you have to have a diesel engine. A diesel engine can be relatively environmental friendly if you add enough AdBlue. But AdBlue isn't cheap and the AdBlue tank takes up space in the car. So VW, Bosch, and the other German car manufacturers switched of the AdBlue as soon as the car detects it's not in a testing setup.
We were more environmental friendly in the 90s only because our cars didn't weigh as much.
So, can we replace fossil fuels in energy generators?
A lot of countries like Brazil build new nuclear reactors to generate energy. The problem is, the waste is going no where. Maybe it's possible to send the waste to the backside of the moon, but the risk of an exploding rocket seems too high for me.
Solar energy does generate only energy when the sun is shining. That's maybe 12h a day and it depends a lot on the location on earth surface. The problem of storage and transportation of energy isn't solved yet.
Wind energy is massively changing. It can generate a lot of energy in a short time period and the next week there isn't even a breeze. It's hard to switch power plants on and off as fast as the wind is changing.
I was thinking, there should be Tesla Power Walls or similar technology next to decentralized wind and solar energy generators. But I really doubt it is possible to switch of all fossil energy.
It's not optional to switch, and soon. The next 20 years will be too long. (Some niche cases can take longer to switch, of course, and that's fine.) If it's not possible we have the options of either using less or suffering massive problems in the medium-term future, which will cost a lot more.
I'm not sure what to do about this. Lobbying and investing in renewable research might not be enough.. but is there anything else really?
That depends strongly on your family situation and your job. For a single individual working in the city or a family with all their extended family nearby you could easily get away without a car.
But not everybody is that lucky and plenty of professions will require you to be in places where public transportation is not an option. An interesting reversal of intentions is happening between the cities of Almere and Amsterdam. Almere and Amsterdam are connected very well through public transport and many people will take the train into Amsterdam each day from Almere. The Amsterdam public transport system is reasonably good and services most of the areas with corporate activity. The fact that Almere has a large and skilled professional population caused some clever business people to move their operation to Almere. Initially those companies were staffed with people living almost exclusively in Almere itself. But now people from Amsterdam have started to commute to Almere in the morning causing a substantial amount of traffic the other way because the Almere industrial areas are not as well serviced with public transport as they probably should have been.
The best combination for such transportation that I've found is to take a small folding bike along on the train, this gets you within a few km of where you need to go and then it is an easy bike ride. But this option is not open to everybody, and it almost closed for me too due to a self inflicted bike accident.
Amsterdam is just about ideal for cycling, Copenhagen is the other EU city that really gets this right and Helsinki gets a lot of credit from me for being almost there. But the majority of EU cities have a very long way to go to make the bicycle the best form of transportation and even in Amsterdam bicycling is anything but safe (mostly due to scooters and taxis).
Amsterdam could probably get away now with closing off the center for traffic completely, say from Munt to central station and east to the Cruqius mill and west to Haarlemmer poort. They would have to build some more underground parking though because that would lose the main new parking garage at Oosterdok.
It's an interesting read but really does not answer at all. Don't see how having all extended family nearby is a factor. Rentals? Getting picked up by the family too remote from a public transport hub? You don't need a car as much as you think you do.
>I don't understand why my health should be at risk for something I don't produce.
A modern society requires some amount of pollution to function. This has been reduced, and we should work to continue to reduce it, but generating/storing/transporting energy (as well as many other activities) generate some pollution. Some of it we directly benefit from (powering our homes, getting food on our tables), but others are indirect (pollution to produce/transport medical equipment when we aren't the ones using it). Given this, one can think of it as a tax on your health for the benefit of society.
Of course there are issues with ensuring people pay their fair share, that people aren't over burdened with the taxation, and that the revenue is being efficiently utilized.
There needs to be a discussion. Public transport is horrendously expensive in some German cities. For example, it costs me 8.90 euros to take the U-Bahn into Munich and back. It's far cheaper to drive, particularly if you have a passenger.
Typically these bans are limited to the inner city or the historic center, there is - outside of some small towns in Switzerland - no major European city that I am aware of that has banned vehicles outright.
The towns that have banned vehicles completely that I am aware of are all small and have simply set up a major parking lot right next to the access road into town. For the ones that I am aware of this was a practical thing to do because the streets in winter were already more or less useless due to the snow and the inclined roads so it was a relatively minor step.
Of course, but cars are not allowed in the town of Spetses where almost all of the population of the island resides. I've been there before some years and it was great!
Taxis buses and other cars are used for transportation to remote areas of the island.
> And the German economy would crash
That will also happen if you remove any major industry. And that's why you plan that in the long term. You start banning some use cases, and you keep increasing it. That's what is being done with tobacco, for example.
But it is not a reason to not do it.
So I think that you both are right, and it is just a misunderstanding on the time-frame that this changes will happen.
You claim things without being knowledgeable of the matter. For certain businesses that require door to door contact there are exceptions. You don't know the plans with regarding alternative means of transportation.
> You claim things without being knowledgeable of the matter.
Oh, sorry about that, forgive me for speaking my mind in a public forum, and out of turn at that. Would you like a position paper with references?
I claim things because I've been interested in transportation for a very long time and have read up on the subject from countless sources. There are a whole pile of reasons why you can't just overnight remove all traffic from cities. For one you're still going to have to supply the cities which means you will need to keep all road and other infrastructure in one piece but with a far smaller tax base available to pay for them, you will have numerous exceptions to your rule (due to for instance people with handicaps, emergency vehicles and so on), there is the small detail of a lack of public transport capability, the fact that public transport is not usually practically usable when you need to transport more than a small bag of stuff and so on. Another issue is that if the larger part of the alternative transportation methods will use electricity that we will need more grid infrastructure, charging points and generating capacity, all of which will not spring into being overnight.
Simplistic solutions such as 'ban all cars' from one day to the next will have serious side effects and you're not going to win this battle by making such idiotic suggestions. Society is like a super tanker, the minimum turning radius is large and if you try to exceed that limit something will break.
'Plans with regarding alternative means of transportation' require time to be implemented and require actual alternatives.
Amsterdam has been slowly but surely pushing vehicles out of the cities inner center with a combination of tax pressure, changes to infrastructure, improved public transport and so on, it's been going on for decades and the effect is very clear. If they had done this any faster there would have been too little time to adapt for all the individuals and businesses depending on mobility.
It's akin to how you change a large technological system: the agile method applied to society. Large uncontrolled swings in direction will not be manageable and will result in only one of two things: some kind of disaster or a reversal. If you don't want either of those you are going to have to be a bit more patient for a proper solution.
I'll just ignore the passive aggressiveness that gushes out between your lines, because it only makes exchanging information about the matter at hand harder.
Let me start by summarizing the facts to get this straight. Germany does not generally ban diesel cars from cities. Some cities plan to ban diesel cars in limited areas and under certain conditions. These conditions are non-exclusively such that if door to door businesses is necessary you are still free to go with your diesel car.
You claimed that "the German economy would crash" as a response to a comment that asked for "Next: Petrol cars please.", which in turn was a comment to the article with headline "Diesel cars can be banned from German cities, court rules".
Germanies economy wouldn't just crash when german cities were able to ban petrol cars. What happens depends on when what bans are imposed and with what accompanying measures.
You don't name a single accompanying measure the cities that are planing. You don't name what exactly is banned. In the absence of knowing these facts, no conclusion can be drawn.
Also, neither I, nor the comment you responded to beforehand, nor the article of the thread mention banning all cars. Where did you get that from? Did you just made that up?
The metaphorical analogies don't convince me, because they seem to be based on intution and not on science.
I don't disagree with the other very interesting points you bring up. Surely, they need to be considered. I'm quite sure any city that plans a ban has thought about them and then some more, and has come up with solutions.
Economy will crash in the next 5 years either way with mass replacement of people by AI (call centers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, ...).
Edit: Plus German car industry will crash either way because most people work not in building cars, but motors, electronics, transmission etc. which are mostly redundant with electric cars.
I'll take either bet. €1000 says the German economy will not crash in the next 5 years due to the mass replacement of people by AI. Another €1000 says that the transition to electric vehicles will not crash the German vehicle industry. (I've changed your wording from cars to vehicles because I do not see the point of the needless restriction.) Let's say as well if the same person wins both bets they get a bonus €1000.
Sound reasonable and good to you? I mean you do believe in what you're saying, yes?
What's your email address so that I can mail you the contract?
I never gamble. Effectively what I'm saying is: polite way–"I'm so confident you're spouting rubbish that I'm will to risk €3000 of my money to prove you wrong even though I never gamble." less polite way–"Put up or shut up."
Also I'm from a neighbouring (check out how I spell neighbour for a clue!) EU country so a link to a US gambling site is no use to me. ;-)
That lawyer thing is like saying "a calculator just beat top mathematicians at their own arithmetic" and expecting it to generate replace maths professors within 5 years.
AI is great but it's hilarious to think much will have changed in 5 years. Have a look at the results from the Stanford Question Answering Database if you want to see how far there is still to go.
This comment does not parse, and the second part of it makes very little sense. NDA -> Non Disclosure Agreement, that's a fairly standard legal device which definitely does not employ the majority of lawyers in corporations.
Most of the farmers were able to get jobs in factories, with little downtime or retraining necessary. What are today's factory workers going to do that's comparable? Remember, they still have rent to pay, food to buy, families to support.
One can derive argument for both sides from industrial revolution (not many horses working around), but generalizing from one datapoint isn't the most intellectually robust way to analyze the issue.
No, during the industrial revolution jobs were mostly created. This was at the same time the agricultural sector lost most jobs. With industry 2.0 and people being replaced, these moved into the service industry. Now the service industry is replaced with no where to go.
> ambulances would be adjusted to walking persons instead of loud cars with their stereos on
German ambulances and firetrucks have an unbelievable siren volume! It is piercing - I have to literally cover my ears if I'm a bystander. I have never heard anything like that in other European countries or the US. So I suspect that you can already lower their volume if you German people were willing to, seeing that it works fine in other places...
I hear it all the time in Houston. I'm pretty sure it's because of high noise plus most modern vehicles trying to reduce or eliminate outside noise. Emergency vehicles need to punch through all that noise reduction.
Nothing like the cars from the '70s or earlier. Every once in a while driving, I'll pass a restored car from the 60s or 70s going the other way, and can smell the exhaust for about a mile. And that's one car.
That reminds me of the Wartburg [1]. Our neighbor had one where I grew up, and us kids used to call it the "Atom bomb" due to the mushroom cloud of blue smoke it generated when it started up or pulled in.
Between those, the Trabants and the Serenas a morning in the former Eastblock would always look like fog. Heavy, worn out diesel engines of trucks and buses didn't help either.
The situation is now much better than when I lived there but even so Poland still has a huge smog problem.
My car (gasoline Euro-5) smells only when the engine is cold. Once it warms up, I can't smell anything. I guess it probably means that the catalytic converter is working as expected (it needs to be hot enough to work properly).
One funny thing I've realized is that I like the smell of coal fires. It must have been horrible back when cities were choking on it, but coal is so completely phased out now that when I occasionally do smell coal smoke from a domestic fire or say a steam engine I really like it.
As a ___ who never owned ____ I would love to see ____ completely banned.
I guess I sometimes feel this way about some things, but then pretty quickly get over it and realize that other people have different utility functions than me, and that I kinda like this whole life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness thing.
I much rather take the approach that externalities be accounted for properly than to ban anything that produces an externality.
So it’s rather much more like; how many trees do you want me to plant to keep my car? Or more probably, enjoy the $2.50/gal I just paid your town in taxes to fill up my gas tank. Instead of, fuck off with your dirty car you’re not welcome here.
The thing is, I don't see how you can put a price on these externalities. 13.000 people die early in Germany alone because of this. What would you have them do with this money? Planting trees wont do them much good.
Liberty is not an absolute thing. My freedom to drive my car ends where it encroaches on other peoples freedom to have a passable living environment.
We've banned smoking in public spaces for exactly the same reasons. The current system is really the tyranny of the majority. Let's just be honest about that and not use euphemisms like "accounting for externalities".
Personally I was thinking purely in terms of the various forms of pollution, although the Harvard study does try to account for injury and loss of life. Externality is an economic theory, far from a euphemism.
It’s easy to gauge how many lives are lost due to the automobile. But how many lives are saved? How many lives are enriched? How many lives are even made possible because of the automobile?
You can look at only the costs of a thing, but I find the appeal to emotion, similar to gun control arguments, to be entirely unconvincing.
Furthermore, technology has steadily improved the safety of these machines, and I’m convinced we’re less than a decade away from a quantum leap in safety by automating more and more of the driving process.
As automobiles get quieter, safer, less polluting, available on demand, and less expensive, I’m afraid you’re going to see quite a bit more of them, not less.
It’s nothing less than economic warfare to ban diesel cars outright from entering a city. Ban the sale of new diesels if you want. Tax the hell out of diesel fuel if you want. Add a toll booth and set a lower speed limit. But your well meaning compatriots spent their hard earned money to buy their vehicles and if you’d just assume fuck them over for it, I’m sure they will find a way to repay the favor. Probably by not coming to your city (and spending their money there) in the first place. To which you might say, “Good riddance!” And we have an expression for that too.
Oftentimes there is an entirely valid reason to get in a car and drive somewhere. I know, this may be shocking to you. Shocking to the people talking about bicycling a couch uphill downthread too.
There are 45 million passenger cars in Germany (for 82 million people) so it seems you’re in the minority on this. Before you call for just outright banning cars, maybe consider how you could make public policy which would decrease the number of cars by 10% without increasing the cost of cars.
How does driving a car in a big German city (which is what I am talking about at least) make lives possible where they weren't before, or save them? I think nobody here is advocating to ban ambulances or fire trucks.
Me too, I can't wait for self-driving electric cars to be used inside the city. That will take care of the local pollution burden put on residents today, and hopefully put cars in a more submissive role in traffic, where they belong.
In many, many ways. People face all sorts of conditions and situations for which an automobile can significantly improve their quality of life.
I’m sorry you can’t imagine the range of human conditions which can make cars a absolute necessary part of modern life for some people, even in dense urban environments.
The funniest example that comes to mind is you (or your wife’s) water breaks and it’s time to head to the hospital. Quick, let’s get on the bus!
You honestly think the only way people should be able to get privately and expeditiously from point A to point B (while potentially transporting hundreds of pounds of cargo) is calling emergency services?
If anything, this site has a nasty "sacrifice life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for some future concept of good" thing going on at times. I sense we'd all be packed in cities, forced to ride bicycles, eat only vegetables, be unable to reproduce without a permit, and live in massive apartment towers with 200 sq of space to save the world.
What a bizarre rebuttal to see on HN. But I’ll respond despite the poor tone.
I took a guess of $2.50 per gallon in total net externality. Turns out after a bit of Googling a study out of Harvard University [1] put the number at $2.10. So, yeah I do believe it, seriously!
By the way, those $2.50 peanuts would add up to $360 billion per year in the US.
I don’t have a problem with a gas tax that tries to fully cover the externalities of driving, as long as the money is earmarked to actually try to offset the cost.
So what‘s with the constitutional guarantee of ownership ? I highly doubt that court decision is constitutional, I think and hope it is going to be overthrown by the German Federal Consitutional Court. I‘m so tired of the freedom hostile Green-Leftist agenda in Germany !
> The ruling was praised by environmental groups but angered many politicians and business lobbies who said millions of drivers might end up unable to use or sell vehicles they bought in good faith.
That latter part is a very serious concern. This isn't hurting big evil corporations who are killing the planet. It's hurting regular lower/middle class Germans who bought cars that they could afford just as everyone else was... electric isn't a financial option for the vast majority of people and diesel has been sold/advertised as comparable to petrol for quite some time...
Like most bad policies it's based in good intentions with some highly questionable/harmful real-world implications.
As a German urbanite who has been moving in and out of cities to even rural areas I have to say: Look beyond your own nose. Not everybody lives in Berlin Kreuzberg.
It's basically statements like these "Next: Petrol cars please" that deprive the clean-air activists of any credibility.
As a German who also never owned a car (also have a driver's license), I find your enthusiasm invigorating. But I do not see it happening.
If the outcome was better funding for public transportation, I would be all for it. With more people using public transportation, traffic would lighten up and may get more relaxed? Everybody wins!
It would be really nice if it turned out this way, but I am not overly optimistic. The car lobby has a lot of power, and the relationship people have with their cars is not very rational.
(I will freely admit that my relationship to my computers is similarly irrational, but all my computers combined gobble up far less energy than a single car with its motor running in idle. Plus, a substantial amount of the electricity that drives my computers comes from renewable sources.)
What do you think about the idea that this is a hidden stimulation for the German car industry, ie. If you can find a reason to ban all cars that are painted blue, you create massive demands for other colors.
This lawsuit was between cities trying to ban diesel cars and their respective states. The two states are openly supportive of their local car industry, while the cities were motivated to improve local air quality by looming EU fines. The court, being the highest administrative court in the country, is also unlikely to be in the car industry's pocket: any backroom communication with industry lobbyists would be a major scandal. To draw an analogy to the US Supreme Court: judges may bring all sorts of personal biases to the bench. But they are unlikely to risk the social prestige of their role for whatever bribe is on offer. After all, they could have chosen much more lucrative careers in the private sector long ago if money was their motivation.
As a factual matter, i. e. "unexpected consequences", your idea might become true. But it's a risky strategy to hope that premature obsolescence of your product will result in consumers coming back for more. With the VW diesel scandal in the background, it's also possible that the industry will end up having to shoulder a major part of the monetary burdens. It's much more likely that the loss to their brands, and the very public failure of their diesel strategy, will far outweigh any gains from some turnover in cars.
Some diesel cars may also be retrofitted with cleaner technology, and others can probably be sold abroad, making the losses not quite as large as one might expect.
What I am trying to say is - I don't belive that this is an obvious form of corruption, pribes and so on. This seems at that scale very unlikely in any Western democracy.
But I find suprising that over the last years it became obvious that electric cars are not the choice for the largest majority of any new car buyers. But all of the sudden the car manufacturer industry is having a scandal (aparently mostly in Germany) that becomes such a manficent scandal that is reaching a dimension never seen before. As a result a large number of cars is most likely going to be taken out of the market that would have never been replaced that early on.
Besides from kicking out a few employees, updating a few models and paying fines, the latter both probably covered by their insurances, the companies have no real consequences experienced. Sales and revenues seem to be stable and a few % changes in brand reputation are not going to hurt them either. Ultimately there will soon be a lot more cares purchased at a time where Tesla is still not mainstream ready.
Sometimes you have to kill the one to save the many.
In my case it does. I am driving a Euro5 Diesel car and live in one of those cities where they may be banned. So, yes, I need to buy a new one. Which is quite difficult, or at least expensive, because it's quite possible that cars with the newer Euro6 Diesel emission standard may also be banned in the mid-term, and the latest standard Euro6d is brand new.
I live in one of those cities as well and sold my diesel car last year when the talks regarding the ban started. I now drive a petrol car. It's not that big of a difference.
In most cities with good bike infrastructure I've seen you cannot ride a bike among pedestrians, they are limited to roads and bike lanes[0]. Whenever I see bicycle on a sidewalk is most often because road is jammed with cars or it's too dangerous for bikes, if we get rid of (most) cars, this will not be a problem as there will be plenty of space for everyone.
There are two differences:
a) It's something that I can control, as long as I stay on the sidewalk and the cars stay on the street. But I have no control over bicycles on the sidewalks (even if there is a bike lane and it's illegal, many cyclists just take the shortest path, because they can).
b) it's a problem than can mostly be solved by technology. I would like to see automatic pedestrian braking being required for new cars. I doubt we'll see bicycles with any kind of emergency braking system in the next decades.
Sure, in isolation I would prefer a car staying in its car-lane to a bicycle driving all over the sidewalk.
But then, this change doesn't have to happen in isolation. The Netherlands is a great example of a decades-long investment in pedestrian-first & cyclist-first infrastructure over cars. Cycles have their own dedicated lanes, increasingly not just painted on the car-lanes but separated from both the car lanes and sidewalks with elevations. And as they're ubiquitous and well-kept, cyclists have no real reason to drive on the sidewalk.
Cycling on the sidewalk just isn't a problem of any significance anymore in most places in the Netherlands. But when I went to Berlin and cycled there, I often found myself on the sidewalk by way of convenience and safety. The solution isn't to say no to bikes and have cars instead because cars have dedicated infrastructure they stick to, the solution is dedicated infrastructure for bicycles and incentives + enforcement to make them stick to it. It works very well in the Netherlands, which was actually, at one time, a country with tons of development geared towards cars.
Why? Excluding children, most pedestrians who get killed by cars didn't pay attention while crossing the street. That's the no 1 cause for adults. The other one is walking on streets without sidewalks.
A couple of relatively recent studies done in Australia came up with the result that driver error was the cause of collisions with pedestrians/bikes around 80% of the time.
As a matter of simple physics, the only way pedestrians are killed in crashes is because cars are moving sufficiently fast to bring deadly force to a crash— which makes cars traveling at speeds over 20mph in areas with pedestrians the fundamental cause of pedestrian deaths.
It'd also practically stop economic growth of areas outside large cities and slow down economic growth of the city itself. Many businesses would be ruined (and thus people working on them). Many people would loose their jobs.
This is a very backwards approach. Why don't we destroy our cities that have replaced the beautiful nature that used to be there instead of them?
For what it's worth, I'm trying to find a place that is free of cars because, well, they ruin life if you enjoy walking and cycling.
So far, places that come to mind are central Ghent and Rothenburg ob der Tauber (sadly the latter allows cars but they're still very few in number). If I were there I would expect to work remote, or start my own gig. I'd shop locally.
There are very few places in the world where you can live near other people and escape automobiles, and I suspect there are at least a few other people like myself.
In many cases I see cycling ruin life if you enjoy driving or walking ;). I do find places that i've seen be bike friendly in Europe do a much better job at this. But cyclists in Toronto can be pretty awful. Likewise can pedestrians and cars. Whichever way I travel, the other two are annoying me or causing me grief somehow.
Some people are inconsiderate :-( . Some of those people ride bikes. I've been annoyed at bicyclists while walking along holding my helmet just after docking my Dublinbike, even.
But a jerk walking is virtually certainly not going to kill me (or my kid). A jerk cycling almost certainly won't either. But a jerk driving quite possibly will - after all, where I come from there's a 9/11 on the roads every month due to drivers, and the dead are disproportionately people walking or cycling.
Of course, 100 years ago the streets were for walking (or horses, bikes, early autos, whathaveyou) and it was quite a feat that auto makers convinced people that only folks inside cars deserved to use 90% of it (all of it, in much of the US), and that it was perfectly normal to leave people walking clinging on to a shred of space at the edge.
Actually a jerk walking may kill you and your kid...its called "mugging" which can happen when you walk places, and which really can't happen easily if you are in a car. And there are many areas in an average city where it's completely unsafe to walk in.
And keep in mind, it's a lot more dangerous for a woman to walk alone than the average HN poster, especially if they need to do so at night.
> Actually a jerk walking may kill you and your kid...its called "mugging" which can happen when you walk places, and which really can't happen easily if you are in a car.
“Mugging” can't happen in a car only in the sense that when it happens to people in a car, it is called “carjacking” instead of “mugging”.
It's a lot harder to carjack someone than to mug, to be honest. Colleges in particular tend to be pretty serious about the risks of danger of being accosted,to the point of littering the campus with callboxes and maintaining a security staff. My point though is that it's not always a one to one comparison; walking has unique dangers to it.
When you say cyclists in Toronto can be awful, what do you mean? Are they mean to you, or do they not follow the rules of the road, or something else?
When I cycle I fear being killed by a motorist; when I drive I fear killing a cyclist. It's important to clarify whether cyclists are putting you in danger or if they are stressing you out. Both suck, but one sucks a lot more.
Most of them are good. But i've seen many run red lights, go the wrong way on a one way street, i've been nearly hit by cyclists a few times. In terms of driving with cyclists, I think the main thing is lack of space more than actual actions. So an infrastructure problem. When driving what tends to give me pause is people acting out of place. So someone jay walking, or a cyclist cutting across lanes, as I then need to be more aware for people doing things incorrectly.
You are quite right in terms of where the danger lies though. It's on the driver more than any other to be the most careful with their actions.
The rules are not made for cyclists, and you can see that in their riding. When you expend your own power for every acceleration and have better vision & hearing, a red pedestrian light with nobody using it suddenly looks less absolute. A one-way street that can easily take 5 of you next to each other, and probably nobody even driving there, when the way around is 500m longer - the same.
You can see the same behaviour from car drivers when the rules don't make any sense (as for example in some upcoming countries).
Cycling only really works when it is classed as a different kind of traffic from pedestrians and cars. If you lump the cyclists in with the pedestrians it will make the sidewalks dangerous and if you put them on the roads they get killed by drivers. Cycling needs separate infrastructure to be a real contender.
Ah okay. I was mainly recalling what I saw in Amsterdam as well more recently in Vienna. I have been to germany, but my memory of cyclist life there is much more hazy :)
There are still plenty of cars in Ghent, except for the very heart of the city. The circulation plan they implemented there works to some extent but it has actually made the situation in the outskirts of the city worse because people that do have to drive now drive longer distances to get to the same place.
There is still inner city parking too (the underground garages) so Ghent is not really free of cars yet.
If you want to live without cars the best place would be a nature reservation or silence zone, there are a few of those in Europe and the few houses that are there are priced quite high as a result but I think they would come closest to your vision.
I was hoping to bear near people as well. I suppose it was a bit fanciful; I visited Ghent in spring and it was jaw-droppingly beautiful (flowers spilling over railings along a pretty river. The blue skies didn't hurt either). That would cost a bit, but from the looks of it not _too_ much all things considered. Some of the old walled cities are car-free enough that I'd let a six year old ride a bike in them, thus Rothenburg odt.
Alternately, a nature reservation shouldn't have residences in it, should it? When we get away from cities, towns, and villages, it becomes more feasible to just buy enough land to enjoy it without automobiles. A bit lonely though.
> Alternately, a nature reservation shouldn't have residences in it, should it?
True, but the ones that have historically been there are usually grandfathered in when the area as a whole is declared a reservation. There will be strict limits on what you can do with such a place but that's a small price to pay.
There was one for sale here in NL, at least 2500 meters away from any trafficked road but - ironically - the people that live there have road access to their property making the whole thing much worse for the other users of that area such as me when I'm cycling there (the road is only about 2 meters wide).
I'd be very happy if you had bought it, that would save at least two vehicles that still use that road!
:-( that's a shame. Can I ask how you found it? I've been researching this sort of thing casually and am not sure where to begin. I'm not aware of an EU-wide real estate search, aside from sites missing 95% of inventory like ee24.
I found it on a bike trip. I've also lived in one of those places (Oudezijl, North-Eastern Groningen). The North-East of the country here is quite bike friendly and definitely as close to car free as it gets. Houses there are cheap because of the fear of earthquakes due to gas extraction, which means it is easy to buy in but very hard to sell.
One very good way to find such houses is to look at night time satellite images and to look for places with very little light. Any houses in those regions will be in very lightly trafficked areas.
Living in a densely populated city is far less resource-consuming than living in rural areas.
You should be thankful for cities, especially if you enjoy living in nature. Distributing city populations evenly across the land would do serious harm to that natural beauty you claim to enjoy.
Yes, of course. People from outside the city come to the city by car to buy goods and offer their services because mass transit is not available or not practical. It's impossible to make mass transit practical for everyone.
It is practical to offer parking at train stations at the outskirts of the city so that people can commute to the train station and leave their car outside the exclusion zones.
That does happen in some cities - also to provide an alternative to exorbitant inner city parking costs - but it will add a lot of overhead to your trip, so for a daily commute it becomes unfeasible unless you're okay with adding 30-60 minutes to it. Every day.
(I did public transit to my assignment (working as a consultant) for five years; won't work with my current one as it's a 2 hour journey for just 60 kilometers).
It would come at a big cost, but lets optimise cities more for the people who actually have to live in them. The balance is too far from centre as it is.
So how does that stop economic growth of areas outside of the city? Sounds like it would ignite economic growth as smaller cities have to create their own services.
If it was better to have these services in the area outside the city, they'd already exist. These areas are too sparsely populated for these services to practically exist, and the ones that already exist depend on car traffic from the cities that would cease to exist if it was impractical to own a car in the city.
Also, realistically, do you need to transport these things on a daily basis? Can you not rent a (electric) truck whenever you need this kind of things?
Heck, a car in the netherlands is also very, very expensive. Especially if you live in the inner core of a relatively old city, which are not designed for cars and where parking space is at a premium.
I'm fairly sure most people working normal office kind of jobs could easily live without a car, especially if cities use that money to make public transport available to more "remote" regions easily.
My employer actually used this reasoning and has an office next to the train station, which makes traveling with public transport from other cities a breeze and prevents the company from having to pay massive fees for parking space.
Western-European capital city here. I can indeed absolutely get-by without a car, as I have for literally all my life.
There are certainly instances where a car is necessary, or sufficiently convenient. For example, I rent a truck when I move homes or get new furniture, and I get a taxi after surgery or a night out, and rent a car when doing something time/convenience-sensitive like hopping between locations on elaborate wedding days that involve a ceremony, food, drinks and after-party all around the city. But all in all, about 5% of my trips need to happen by personal vehicle, at most. Everything else is can be done via public transport or bicycles.
Nowadays we have ride-sharing and electric 'public transportation' mini-cars available that you can rent for 15 minutes or a few days. The costs are about twice that of a normal car, but as I only use it in 5% of my trips my total expenses are barely affected, while giving me the convenience of a car when necessary.
There's no real reason to keep a personal car myself. Actually I've never owned one, but it's become easier and more convenient over time. Borrowing a car from a friend or traveling far to a car rental, or expenses of renting aren't problems anymore.
Having kids or working very far from home changes the incentives quite a bit. But I think there's a lot of value in optimising for distance. As a species we spend way too much time on mundane travel, even to the point of inefficiency. I've seen people chase a job that pays $300 more for $250 in self-paid traveling costs per month. These are people who will pay $10 for delivery of groceries instead of spending 30 minutes to go to the store, but are willing to travel 20 hours more each month for a $50 net benefit.
> But I think there's a lot of value in optimising for distance.
i definetly agree to this, spending time on travel is pure waste. One of the best decisions for my personal health and my career was getting a job which is located 10 minutes from my home by bicycle. The amount of free time you have left because you spend a lot less time traveling should not be understated. Also, i find commuting very boring and stressfull, and living close to work has done wonders for my mental health aswell.
Yes, actually. All of those things can be transported by cargo bike.
There is a place for automobiles, and vans, in cities (ambulances come to mind) - just like there is a place for helicopters, but what we have now is a gross distortion that came as a result of more or less legalizing killing people with your car (as long as it was an accident) and giving people ample free asphalt and parking.
Haha I've done it, the Dutch are a bit crazy but yeah... we transport furniture on what essentially is a (frontloaded) trailer-bike.
That having been said, I think it's a silly solution to expect bicycles to take over logistics. I think we can all agree however that if the only vehicles on the roads were for logistics and public benefit (e.g. ambulance) that'd be a massive improvement already.
Honestly trying to convince people that a full life can be lived with a bicycle feels a lot like the problem of the cave.
There's a whole world outside the parking lots, but too many people have never even seen it; just pictures of it on travel blogs about Amsterdam, and don't really think it's real.
Edit:
In addition to gears, batteries and motors are a thing.
Speak for yourself. I'm referring to both, having spent most of my life in California and half a decade in Europe (ish - Ireland is peripheral in more than one sense).
There are some differences wrt property taxes, etc. but for the most part, roads are an all you can drive buffet, if you're in a car that is, so of course people use them without regard to cost. My taxes pay for roads but I only get a sliver of them as a bike lane on some of the thoroughfares in the city. Even the motorway tolls are laughably low; a few Euro at most barring one tunnel.
As always you can find exceptions. French motorways begin to cost enough to matter. Demand-priced parking and Express lanes in California have brought something resembling sanity to space allocation where it was obviously desperately needed. But for the most part my point stands.
I mean free at point of delivery. People using them don't necessarily pay for them (if I drive from SF to San Diego, I pay nothing to LA for the use of their roads, which doesn't really seem fair, though admittedly most of that drive would be on Interstate) I'd have no problem with tolled roads. Funny enough I would _love_ tolled bike paths - I'd pay several grand a year for them willingly - if I could even get them.
But I can't because we give roads to cars for free and that can't be questioned.
For that matter I'd love to lease some of the park and ride spots near transit so I could build an apartment on them (they're nearly free) but apparently I'm not allowed to do that. I can't even use them to park a mobile home permanently. How is that fair?
I disagree with the concept of toll roads, at least insomuch as they're effectively double-taxing us: we pay taxes for roads already. Now you want me to pay again to use the road?
But really, if roads were not free in the first place, toll roads would basically stop being a thing and the roads themselves would become the toll.
It's a double tax because you're not paying enough for the road in the first place. I understand that there's this huge resistance to paying tolls for roads, but there's a valid reason for them for a variety of policy reasons (decongestion of city centers, insufficient funding to build out the road without private participation/tolls) that make it a valid tool for governments to lean on. In fact, the tolls allow for a more focused alignment of price vs usage (insofar as non-users of the toll road aren't tolled), which is a reasonable approach to take as a mixed pricing (taxes + tolls) model.
I think most roads should be paid for by tolls and taxes reduced accordingly. This is because roads tend to have a huge number of negative externalities.
In some cases the very act of having to pay increases the utility of the road to the user - see congestion charging. This ensures people who gain the most economic benefit from using the road are the ones using this precious resource.
Of course, your point could be applied to any government-provided service where there is a fee. The tram receives public funding but I still have to buy a ticket, after all.
Most of these could be transported on bike trailers. The bed will probably need to be shipped in disassembled form, but then again, I've never seen beds shipped in one piece.
That said, there are certainly things that you absolutely have to transport with some sort of automobile. But there's no problem with exempting such transports from a possible car ban.
So let's take a different approach: Let's find a better solution for individual transportation that doesn't require human labor (e.g. pedaling) and offers the same benefits (ability to comfortably make 500 km per working day, for example - that's average daily mileage of a taxi driver).
You seem very much in favour of cars, but also imagining that cities without cars would look much like cities with cars. Huge amounts of land are given over to roads and parking. Get rid of these and you have much denser cities without decreasing usable space per inhabitant.
But if you make cities even densier, you'll have to restrict their height. People on the first floor still want sunlight for a reasonable time :) Meanwhile wide streets allow tall buildings..
The situation is similar to Germany's work on its electric power sources. Nuclear was turned off because it's dangerous. Now Germany spews out about same carbon as before giant investments in solar, electricity is four times the price as in US, plus they now have to buy from France cause they don't produce enough.
Stop touting "Germany buys electricity from France because they don't have nuclear power". France always exported electricity because they cannot power their nuclear power plants up and down as easy as others can their coal plants. In hot summers and cold winters France relies on Germany electricity to stabilize their net because nuclear power then becomes a problem.
It is possible to power up and down nuclear power plants, it is however very inefficient. And when you have neighbors wanting to buy your surplus electricity and a grid that support it, why bother?
France and other countries (like Switzerland) import electricity from time to time not because they are unable to produce it, but because it's cheaper to do so. Germany on the other hand have to import electricity when there not enough wind/sun and their coal plant are already maxed-out.
France in recent years relied on energy imports during winters, because they heat a lot with electricity[1], and e.g. in 2015 they had to temporarily shut down a lot of their nuclear plants due to "quality concerns"[2], tho that was not the first time other European nations had to save them from going dark.
Germany mostly has a positive import rate (importing more than exporting) during the summer mornings and evenings, mostly because it's less windy in summers, it's dark so no solar, foreign surplus energy is readily available and cheap so that it doesn't make sense to increase hard coal energy production for a few hours each.
But the coal plants are far from maxed out, and Germany does not rely on imports. E.g. during summer mornings when Germany imports about 4 GW to make up for lack of wind and solar, the hard coal plants produce 4-12 GW, meaning to avoid those imports you'd have to run them at 8-16 GW. Those plants alone can produce 19 GW easily, and that's just hard coal.
If you like playing with interactive charts about energy production in Germany and the import/export rate, Fraunhofer ISE offers https://www.energy-charts.de/
PS:
Since 2006 up until now, Germany had a negative annual import rate (more exports than imports)[3].
And the last month Germany imported (not necessarily had to import) more energy than exported was September 2011.
Coal plants in Germany have the same problem as elsewhere: They are becoming too expensive.
Renwable power in Germany is mostly a mix of solar and wind energy. In the summer, the curve of solar production fits nicely the daytime of the highest demand, while the higher production of wind energy is in cold stormy winter months. What needs to complement the mix are gas power plants which can be ramped up and down quickly. Coal plants are too slow for that.
Typically you want to keep nuclear plants running at full power all the time, as most of the costs are fixed or sunk, independent of the electricity output. Most countries use nuclear power just to generate a small fraction of their electricity, so can do this without issue.
However over 90% of France’s generating capacity is from nuclear power, so during low demand times there is a lot of excess. They do actually shutdown some reactors during weekends, but it’s better if they can sell the electricity cheaply to their neighbours, who can then avoid running some of their gas or coal plants - so it’s a
win-win for everyone.
> over 90% of France’s generating capacity is from nuclear power
I knew France used nuclear power, but I didn't realize they relied on it so heavily. Yes, in this case they'd get more excess since they're running above base load.
Do they really shut the reactors down during the weekends? My dad worked in nuclear, and the plant would be down for a few days if it ever tripped, planned outages were about two weeks.
You could always smelt aluminium, pump water uphill, or simply boil some water etc with the excess power. Excess production is a far smaller problem than lacking production - so please don't try to play this off as Germany doing France a solid on this front.
If you have a hydrogen fuel economy as well the excess could be used for electrolysis, or any other form for storing energy potential for a future date.
Germany is "exporting" energy because its ecological agenda is forcing energy companies to buy all green energy that is produced all the time, leading to severe instabilities for the grid. So to keep the German grid from collapsing Germany is dumping its energy into foreign grids, for negative prices even. It has caused the neighbouring countries so much trouble, that most of them installed phase-shifters to block out the German dumping.
That's an inherent problem of non-fossil electricity production. Electrical energy is expensive to store (some hydro plants e.g. in Austria do that).
For both nuclear and renewable, the marginal costs for producing an extra MWh, once the plant is built, are close to zero. Because on a market of any commodity, the marginal costs determine the market price, this means that once there is more electricity produced than there is current demand, the price goes to zero. This is actually the realization of the old promise from the fifties that with nuclear energy, energy would be so 'cheap' that it would not be worth the effort to install an electrical meter.
The flip side of the coin is that energy production with this cost structure, marginal costs at zero, need some degree of subsidies to be economically interesting for the operators. Renewable energy in Germany is funded by a very visible green energy tax. Nuclear power in turn is expensive to build and was mostly funded by research funds and hidden subsidies. Such as that the final storage of spent nuclear fuel is paid by the state. Extremely expensive but it does not appear in the books of companies.
Have you driven a modern diesel? At lower speeds, they easily beat similar-displacement petrol cars off the line with superior torque. They are weaker at high speeds, but in normal (especially city) driving, a diesel is usually faster than a petrol.
But yeah, their main factor for popularity is the cost per km. They use less fuel than petrol engines, and the fuel is less expensive (in Germany). This is offset by higher road tax and insurance somewhat, but for commuters and others who drive a lot (>~20000km per year) diesels are a much more cost effective option in Germany than anything else.
Diesel isn't that cost efficient actually, even if you drive a lot. Diesel are more expensive to maintain due to regulations, plus diesel cars tend to be more expensive their petrol counterparts. Moreover, there is depreciation, which tend to be worse for diesel cars, because they are valued less on the second hand market (fairly or unfairly).
On average, you should expect to drive at least 150.000+ km before you've broken even on a diesel car with its petrol counterpart.
People only look at fuel consumption and fuel prices, but maintenance and depreciation are actually one's biggest loss on a car purchase. And in general petrol comes out on top.
The premium of diesel engines over petrol is one of the key reasons that we don't get many in the USA (the other issue being emissions). Bob Lutz, former GM CEO, was a big proponent of diesel but repeatedly acknowledged that it doesn't make sense in the USA. The market for people willing to pay the $5,000 premium (in 2007 dollars, mind you) was very small. Americans don't appreciate just how cheap cars in their region are.
GM did manage to get a diesel Cruze into the USDM market, and keep it here, but it's low-margin and not a huge seller. A manual diesel Cruze starts at about $25,000 (compared to $17,000 for the base). So it is basically slotted as an "enthusiast" model, just not a high-performance one like Ford and Honda would offer.
Different tax systems can affect the equation even if you disregard that you pay less at the pump for fuel that your car consumes less than a petrol equivalent – lower CO2 figures may also mean that you pay less yearly fees or less taxes on car registration as well. The break-even figure certainly varies by country (as does depreciation of different cars).
Diesel has a higher maintenance cost too, especially if you only drive short distances. IIRC the main cost here is the catalysator, which basically clogs up if it can't properly heat up. That doesn't happen on short range.
> Now Germany spews out about same carbon as before giant investments in solar, electricity is four times the price as in US, plus they now have to buy from France cause they don't produce enough.
Well, they require a more complex motor which handles higher pressures and supercharging. The picture would be different if you would compare motors with the same price.
It's an illusion that diesel vehicles are faster than gasoline. Gasoline engines have way more horsepower and are faster that the diesel options (unless Germans are getting neutered or smaller power plants than say, the USA)
That's a strange statement. More horsepower based on what? I think if you look around, you'll see that the largest and highest horsepower combustion engines all burn diesel. Semi-trailers are exclusively diesel.
Your statement on speed is also odd. Record setting cars may burn gas, but your typical car driving around a city or highway needn't ever go faster than 160km/h. Most cars can achieve this, and most modern cars, whether diesel or gas, can achieve this without much difficulty.
This leaves us with acceleration, where diesel vs gas is equally unclear. As small diesel engines often ship with turbos, you'd be perhaps comparing a turbocharged 2.0L diesel vs a normally aspirated 2.0L gas engine. Assuming roughly equivalent mass of the cars, with higher low-end torque, the diesel will win just about any street race.
If what you're comparing is purchase price to acceleration, then indeed the gas cars may win.
This is really wrong. It's a weird myth that gets perpetuated in America where people don't really drive diesels.
Let's compare a 2.0L diesel Golf TDI to a 2.0L petrol Golf GTI. Same car, same displacement, both turbo engines.
The Golf TDI does 0-60 in 9.0s and a quarter mile of 17.0s@84 mph.
The Golf GTI does 0-60 in 5.7s and a quarter mile of 14.2s@100 mph.
There's a staggering difference in performance there. The TDI is so slow that it's genuinely difficult to find a Motor Trend instrument test on a slower car, because at that point, it's too slow to really bother.
I found the 2018 Rav4: 0-60 in 9.3s and a quarter mile of 17.0@82.
If you want to do this comparison please do it right: The Diesel equivalent to the Golf GTI is the Golf GTD. There's more than just displacement that makes up an engine and the fact that is some kind of turbocharger.
Their difference in 0-60 seems to be 6.4s vs 7.4s according to what I find. Guess the difference in higher regions might be even less, because of a different torque profile in turbocharged diesel engines.
The GTD is Euro-only, so it's harder to get performance comparisons. But it's still much slower than the GTI, I found a 15.6@93 in the quarter.
0-60 is an awful way to measure acceleration; most of what it measures in modern cars is traction, since a Mk7 GTI will shred the front tires with a hard launch. So high five second and low six second times are both accurate, it just depends how good the launch was.
That's why you compare quarter mile times when looking at acceleration. And the GTI is still so much faster than the GTD; a full second and a half and 7mph trap. Meaning, in a drag race, the GTD wouldn't be close enough to read the GTI's license plate.
I think the 0-40 profile would be much more favorable to the TDI, and much more useful to the typical driver. But we'll never really know as that's not the standard measurement.
The diesel golf is still a lot slower to 40 than the GTI. The TDI diesel has a lot of turbo lag, a narrow powerband, and poor gearing. What people who've never owned diesel cars fail to realize is, that peak torque number is hugely misleading. It sounds impressive, but it starts from like 2200RPMs and falls off a cliff past 3500. While a (modern) turbocharged petrol engine has full torque by ~1800rpms and that lasts until like 5000rpms.
I've owned a (Jetta) TDI before, I even tried to make it fast. Even with a tune and full exhaust it was slower than a stock turbo petrol.
It's always Americans that talk about how awesome diesels are. I never see posts from Europeans (who are the ones that actually have to drive them) talking up diesels. They are always complaining about how terrible they are.
This comment makes no sense. I'm saying diesel engines are bad for performance. It's not physically possible to make a diesel 1.6L engine that produces F1 levels of power, they just can't spin fast enough.
The comment make sense, since I'm saying "[i]f it were true [that diesels easily beat gasoline burners in a street race], Formula-1 would use nothing but diesel engines [which they don't at all]."
I have not had a problem with cold starts with diesels in the decade I've been driving them. I did have a VW Golf with a PD engine but now have a VW with a Common Rail engine. In both cases I prefer them to petrol cars because:
a. the torque is great - not slow to accelerate at all. Try one! The PD engine had great low-end torque but the common rail has great torque for the entire power band, which is extensive. Really rapid. Perhaps you were driving an ancient SD-engined vehicle without a turbo??
b. Driving is so smooth; petrol is quicker to respond which is less forgiving.
Also, as the engine components are larger and slower moving, they last far longer; my work colleague's 2005 5-series BMW is nearing 250,000 miles and is still supremely fast. (Contrast with a bike engine that goes for 40k or 50k due to high revs?)
My 2008 Golf did get smokey but the guy I sold it to has been using the BP cleaning diesel (or the Shell equivalent) and says it doesn't smoke at all any more.
I like the sound of them; the non-sporty petrol cars round by me sound like the engine is rattling to pieces (eg my colleague's Vauxhall Astra); with high-performance tuned sports cars then yes the petrol sounds great. I rarely see any V-configuration engines these days.
I think you've never driven a big modern engine diesel car. I have driven this BMW 535d[0] and believe me this monster is not "slow" in any way (0-100km/h in 5.5 seconds). It accelerates faster than the petrol equivalent because of the more torque it produces.
Sure, a big engine diesel is quick, but small-engine ones are slow. The lack of top-end power makes them suffer at highway-speed passing. The diesel Cruze, for example, has a 5% (4mph) lower trap speed at the end of the quarter mile over its gas sibling (with the same 0-60).
Also consider that 3.0L I6 diesel has the same 0-60 as a 2.0L turbo four-cylinder Honda Accord, but a huge reduction in highway acceleration (traps 98mph vs. 103mph in the Accord).
Diesels have better torque, which is mostly what feels like "power." Few people travel at top speed, so lower horsepower does not have the same feeling to the driver as high torque.
Diesels have literally the worst powerband for automobiles, especially mated to automatic transmissions. Diesels have power down low in the RPMs, but that's never where you are when you need power. When you need to accelerate, you floor the throttle and the transmission downshifts into the upper RPMs.
They are good for accelerating 0-40, but they are significantly slower at 40+ -- which is where most people accelerate hard, like merging on the highway or passing.
When I merge onto the highway, I use 5500-7000rpms, when I don't want to accelerate quickly, I use 2000rpms. It's why I hate driving diesels: 280ft-lbs at 2000rpms is useless and only 105hp; I want 280ft-lbs at 6500rpms (345hp).
No replacement for displacement does hold true for diesels. I've seen some crazy fast, crazy large diesel pickups at the drag strip. 3.0L is about the displacement diesels can start making power, anything below that the limitations of physics are holding it back.
> what are the advantages of diesel engines in cars if not efficiency?
I wouldn't assume that there's a direct relationship between diesel engines still being around and diesel engines still having an advantage over others. Not having to replace your fleet of trucks, buses, trains or whatever is a big enough advantage for most companies.
Also, importing energy from other countries isn't a sign of poor energy production. If buying energy from you costs me less than turning my power plant on for a day I'm gonna shut it down and call it a day. Not to mention the fact that energy prices are sometimes negative (i.e., they pay you for taking it).
To add a bit, it should also be noted that many of the reliability issues that passenger diesels have are related to emissions equipment. Industrial diesels engines are not required to have all the fickle equipment, so they are generally much more reliable.
So buses and trains have significantly longer service lives and lower operating costs than passenger diesels do. Turns out, diesel engines are wonderful when you don't care about emissions.
Can you please elaborate where you got your data points from.
I am a diesel car owner (have been for about 15 years) and I have yet to experience those issues you mention. Currently it has -12°C outside and my car starts just fine.
Back in the late '90s when I got my first diesel (a Citroen AX, with what was at the time the smallest production diesel power plant available) you'd have to wait many seconds for the glow plugs to warm the car before trying to start it. Diesel also freezes in the extreme cold, though that's not really a major issue in the UK. You could also run it on used cooking oil.
In the 20 years since then diesels have undergone massive and very rapid evolutionary changes through tax incentives (massively favoring low CO2, high MPG cars) and resulting fleet buying pressures. The result is what we have now: fabulously complicated, precision-engineered common rail engines with multiple turbochargers, incredible efficiency, almost petrol-like smoothness, weird stuff like urea tanks, and instant starting. If you put old vegetable oil in them they would break instantly and expensively.
I went from that AX in 1995 to a new Jaguar XJ6 in 2008 (via lots of petrol cars). The only thing they had in common was the black pump. In no other way were those engines comparable; the Jag was a beautiful, torquey, silky, rumbling thing that felt like a big V8, did 1,000 miles on a single tank, and beat 911s off the traffic lights (well, until 30mph). The AX was an agricultural dinosaur that deafened anyone in it and was so nose heavy you'd break a sweat parking it. One of those cars I could and did keep in tune with a hammer and a can of WD-40; the other needed a team of factory mechanics with computers and an expensive annual service. I sold it as soon as the warranty expired, but the AX was running fine until my sister drove it into a parked car shortly before I got the XJ.
> If you put old vegetable oil in them they would break instantly and expensively.
Haha, an acquaintance of a local Linux user group I used to visit drives an old BMW which he has modified to run on vegetable oil. To be precise, oil which has been used for preparing french fries. You can easily recognize the smell. He was a car mechanic, I guess he knows quite well what he does.
Yep. A basic diesel engine is a pretty amazing thing that, like a jet engine, can burn pretty much anything and is simple to maintain. Once you start adding all the modern gubbins in it to make it efficient and powerful, you lose that generality.
The main issue with using alternative fuels in modern diesels is the injectors: unit injectors and common rail systems are high pressure, precision components that are very sensitive to fuel quality. Used frying oil is not clean.
So your mate's BMW either had some modifications to let it use vegetable oil reliably, or it's really old!
Usually diesel fuel in winter contains additives to prevent freezing/clogging the filter. Some diesel cars also have heated filters. I’ve had a diesel car fail due to a frozen/clogged filter in winter, but that was more like -20. It’s rare, but it happens.
In support of your statement, in comparison to gasoline, diesel costs less to produce, it has more energy per unit of volume, it is much safer to store and use, diesel engines produce more torque at lower RPMs, and yes, vehicle maintenance is less costly over the length of ownership for the vehicle.
Nowadays with turbos, injectors, particle filters (required in Europe from 2007) and other fiddly bits, it's not clear that diesel engines have an advantage.
The particle filters are especially kludgy - most rely on having fuel injected down the exhaust pipe to burn the trapped cinders and regenerate the filter. If you don't run the engine long enough at 2000 rpm or so (to get the right temperature), you may clog the filter and need an expensive replacement.
(Worse yet, some designs just use the engine fuel injectors at the "wrong time" to get the piston to expel fuel down the exhaust pipe. This can contaminate the engine oil with diesel fuel and cost a few thousand in repairs, as a colleague learned the hard way ...)
Regardless of exporting a lot of electricity, they are also now completely dependent on French nuclear power for energy security. German renewable sources are intermittent. In short, they produce energy when there is enough wind and when the sun shines, and both of those are conditions that correlate heavily over all of Germany. German electricity demand largely does not match them -- unlike in hotter climates, air conditioning is not used much, so demand is negatively correlated with sunshine, and the intermittent capacity greatly exceeds the variable capacity.
So today, when it's windy or the sun shines in a clear sky, they have great overproduction, while when neither is true, they depend on foreign sources.
Same difference with nuclear power. Starting and stopping nuke plants is very expensive/inefficient, yet energy demand is fluctuating wildy. That's why there is an international network for transmitting energy.
One example is French excess nuclear energy in the summer (in central Europe AC are very uncommon, so energy demand is low when it's hot): Germany can more easily switch off renewable plants and import French nuclear power, yet still is a net exporter.
In the summer one runs into cooling problems for the plants too. Sometimes they have to be shut off because the river is already too warm - creating problems for France.
No, it's not. Most electricity is used during the day, since that is when the cooking and washing is done. German companies prefer working during days too, although the larger factories will have a shift system.
> Regardless of exporting a lot of electricity, they are also now completely dependent on French nuclear power for energy security.
most western european nations have a very interdependent energy grid. (more so then the post-warsaw pact countries). The corridor BeneLux, Germany, france and italy is highly integrated. These systems are already reliant on each other, so power dependency in terms of nuclear power isn't really an additional issue.
I was in Spain last year for several weeks and it was so depressing how every town viewed at altitude was covered in a pervasive pea soup of diesel smog.
The link between German industrial policy/protectionism and environmental disasters like diesel has been known for a while now but European cities in particular will be paying the price for a long time.
How do you know it's smog caused by diesel? LA has suffered (don't know how is it today) for years from smog and the majority of the vehicles there are petrol. I mean you can't blame it all on diesel.
Back in those days, gasoline/petrol cars had much worse emissions than they do today. They've since been cleaned up a little when it comes to smog-forming emissions. Diesel hasn't.
Well, in theory perhaps. In practice, a bit of stupidity can make nuclear reactors fail spectacularly. Chernobyl had operators doing stupid things. Fukushima had planners ignore centuries old warnings about tsunamis in the area.
I was a proponent of nuclear power for a long time, but I became cautious when I realized that it still involves humans making mistakes. Now I hope that the German reactors hit their shutdown dates without incident now that all incentive to maintain them properly has been removed by setting those dates in the first place.
Yeah, but as I'm sure you heard before, newer reactors are really well-designed.
I think the low death rate per kWh, effective risk to the environment, and carbon footprint are all clearly in favor of nuclear.
The downsides: cost, time to operation, and ramp up/down times. But none of those have large negative externalities.
Compared to the negatives of conventional power plants, I really think we should be subsidizing nuclear heavily to mitigate climate change -- in addition to renewables.
No matter how much you put your emphasis on the technology, this does not make the human factor go away. Reactors are too complex to build and run without human supervision and maintenance. Thus, incidents and accidents based on human error will happen eventually.
Also, you leave out one aspect of nuclear power generation: really long term storage is required for the fission waste products. This has its own troubles and unsolved problems.
An old salt mine in Germany was converted into an experimental long term storage facility for nuclear waste. Originally, the site was judged to be geologically stable enough to contain the waste for a couple of millenia. However, it turns out that the amount of water that was seeping through was underestimated badly. Now, they are scrambling to get the waste back out. But noone has an idea how to do this safely with badly corroded, damaged and burst containers down there.
No other site has been selected for another attempt to put radiating materials into a safe long term storage. In other words, no spent fuel rod has been put into any kind of long term storage yet.
Diesel fuel is taxed lower primarily because it’s historically been the fuel for trucks. Using Diesel engines in cars is a comparatively new development.
“Taxing the fuel used by companies is hurting the economy more than taxing the fuel used by personal cars".
It's exactly the same reasoning/lobbying outcome that was behind the American (and now historic, I think?) tax advantage of light trucks over sedans. Both then lead to comparable, and in different ways unecological adaptations: diesels in Europe, F-150s stateside.
They are two different use cases. You need fossil fuel road transport from distribution centers and to the last mile of businesses and homes. I don't think electric will be able to handle that duty yet, and maybe not possibly unless for relatively short distance last-mile stuff.
That's not true. Diesel was a byproduct of gasoline production, which was cheaper because in less demand. This is changing slowly.
> Now Germany spews out about same carbon as before giant investments in solar, electricity is four times the price as in US, plus they now have to buy from France cause they don't produce enough.
That's disinformation. Germany has a high and growing percentage of renewable power, and it exports electricity - for example, frequently to France, especially in the summer, because scarceness of cold river water to cool the french nuclear plants.
Then, renewable energy in Germany is subsidized to some degree, a subsidy which is paid by a small percentage on the bill of private households. On the other hand, there are numerous companies which are except from this tax.
Also, every time there is an oversupply of wind or solar energy, the price at the energy spot market goes to zero. In the net result, companies are paying much less for energy.
And what you also are leaving out of the equation: Renewable energy is now cheaper than nuclear. There is only one nuclear power project in the EU, Hinkley Point in Britain, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the whole project is likely to make a net loss. I guess the only thing that keeps it alive are the nuclear weapons ambitions of the UK government.
In a big picture sense, they're the same. I think it says something different about intent though. A subsidy says something is essential or desirable. A relatively lower, but still very high excise tax says one thing is disliked less than the other.
And really, there usually is little significance to how the subsidy is paid, it's usually just an artefact of how it developed historically and how things were easiest to implement, potentially depending on psychological factors.
I mean, what would the alternative look like? You have to pay the same tax for both, but then can claim back a fixed percentage of the taxes on diesel? On the same form? Or should they have created a separate agency that processes the refunds? There simply is no other sensible way to implement this subsidy, and that's why it is the way it is.
I think jacquesm adequately explained one of the major distinctions: a high tax that's slightly lower than the tax on a competing good does not result in a below-market price. While many of the effects are similar, it is not the same.
> a high tax that's slightly lower than the tax on a competing good does not result in a below-market price.
Erm ... what do you consider "the market price"?
I suppose it's not the price that people actually pay for something in the market, as then even the state paying for all your diesel needs would still not qualify as a subsidy (if the state pays for it, you don't pay anything, that would make the market price zero under that definition, so the free diesel would not be under market price, therefore not a subsidy, right?)?
But what is the market price, if it's not what people pay?
> While many of the effects are similar, it is not the same.
In economics, oversimplifying slightly, the market price is the equilibrium price. That is, where the demand curve and supply curve cross. This is the price the market will settle on without outside forces acting on it.
A subsidy results in a sale price below the equilibrium price while sellers receive payments above the equilibrium price. An excise tax has the opposite effect.
Different excise taxes on competing products may lead consumers to prefer one over the other, but still results in less consumption of both products than the market would without intervention.
OK, so let's check whether that holds up: Suppose petrol was taxed at 1000 EUR/l and diesel was taxed at 0.01 EUR/l. Do you think that that would lead to less consumption of diesel than in the no-intervention equilibrium with the seller receiving payments below the no-intervention equilibrium price?
The only fuel in Europe that you could class as 'subsidized' is so called 'red' diesel that is used in agriculture. You could run that in your regular diesel engine and it will work just fine but the coloring will stain the fuel delivery system and the tank in such a way that even many runs of regular fuel later it is detectable and this will get you a very heavy fine.
Diesel is taxed significantly lower than petrol in germany which accounts for most of the substantial price difference. One could argue that this is a form ob subsidy.
They are both taxed, but at a different rate. The government picks up the cost in terms of lost income. Yes, it's a subsidy (a deliberate tax break). The historic reason is that diesel was used for trucks. Later, diesel cars were considered to be environmentally better since they produce less CO2 per kilometer. They're just worse in other regards.
I'm sorry, but I just can't agree with you. If we start to take words and stretch their meaning beyond the agreed upon definition then any argument becomes meaningless. 'subsidy' is a very clearly defined term.
"a sum of money granted by the state or a public body to help an industry or business keep the price of a commodity or service low."
If the state is issuing a tax on something it is by definition not subsidized.
I hate quoting wikipedia, but the definition they use is far wider:
"A subsidy is a form of financial aid or support extended to an economic sector (or institution, business, or individual) generally with the aim of promoting economic and social policy.[1] Although commonly extended from government, the term subsidy can relate to any type of support – for example from NGOs or as implicit subsidies. Subsidies come in various forms including: direct (cash grants, interest-free loans) and indirect (tax breaks, insurance, low-interest loans, accelerated depreciation, rent rebates)."
That would at least indicate that the definition is by far not as clear as you would like to have it.
Diesel is taxed lower with the aim of promoting two economic goals: lowering total CO2 output and supporting the transportation sector. It falls really right under that definition.
But it's not a tax break. You pay more taxes on diesel than on other things, except gas. Are all other things subsidized because they don't have the gas tax?
It’s the same thing as gas: fuel, to power a car. It just happens to be a slightly different mix of hydrocarbons. It’s sold from the same machine, at the same place for the same purpose. And it’s taxed the same way in pretty much all European countries, Germany is the odd outlier. Different kinds of petrol are taxed the same way, too.
The same mix of hydrocarbons that is diesel fuel is sold for heatings as well (Heizöl) It’s taxed different - since it’s a different use. And since that one is taxed much lower, they add a red color and using it as fuel is tax evasion and lands you in jail.
The Energiesteuergesetz is the law which regulates the taxes. It has individual tax rates for Benzin (gasoline), Diesel, CNG (gas), LPG (autogas), heavy oil.
Per fixed amount of energy, diesel is the second highest taxed energy carrier.
Isn't the logical conclusion of this argument that gas is also subsidized because the tax could be higher?
Or that toys are subsidized because they don't have the additional diesel/gas tax (which, btw, you pay VAT on...)?
European law has been very tilted towards
Diesel engines for a long time. As the recent VW debacle proved - oversight was quite lax compared to the US diesel regs. This laxness was the result of the influence of BMW, Mercedes and VW and the outcome of years of corporate lobbying. It’s a good first step, but they have further to go.
Despite the rhetoric, Germany has also been very restrictive with Tesla, viewing it as a challenge to its crown jewel automotive companies (no credits, no additional supercharger stations, much harsher reading of laws to protect their own industries).
You know that Germany will be serious when that changes.... (or the German car companies will have finally caught up to Tesla’s battery power and power train)...
Very true, but that’s partly because they believe NOx emissions were lower than they really were, thanks to cheating. I like to think that if they’d realized the magnitude of the non-CO2 issues, they would have taken a different path.
not to mention that supercharger stations also would be beneficial to all German producers, because they too invest into electrical cars. VWs investment is about five times larger than Tesla's which isn't surprising given the size of the company.
Partially related: "Fiat Chrysler is reportedly ditching diesel cars by 2022" (https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/26/17053362/fiat-chrysler-di...). Diesel sales are collapsing all over Europe, I think one of the latest reports puts the number of new Diesel cars sold in France at just under 50%, while they used to be at 75% four or five years ago. The writing is on the wall.
I am so confused by government policy here in the UK. Right now I'm looking at a 5 year old used Diesel car with £0 road tax and 70+ MPG for about 10k GBP.
My current Petrol engine costs £130/annum road tax, and only gets 30-40 MPG, I can also buy petrol cars with road tax of £240-500/annum (based on emissions)
But if I buy the Diesel, it could be banned or worthless in a few years, because of these types of policies. So what is the government telling me to purchase?
I can't buy an electric car because I only have on street parking so there's nowhere to charge it, and decent electric cars aren't really available at the 10k mark yet.
I could be wrong, but I would guess that your quandary isn't to do with the policy as such, but the way it's been gamed by car manufacturers. That diesel would likely have a much higher road tax if its actual emissions were taken in to account, and not just the lab-based ones.
Get a petrol car pay the tax would be my recommendation. Depends on what you need too. My 5-year-old petrol Fiesta was <£10k and is £0 road tax.
> That diesel would likely have a much higher road tax if its actual emissions were taken in to account, and not just the lab-based ones.
Is NOx a consideration for road taxes? If not, that's the issue. Diesels do emit less CO2 than gasoline and AFAIK, no auto companies were "cheating" CO2 emissions, just NOx.
Vehicle Excise Duty doesn’t (generally) change retroactively, so 5 years ago they were telling whoever bought that diesel car to buy diesel.
The bands are now (since April 2017) flat regardless of emissions for petrol and diesel [1], so the encouragement is to buy either an electric car or a petrol/diesel car (as you prefer) with a new price less than £40k (or more than 5 years old).
The only part that changes with emissions now is the fee at registration, which is factored into the purchase price (for a new car) or already paid (for a used car).
> So what is the government telling me to purchase?
At least here in Germany, the message is clear: everything is fine, as long as the replacement interval is as short as the industry needs it to be. If the carmaker lobby could get away with it, they would make the government outlaw all cars already sold biannually.
(Except for vintage cars, which are sacred temples of brand heritage)
I seriously hope you do the right thing and do NOT buy diesel.
It would be incredibly irresponsible now that the dangers of NoX are known.
FYI, I live in London and am seriously affected by NoX, I’ve had bronchitis several times in the past few years.
London exceeded annual NoX limits within just a few weeks of the new year.
Luckily the tide is turning, public opinion is increasingly growing against diesel, and the govt is finally enacting extra diesel fees and considering bans.
Government policy is to not retroactively change tax bands but to control vehicle use through other means, eg emissions zones.
I’m sure you can work out the morally correct action based on the types of areas you drive through. You don’t really need the government to make this decision for you.
Ignoring the question of whether there's even a morally correct action here, why not keep the worthless car you already have instead of replacing it with a newer one? That £10,000 will pay for a lot of petrol, car tax and repairs.
As someone's who's tried that, depending on how old the car is, that 10k can be burned through rather quickly. And then there's next year's maintenance to worry about.
I don't see how that will work in real world. In most Eastern Europe average car is like 15 years old diesel, so these (cheap) semi-new diesels that will go there from Germany will actually be an upgrade.
> The EU’s top court ruled that Poland has persistently breached European standards on air pollution, which causes nearly 50,000 deaths in the country each year.
It's not caused by old cars (for the most part), but rather by people burning cheap coal in inefficient furnaces to keep warm during winter (see "energy poverty").
Right. Seems like Germany needs a cash for clunkers program like the US had. The best way to guarantee a car not pollute is recycle it into constituent components.
I wonder which ways the prevailing winds blow? (Do they follow the jetstream?) Salt Lake City, Denver, and Los Angeles all suffer significant air pollution from neighboring states and cities- air pollution is a regional, not local, problem. In other words- they ship the cars off, but the pollution could blow right back to them!
The backstory here: EU law mandates doing something to reduce pollution if it's too high. German law prohibits various kinds of discrimination. For example, a simple ban on half the cars on Monday and the other on Tuesday would bother large plumber companies much less than independent plumbers who need a carful of tools and have only one car. What actions are the cities permitted to take, and/or required.
I think that's by design. The law is a compromise, written such that the unpleasantness would bite, but would not bite until the people who negotiated the compromise were safely out of office.
True, Stuttgart as the biggest cluster of German car manufacturing has been the epicentre of the German pollution-debate (that was based around particulate matter, not NOX).
The Diesel has become somehow the victim of this (sadly, since as mentioned by other commenters here, Diesel cars have their advantages).
The reason Stuttgart is Germany's pollution capital has almost nothing to do with the Diesel but:
- its topography, being a city almost completely surrounded by hills, thus unusually hot and windless for a German city
- the upper class areas on the hillside/slopes are the main polluters with houses dating from ca 1900 and/or re-equipped with pellet heating systems that were subsidized because of energy footprint while being even worse pollution-wise than even older heaters
Both of these points are validated by the fact, that it's not the weekends when the pollution calms but its the winters when there is almost a daily pollution warning - its when the rich people heat.
Even the plaintiffs in the other recent (particulate matter focused) important German pollution case complained that a Diesel ban does nothing for the pollution situation: The main source for car based emissions aren't the engines - but the wheels.
Is this backed by real science? I was under the impression that modern diesels were highly efficient and quite within the acceptable emission standards.
There's a big difference between general "emissions" which a lot of people take colloquially to just mean greenhouse gases (and CO2 in particular with combustion engines), and then the small particulates and other things (like NOx) that create worse local air conditions[1]. Most "modern" diesels in use do still have the latter problem. I think at the very cutting edge, if you maintain a very good filter and operate in favorable conditions you can cut those emissions dramatically, but as far as I know it isn't widespread among the personal diesel fleet.
Most local air pollution, counterintuitively, doesn't even come from exhaust.
Wear on tires, brakes, and the road each contribute more individually.
There's another process called resuspension that dwarfs even these. Cars grind down large particles sitting on the road, making heavy particles light enough to float in the air. Then the cars' wake kicks those newly light particles into the air, suspending them in the air.
That process is driven by vehicle weight, size, and aerodynamics, and contributes about two-thirds of the particulates from all vehicle sources.
One of the interesting takeaways from all that is that average vehicle weight can be massively important to local air conditions (no pun intended).
I think there's still some debate about the exact relationship between weight to PM output, but lighter frames and smaller vehicles are probably a good idea:
Ehh.... I worked for a long time as a mechanic on diesel engines. The engines are designed to conform with emissions requirements as they are written, not necessarily to be more efficient or cleaner. And of course some auto manufacturers have taken rather "creative" approaches to meeting these requirements.
Even with everything above board, the technology is not really there to make diesel a great solution for autos. First, the emissions equipment in modern diesel engines adds weight and reduces engine airflow, making them less efficient than they could be. In fact, today's small diesel engines are only 10-20% more efficient than gas equivalents, when in the past they have been over 50% more efficient.
There are three primary types of pollution that come from an internal combustion engine--carbon, which causes global warming; nitrous oxides, which cause smog, and particulate matter, which contributes to air pollution and also causes all sorts of nasty health problems. Diesel engines are better than gasoline on carbon emissions by virtue of being more efficient, although as I mentioned this gap is closing. Special catalytic exhaust equipment has been added to newer diesel engines to reduce nitrous oxides, but it's expensive and the environmental benefits are marginal. Particulate matter is addressed by burning the soot that comes out of the exhaust, again using expensive equipment that reduces efficiency, and AFAIK the science is still out on whether and by how much this actually reduces environmental/health impacts.
Some municipalities in the US have perhaps misguidedly banned diesel engines from their roads. The situation is a little different in Europe, where diesel engines are found in a much larger share of passenger vehicles. If Europeans drove as much as Americans did, their cities would all look like LA circa 1975. I'm not sure about car ownership trends in Europe, but I think it would make sense for any city that expects increases in car ownership to start regulating diesel more heavily.
It’s backed by science. Due to the high temperatures in a Diesel engine, the amount of NOx produced is far higher than for petrol cars. NOx can be handled by a catalysator using AdBlue or similar, so in theory Diesel engines could be clean. In practice the standards are routinely ignored by the car makers.
The ruling allows banning cars that do not fulfil current standards, so a recent car is probably unaffected. However, the restriction could be lifted if only banning old cars proves insufficient. Then, newer cars could be affected.
From the article: »Cities will probably target models with older emission controls. Of the 15 million diesel cars on Germany’s roads, only 2.7 million have the latest Euro-6 technology, data by the KBA motor vehicle watchdog showed.«
Episode 1 (Hard NOx) of the Netflix series "Dirty Money" covers this quite well: https://www.netflix.com/ie/title/80118100
The other episodes are also worth a watch.
The emission standards in question are per m² in the city, not per car. It doesn't matter whether the emissions come from 1000 clean or 100 dirty cars.
Diesel cars produce less CO2, and I believe that's only because diesel engines use less fuel than gas engines (about 40% less). This was the idea behind "diesel being cleaner".
However, diesel is way more dangerous to human life because of the NOx particles. This is why diesel cars will now be the first to go.
You may be lumping two things together there: (NOₓ) NO and NO₂, as well as particulate matter. Those are different products of the combustion, with different environmental and health effects.
NOx is also the biggest product of animal agriculture. It also has an effect on climate change. Global warming potential is around 300 times larger than CO2. [1]
Modern diesels, sure. Latest offerings from BMW, Mercedes or Audi are actually super clean, especially if equipped with an AdBlue system. But get out on the road and you see people still driving 90s diesels which emit huge plumes of black smoke every time they accelerate, and I know people who buy brand new cars and the first thing they do is cut out the DPF, EGR and pretty much every other emissions reducing system "to keep the running costs low". It's a disgrace, and older diesels should absolutely be straight up banned in cities with very harsh penalties for modifying modern ones(in UK removing the DPF attracts a £5000 fine, but in many EU countries it's still not a problem).
Generally they are not. Newer ones are within limits set acceptable by emission standards, but those standards don't really model real world use where their performance is generally atrocious.
I happen to be (now not very happy) owner of a diesel car.
Most cities in Germany are not interested banning them in the first place. They already have the problem that people don't go shopping in the cities anymore, with amazon and co. making it so easy to shop from home. So making it harder to get into the city is not what they want.
Yes it is. It is not about CO2 emissions, where Diesel engines are indeed more efficient than petrol engines, but about the "fine dust" emitted by a highly charged turbo setup, like most modern Diesel layouts are...
A correction to the headline; its only older diesels, not all diesels.
From way down the article:
> Cars that meet Euro-4 emissions standards could be banned from Stuttgart from next January, while Euro-5 vehicles should not be banned until Sept. 1, 2019, four years after the introduction of the latest Euro-6 standard.
If you have a diesel with Ad Blu designed to catalytically remove NOx, you should be OK for now.
Can anyone more familiar with this case comment on what exactly happened here?
It sounds like two private organizations, DUH (Deutsche Umwelthilfe) and ClientEarth, sued a couple of cities (Munich, Stuttgart, and Dusseldorf, possibly among others), saying they had to improve air quality. This was, apparently, on the basis that the cities had illegally high levels of NOx -- I'm not certain on what basis this was illegal, whether German or EU regulations.
Munich offered a ban, which everyone was happy with. Stuttgart and Dusseldorf attempted to offer a mitigation strategy, and DUH and ClientEarth sued again saying that the mitigation was insufficient, and the judge ruled that they only a ban would suffice.
The cities appealed, apparently on the basis that they were not legally allowed to impose such a ban(?) and now, a higher court has ruled that they are legally allowed to impose such a ban.
awesome news - first of all public transportation in any town with more than a hundred thousand inhabitants is good enough that nobody needs to use a car except for very specific cases. of course if everybody would switch to ÖPNV then the capacity would be maxed out - so the conclusion is increasing availability of public transportation.
also the way parts of government (mostly those rooted in Bavaria) attempted together with VW, Audio etc. to weasel their way out of taking responsibility. the testing applied was stupid and lacking realism - but nonetheless they programmed software that detects a test and adjusts the motor's inner workings. that's beyond benefiting of stupidity - that is criminal.
It feels great, great, great - I hope this will strengthen research and development for and of electric vehicles.
Wouldn't it be great if Tesla kicks these cheaters in the bin and wins the car race (like the iPhone did vs. the other phones)? Pity producing cars isn't as fast as manufacturing an iPhone. Germany's industry is in real trouble, looks like they were cheating.
What would be really great if we could get rid of cars all together, spend all that money on an awesome PT system, and convert 80% of roads into parks and other uses. Make suburbs actually nice places to live.
iPhones are produced by contract manufacturers. That's not how the car business is organized: there's no existing contract manufacturer that can produce the Model 3 in high volume. They only exist for low-volume, high-end cars.
I assume they are removing cars and buses making use of this tech first as they are far more likely to be dirty that cars. Even the cheating VW cars were still magnitudes cleaner than the immediate previous generation.
I think they are going to find their pollution problem is nearly as bad and will need to make more difficult choices rather than relying on fear of a partial truth. It isn't just diesel cars making their cities dirty. As stated, the change made to even the cheating cars would have demonstrated such if it were just cars
Buses, HGV's and all other large vehicles actually tend to run okay on diesel, because they are large and expensive enough to carry and pay for the necessary equipment to reduce NOx and PM. It's small cars in particular where diesel just doesn't work.
Next: Petrol cars please.
Costs for cities would decrease a lot [1], room for bicycles would increase, noise would drop to a level which can't believed, ambulances would be adjusted to walking persons instead of loud cars with their stereos on and air would be wonderful.
[1] https://www.amazon.de/High-Cost-Free-Parking/dp/193236496X