Paris pollution after they added bike lanes and restricted cars
Paris pollution after they added bike lanes and restricted cars
90 comments
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"It turns out not burning a bunch of fossil fuels leads to less pollution"... news at 11.
The really dumb part of all of this is that people have just accepted cars as the default mode of transportation for so long that it's hard to even envision a world without them. They're normal, despite being expensive, dangerous, horribly inefficient, killing people actively (crashes) and passively (air pollution, plastic in our lungs, parkinsons/dementia, obesity, and more), and directly contributing to isolation in our communities. Every car we can get off the road, especially in our cities, makes the world a better place.
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people have just accepted cars as the default mode of transportation
That wasn't an accident and it didn't just 'happen;' it was the very deliberate result of a combination of automobile and oil industry propaganda and US government policy back in the 1930s-1950s, motivated by several factors ranging from utopian modernist city planning to good ol'fashioned racism.
Some random sources to get folks started:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement
- https://www.strongtowns.org/curbside-chat-1/2015/12/14/americas-suburban-experiment
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_(New_York_World%27s_Fair)
- https://www.pbssocal.org/history-society/the-birth-of-sprawl-how-ending-the-great-depression-meant-inventing-the-suburbs
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there's also the argument that pushing to distribute population centers away from cities forced the soviet union to manufacture larger and more numerous atomic weapons to maintain parity with US capabilities.
not in the "hey we want to save as many people" way it's portrayed, more like, let's make it harder for the sov's to equal the potential megadeaths we intended to dish out
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I'll definitely have to check out the underpinnings and use of that term. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
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After I've moved I could technically do everything using public transport and bikes
The issue is that public transport is literally more expensive than a private car for me in the Netherlands (as I get a company car)
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The crazy thing as well is that especially after COVID people will use the isolation of cars as a positive. You have people who don't like transit cause they would have to be near other people. Which just shows how crazy isolated and disconnected from our communities we are in the US atleast.
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Its an interesting angle because that is what we did exactly with smartphones and social media too. We adopted them so voluntarily as if they were the best things happened in this century.
But looks like in todays world we could have been a much better society without them ever existing
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For all the doomscrolling we do on smartphones, I’m still of the mindset that there are many ways their existence has made people’s lives better. For instance, I likely never would have become so transit-brained if not for smartphones. I practically have nightmares of trying to navigate train maps/schedules through nothing but paper and a loose idea of where my destination was.
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Hey hey hey, don't you know the real solution to vehicle deaths is to get a bigger car?
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@MisterFrog @azimir And keep driving faster and more distracted and encouraging the government to widen the roads to speed up traffic.
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Just one more lane bro. I promise bro just one more lane and it'll fix everything bro. Bro, just one more lane. Please just one more, one more lane and we can fix this whole problem bro, bro c’mon just give me one more lane i promise bro, bro bro please! Just need one more lane
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Fact: 99% of city planners quit one lane before they fix traffic
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Cities hate it when planners do this one simple trick...
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Average lane-brainer argument
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Are you a bot posting this on every thread? Or are you just here to feel outraged? Because this is a post about doing the opposite.
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funny how he keeps posting something that people inherently KEEP FUCKING DOING with zero fucking positive results... almost as if they're lampooning the entire shit state...
say, maybe it's not literal? huh
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Sarcasm
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I'm genuinely curious how you could have read that and thought they was serious
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I get you, some comments are more natural when the story is a disappointing one
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France isn’t perfect or without its own problems (or fucking right-wingers), but damn overall they’re really crushing it lately.
(I wonder how hard it is to emigrate to France…)
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That's happening in Paris. Some other cities are moving in right direction too, some installing new trams from zero etc. Most bigger cities have subways. But you should try visiting rural France without a car... Not a butcher or a bakery left for many kilometers/villages around, only big roadside Malls with an enormous supermarket and some fake little "shops" at the entrance. Many rural villages are dead and without a car you're screwed big time. This is where the Gilet Jaunes came from.
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Our president just said democracy? Never heard of her and named prime minister a member of the party with the least elected parliementaries but OK.
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Although it is good that they added riding bicycle lanes I doubt that is the only reason for the lowering of pollution.
Not only do we have electric and hybrid cars, due to euro standard combustion engines have become a lot cleaner during the same span of time. Plus public transport has also become a lot better during that time.
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Yeah, car restriction is the key. Then you must plan for people who needs to move. Cars don't belong to the city, only for leisure trips outside.
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Yeah but then you can't feed the bycicle narrative because of course everybody starting their bikes to.commute those distances!
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Well it does have a major impact, less cars -> less congestion -> less polution. But it has to work in tandem with other changes such as lowering driving speed increasing public transport network with emphasis on network, mandating tighter control on polution. You could say that the bicycle lanes are an indication of a change in attitude towards car only transportation.
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It's good that you included the source because without a scale this meant fuck all.
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Thank you. I was about to ask for the same thing.
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Woah, woah, keep it down lads. There's Americans around who can't handle this kind of information!
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I’m an American who wants European style cities and public transport because it’s actually better for drivers, too.
Germany has zero speed limit on some highways because of this.
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Coming back from some time in Europe it's imposible to unsee how good we could have it.
There's a perfect highway near me begging to have no speed limit. Straight, flat, no major cities.
But knowing how things would go someone would try to break the sound barrier in a vehicle that was not up for it and die. Then a ton of knee jerk legislation and regulation would make things worse for everyone.
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They installed efficiency modules to reduce biter expansion?
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And it is going to get even better: https://www.dw.com/en/france-paris-to-increase-car-free-zones-after-referendum/a-72019387
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That sounds nice but oof 4% turnout.
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Yeah that is very low, but i don’t know what is normal in those elections.
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Thanks for posting source, OP!
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Thank you
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Keep seeing this picture but no control group. Give me the same data for a French city other than Paris to understand whether this is about local policy change or about emissions standards and the move to electric cars.
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Googling tells me DEF (diesel exhaust fluid) was required in 2015 in Europe. Other posters have said this graphic is NO2, which is what DEF reduces.
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There's no legend. This is a worthless image
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I posted this somewhere in the comments already, but copy pasting it to be helpful:.
Op cut it out for some reason, but it is in the linked article. Here is a screenshot of the 'y-axis':
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Legend? This is an image of Paris transforming from an active volcano into a radioactive site.
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All the bikes run on uranium.
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Also no control group to determine whether this was due to bike lanes like the post title claims
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The red parts are pollution.
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This is the same thing as a graph where the y-axis doesn't start at zero.
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Op cut it out for some reason, but it is in the linked article. Here is a screenshot of the 'y-axis':
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Oh wow, not even co2
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c'est magnifique.
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How much of this was dieselgate and DEF fluid?
DEF: Googling say DEF was implemented in 2015 in Europe. Other posters have clarified the map shows NO2, which DEF reduces by "up to 90%"
Dieselgate: Also 2015. "On 29 September 2015, Volkswagen announced plans to refit up to 11 million affected vehicles, fitted with Volkswagen's EA 189 diesel engines". Affected cars emitted 40x the legal NOx levels. It also accelerated EV offerings. Also increased testing and scrutiny.
Yeah I'm leaning more towards this being dieselgate and DEF.
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Worst thing about this is that pollution is still pretty bad in Paris, they've come pretty far but there's still a lot of progress to be made there
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The red areas doesn't indicate temperature .... it indicates thrown away cigarette butts
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Cars also got more environmental. I'm/!not saying bike lanes are bad. But this might be a bit biased.
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Thank jeebus a few 1000 kilos of steel and (micro)plastic, replaced every year with an even larger pile of resources, is not execactly environmentally friendly
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If someone draws a conclusion from the facts it could be biased, but this is just merely data. You could say that it is framing a certain set of results, (since it doesn't say anything about how pleasant a trip by car is compared to a trip by bicycle for example), but the collection data seems to done perfectly neutral.
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90 comments