[frankest]

EV self-driving shuttles you can take on demand so nobody needs to keep a car

[milesskorpen]

EVs help with air pollution & congestion, but a huge part of the AQI impact of cars is tires, and I don't think there's a solution for that yet short of "fewer cars"

[Aloisius]

I thought the tire wear particulates being a huge source of particulate air emissions was an overestimate due to misunderstanding and misquotation of primary literature by secondary literature used by regulatory agencies.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.4c00792

[amanaplanacanal]

How do EVs help with congestion? They take up the same amount of space as an ICE car.

[d_sem]

electric bicycles have significantly less tire waste.

[rcpt]

Braking dust is worse than tires, and EVs don't use brake pads nearly as much because they rely on regenerative braking.

[Ar-Curunir]

How do EVs help with congestion

[dangus]

Or, how about this, connect them together and put them on rails to reduce friction.

You could even run them separate from the street with raised platforms for accessibility and sometimes even run them underground.

We could call this something like “underway” or “steel beam connect-o-cars”

[dzhiurgis]

> put them on rails to reduce friction

Good luck climbing hills. A lot of systems like these moved away from rails onto rubber tires.

Rapid bus is probably best combination. Yes it will never match the throughput of rail, but it's vastly cheaper.

[rcpt]

That's so unbelievably difficult it might as well be impossible. It's easier to teach cars to drive themselves than it is to build transit. Ridiculous I know.

[rayiner]

No, individualized point to point travel is better. I just got back from Tokyo and Taipei, which have transit systems better than any European country. And it was still faster to Uber everywhere.

[stouset]

EVs are just going to further escalate the race to the bottom with traffic that we’re already seeing with services like DoorDash.

Driving down the marginal cost per hour to operate a vehicle on the road and removing humans who are averse to sitting in endless traffic is not going to result in the utopia people think it will.

[mmooss]

EV human-driven shuttles can do the same. Why do we need a robot for that?

[kmeisthax]

This is a bad way to provide functioning public transit and a good way to enshittify car ownership. All the externalities of private vehicles with all the downsides of not owning your own mode of transportation.