>We're going to see a diaspora out of the city and into the countryside
I think that instead we will see cleaner air in cities since the economics of electric/hybrid cars will win, especially in city traffic. This trend can already be seen in SF where zero-emission hybrids and electrics make up a decent percentage of the traffic.
You talk about these things like they are the future. But western cities are already much much cleaner than 40 years ago. The move to electric cars and more livable cities is just the continuation of a fight that has been going on at least since the industrial revolution and adoption of hygiene.
Long before the industrial revolution. Horse manure and slaughter runoff were huge sources of disease in cities even before coal smoke took over the air.
As others have mentioned, personal automobiles are the problem, not the fuel they run on. Modern engines run rather cleanly. Noise, safety, rubbers and other particulates are also ruining the local environment.
I am not really disagreeing with you but one should add that bad smell is not necessarily a good indicator for what is unhealthy.. there are many poisonous gases without any smell (also emitted by cars).
It may be you who are mistaken: “...particles from brake wear, tyre wear and road surface wear directly contribute to well over half of particle pollution from road transport.”
Particle pollution, if they are using it correctly, which I think they are, includes exhaust and pretty much every post-production pollutant produced by a car (before it is scrapped I guess). See: https://www.epa.gov/pmcourse/what-particle-pollution
Or you can use some basic math, and calculate how much tire/breaks wears(loses original matter) per 100 000 km and how mach of gas a car burns for the same distance and compare these numbers.
My understanding is that on average, a tire loses a molecule's worth of rubber thickness every time it goes around. I would imagine tires lose more with heavy breaking of fast starts. The other day I saw some idiot on a motorcycle purposely spinning his tire at the stop, leaving a black mark on the pavement and a lot of smoke, which I then had to drive through. Fortunately that's rare.
What happens is you can never get fully complete combustion. Some of the gasoline gets cracked and recombines to form HC soot. Which is also very reactive. Thus likely really bad for you.
This gives actual figures for PM2.5 emissions from exhaust, brake wear, and tire wear per mile for both gasoline and diesel vehicles.
There is an argument about how much EV's would reduce PM2.5. The above shows things were a lot worse 20 years ago. And current gasoline cars produce 0.008gm/mile PM2.5 from exhaust and 0.003 and 0.001 from brakes and tire wear.
That says to me that EV would still reduce emissions a lot. One can assume that brake wear is half that of a gasoline powered car. So you go from 0.011gm/mile for gas. To probably 0.003 for EV's.
That does not tell us anything though. The fact is that “The largest part of most combustion gas is nitrogen (N2), water vapor (H2O) (except with pure-carbon fuels), and carbon dioxide (CO2) (except for fuels without carbon); these are not toxic or noxious (although water vapor and carbon dioxide are greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming). A relatively small part of combustion gas is undesirable, noxious, or toxic substances, such as carbon monoxide (CO) from incomplete combustion, hydrocarbons (properly indicated as CxHy, but typically shown simply as "HC" on emissions-test slips) from unburnt fuel, nitrogen oxides (NOx) from excessive combustion temperatures, and particulate matter (mostly soot).”
A lot of energy has gone into cleaning up engine pollution already. Not sure where the 30% number comes from, but Brakes probably will get cleaned up once they become the star of the show.
I hope we will see cleaner air in cities! But the time it takes to replace a country’s vehicle fleet is sometimes measured in decades, and no-one is even starting on a project of massively reducing fleet emissions. I think / hope you are right in the long term, but I think I am right in the short-medium term :)
> I think that instead we will see cleaner air in cities since the economics of electric/hybrid cars will win
Citation needed. The whole economic and environment footprint of electric vehicles in relation to their efficieny is rather bad. The future would the CNG but something is holding it back.
I think that instead we will see cleaner air in cities since the economics of electric/hybrid cars will win, especially in city traffic. This trend can already be seen in SF where zero-emission hybrids and electrics make up a decent percentage of the traffic.