> Mr. Slapikas said he pulled in $64,000 in rewards in 2021 for simply paying attention on his daily walks for exercise: “I would expect to get three a day without even looking.”
That’s almost 10% of the total fines paid out last year, according to the article.
I wonder what the distribution of payouts looks like. I assume it’s a small number of people collecting the bulk of the fines.
Regardless, it looks like it’s working. Idling cars may not be producing the bulk of emissions, but it’s one of the easiest places to start cutting as it’s otherwise wasted fuel and emissions.
The whole thing just doesn't feel right. I don't care if, in this particular case, the cause is not-terrible (preventing pollution). There's just something "off" about the enforcement mechanism.
Serious crimes? Sure: Do your civic duty; call the police. But this? Mind your own business.
Not to me. East German reporting was about controlling the citizenry to support the regime in power. This is about protecting the health and comfort of one's neighbors and oneself. That is very much my business.
The Texas approach is quite different -- it encourages people to sue other people with completely artificial standing. In fact the Texas approach was designed to be entirely different from a government run bounty program in an attempt to undermine the constitution.
This is more similar to whistleblower laws that pay a bounty for taxes recovered by the IRS. In both cases the government is the one taking the action that fines the perp.
Or maybe they would be on the other side, helping truck drivers fight the tickets? Heck, they're VC-funded. They'll probably be on both sides! Think of it as the new "two-sided marketplace".
Maybe HN could no-code it. Find some NYC public camera feeds, pipe it to an ML algo to detect cars with vapour coming out of the exhaust, record and send off for $$.
Abortions in Texas, guns in California, tickets in NYC... guess vigilante profiteering is the new legislative norm? Get citizens to snitch on each other to fill your budget shortfalls.
The potentially illegal/unconstitutional part of it is the prevention of abortions.
Encouraging citizens to bounty hunt each other... that's the novelty that the other states are copying.
These creepy "see something, say something" laws turn neighbor against neighbor, criminalizing behavior that would otherwise be considered acceptable, and turn passive observers into active enforcers for the sake of profit.
> criminalizing behavior that would otherwise be considered acceptable
Again, these situations are not comparable. Idling commercial vehicles are already disallowed, this program literally gives a cut of the fine the government is going to impose.
Laws -- whether abortion or idling -- aren't some permanent unchangeable thing. They just cater to the whims of lawmakers and public opinion of the day. Idling wasn't always illegal in NYC either; somebody made it so, and then tacked on the bounty hunting in 2015.
Preventing abortion may be illegal now, but probably won't be for much longer if the rigged Supreme Court gets its way. Still, that isn't a novelty. Control of abortion has been a partisan fight for decades. Idling just doesn't attract the same constitutional scrutiny (and why should it).
The bounty hunting thing is an additional layer on top of that, however, and one that's relatively novel. It's why California copied it for the gun bounty.
Why does it matter that the Texas thing is a workaround? That's just a technical detail. The point remains that in all those mentioned cases, the government is encouraging people to turn against one another. Sometimes resulting in violence, as indicated in the article. I feel like people are already becoming increasingly antagonistic toward one another, and this citizen enforcer trend is adding incentive in the wrong direction.
Yes, Texas used citizen lawsuits as a workaround for something they couldn't themselves enforce without risking constitutional ire (for now). It's a legal sleight-of-hand that wins them bonus points with conservatives while buying time for the new Supreme Court to outlaw abortion. It's disgusting.
At the same time, it is creepy for Texas, California, New York or any government to entice citizens to act as informers and tattle on each other. The social costs of that aren't just measured in less budgeting for meter maids, but also increasing social distrust between neighbors.
These aren't mutually exclusive, just two complementary, nasty things happening in government.
In all three cases, it mobilizes private citizens to factionalize against each other to fulfill some elitist agenda, creating legal conflict with a profit motive where there wasn't before. Sure, somebody might've rolled their eyes at an idling truck or silently viewed their aborting/gun-toting neighbor with contempt, but these laws encourage active interpersonal conflict in the name of the state, turning untrained citizens with no experience in de-escalation into deputy law enforcement.
How did you go from "the government shouldn't use citizens as secret police against each other" to "citizens shouldn't report a fire"?
First of all, a burning building isn't an criminal act (unless it's arson). It's an accident/disaster. Second of all, you don't get paid for calling 911 on a burning building. There's no bounty to collect. Third, you are not turning in a fellow citizen for something that you wouldn't otherwise have if not for the bounty. Fourth, a fire is a life-threatening situation for all involved.
A more reasonable example is "You should not call 911 if you catch your neighbor jaywalking across the street." Or, like if you catch them leaving dog poop behind, you don't need to sic SWAT on them. Just fucking talk to them and ask nicely first, and maybe file a complaint somewhere if they're really assholes. But you don't just jump to trying to fine and imprison someone for every minor offense.
And with the abortion and guns in particular, they really are none of your business. What someone does with their body or their private property, if they're not hurting anyone else, really shouldn't be policed by their fellow citizens.
If you really want to set a bounty on things that have a measurable, tangible threat to public safety -- like actual arsonists, rapists, murderers, and similar felonies -- you know, maybe that's OK by me? But not stupid things like idling your car or regretting who you fucked last night.
Are you talking about the air pollution from idling? It's elitist because it's minor, and not the sort of thing that citizens would naturally try to prosecute each other for.
Should citizens police each other for eating beef? Driving older cars? Not passing smog tests? Not supporting nuclear power? Cooking with natural gas? Flying on planes?
It's not the kind of society I want to live in. It's not the kind of relationship I want to have with my neighbors. They're the kind of situations that call for carrots more than sticks, and certainly not secret police.
It wasn't like a bunch of citizens got together to tackle air pollution, and somehow came up with that as the most sensible solution (vs, say, emissions standards or the autostop/autostart systems in newer cars, or better transit and biking). It was just some bureaucrat trying to score cheap political points by having citizens snitch on delivery drivers and such who are already underpaid and just trying to get by and do their jobs. Did this measurably improve air pollution in NYC? No, it just gave rise to a cottage industry of the equivalent of ambulance chasers.
It sounds to me like you just don’t believe cutting back on air pollution is important. Perhaps if you spent more time in a heavily-polluted place such as many south Asian countries (India, Bangladesh, etc.) or Mexico City, or if you’d grown up in the smoggy hellhole that was L.A. in the 1970s, you’d feel differently. For wide swaths of the population, it’s definitely not “minor.”
We also have an entire planet to think about. Climate change is real, and we want our children’s children to continue to live here and for the complex ecosystem that makes it work to continue to operate healthily. To call the very justified concerns about future survival as “elitist” is unfairly dismissive.
Sorry, I was editing my post while you replied, so you didn't see the bottom update.
For what it's worth, I grew up in a polluted city, studied climate science in school, and work in renewables. It's not that I don't think air pollution is a big deal, it's that I don't think the idle car secret police are a good way to deal with air pollution.
CAFE standards? Great. Point-source air pollution tracking and fines, from factories and such? Cool. Renewables-backed electric cars? Great. Cleaner, low-carbon grid mixes? Yes. Divestment from fossil fuels? Cool. All of these are actually hugely beneficial actions, but they don't require the state to turn citizens into informers against each other for petty everyday actions.
Air pollution is your typical tragedy of the commons situation, borne of the collective actions of millions of people living in an industrialized society and just trying to live their lives. It's not the sort of thing worth putting a bounty on, IMO, at least not at the individual level. At the corporate level it's a different story, cuz that's a cost of doing business and accounting for externalities and such.
All of those are better solutions than criminalizing trivial behavior and fostering a culture of distrust, all for little to no measurable improvement in air quality, just to satiate the political agenda of a politician. It's the difference between cheap political points for low-hanging fruit, vs doing the actual useful and hard work of setting sustainable climate policies that don't regressively hurt the working class while also turning citizens against each other. It's that sort of blindness to the needs of the average person that makes this sort of thing elitist.
I don’t necessarily quibble with your concerns about the right way to achieve the outcomes we all seek. But please don’t paint real concerns about health as “elitist.”
If anything, people who don’t have to worry about these things — who get the privilege to live in suburbs with wide-open spaces, blue skies, and clean air — are the true elites. Being able to live this way is the dream of billions of our underprivileged fellow human beings who grow up in filth and overcrowding.
Sorry, but I have to disagree. It IS elitist, the sort of law that a detached lawmaker would make, with no concern about its impacts on regular people. Again, do we outlaw beef consumption, road trips, flying, older cars, leaving the lights on when nobody's home, more than 2 kids...? All these things contribute to air pollution, but we don't want them to be illegal. Yes, even if it means worsening climate change.
If idling is such a big problem, legislating adaptive technology (auto on/off) is a better solution.
If it is really about the billions of underprivileged humans and animals suffering from climate change, we need mass mobilization on the scale of the Manhattan Project or bigger, across multiple coordinated nations... not hunting down people who idle their cars more than 2 minutes. It's just the sort of thing that's neither necessary nor sufficient for addressing climate change, yet with a big social cost (distrust), which makes the working class hate environmentalists even more. It is the exact kind of elitist regulation popular in the 90s and early 2000s that caused a huge cultural backlash and created the climate divide we see now. It's not just regressive but counterproductive.
Unfortunately I think you are laboring under a false premise, namely, that folks in the U.S. are "regular people." With our (relatively) clean air and water, room to spread out, big houses, big vehicles, etc., we are all elites compared to the majority of people in the rest of the world. Compare against most of the world who get by on far less than we do: they don't have huge vehicles and homes; they don't eat much beef; etc.
So it's not about elites vs. "regular people" here, it's about middle-class elites vs. other middle-class elites fighting over whether Johnny gets to buy and use the toys his middle-class income gives him the privilege to play with, and what kind of sacrifices we will make for the greater good. It's not regulation that is causing a cultural backlash: it's intentional and insidious cultural warmongering by a largely silent but even-more-insidious class of elites (the uber-wealthy) who fund think tanks, hire armies of lobbyists to press Congress, and discover and fund media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to pit Americans against one another and keep them distracted away from the even bigger issues we face. Democratic and existential crises are just collateral damage to the interests of these people.
This war of the narratives traces its roots to the 1960s, where the country was beginning to come to grips with racism (Civil Rights Act) and the Vietnam War. White middle-class and Greatest-Generation fear of hippies, Blacks, homosexuals, atheists, and others was easy for politicians and monied interests to leverage. Soon, think tanks and lobbyists started pressing Congress (along with the backing of Reagan, who was propelled to victory by the Moral Majority who brought politics into church) to deregulate the airwaves, leading to even more divisiveness in the media. Communication consultants like Frank Luntz (author of the so-called "death tax") were hired to sharpen the divide.
And Americans are sadly and unwittingly falling for this manipulation, hook, line, and sinker. Now it's the freaking Baby Boomers (who were part of the '60s counterculture and became the very thing they fought against) who are ensnared in it, and I fear my fellow Gen-Xers are being also being led into this trap.
I, for one, refuse to accept that any way other than massive world coordination is a pointless exercise. Major change is often the aggregate of small changes anyway. And being willing to make sacrifices in the name of health before others do (especially others who can less afford to make such changes) is what admirable and moral leaders do.
An observation: Given the choice between two leaders, one who calls people evil and selfish, and another who (however cynically) defends their behavior and shares in their denialism, the latter is going to have way more followers. It's an unfortunate aspect of our primate psychology and individualistic culture.
Yes, it's true that many of the flames of our culture wars are fanned by the elites on purpose. Divide and conquer. But every accusation has some seed of truth in it, and the recent environmental movement was all too good at providing easy fodder for criticism.
I think the moral purity route is a failure of both strategy and empathy. Demonizing your opponents doesn't get them to listen to you at all, it just puts them on the defensive and they'll look for any excuse to dismiss you. That's exactly how it's played out over the last twenty years, and despite all the yelling, despite Greta. We're no closer to climate solutions, but half the country is a lot less persuadable now and more hardened and inoculated against environmental messaging. They might've listened if we asked gently instead.
If your argument is that all Americans are elites, great, you've convinced the environmentalists and the bleeding heart humanitarians. Everyone else just writes you off and goes on their way. It doesn't change anything, it just satisfied some urge for moral self righteousness, and I bet that doesn't last either.
We're all pretty selfish, especially cultures of the European tradition of conquest, hierarchy, and individual power. The sad truth is that you can't really get people to care about the billions of strangers suffering from their lifestyle choices. We're just not built that way. We got here, living in middle class comfort, through violence and exploitation. It's completely immoral and completely human.
Asking for individual behavior change on that scale is a political dead end that does nothing but create enemies. It's tactically unsound and ultimately counterproductive, even if it gives you an illusory moral high ground.
Greta came and went and the world is no better now, and half the country is dismisses her as an angry young woman and never bothers to listen to her message. Meanwhile solar adoption keeps skyrocketing and cars are getting more miles to the gallon. Sometimes softer broad approaches are more successful than demanding individual behavior change. Most humans just aren't moral creatures. They're not evil, they just don't focus their lives on the pursuit of ethics. It's how we evolved; either we can acknowledge that and work with it to make gradual gains, or keep up a self righteous facade and keep making enemies instead of progress. Shrug.
As you point out, the people have already turned against one another. This is just harnessing that pre-existing animosity in service of enforcing the law, since it seems the police simply don't enforce the law anymore. People have realized it's a free-for-all, and routinely violate all sorts of traffic laws, knowing that the police are basically doing nothing anymore. I did the math here in a past post I can't find, but concluded: If I could stand by the road with a camera, report all incidents of cell phone use while driving, and get just 10% of each fine, it would be a substantial percent of my income. That's one single law on one single stretch of highway.
Yes, it sucks that people are against each other, but the root problem is lawlessness, and that the people whose job it is to enforce the law are off doing whatever else.
We railed against the cops publicly during 2020, I think the police are happy to sit back as municipal workers and wait 10 years to collect their pensions.
What people don't realize is reducing police interactions with citizens is exactly regressive, leading to more mistrust between citizens, traffic deaths, and even pollution and climate change as per this article.
This comment on HN would have been downvoted to grey for the better part of 18 months until only recently, as a point of reference. During the Trump years assumptions would have been made about the commenter. Now I think we're all coming to agreeing that we need police to do their jobs and to hold them to it, or we get articles like this one.
Maybe it doesn't have to be as binary as more vs fewer police? I wish the call wasn't "defund the police" but "create institutional alternatives to militarized policing".
That same heavily-armed force you use to fight druglords doesn't have to be the same force used for routine traffic enforcement, and maybe traffic enforcement shouldn't automatically get people scanned for outstanding warrants and such. A broken brakelight need not escalate into an armed car chase. The same way the fire department is separate from police, maybe there needs to be other institutions for tackling different situations, with academies training for different tactics that don't always involved armed conflict.
Our one-size-fits-all policing might seem relatively harmless for middle-upper-class whites and Asians, but they can be outright deadly if you're black or brown. You never really know if you're just going to get a friendly warning or say the wrong thing and be killed. The way we do policing is relatively unusual in the developed world, and very violent, and encourages both arms races and a severe distrust in certain communities. Just reimplementing that sort of system is going to get us back to the same place... armed enforcers that serve one part of the citizenry at the expense of others.
In Anglo-Saxon countries there is a new and distinctive form of state: the busybody state. This state is defined by an attachment to bureaucratic procedures for their own sake: the rule for the sake of a rule; the form for the sake of a form. Its insignias are the badge, the policy, the code and the procedure. The logic of the regulation is neither to represent an elite class interest, nor to serve the public, nor even to organise social relations with the greatest efficiency as with classic bureaucracy, but rather to represent regulation itself.
Someone is helping enforcing laws and they don't have a qualified immunity. Seems like a step in the right direction. Of course, based on what happened in GA, there's a limit to what regular citizens can be entrusted with.
One frosty, completely still morning in Brooklyn, a white panel truck had been idling on our corner for 20 minutes. I walked out to find diesel fumes hanging, head-high, like some kind of haunted house fog, for a block in every direction. I fully support this law, citizen reporting and all—diesel soot kills. Turn your engine off.
Me too, 100%. I wish they’d introduce something like it here in Tokyo. The walk to my kid’s school every morning drives me crazy.
This isn’t going to change unless we set the right incentives. For the people in this thread worried about violence against the reporter, I think it much more likely that drivers will simply get the message and turn off their damn engines.
>For the people in this thread worried about violence against the reporter, I think it much more likely that drivers will simply get the message and turn off their damn engines.
You obviously haven't tried to ask a delivery driver in NYC why their truck is running... I have done it several times in the east village, and got nasty looks and angry responses every time. I wasn't even recording or anything, just walked out of my door and said "hey man, any reason you have to run your truck right now?" And I'm also a 6 foot, not-skinny, guy.
I drive a 30 y/o diesel van and if I don’t warm it up for a while in the morning it runs like shit/dies. I had to explain this to a lady while I was loading it up for volunteer food delivery once.
It's pretty well established that diesel motors produce PM2.5 particles that are damaging to humans, if it's a 30 year old unit it's probably pumping it out in good quantities with little restriction. PM2.5 particulate from a diesel motor starts to irritate the lungs and eyes pretty quickly.
We've always given a pass to cars for the unpleasantness they bring into a city because we figure there's no alternative, that's just how the city runs. But there are alternatives now, and people are getting fed up with the noise, smells and pollution.
Even without the very well document health affects, cars are just shitty to be around when you're not inside one yourself, I think it's fair that we'd rather not deal with them when on foot or in your own home when possible.
If it's sufficiently old it probably doesn't produce as much PM2.5. Very old engines tend to produce larger particles. There was an unfortunate period in the development of diesel engines where the engine burnt the fuel well enough to produce very small particles and high amounts of NOx but before filters were mandatory. Of course the old engines will in put out a lot more hydrocarbon pollution which is not particularly healthy either.
That's true, and if I'm not mistaken the increase in PM2.5 particles produced is due to the emissions requirement to reduce NOx output. Balancing two negatives in a way.
That is my understanding also. There is a tradeoff between very complete combustion in a lean mixture under high pressure that produces few particulates but lots of NOx and running a rich mixture at lower temperature that produces less NOx and more particulates. Fortunately modern engines have filters both for NOx and particulates, so that neither is really a problem. At least once the car has warmed up, which in cold climates and city driving can be roughly never...
That's not really true for modern vehicles. They handle it a lot better. Many are also designed to turn on and off constantly at stop lights, so they're designed to properly handle temperature and lubrication during the start/stop cycles.
If you're in a particularly cold winter you might benefit from it but really that's a judgement call. If you live somewhere mostly above freezing and drive a modern car, you're probably good to drive from the moment you start the car. Unless you're about to go full throttle on a racetrack, should be fine.
I warm up my 96 Nissan before driving, but I just go easy for the first 5 minutes in the 2010 Nissan.
> Many are also designed to turn on and off constantly at stop lights, so they're designed to properly handle temperature and lubrication during the start/stop cycles.
Many late 00's engines were also designed to turn off cylinders to improve engine efficiency, but that turned out not to be implemented very well and engines died from carbon fouling. Big problem with Honda in particular iirc, and people would routinely bypass it to save their engines.
Automakers have to comply with CAFE standards and other mandates, but at the end of the day there's no mandate that an engine made with gen-1 technologies will make it to 300k miles either. Automakers don't really care if your engine dies in 10 years or not, they've put out lemons before and they will do it again.
Early CVTs failed at extremely high rates/short lifetimes, for example, and early OAT coolants like Dexcool were notorious for eating up every seal inside an engine. Early high-compression diesels had about a decade of their fuel injectors being eaten away by the abrasive sulfur before the ultra-low-sulfur highway diesel changeover. These technologies are of course completely normalized and trustworthy today, but that's not much consolation if you're the one paying the repair bills on a gen-1 lemon.
For some reason "don't upgrade to a v0.0 release of a new major version of iOS" is common knowledge here but nobody wants to apply that same logic to cars. The general public gets it though.
Now that cars have got 10 years of stop-n-start under their belt it's probably more reliable but still, it's a challenging design criteria for an engine.
Not saying diesel fumes aren't a problem either, mind... we probably need to go electric in the long run. But at the same time, on the level of personal self-interest... it's probably better for your engine to not start and stop constantly. It's just bad when everyone is idling because they don't want to start and stop. Tragedy of the commons.
I don't think that is true except, perhaps in the case of much older vehicles—particularly carbureted, rather than injected—vehicles. Most of the advice I have read in, say, the last 20 years for gasoline-powered vehicles, is to allow no more than about 30 seconds to a minute of standing warm up before gently driving off. The engine will be fully lubricated within 10-15 seconds and ready to go.
>allow no more than about 30 seconds to a minute of standing
This heavily depends on the temp range you are discussing.
Lubrication is the least of your worries at certain temperatures. The engine block and pistons being too cold cause problematic expansion and contraction which can lead to block cracks or permanent engine knock issues from what I've seen. This will eventually lead to needing an engine replacement.
You can actually hear my '96 motor quiet down as the oil makes it's way through the head. Takes about 15 seconds. I wait for the engine coolant temp to reach 75c before I give it a good wick. It fluctuates between 75c and 85c under good load.
Interesting to me, is that when idling down a hill it does not drop, but if left in gear going down a hill it does drop in temp. It can actually get itself below operating temperature in gear going down a hill. I presume because the heat being pulled out via pumping air through the combustion chamber is greater than the thermostat would allow to be pulled out via the radiator.
I would have thought the thermostat would account for faster water flow, at least stopping the temperature drop at operating temp. But as another user pointed it, it could be a bad thermostat also.
> You can actually hear my '96 motor quiet down as the oil makes it's way through the head. Takes about 15 seconds. I wait for the engine coolant temp to reach 75c before I give it a good wick. It fluctuates between 75c and 85c under good load.
Pretty typical of engines of that vintage with hydraulic lifters.
> Interesting to me, is that when idling down a hill it does not drop, but if left in gear going down a hill it does drop in temp. It can actually get itself below operating temperature in gear going down a hill. I presume because the heat being pulled out via pumping air through the combustion chamber is greater than the thermostat would allow to be pulled out via the radiator.
I didn't think that would significant but I could be wrong. Is it a diesel or gasoline engine? My guess would be the thermostat is leaking or wrong temperature.
That's why when I get in the car I start the engine first, then fiddle about with the seatbelt, parking brake, getting settled, check the mirrors, etc. By the time I finish all that the car is ready to ease into gear.
As far as I know, it is more environmentally friendly to drive an old car until it falls apart than producing a new one that has a better eco balance while driving.
I remember from the "Cash for Clunkers" debacle, it was pointed out that scrapping an older car for a newer fuel efficient one took 20,000 miles driven on the new one to break even in emissions.
Your wording makes it a bit unclear, just for clarity: this means that GP is wrong, it's definitely better for the climate to have your old car crushed and buy a new car. The amount of CO2 expended during manufacturing of your car is not significant on the lifetime of the car.
If it's really just 20,000 miles then frankly it might even be one of the most effective ways to turn your dollars into reduced CO2 expenditure.
This is where a hyper focus on solely CO2 emissions is likely harmful. One also needs to consider the environmental impacts of mining for all the raw materials, for example, for that new car.
> Your wording makes it a bit unclear, just for clarity: this means that GP is wrong, it's definitely better for the climate to have your old car crushed and buy a new car. The amount of CO2 expended during manufacturing of your car is not significant on the lifetime of the car.
I did not claim climate-friendliness, but environmental friendliness though.
Well if you want to be good for the environment you also have to consider nitrate emissions and fine particles.
Also, it was my understanding that most of a (ICE) car can be melted and reused, so maybe the mining impact is lower but I don't know what the real world consequences are.
That still would ignore major sources of pollutants, such as tires (that get distributed into the air and on the road while driving). Electric cars do not improve that at all. If we just focus on emissions from the motors, why can't we just replace the motors instead of producing new seats, steering wheels and doors, while attaching a bunch of computers to it that also undermine the driver's privacy, and selling the package for double the price?
A yeah 100%. You couldn't replace an ICE with an electric motor, at least not with current technology, but you could definitely replace it with a more efficient one. Maybe even with a hybrid if you're willing to give up some room.
On the contrary what people do to the atmosphere is everyone’s business. I can empathise or understand if they need it for good work and can’t afford a new one. Unfortunately a lot of society has been misdirected into being over reliant on cars.
Not to mention all the other inequalities in society. They mentioned volunteering, If it’s good they should probably be compensated more than some worthless crypto tech bro for example, and should have a good van. But we have to work in the current system.
Sure, it’s not an ideal solution. If we had any sense, we would ban diesel and gasoline vehicles from our cities and subsidise their replacement with zero emissions vehicles. Combusting hydrocarbons have no place alongside our kids. People will look back on us in 50 years and laugh at how stupid we were.
Until then, we need people to do what they can. We’re talking about commercial vehicles - either the owner will bear the cost, and make it clear to employees not to do it, or they won’t, and people will learn quick smart to turn off their engine anyway.
In 95% of cases, people aren’t doing it with the intention of being anti-social - they’re just not aware of it. This sort of enforcement scheme is the kind of thing that changes cultures, starting with polluting corporates.
In 50 years? I've been looking back at humans since I was born and thinking there is not much to be proud of. We made the planet a worse place for every other species expect maybe cats and dogs.
Try a small game: how much car's there are in your city? How many kWh/day they need? Now try to interpolate at national level and just try finding an answer to: how can we recharge? IMVHO single family homes, in a certain (albeit large) part of the world, well placed, that can at least two car per adult head, might run on p.v. and so energy is not a problem, on scale such hypothetical society can meet their energy need most days and can use wind/hydro/nuclear for the others.
However:
- most cities, witch means most densely populated areas of the planet and where most peoples live, can't do that, simply there is no physical space.
- we probably can't produce enough batteries, in natural resources terms, to substitute all ICE cars, and keep producing them when after just 5-8 years initial batteries are dead (we still do not have viable way to recycle).
If you follow the press you've might have read things like:
etc witch clearly depict a future of a divided society: a small minority living in modern homes, with p.v. et al. to meet their energy needs, e.v., perhaps flying ones (witch might be cheaper than keep up a big road network in the actual climate change state) and the rest confined in modern smart cities, closely similar to factories or prisons, oh something like:
etc. I honestly do not know what can be our (humans) options so far, BUT certainly I do not like decisions made by those who are actually responsible of our tragic evolution. Personally I quit a large modern city toward a served-enough mountains area, building a new modern home, with insulation, anything electrical, p.v. with lithium storage to power and backup, with various backups (nearby water source, water recuperation at home, emergency/for pleasure airtight wood stove enough for heating the house etc) and the above depicted future society might be even good for me: as long as I can get services (food, tools, meds etc) my own personal life is already, still remain if nothing of that happen and can remain if such evolution happen, better than before, but such new society can't last longer. No society where too large part of population are pushed toward India's caste-alike isolation between cohort of people can really last much, especially in modern times where we need enough smart people to keep out tech up.
People living in areas without public transport should have driveways and/or garages. Driving an average 14,000 miles a year or 40 miles a day, or 13kWh, is easily charged from the power you get out of a standard socket overnight, 1kWh per car, less than a space-heater.
If you live in a city and thus don't have a private parking space, then you should be using mass transport. Cars don't work in high density areas.
I live in the country in the UK, I do have a bus, it runs 6 times a day and doesn't go in the right direction or right times for most purposes, but the total mileage we do is easily charged from an extension lead, and solar on the roof would provide more 15,000 miles of power over a year - far more than we use.
However the cost of both an electric car and the solar installation isn't worth it, because we don't pay externalities for the carbon production.
> People living in areas without public transport should have driveways and/or garages.
And do have also the ability to produce electricity with a usage pattern that permit self-charging the car? Electricity grid are a bit complex to be kept up, to be more precise generators need time to step up produced power and time to step down, that's why we make large enough grid to average the load on generators counting on a big enough user base to have a nearly constant load on the grid, small variations of loads can be sustained. Slowly charging a car, test on few friends cars, means around 15-20A witch yes is not exceptional BUT if many people charge their car during the night that means a spike load, a significant one, on the grid, something no actual grid can sustain. Remember: we do not have "big hyper-condenser batteries" to absorb a spike while generator step up and we do not have "energy sponge" to dump excess of energy once a load drop and the generator need a bit to lower it's produced power. That's the very same problem of domestic p.v.: if they are connected to the grid it's the grid that sustain initial spike while the solar inverter step up, and it's the grid sustain final spike receiving the excess of energy while the inverter step down. If your load surpass injection limits your inverter will disconnect loosing power completely to do it's best to keep a constant frequency on the grid.
We have invented the CONCEPT, since so far exist only on paper and small scale experiments, of smart-grids, to mitigate that big problem: in a smart grid nodes talks each others to say "hey, get ready to produce more energy, I'm about to soft-start from x to y", generators can potentially answer back "don't, we are overloaded" or "ok, we get ready for you". E.v. in the game can provide batteries + inverters to quickly intervene backing up the grid segment per segment. Similarly in case of disruption they can keep a house powered connected to it's micro-grid + anti-islandic system to avoid injecting to the grid. So far we haven't such networks, we have only ideas and experiments. It will take decades (one it's not enough, for all not so small countries) to implement them at a certain scale.
> If you live in a city [...] then you should be using mass transport.
Witch is an enormous issue alone: mass transport are very costly and very inefficient, they are efficient only when fully loaded, exactly when people do not like them for the crowd. But we need to move 24/7/365 not just in peak time, so public transports are complicated and bad in terms of energy saving and outcome service. They are pushed just because there is a hyper-push against personal ownership and autonomy at any cost. But the truth is that public transports are needed in dense cities, but are absolutely unsustainable and dense cities are. Some want them, just because dense cities means mass surveillance where very few can rule many easily, also making them dependent for anything. Even accepting that big liability in cities you still need cars: you have sometimes to go outside, you have to transport heavy/bulky stuff, witch can't be done on public transport. People who work in the city need vehicles just because a plumber, an electrician etc always need a not so small set of tools with him/her etc.
> However the cost of both an electric car and the solar installation isn't worth it
True, and that's why to push the Green New Deal they artificially hyper push up energy prices, both to finance massive private investments in energy production and transmission and to force people who can to buy the Green New Deal stuff and the others to starve sliding toward State subsides at State (of course, not Democratic state but one run by private neoliberal interests) rules. That's already happen. When I've made my new home I know it was not economically interesting BUT I've smell rod...
Electric vehicles would completely get rid of this problem. I doubt we will be talking about this in 10 or 15 years, though I wish the transition would occur more quickly.
> Electric vehicles would completely get rid of this problem.
If the truck is 'idling' with the electricity flowing from its batteries, the pollution and climate impact is just dislocated in space and time to the power plant when the truck is charging.
If the truck is off, then there is no problem, but now ICE motors also can automatically turn off and on.
When idling an internal combustion engine burns fuel just for not stopping. This needlessly wastes fuel, causes CO2 emissions, stinks and spreads unhealthy soot blackening lungs and walls of nearby people and houses.
An EV engine just stands still. If people use power, they draw that from the battieres, however this energy is not wasted but employed for something useful.
'Just' dislocating the pollution away from a dense city block at street level, where people live and work, to a power plant where emissions have less human impact and can be addressed more effectively, sounds great.
Trash collection just dislocates rotting food scraps and garbage from city streets to a landfill. I think it's an acceptable arrangement!
Trash is not a meaningful analogy, for obvious reasons. I agree there are some benefits to dislocation to the power plant, but nearly enough nor as many as just turning off the engine.
Keeping a battery or even a cab warm doesn’t require so much electricity. Also, it depends on how the electricity is generated (hydro, nuclear, coal with much better scrubbers than a small ICE). Even let’s say the electricity is generated by coal without decent scrubbers (something not allowed in the USA at least, but let’s pretend we are in Mongolia): the coal plant is still way outside of the city (in this case, Ulan Bator).
I assume the vehicles are idling to keep the heater on, or the engine warm. Also, it seems like diesel is different from unleaded gasoline in terms of what engines can do or not.
> I doubt we will be talking about this in 10 or 15 years
Currently only ~2% percent of vehicles sold are electric. Going to take 10 years just to get to 50% of sales. That's not even including commercial vehicles.
TLDR - it's going to take somewhat longer than that.
Many states and countries have vowed to prohibit ICE sales by either 2030 or 2035. So eventually the choice is gone, but the tech is catching on rapidly anyways, and who wants to be the last person to by an ICE?
I don't think NYC's method of reporting reveals the reporter's identity to the driver, and assuming the reporter observes discreetly, NYC is dense enough that the reporter could be any of far too many different people for the driver to reliably target any attempt at retaliation.
I work in steel fabrication / construction, the idea of 'engines off inside' hasn't caught on in Tasmania in the industry.
When I was in Adelaide circa ten to fifteen years ago I recall the local food and beverage manufacturers all had signs to the effect 'strictly engines off inside'.
Nothing worse than a workshop full of diesel soot, though the exhaust urea fluid (AdBlue) in the newer trucks does give it a distinctively more breathable aroma, so there's that.
I mean, it's just constant non-sense. For example:
1. The guy is apparently completely unaware of the laws of his home-country, comically confused about everything.
2. Apparently he entered the country without exchanging his money for the local-system, then is constantly confused that his money doesn't work.
3. Apparently it's highly illegal to pay other peoples' fines (why?), but instead of just declining such illegal payments, it accepts them (why?), then sets off all sorts of dramatic alarms.
4. Unpaid fines stop peoples' cars instantly, even while driving down the road.
5. The last scene shows prisoners relaxing, sipping wine from wine-glasses. Even though they're prisoners, in a country where alcohol's illegal.
1. he's a visitor, who left the country years, seems like decades ago.
2. he's been away for decades? and now the country is no longer what it used to be?
3. artistic license to demonstrate a point? do you expect films to be some pedantic, step by step, black and white, logic device? It's art, and like life itself, it's not always logical. Fraudulent payments go through as well in real life, but clearly they shouldn't, because they are illegal? Perhaps some citizens are exempt from this rule, and so they allow payments, but punish those not allowed to pay? Perhaps there are many other reasons for it, say, why decline it, instead of taking that money, and fining the other person, that way the "criminal" has less money to begin with, and perhaps that was found to be the more effective punishment?
4. tesla can park itself, why can't it park itself automatically once you are found no longer fit to drive in transit?
5. they are "free". in a "prison". are they free in their "home? is there a difference? It really is the point of the entire short.
what it supposed to be? it's an award winning short.
A good argument against X might try to show probable -- or, failing that, plausible -- consequences of X.
But that video's too much like, "If they pass this law I don't like, aliens will invade, earthquakes will shake, and volcanos will erupt!".
If you want to make a real point that people care about, it has to make sense. You can't just make up non-sense, cite "artistic license", and expect people to believe it.
I would think the social discontent is more harmful to society than the excess diesel soot itself. I imagine if I were in the position of a broke truck driver trying to get by I would see the guy trying to take money out of my pocket as more of an existential threat than soot.
If you get in and out of the cab all day, wear more clothes. That's what I did, worked great. In the summer it's just not that big a deal, you're sweating in every other part of the job anyway. Roll the windows down maybe.
If you're talking about the cargo, the insulation will easily keep up over an hour or two plus of being stopped.
You run the heater to defrost the glass in your car. It often takes a few minutes for it to be effective. Otherwise, you can’t see and you’re a danger to yourself and others.
In the winter, it’s more common than putting gas in your car. It’s kinda odd explaining this though
I live in the subarctic region, a stone’s throw away from the arctic circle. We have snow and frost in winter.
We use ice scrapers. :) As a matter of self-reliance and/or common courtesy.
Defrosting the windows with the engine is really not nice, especially not when it’s a diesel with the fumes hanging in the winter air and going inside people’s windows and into baby carriages and kindergarteners’ noses.
It's not only not nice, it's a genuinely bad idea. If you have large sheets of glass (truck windows) and large heat differentials, you are asking for catastrophic failure due to uneven expansion. I know multiple people this has happened to personally, and there are also some truck manufacturers who recommend against this kind of defrosting for exactly this reason.
If they really want to make a difference, they should enforce this against individuals too, not just companies. Lots of people leave cars idling when waiting in the heat/cold/rain. That adds up too.
If you talk to a random sampling of New Yorkers, I suspect that you'd find much more social discontent in the lax enforcement of our idling and parking laws (and related things, like placard abuse) than in this.
(Besides: it's a strange thing to appeal to when one side is physically assaulting the other.)
I imagine that would be true. There are very few people getting beat up by truck drivers relative to the number of people who don't like lax enforcement of idling and parking laws, placard abuse, etc.
>(Besides: it's a strange thing to appeal to when one side is physically assaulting the other.)
To many people there is not much difference between physical and economic damage. Add in the perceived personal disrespect and that's why you get fights.
Thanks, that should be all we really need to see here.
> The externalities should be charged where they occur
You can walk to the farm and negotiate with the farmer to buy from him rather than allowing it to be transported back by diesel, are you doing this or is this just more hypocrisy?
> >I shouldn't [ be allowed to buy food ]
> Thanks, that should be all we really need to see here.
I've never said that I shouldn't be allowed to buy food. I simply believe that when I do, I should pay the true cost of it.
> You can walk to the farm and negotiate with the farmer to buy from him rather than allowing it to be transported back by diesel, are you doing this or is this just more hypocrisy?
You have an oddly black and white view of the world. There are plenty of things that I think we should change that currently benefit me. I can participate in the system while still recognizing its flaws and arguing that they should be fixed. I can't reasonably opt out of everything where I disagree with some aspect of it. Do you believe that politicians should vote against all bills that they disagree with any part of?
I think the wealthy in my country should pay more taxes than they currently do. I make more than the median income so this would probably result in me paying more taxes too. I can hold this view without donating part of my salary to the government. I'm against capital punishment. If I see someone committing a crime they could receive the death penalty for I'll still call the police. Do you believe that these views also make me a hypocrite?
>I've never said that I shouldn't be allowed to buy food. I simply believe that when I do, I should pay the true cost of it.
A distinction without a practical difference. It's effectively impossible to buy food at the true cost. Therefore you don't think you should be allowed to buy food.
>If I see someone committing a crime they could receive the death penalty for I'll still call the police. Do you believe that these views also make me a hypocrite?
Yes. If you narc someone out to a system that metes out the death penalty and you disagree with it, then you're no better than the executors.
>I think the wealthy in my country should pay more taxes than they currently do. I make more than the median income so this would probably result in me paying more taxes too. I can hold this view without donating part of my salary to the government
Yes this is highly hypocritical. You want to demand others do something at gun-point that you won't even do voluntarily.
People do this for so long too. Sometimes nearly an hour will pass and someone’s car/truck/van will just be sitting double-parked or in some other non-parking spot with the engine running and blinkers flashing.
It’s like dude… this isn’t some secret loophole to getting to park somewhere that’s not allowed because another place is inconvenient.
You realize some people have to warm up vehicles on extremely cold days by letting them idle for 5-15 minutes. How are they supposed to accomplish this now?
Article has a js paywall so I'm unable to read if there is an exception.
By this logic what is wrong with all those people getting up early and driving to work, don’t they know some of us don’t have a job! Where do they get off?
>There's no reason that anyone should need to use a personal car for commuting inside urban areas.
This ignores every laborer that requires heavy tools to complete their daily task. The people that keep your buildings and homes comfortable, for example, can easily have hundreds of pounds of tools.
Lol you think this was written by someone who depends on moving heavy tools for their daily job? The fact this was completely overlooked, by someone so removed from the commoner as to not even realize the common man often needs a truck full of tools as part of their commute, tells you all you need to know about the perspective of this viewpoint.
The set of jobs that require moving around a truck full of tools is tiny relative to the number of workers -- blue collar or not -- that don't need this.
No one is going to buy into your hypothesis hinting that a plumber or electrician who carries their tools in their truck as part of their commute isn't part of the common man. It's simply a semantic game, trying to frame a definition to meet your extremist viewpoints.
It takes a serious disconnect from reality to make the statement 'There's no reason that anyone should need to use a personal car for commuting inside urban areas.' Either someone remarkably rich or naive.
That's not a "commuting with a personal car", that's
"working with a company car". Completely different use case.
Steve the Office Manager doesn't need a 2.5 ton pickup truck with a 6-foot-tall frontend that needs a forward-facing camera because the visibility is so shit that there's no way to avoid splattering all of the children on the 2 mile trip through populated neighborhoods between his house and office.
And yes, Steve is a representative buyer of big trucks these days. Actual working professionals want to be able to actually see where they're going, so they buy vehicles with short frontends and high capacity, like the Ford Transit.
A Edwards poll of Pickup owners in 2018 showed that 75% have never hauled anything, and 70% use the bed less than once a year (ie, never). The sales numbers bear this out as well, pickups with actual usable bed space are very unpopular, almost all the units that are sold have crew cabs, with about as much room in the back for hauling as a minivan with the bench down.
>That's not a "commuting with a personal car", that's "working with a company car". Completely different use case.
Another case of complete disconnect from reality. Many tradesmen use their own personal vehicles. If you want to call it a 'company car' because the commute involves transport of professional tools, then go ahead and play that semantic game.
>And yes, Steve is a representative buyer of big trucks these days. Actual working professionals want to be able to actually see where they're going, so they buy vehicles with short frontends and high capacity, like the Ford Transit.
Something you're so intimately familiar with, that you totally overlooked that there actually are reasons 'anyone should need to use a personal car for commuting inside urban areas.'
>Steve the Office Manager doesn't need a 2.5 ton pickup truck with a 6-foot-tall frontend that needs a forward-facing camera because the visibility is so shit that there's no way to avoid splattering all of the children on the 2 mile trip through populated neighborhoods between his house and office.
And you probably don't need to have your heat set past 50 degrees in winter or 90 degrees in summer, but I bet you use more energy than you need, helping destroy the environment and kill off animals. You don't need to buy lots of things, but won't someone THINK of the splattered CHILDREN!!!
>A Edwards poll of Pickup owners in 2018 showed that 75% have never hauled anything, and 70% use the bed less than once a year (ie, never). The sales numbers bear this out as well, pickups with actual usable bed space are very unpopular, almost all the units that are sold have crew cabs, with about as much room in the back for hauling as a minivan with the bench down.
The change in pick-up trucks to be massive oversized behemoths including those with large cabs is the result of mental illness of those passing CAFE standards which made it effectively illegal to produce a small efficient truck.
Are you genuinely incapable of understanding the difference between "commuting with a car" and "working with a professional vehicle" or just pretending because you don't want to admit that you grossly misread the comment that started this thread?
You've simply changed the definition of 'commuting with car' to mean any situation where you don't actually need to commute with a car.
A personally owned vehicle used to commute your tools to work could semantically call a 'professional vehicle' if you want to play games, but it's still commuting with your personal vehicle.
Laborers, small biz folks, anyone who visits multiple sites a day with no set cadence, or people who just want to feel in control over their commutes - blanket statements like this miss large swathes of the people who actually power the city.
And at the end of the day, are you really willing to strip people of the freedom to drive through an urban area?
I'm sure this wasn't your intention, but you've identified that there are two groups (or more) with very different levels of utility associated with their choices.
People who "just want to feel in control" are, essentially, externalising the cost of their choices while having better options available to them. There's not an upside for anyone.
Whereas people who need to drive, where work couldn't be done at all if they didn't, would actually be more efficient if they had clearer roads to get around on. It would save them fuel costs and time.
Really though, I sense that your argument isn't in good faith. A nuanced look at this can easily see that some activities in a city require a vehicle to add value, and others don't. Lumping the two together and citing freedom (to externalise the cost of your choices on to others) is a little like using tradespeople as human shields.
A white collar worker in good shape going from, say, Rego Park to Wall St is a great candidate for the subway. But that’s the happy path. If you need to go from there to the far parts of Brooklyn, or any part of the Bronx or Staten Island? Virtually impossible (if you want to get to work before lunch time) without a car. And certainly many with disabilities would have a hard time (as much as the MTA is improving on this front).
Get an electric engine warmer, defa or calix are popular here. Don’t know about NY but here in cold Sweden you can find such outlets on most private apartment block parking spaces. This is not an EV charger, just a normal power outlet you plug into your car for the purpose of heating the engine and some times also the cabin.
Today they aren’t as popular as they used to be, modern cars usually have no problem starting anyway. And most people are lazy to plug a cable so instead use the cars built in pre-conditioner, which sadly also burns diesel and smells even worse than when combusted through the engine.
More modern cars can also utilize the EV charger for this purpose. Another reason why hybrid or EVs are superior to diesel in the city.
For the last min. 20 years a minute of idling was more than sufficient even with temps below -25 Celsius (-13 Fahrenheit). Engine was lubricated after 15 to 25 seconds.
The rest was nice stories we told ourselves to not feel our butts freeze.
I learned a long time ago not to put the burden of this specific comfort (warm car in freezing winter) onto my neighborhood. But maybe that is just me being raised with values towards being a good citizen and a potential good ancestor for the next generations to come.
You can easily choose not to read his post, people can't easily choose not to breathe the air where they live. Well, some people can, they can get a car and move.
People are entitled to freedom under the law, but society is free to enact laws that make idling illegal, even if it means some people's vehicles won't start in winter, or restrict vehicle traffic on certain urban streets, whether this pertains to 18-wheelers or a regular handymans truck. Though I'm sure some people will claim there is a constitutional right to getting everywhere by car, and so society is actually not free to do that.
Either way, I doubt there will be significant change. Car culture has a vice-like grip on society, there is no path whatsoever out of this particular local maximum. There may be gestures towards coexistence with other modes of transportation, but never at a significant cost to cars. And that just isn't enough.
Wow. So you feel it comparable to pollute a neighborhood with health adverse fumes to receiving commentary about such behavior?
What you are talking about is not freedom. It is the opposite. It is egoism. You want to do as you please without (negativ) consequences for your actions.
Your freedom ends when it impairs the freedom of others. In this case the freedom not to be poisoned by your car's unnecessary (that is the important distinction here) exhaust fumes.
But yeah. Go on denigrating others by calling them entitled.
As someone else stated on a sibling comment of yours. You can decide not to read. But you cannot decide not to breath.
You argue (if one could call you polemic that) to be free of the (negative) consequences of your actions. Free to dump your externalities onto society and burden others with the fallout of you (unnecessary) actions.
Huh? How can I decide not to read a comment before reading it? The only way for me to tell if a comment offends me, is if I read it, but by then I'm already offended.
"Externalities" is a useful economic concept but it's been hijacked by people who use it as "stop doing things I don't like".
This really isn't needed on modern fuel injected vehicles, especially on petrol (gas) vehicles. The only thing you are really heating up is the cabin. Idling for 1-2 minutes when it's below freezing may be beneficial, but leaving a modern car idling for 15 minutes is a waste and doing nothing other than making it more comfortable for you. Once it's idling at a stable RPM, just start driving and take it easy for a few minutes.
The main part of the engine that needs to be heated up when cold is the oil, so that the viscosity is low enough to allow it to flow to all the parts of the engine it needs to reach. Modern oils do not have any issues being viscous even when cold, just make sure you use the right oil for your vehicle & climate, and change it on schedule.
Diesel engines are usually physically bigger and the combustion temperature is lower than petrol, so it takes longer to heat up. The biggest issue with a diesel is actually starting it though, that's why in colder climates diesel vehicles usually have a Webasto or similar device to preheat the coolant for you which will make it easier to crank.
Of course there are exceptions to this advice if you live in extreme climates, but NYC is usually not that extreme.
I can't wait until all the idling police officers, political figures, and the very people collecting the fines get drained dry by people calling. They want people to rat out people idling, lets start with government officials. Every single one of them should be ratted out at every possible opportunity before we out the general populace.
It's not blown out of proportion. Diesel and just all combustion in general is shaping up to be the next asbestos/lead. It's extremely clear how dangerous these fumes are but we have been desensitized in to accepting it.
That last article itself cites 15 sources. The data shows significantly more deaths from diesel than asbestos and roughly or par with lead. Remember that those exposures last a lifetime, so the data lags significantly.
"That last article itself cites 15 sources. The data shows significantly more deaths from diesel than asbestos and roughly or par with lead. Remember that those exposures last a lifetime, so the data lags significantly."
Not saying it's not bad, but this equivocation is just not accurate in my view. More deaths sure - because more people were exposed. Can you honestly tell me you would rather be exposed to asbestos or lead (no ppe)? Also, emissions controls have increased as has air quality since the 80s. I doubt this idea that the data still has lag left in it. We would expect to see the most impact at the higher exposure levels.
Obviously you personally would rather not be exposed to asbestos or lead but at the societal level 1000 people that are really really dead and 1000 people who are just normally dead aren’t that different. And honestly it’s worse for diesel having wide exposure because there are in between states between totally fine and dead and those affect more people.
But that wasn't the grandparent thread question where someone asked for sources on exhaust gasses being as dangerous as asbestos/lead?
We all know that car accidents are one of the top killers in the world, yet we don't ban cars outright. But that's because absolute numbers are big simply because billions of people drive cars: on a per-trip basis, they are actually not that bad.
The question was whether diesel could plausibly be “the next asbestos/lead” and the answer is yes, absolutely.
The question was not which dosages of which chemicals would be more harmful for a short term exposure. That’s not relevant to answering the above question. In fact it likely has a different answer.
(For lag I’m referring to the lead/asbestos data. Exposure to these has been on the decline for decades but we’re still seeing deaths due to exposures 40 years ago), so they presumably cause an outsize number of deaths per year currently).
"The question was whether diesel could plausibly be “the next asbestos/lead” and the answer is yes, absolutely."
If you mean by perception only, then sure. These three things have existed together for a long time. If you eliminate the two more dangerous ones, then the remaining less dangerous/acute one will be next in priority and get the attention.
No, as noted and cited, the absolute numbers for diesel are worse than those for lead. That’s not perception, it’s fact. And we’ve absolutely not eliminated the other two because they still exist in the environment and everyone ever poisoned by them who is currently still alive is yet to appear in the death statistics, hence the lag.
What does being exposed mean? Being around asbestos and lead in its normal use is completely safe. People live in asbestos buildings without issues. There is no standard dosage of asbestos but if you count grinding it up and huffing the dust then it would only be fair to compare to standing in a garage of exhaust fumes which will kill you within minutes.
That's not true either. We're talking about normal use. You can stand near an engine thats not running, just like you can live in a building with asbestos or lead. How about lead pipes, that's normal use and exposure at one point in time. Asbestos used to be much more common than it is today, with no idea that it was dangerous. People would commonly come into contact with it when remodeling.
In any case, under normal conditions, nobody is going to choose realilistic exposure levels of lead or asbestos over ambient diesel fumes.
Flipping it slightly, what intuition leads to anyone thinking that fumes from burning _anything_ is safe to breath in large quantities? We know that standing in a room filled with fumes from burning one thing — be it gasoline or wood — kills quickly. So why wouldn’t it make sense for a million cars running every day to also have a negative health impact?
There are plenty of events in history where stale air in a city along with significant pollution killed tens of thousands of people over a short period, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London.
But taking it to a philosophical level, what framework gives one the right to pollute? In my view, the opposite is true. Clearly, if a factory dumps toxic waste on your property, they are violating your property rights. I don’t believe anyone should have the right to pollute, based on the simple fact that any polluter violates another’s property. Our society of course isn’t quite there, but I believe we are sacrificing a rights by allowing pollution (even from ourselves), rather than the other way around (polluters having a right to pollute.)
What a strange way to pose a question. So, we know that there are risks with electromagnetic waves in X-rays, so we try to limit our exposure to them.
But do you, for instance, run a Wifi access point at home? Do you use a cell phone? And you surely know how radios work: electromagnetic waves. To use your phrasing, "what intuition leads to anyone thinking that electromagnetic radiation is safe in large quantities?"
While we know something of electromagnetic radiation effects on health, we know almost nothing regarding long term effects of the type that have become our daily environment, because this level of exposure (wifi APs, cell phones) is a very recent phenomenon.
But, we could find out in the long run that they have a non-negligible effect on a part of the population that it may end up being classified as "pollution" in the future too.
The point is that people disagree on what are "large quantities" with exhaust gasses (even different governments do, which is why there are different standards), or where do we draw the line. Going with the extreme example can actually be counterproductive because it can easily be proven irrelevant.
The other problem with air pollution from cars is that it's conflated with global warming today (not saying it's not an issue, just that everyone wants to solve both problems at once). One can easily solve for one problem without solving for another (eg. allow only use of clean vehicles during peak hours as a pretty light restriction, to banning non-clean vehicles only in dense urban areas as a pretty strong one).
As a kid, our scout troop had a fundraising deal with the local Schwan's distributor, they would bring in a delivery truck full of ice-cream and we'd sell it at a local festival, and then pay wholesale for what we'd used.
Anyway basically there was no power at the festivals, it was usually just a parking lot at a local highschool, so they'd plug it in overnight. Not sure whether they had batteries/etc, but they were perfectly fine being out in a hot parking lot for 16 hours, no problem. And we were constantly in and out of the trucks selling ice cream which is not what a delivery truck was designed for.
No it is not. They are major pollutors, as mostly are older trucks run by local semi-mafioso organizations (I am not kidding. There even have been turf wars over it).
This is exactly my reaction to this whole comment section too honestly. "Reporting your neighbors and being a professional snitch is good" is the type of take you only see in HN. Yes, laws need to be enforced but it does not mean we need to all turn into paid petty neighborhood cops/informants .
Not only because it makes you miserable but also because there's always a risk when you start calling law enforcement on people.
It's one thing to call the cops when another party has aggrieved you or violated your rights in some (even minor) way. It's entirely another for the government to create financial incentives for people to report their fellow citizens for petty crimes that the payee would otherwise not care about / be impacted by.
Even this particular bylaw is clearly contentious in the comments here. Surely you can think of at least one law that you disagree with - imagine if there was a payout for reporting on it, and how that scenario could play out.
I outlined this above, but I think there is a very clear argument that pollution is a violation of your property rights. Would you be happy if someone ran 200 Diesel engines upwind of you, making the air around your home on your property unbreathable? I believe that should philosophically indicate that your rights are being violated when someone is polluting.
I'm not against the law. If someone is polluting your air then you have a right to call the police and report it - but you should be doing that because you care about the air, and not because you're getting a cut of the ticket.
Property rights in the US, for good or ill, don't entitle you to force others to stop the flow of air going into your property. You can use your property rights to live inside of a sealed bubble if you don't want access to air.
What you really mean is you want to infringe on the property rights of others, because you're unwilling to seal off your own property.
Can you think of no other laws or situations where the same incentivized system was in place?
Personally, I can see both sides of the argument. I hope that most people can as well, even in today's polarized world, where sensationalism and tribalism abound. Ultimately, if one's action (privilege) poses a danger/risk to others, I tend to favor curbing that privilege, even if I don't like it. The key issue is the balancing act between the real danger/harm posed vs. the cost to privilege/right. In this instance, most people would agree that a city like NYC has plenty of privileged vehicle operators. So, curbing that privilege by limiting idling of diesel vehicles is more than acceptable.
Putting dry ice in the coolers should do it. Stuff's so cold that if you don't separate food container from dry ice with newspapers or cardboard, the food container gets frozen.
Outside where I once worked, I got fed up with the ice cream van idling the diesel engine outside my window, so I complained to the local council by email. Why wasn't the driver using the power socket in the lamp post that was there for the purpose?
Ten minutes later, police appeared and arrested the driver.
The council wrote back and said the driver was trading illegally, and had been warned before.
If the person had been a repeat offender this is totally plausible. I once mentioned a builder to someone on a local council and she went on a small rant and gave me her number in case a certain behavior was repeated.
You know, I remember many times on my neighborhood’s Facebook post age people saying things like “thanks whomever reported my barking dog. I had no idea it was a problem now I owe $500. Why didn’t you just tell me?!” or whatever. So I was like, oh yeah I’ll just be a cool neighbor.
I texted several of my neighbors once. Completely polite and to the point “hey, there are dogs barking all day lately. Can you double check yours isn’t one? It’s really disruptive. Thanks!”
One of them passive aggressively never spoke to me again until they moved. The other texted me back berating me. How dare I even suggest their perfect dog…
Nope, the ordinance that I found says they can run it for loading, unloading, and processing. I'm pretty sure refrigeration and food trucks fall into that.
Thr meter maids in NYC were brought under the NYPD because they used to be routinely beaten up when they were a civilian agency issuing people tickets. Now I don't condone violence, but this just sounds really risky. A lot of these drivers may be forced to eat some or all of the fine, and when they see some average joe shmo playing tattletale on them, I'd expect an uncomfortably large number of them to get physical. I do not think it's wise of NYC gov. to promote this sort of thing.
You don't tell them you're tattling. The average truck is passed by hundreds or thousands of pedestrians per day. How is the driver going to know which one phoned him or her in?
Indeed the subtitle of the article: “Some drivers respond with fists.”
For example,
> “I go out thinking I’m going to get assaulted,” said Ernest Welde, 47, an environmental attorney. “I’ve had my bags stolen by truck drivers. I’ve been physically assaulted. I’ve had to call the police a couple of times.”
>Another man, Eric Eisenberg, had a similar experience across town last year. An Amazon driver and two colleagues noticed Mr. Eisenberg pointing his phone’s camera at their idling truck, knocked him to the ground and held him down, according to a lawsuit Mr. Eisenberg filed in January.
> >Another man, Eric Eisenberg, had a similar experience across town last year. An Amazon driver and two colleagues noticed Mr. Eisenberg pointing his phone’s camera at their idling truck, knocked him to the ground and held him down, according to a lawsuit Mr. Eisenberg filed in January.
There has to be some way to make Amazon.com pay for the actions of people who are working for them even if they are technically a separate LLC. The situation won't improve unless the CXO and the board at Amazon.com not some mid level or low level manager, not some contractor goes to prison for these things.
Probably a few problems worth addressing (the assault being one, the idling another) but in the mix would be the timeframes and budgets expected of couriers. The city sets rules, Amazon sets expectations of time and cost, and the brutal area in the middle is left to drivers maintaining vehicles, dealing with rising fuel costs, trying to find a place to park near the delivery target, etc. I have parking when it's something I need to do once that week; can't imagine having to deal with it constantly every day while on the clock. I'd say that pressure carries over when they cop attention for a separate issue such as idling.
> Thr meter maids in NYC were brought under the NYPD because they used to be routinely beaten up when they were a civilian agency issuing people tickets. Now I don't condone violence, but this just sounds really risky. A lot of these drivers may be forced to eat some or all of the fine, and when they see some average joe shmo playing tattletale on them, I'd expect an uncomfortably large number of them to get physical. I do not think it's wise of NYC gov. to promote this sort of thing.
We already have a terrible mayor. Even the last mayor said something to the effect of they don't care about people stopping on the bus lane if they are actively loading or unloading. I am sure the new mayor will continue this policy.
Across the river in Jersey City, I've seen even police patrol cars do not care about engine idling laws. These laws probably don't matter if you are in the middle of nowhere in Kansas City but they are absolutely essential in New York City area. We need more enforcement, not less.
If I had to go to court and pay a fine for a guest who put out the trash incorrectly -- no warning, straight a ticket -- I have exactly ZERO sympathy for these engine idlers. They must pay. I'd say while we are at it, make the fines increasingly larger and force these law breakers to go to court and make them waste progressively longer amount of time with the court system every time it happens as well.
> they don't care about people stopping on the bus lane if they are actively loading or unloading.
I once had to deal with an asshole double parked on a two way street forcing all of the traffic behind him to drive on my side and block the other direction. Did not GAF despite truck parking being available at the end of the block.
> I once had to deal with an asshole double parked on a two way street forcing all of the traffic behind him to drive on my side and block the other direction. Did not GAF despite truck parking being available at the end of the block.
My complaint about unlawful parking is with people who put reflective vests on their dashboards. This is blatant corruption and we should not tolerate it.
I think we need a similar photograph law about unlawful parking and if there is a reflective vest or NYPD paraphernalia visible in the car, the fine goes up 100x regardless of whether they are NYPD / NYC employee.
In New York, the traffic cops ignore illegally parked cars that somehow indicate they're part of the brotherhood. A reflective vest will do, so will a hand written note saying you're a cop, court officer, employee at DA's office, surgeon, accountant in NYPD, anything really that indicates you're "one of them". A thin blue line sticker will also work.
"In the movies I’ve seen people who try to get out of a traffic ticket by telling the police officer they made a donation to the policeman’s ball, but those were comedies. I had no idea that not only does this exist there are official cards. In fact, the police in New York are livid that the number of cards is being limited."
>If I had to go to court and pay a fine for a guest who put out the trash incorrectly -- no warning, straight a ticket -- I have exactly ZERO sympathy for these ...
Will fining other people make you feel better about the way you were treated?
If you report these offenses it's common for your home address to show up in court documents. Unless you live in a building with doormen you're putting yourself at quite a decent amount of risk.
> If you report these offenses it's common for your home address to show up in court documents. Unless you live in a building with doormen you're putting yourself at quite a decent amount of risk.
All the more reason for EVERYONE to do it.
I propose while we are at it, we don't try to guess what is a "Legally authorized emergency motor vehicles" and complain about NYPD cars that are idling anyway. They can't kill us all!
The article mentions that reporters are required to do their own research to determine if a business is a repeat offender. I wonder if there's an opportunity for a service to act as a clearinghouse for these reports? :)
that was my first thought too, but NYC already makes it pretty easy to look up traffic violations by licence plate number. if idling violations are included here, there's not much one could add to that.
I know this is about commercial vehicles, but on a personal note I really wish noncommercial vehicles were far better in accessory mode. Specifically it is common that either the hot, cold, or both HVAC won't function while the engine is off and the vehicle in accessory mode often leaving people idling in high or low weather scenarios (or simply just melting ice on your windshields).
I feel like there's far too much focus spent on chastising the sinners and not nearly enough effect spent creating vehicles where the common sense action is not to need to idle. Even hybrids may run their gas engines purely for the HVAC, we have a Prius and depending on the temperate and fan speed, it can kick on the engine even with full hybrid battery.
Let me ask this: Where is the article or city report that talks to the commercial drivers and seeks insight into WHY they're idling? Unreasonable time constraints? Cabin temp? Company policies? Let's dig into that. This "burn the witch" stuff never works long term, and we have to seek to make non-idling the rational choice not the enforced one.
It minds me a lot of these "cut speeding initiatives." They work, while they're going on, but success has been seen longer term by just re-designing roads to communicate the safe speed (e.g. planting trees, pinchpoints, et al[0]).
Only when warm. Many modern gasoline burning vehicles are extremely stinky when cold. As I understand it, they deliberately run rich when first started to help heat up the catalytic converter, and I wonder if this is a case of optimizing for the wrong thing.
EVs are, of course, emission-free when idle. (Although, oddly, at least some Teslas still can’t open or close their windows when in the off-ish state.)
My understanding of the cold-rich start was not anything to do with the catalytic converter.
Cold air is more dense and contains more oxygen. At the same time, when the engine is cold gasoline is harder to vaporize and doesn't vaporize properly, and also can condense on cold engine parts. Running rich while the engine is cold allows additional gas to offset both of those issues.
When the extra un-combusted gasoline passes through, a secondary air injection system allows the fuel to be burned up before reaching the catalytic converter and does heat it up faster, but this is a secondary benefit rather than the primary benefit.
My 23-year-old V12 7 series has electrically heated catalytic converters for this very reason. Thanks to those, according to German regs it qualifies as a ULEV! I think it still stinks at first start. Also, the cats cost two grand each to replace and the car requires a second battery to power them without draining the main starting battery so much that the car won't turn over. That's probably why we don't see more of this...
A really good way to generate lots of torque from a stop is an electric motor. You could use a combination of gasoline motors at speed with electric to start to get this same combination.
Diesel electric locomotives have a much worse idling problem than diesel ICE vehicles, you can’t just shut the turbine down without consequences, especially in winter, so they just idle for hours. See for example https://www.saferail.ca/blog/2019/7/3/idling-of-diesel-engin...
Yes. I know for a fact that diesel locomotives of trains are kept running even if its next trip is hours later.
I don't know the underlying reason for that though. I always assumed it was some combination of using too much fuel for starting (more than what it would consume if it was just idling) and the starting itself being a complicated process. But I could be wrong.
But then, for trains there exists fully electric locomotives, so this looks like a solved problem in that industry. All that's left to be done is phase out the diesels (apart from electrifying the tracks itself).
Ya, if we would just electrify our rails like they do in Europe, the problem would be solved. Battery is also an option, though it seems only viable for auxiliary locomotives (the ones that push carriages together in yards) for now.
Diesel electric is only used in locomotives (and some big mining equipment) because the realities of the "get the power from the engine to the wheels" problem makes it work well in those use cases. Directly transmitting the energy without converting into electricity and back is more efficient until you start talking about absurd levels of gearbox and input/output speed discrepancies and whatnot. If the double conversion was more efficient we'd see electric drivetrains in far more places.
On quite a few cars, parts of the HVAC system (namely the AC compressor and potentially some of the fans) are mechanically linked to the engine with belts, rather than using electricity.
Indeed. Only electric vehicles and hybrids, some with electric vs belt driven compressors, others with electric driven heat pumps, can run HVAC without the need for an engine running.
Also, even if they're separate, AC and heating can use a lot of electricity and normal ICE cars usually don't have big batteries. Especially in the winter you'd also need a solid reserve, because the car might be already be discharged due to cold and need more power to get going. Throw in some short range trips and an engine stop automatic and you'll quickly end up with an empty battery, which will reflect very bad on the manufacturer.
You could of course add a second battery, but that would add a lot of weight and complexity for a not very noticeable benefit.
I'm sure that wearing warmer clothing, keeping windows doors closed will keep in the heat, or open the windows and let a breeze cool you in the hot weather...for 10-20mins but ofc depends...
Here in Romania unfortunately no such a law, so I ask politely, if refused ask why, if again leave their door open or take their car picture... I feel like a jerk sometimes so have been doing it less... also so many car drivers seem to think they have a right rather than are a blight....¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One thing the bus drivers here said is their electronic system resets if they stop their motor, don't know if it's BS , they seem nice guys just not very educated in ecological stuff , like most Romanians..
Nice to see such an article
Neither of the simple solutions given will work in all situations. Cars still get super cold if the temperature is say 0 to -5 Celsius (32 or ~22.5 Fahrenheit).
Be in a car with that temperature for an hour+. It’ll be awful for most people.
Maybe a car isn't a house? I mean I understand that it's not practical all the time but your polluting the air by sitting inside your car instead of being in a building with an electric and optimized HVAC.
I kinda get where this discussion is coming from but to me it sounds extremely weird to not use the amenities you've bought. Kinda like walking around with a jacket and a hat at home when you can easily pay your heating bill.
I'd say thats the approach I've been taking (ie using a jacket and hat) one winter I used an electric blanket, went to work a bit early during the winter, my room managed to stay above 3C, boy was I glad and enjoyed the warm up of spring so much more...this winter I went to Egypt... my point not having makes you appreciate things differently and if you do it by choice there's less stress...in Egypt I chose to live as cheaply as possible, hitching, learning the language, eating street food, sleeping in doorms...I find you appreciate people , time more... as for the above question it's about CO2 poisoning your surroundings, it's why we finally got rid of lead from petrol, asbestos, smoking on airplanes and hopefully one day CocaCola plastic bottles...
That's nice. For me essentially not spending money on quality of life/fun makes my motivation to work disappear since I stop seeing a relation between quality of life and work put in.
Hi, Pete! I loved the work you did in South Bend. Do you have a lead on a used electric car that will seat four people and our dog? Budget is 12k. Thanks!
there’s a series of options that all fit. there needs to be a better argument against change other than repeating the fears we’ve heard others express. take some time to see if what people tell you is true
A new Nissan leaf gets less than 70 miles of range in the winter, and they have notoriously bad battery life. A used leaf in cold climates is actually useless.
Assuming that the OP is talking exclusively about asthetics when they specifically mention winter performance is bad faith.
Older leafs (don't know about the new ones) don't have thermal management and are literally useless in cold weather.
IMO Leafs do a disservice to the adoption of electric cars because many of peoples' gut reactions to buying an EV (what if I run out of battery! Does it work in cold weather? Will the battery last? What about resale value) are actually showstoppers for these glorified golf carts. There are more and more options for 200+ mile range EVs that will work for more than a niche subset of Americans, but "you can buy a leaf for cheap" isn't helpful and helps spread FUD about EVs.
I live in an apartment that uses parking lot style parking and has no electricity running to the spots. Management has been asked before if chargers can be installed and they said “sure, if you pay for it and it stays here when you move”. Not sure why they wanted to keep the chargers, but that’s their rules. So what do I do? Buy an EV and charge it where?
I bought a used 2012 Nissan Leaf in 2015 for $12.5k. It was a post-lease vehicle. Around 25k miles at the time. I used it as a daily driver until COVID hit and it’s still my go-to vehicle in the house.
Lol I know it's against etiquette to complain about downvotes, but I didn't think I needed to actually explain that the average cost of an industry of cars is utterly meaningless. There are cheap EVs, there are expensive EVs. Unless you're buying a fleet of EVs of different makes, looking at average price is a fallacy.
Having observed, what, maybe two or three hundred drivers of commercial diesel vehicles, and verbally surveying, what, maybe 15% of those, I've come to the firm conclusion the overwhelming majority of them leave their engines idle due to a historic quirk, whereby it was widely considered to improve longevity of the engine to reduce the number stop-start cycles. This has been pretty much obsoleted by improvements in metallurgy, machining tolerances, and lubricant improvements - thermal cycling is still important, but that's a negligible concern over a 20 to 40 minute period in temperate climates. Modern turbo diesel engine cold-starts should be considered ready to drive in a gentle manner immediately, avoid full boost till operating temperature - but full boost should rarely be needed in most driving conditions anyways.
I have a 2nd gen Prius. You can generally use the EV button to prevent the motor from turning on.
Perhaps unrelated, but when turning on the engine for the first time in a while the Prius will burn gas to heat up the engine. You can prevent that too by pressing the EV button right after pressing the power button. (Or maybe you can hold it down while pressing the power button?) Not sure if it works all the time.
Not sure that's the city's responsibility but more between industry and manufacturers. Industry could use the press (as you said) to apply pressure, but the city would have enough on its plate.
"I feel like there's far too much focus spent on chastising the sinners and not nearly enough effect spent creating vehicles where the common sense action is not to need to idle."
Actually it seems like many sinners are perfectly happy to blame only the delivery drivers, instead of applying this to other vehicles (their own) as well.
But many people do have cars, arguably a larger number than trucks. Many of them letting it idle for fairly long periods of time in the winter to remove ice, in the summer for air-conditioning if waiting for someone, etc. So on the aggregate, they are still producing a high number of fumes.
Also, if the business requires the truck to idle to run loading, unloading, and processing equipment, then the law exempts them from the requirements while using that equipment.
What type of engine? Idling an ICE should produce more excess heat than anyone desires. Unless the engine goes into start/stop which I’m not sure counts as idling and I doubt it does so if started in the cold, at least mine doesn’t. This can also be overridden with power drive mode or disabling start stop.
When my thermostat was stuck open it would take me 30 mins of driving to get actual heat. After I fixed it still takes ages for most (small) cars to warm up at idle. It's only when you start driving excess heat is produced.
Same with a boat oil changes - you either sit there for half an hour and maybe oil loosens up or you go for 15 minute spin around and it's ready for sucky sucky time.
How are these complaints verified and how does the city know multiple complaints are not being made with the same video? Is the fine per occurrence? How are videos checked for evidence of editing?
The article says that there is a staff of 14 verifying the videos.
The fines are levied through a judicial system similar to traffic tickets, so the check on these potential abuses is for the accused to offer evidence to the contrary. For example, if they were already fined for a violation occurring at a specific time that would be an excellent defense against a subsequent ticket.
Fourteen people . . . incredible. I reckon the program is paying for itself but it seems surprising that the flow of complaints is high enough to keep a team that large busy.
Wow, this is fantastic. I like to work on my balcony, but there are constantly trucks parking below, with poorly maintained engines left to idle for hours a day, spewing fumes that leave a layer of grime coating everything (and send me back inside).
Oooh, I wish they did this in MA. I could make tons of money just in the pickup line at my kid's school alone. We've got an anti-idling law here in MA, but I don't think I've ever heard of anybody getting a ticket, and most folks aren't even aware of the law.
How about automatic idle mitigation systems? Just automate it on truck level. Cost is low and at scale would be very minimal. Also if you are worried about ambient cab temp, you should not be too worried.
Are a lot of these trucks refrigerated? Are they idling simply because the engine is the primary power source that keeps the refrigeration unit running? My most recent Subaru has automatic idle stop/start intended to reduce idling waiting at traffic lights but makes sure cabin AC, battery levels etc aren't compromised.
Trucks that need the engine running for refrigeration are exempt from this. I’d wager the vast majority of trucks doing deliveries / idling in NYC are not carrying material that needs to be refrigerated, and they’re usually clearly labeled on the outside.
Probably depends on how expensive the fuel in the area is. Most people I know would certainly turn it off since leaving it idle while waiting means literal dollars worth of fuel being burned.
Maybe you want the radio going? Maybe you want your music to stay on? Lots of reasons people would unthinkingly not do this. My goal was to point out that for many this is an unconscious decision.
You don't need the engine running to have the radio going. In my experience, most people turn off the engine and leave the radio on while they're stopped briefly. It's why the ignition keyhole has an ACC position.
For diesel, there is the thinking that if you keep the engine idling rather than turning it off and back on (letting it cool down) it will last much longer. I don't know how much truth there is in that but I do know it is a popular opinion.
For older diesels, it is more efficient to leave them running than turning them off and restarting them. And I am talking OLD diesel trucks that have indirect injection systems. They'll smoke a hell of a lot more than just letting them idle.
Still turn them off if you don't need it running. Most modern diesels 2004+ are way more efficient in this regard in consumer vehicles and modern diesel trucks are better than they used to be.
Once, before 1990 or.so diesel engines were hard to start cold. You either left them running or plugged them into the wall so the heater instead could keep them warm. It wasn't unusual to leave a truck running all day because otherwise it wouldn't start in winter. In Russia they often built bon fires under their trucks in the morning. I know of tractors that have a gas engine just to start them, which also worked, the gas engine would run at full speed for a few minutes until the engine would finally run.
Not that the above is historical. Modern batteries are much better. Direct injection engines start almost as fast as gas engines these days.
One reason I haven't seen mentioned yet in this thread is that even for modern turbo diesels you are instructed in the owner's manual to let it cool for about 4-5minutes before shutoff. IIRC this allows the turbo to cool enough to not get damaged when there's no airflow. Funny enough they also tell you not to let it run too long, presumably because the engine is too cool to burn it completely and you get residue buildup; I believe this is due to the biodiesel they cut most fuel (diesel #2) with.
Source: I own a modern turbo diesel and read the manual.
Just make the penalty for fraud very significant and award the truck drivers half if they can prove fraud happened (Dashcam video or something similar). Combined with city CCTV it should be pretty possible to work out who was lying in the case of a dispute.
I don't know, if you're worried about that sort of thing I'd think there's a very long list of exploits that should concern you more than this quirky bounty program.
>"This is a scene from the city’s benign-sounding but often raucous Citizens Air Complaint Program, a public health campaign that invites — and pays — people to report trucks that are parked and idling for more than three minutes, or one minute if outside a school. Those who report collect 25 percent of any fine against a truck by submitting a video just over 3 minutes in length that shows the engine is running and the name of the company on the door"
The idea of people ratting on each other like this somehow does not inspire me. Doing it for free in egregious cases is ok in my book but the former in my view just plainly sucks.
Not sure. I mean I am all for whistleblowing. Have no strong opinion about compensation in this manner.
Ratting on people is different. Sure if I see an actual crime (or at least what constitute one in my eyes) I'll report. But report for example my neighbor for building "illegal" shed - I think it'll hurt my inner integrity too much.
To be clear: SEC "whistleblowers" are rats in the colloquial sense: they come from inside the companies themselves, and report malfeasance to the SEC in exchange for a cut of the penalties.
Similar, what we're talking about is an actual crime in NYC. It's illegal, full stop, to idle a commercial vehicle for more than 3 minutes. You might not want that to be the law, but that's a very difference stance vs. "it's not an actual crime."
>"To be clear: SEC "whistleblowers" are rats in the colloquial sense: they come from inside the companies themselves, and report malfeasance to the SEC in exchange for a cut of the penalties."
Put it this way. I'll deal with it when I see it. For now this is too abstract for me. In any ways if they only do it because they get rat money I am not very fond of it.
>"Similar, what we're talking about is an actual crime in NYC"
And it is a crime to be gay in Barbados. So fucking what? If I was in jury I would go for nullification right away and fuck this law. I have my own moral compass and am trying to follow it in how I perceive other humans.
In NY illegal idling is an actual crime (at least in a lot of people’s eyes). It’s a violation of the commons by outsiders who are transient, so aren’t affected by the pollution they’re causing.
I am greatly in favor of allowing people to be rewarded for preserving the commons, whether that’s by helping police figure out who committed a felony, or by gathering evidence of ongoing traffic violations.
There is no "ratting on each other." The people driving these trucks aren't personally liable; it's the companies they work for that are fined.
All things considered, this is about the best possible application of law enforcement: it's nonviolent, nonconfrontational, directly improves quality of life within the city, and pays everyone involved (including the city itself.)
Am I to understand that the city should subvert its own laws because some owners have no scruples?
If this proves to be an issue and not just a speculative problem, then let's empower drivers to report owners for malfeasance. Until then, I'm content to treat it as the hypothetical it is.
The reply did not say or even imply anything you wrote like your first question. They only corrected the simplified/omitted info regarding avg employees and not suffering from fines
That… doesn’t seem like a large number? It’s 1,000 per month. This could happen once a day and be four blocks away each time. I see multiple trucks parked and idling daily in the same few blocks of a residential area of Seattle. If this is some kind of money making scheme, sure seems like they’re being really lazy about it and leaving money on the table.
It's a very small number, unfortunately -- infractions like these are among the cities lowest priorities, despite their outsized impact on quality of life.
This isn't the only virtuous revenue stream that the city throws away: it's an open secret that parking violations are basically unenforced for companies, and that the city will happily agree to cents on the dollar once you've racked up a few thousand violations.
> The reporters are also responsible for requesting their rewards months later, once they have learned that a fine was paid. The city does not pay the reporters automatically.
According to the article, the truck drivers act all indignant that they are not allowed to idle their trucks and that citizens can report that behavior and cause fines to be issued.
Did these people forget that operating a motor vehicle is a responsibility and privilege, not an unlimited right, that their behavior has consequences for the general public (externalities like air pollution, collisions), and that they are required to follow the law when operating their vehicle?
> Did these people forget that operating a motor vehicle is a responsibility and privilege, not an unlimited right, that their behavior has consequences for the general public (externalities like air pollution, collisions), and that they are required to follow the law when operating their vehicle?
So ... they're just like 90% of the posters in any HN thread where driving in excess of the speed limit on the highway is discussed then?
The modern interpretation is that reducing speed limits by writing a number on a sign is much less effective than designing the road to feel more dangerous - narrower lanes, more turns, more obstacles nearby, etc.
The protest makes sense if the law is not worthy of common sense. The law is not a great signal for morality or ethics -- see as an extreme example: segregation
> operating a motor vehicle is a responsability and privilege
Responsability yes, but a privilege?
If public transport were abundant and pervasive everywhere in the world that would be true. Freedom of movement is a basic right and in a lot of places, you can not enjoy that right unless you have a car.
> you can not enjoy that right unless you have a car
Most of the people were born with a pair of legs, which they can use to enjoy their natural freedom. A car is still a privilege for those, even if economics “require” them to own one.
What I don't understand is that the truck drivers are here delivering packages to help the citizens! Like I want my amazon driver to not be harassed when delivering stuff to my house, and I want restaurants and business around me to be resupplied easily so I can go to them.
The consequences you mention, feel more like a consequence of us demanding X amount of goods in our cities each day, and having no other infrastructure to get them there besides trucks, than the drivers individual malfeasance.
I bet that your opinion will change really fast when there is almost constantly a diesel engine idling outside your window, polluting the air and generating literal smog in the winter.
I’m against excessive engine idling as much as anyone but when I read about Amazon drivers being guilty of this it did make me stop. We already know they have insane targets each day and drivers are pushed to the limit enough that they piss in bottles. I imagine leaving the engine idling is a rational choice they’re making to be able to drive away quicker once that delivery is done. Yes it’s awful but they’re just responding to the incentives given.
There’s definitely an element of hypocrisy in all this. I don’t think all the people that foisted paper straws on us have forgone Amazon deliveries. On the contrary I bet the demographic are disproportionate users.
> I imagine leaving the engine idling is a rational choice they’re making to be able to drive away quicker once that delivery is done. Yes it’s awful but they’re just responding to the incentives given.
There might also be mechanical reasons. First, according to what I've read stopping and then starting puts more overall wear on the vehicle than idling unless we are talking about a long time between the stop and start.
Second, if they are going to spend all day alternating between short delivery stops and short drives to the next delivery they might have to worry about whether or not the battery would be able to handle all those starts. The short drives might not be enough to replenish the energy from the battery that was used for the start.
As others have said, this provides a counter-incentive, but more importantly: why can't we fix both? We wouldn't make stealing legal because some people do it out of desperation - we can keep stealing illegal and at the same time take measures to ensure people don't need to steal to survive. Same with this.
I don't like diesel fumes either, but I'm surprised to see so many Americans signing up for an informant society. There are other ways to solve this problem.
I suppose there's not many other ways to incentivise people in America other than offering them money. Seems like simply informing for the overall benefit of society wouldn't be incentive enough ...
...is a contradiction in terms. People who report things to the responsible authorities rather than taking violent enforcement action themselves are engaging in exactly the behavior vigilanteism is defined in opposition to.
> Do you really think citizens policing each other is a good way to enforce laws?
Irrelevant, because this isn't citizens policing each other. (Though, I will note in regard to your question that the alternative of having a distinct subculture separate from normal citizens that inevitably views themselves aligned against the citizenry policing the citizenry is far worse than citizens policing each other, but yet that's what we mostly do.)
> This is going to get ugly real fast. It creates division and disharmony in a community
Lawbreaking creates division and disharmony in a community.
> Read history.
I’ve read quite a bit of it; but I disagree with your implicit analysis, which attributes to a method of enforcement that most modern societies have chosen for some laws problems that stem not from that source but from the particular laws which certain repressive societies enforced using that and other methods.
> The IRS Whistleblower Office pays monetary awards to eligible individuals whose information is used by the IRS. The award percentage depends on several factors, but generally falls between 15 and 30 percent of the proceeds collected and attributable to the whistleblower's information. Awards can only be issued once a final determination can be made, and as such, award payments cannot be made until the taxpayer has exhausted all appeal rights and the taxpayer no longer can file a claim for refund or otherwise seek to recover the proceeds from the government.
Know someone with $100k of unpaid taxes? That's a $15k - $30k payout.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 350 ms ] threadThat’s almost 10% of the total fines paid out last year, according to the article.
I wonder what the distribution of payouts looks like. I assume it’s a small number of people collecting the bulk of the fines.
Regardless, it looks like it’s working. Idling cars may not be producing the bulk of emissions, but it’s one of the easiest places to start cutting as it’s otherwise wasted fuel and emissions.
I kid, I'm down for this sort of citizen engagement when it comes to externalities.
https://www.tatler.com/
The whole thing just doesn't feel right. I don't care if, in this particular case, the cause is not-terrible (preventing pollution). There's just something "off" about the enforcement mechanism.
Serious crimes? Sure: Do your civic duty; call the police. But this? Mind your own business.
It feels vaguely East-German.
This is more similar to whistleblower laws that pay a bounty for taxes recovered by the IRS. In both cases the government is the one taking the action that fines the perp.
In any case, pollution is my business.
In both cases it pits citizens again citizens, which is what’s starting to feel creepy.
Or maybe they would be on the other side, helping truck drivers fight the tickets? Heck, they're VC-funded. They'll probably be on both sides! Think of it as the new "two-sided marketplace".
Pareto Distribution: 20% of the Y cause 80% of the Z
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
Encouraging citizens to bounty hunt each other... that's the novelty that the other states are copying.
These creepy "see something, say something" laws turn neighbor against neighbor, criminalizing behavior that would otherwise be considered acceptable, and turn passive observers into active enforcers for the sake of profit.
Again, these situations are not comparable. Idling commercial vehicles are already disallowed, this program literally gives a cut of the fine the government is going to impose.
Preventing abortion may be illegal now, but probably won't be for much longer if the rigged Supreme Court gets its way. Still, that isn't a novelty. Control of abortion has been a partisan fight for decades. Idling just doesn't attract the same constitutional scrutiny (and why should it).
The bounty hunting thing is an additional layer on top of that, however, and one that's relatively novel. It's why California copied it for the gun bounty.
The state can enforce the emission law; citizen enforcement is not required.
Yes, Texas used citizen lawsuits as a workaround for something they couldn't themselves enforce without risking constitutional ire (for now). It's a legal sleight-of-hand that wins them bonus points with conservatives while buying time for the new Supreme Court to outlaw abortion. It's disgusting.
At the same time, it is creepy for Texas, California, New York or any government to entice citizens to act as informers and tattle on each other. The social costs of that aren't just measured in less budgeting for meter maids, but also increasing social distrust between neighbors.
These aren't mutually exclusive, just two complementary, nasty things happening in government.
In all three cases, it mobilizes private citizens to factionalize against each other to fulfill some elitist agenda, creating legal conflict with a profit motive where there wasn't before. Sure, somebody might've rolled their eyes at an idling truck or silently viewed their aborting/gun-toting neighbor with contempt, but these laws encourage active interpersonal conflict in the name of the state, turning untrained citizens with no experience in de-escalation into deputy law enforcement.
First of all, a burning building isn't an criminal act (unless it's arson). It's an accident/disaster. Second of all, you don't get paid for calling 911 on a burning building. There's no bounty to collect. Third, you are not turning in a fellow citizen for something that you wouldn't otherwise have if not for the bounty. Fourth, a fire is a life-threatening situation for all involved.
A more reasonable example is "You should not call 911 if you catch your neighbor jaywalking across the street." Or, like if you catch them leaving dog poop behind, you don't need to sic SWAT on them. Just fucking talk to them and ask nicely first, and maybe file a complaint somewhere if they're really assholes. But you don't just jump to trying to fine and imprison someone for every minor offense.
And with the abortion and guns in particular, they really are none of your business. What someone does with their body or their private property, if they're not hurting anyone else, really shouldn't be policed by their fellow citizens.
If you really want to set a bounty on things that have a measurable, tangible threat to public safety -- like actual arsonists, rapists, murderers, and similar felonies -- you know, maybe that's OK by me? But not stupid things like idling your car or regretting who you fucked last night.
Should citizens police each other for eating beef? Driving older cars? Not passing smog tests? Not supporting nuclear power? Cooking with natural gas? Flying on planes?
It's not the kind of society I want to live in. It's not the kind of relationship I want to have with my neighbors. They're the kind of situations that call for carrots more than sticks, and certainly not secret police.
Edit: looks like the idling law was primarily sponsored by a city councilmember back in 2015: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/council-member-wants-to...
It wasn't like a bunch of citizens got together to tackle air pollution, and somehow came up with that as the most sensible solution (vs, say, emissions standards or the autostop/autostart systems in newer cars, or better transit and biking). It was just some bureaucrat trying to score cheap political points by having citizens snitch on delivery drivers and such who are already underpaid and just trying to get by and do their jobs. Did this measurably improve air pollution in NYC? No, it just gave rise to a cottage industry of the equivalent of ambulance chasers.
We also have an entire planet to think about. Climate change is real, and we want our children’s children to continue to live here and for the complex ecosystem that makes it work to continue to operate healthily. To call the very justified concerns about future survival as “elitist” is unfairly dismissive.
For what it's worth, I grew up in a polluted city, studied climate science in school, and work in renewables. It's not that I don't think air pollution is a big deal, it's that I don't think the idle car secret police are a good way to deal with air pollution.
CAFE standards? Great. Point-source air pollution tracking and fines, from factories and such? Cool. Renewables-backed electric cars? Great. Cleaner, low-carbon grid mixes? Yes. Divestment from fossil fuels? Cool. All of these are actually hugely beneficial actions, but they don't require the state to turn citizens into informers against each other for petty everyday actions.
Air pollution is your typical tragedy of the commons situation, borne of the collective actions of millions of people living in an industrialized society and just trying to live their lives. It's not the sort of thing worth putting a bounty on, IMO, at least not at the individual level. At the corporate level it's a different story, cuz that's a cost of doing business and accounting for externalities and such.
All of those are better solutions than criminalizing trivial behavior and fostering a culture of distrust, all for little to no measurable improvement in air quality, just to satiate the political agenda of a politician. It's the difference between cheap political points for low-hanging fruit, vs doing the actual useful and hard work of setting sustainable climate policies that don't regressively hurt the working class while also turning citizens against each other. It's that sort of blindness to the needs of the average person that makes this sort of thing elitist.
If anything, people who don’t have to worry about these things — who get the privilege to live in suburbs with wide-open spaces, blue skies, and clean air — are the true elites. Being able to live this way is the dream of billions of our underprivileged fellow human beings who grow up in filth and overcrowding.
If idling is such a big problem, legislating adaptive technology (auto on/off) is a better solution.
If it is really about the billions of underprivileged humans and animals suffering from climate change, we need mass mobilization on the scale of the Manhattan Project or bigger, across multiple coordinated nations... not hunting down people who idle their cars more than 2 minutes. It's just the sort of thing that's neither necessary nor sufficient for addressing climate change, yet with a big social cost (distrust), which makes the working class hate environmentalists even more. It is the exact kind of elitist regulation popular in the 90s and early 2000s that caused a huge cultural backlash and created the climate divide we see now. It's not just regressive but counterproductive.
So it's not about elites vs. "regular people" here, it's about middle-class elites vs. other middle-class elites fighting over whether Johnny gets to buy and use the toys his middle-class income gives him the privilege to play with, and what kind of sacrifices we will make for the greater good. It's not regulation that is causing a cultural backlash: it's intentional and insidious cultural warmongering by a largely silent but even-more-insidious class of elites (the uber-wealthy) who fund think tanks, hire armies of lobbyists to press Congress, and discover and fund media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to pit Americans against one another and keep them distracted away from the even bigger issues we face. Democratic and existential crises are just collateral damage to the interests of these people.
This war of the narratives traces its roots to the 1960s, where the country was beginning to come to grips with racism (Civil Rights Act) and the Vietnam War. White middle-class and Greatest-Generation fear of hippies, Blacks, homosexuals, atheists, and others was easy for politicians and monied interests to leverage. Soon, think tanks and lobbyists started pressing Congress (along with the backing of Reagan, who was propelled to victory by the Moral Majority who brought politics into church) to deregulate the airwaves, leading to even more divisiveness in the media. Communication consultants like Frank Luntz (author of the so-called "death tax") were hired to sharpen the divide.
And Americans are sadly and unwittingly falling for this manipulation, hook, line, and sinker. Now it's the freaking Baby Boomers (who were part of the '60s counterculture and became the very thing they fought against) who are ensnared in it, and I fear my fellow Gen-Xers are being also being led into this trap.
I, for one, refuse to accept that any way other than massive world coordination is a pointless exercise. Major change is often the aggregate of small changes anyway. And being willing to make sacrifices in the name of health before others do (especially others who can less afford to make such changes) is what admirable and moral leaders do.
Yes, it's true that many of the flames of our culture wars are fanned by the elites on purpose. Divide and conquer. But every accusation has some seed of truth in it, and the recent environmental movement was all too good at providing easy fodder for criticism.
I think the moral purity route is a failure of both strategy and empathy. Demonizing your opponents doesn't get them to listen to you at all, it just puts them on the defensive and they'll look for any excuse to dismiss you. That's exactly how it's played out over the last twenty years, and despite all the yelling, despite Greta. We're no closer to climate solutions, but half the country is a lot less persuadable now and more hardened and inoculated against environmental messaging. They might've listened if we asked gently instead.
If your argument is that all Americans are elites, great, you've convinced the environmentalists and the bleeding heart humanitarians. Everyone else just writes you off and goes on their way. It doesn't change anything, it just satisfied some urge for moral self righteousness, and I bet that doesn't last either.
We're all pretty selfish, especially cultures of the European tradition of conquest, hierarchy, and individual power. The sad truth is that you can't really get people to care about the billions of strangers suffering from their lifestyle choices. We're just not built that way. We got here, living in middle class comfort, through violence and exploitation. It's completely immoral and completely human.
Asking for individual behavior change on that scale is a political dead end that does nothing but create enemies. It's tactically unsound and ultimately counterproductive, even if it gives you an illusory moral high ground.
Greta came and went and the world is no better now, and half the country is dismisses her as an angry young woman and never bothers to listen to her message. Meanwhile solar adoption keeps skyrocketing and cars are getting more miles to the gallon. Sometimes softer broad approaches are more successful than demanding individual behavior change. Most humans just aren't moral creatures. They're not evil, they just don't focus their lives on the pursuit of ethics. It's how we evolved; either we can acknowledge that and work with it to make gradual gains, or keep up a self righteous facade and keep making enemies instead of progress. Shrug.
Yes, it sucks that people are against each other, but the root problem is lawlessness, and that the people whose job it is to enforce the law are off doing whatever else.
What people don't realize is reducing police interactions with citizens is exactly regressive, leading to more mistrust between citizens, traffic deaths, and even pollution and climate change as per this article.
This comment on HN would have been downvoted to grey for the better part of 18 months until only recently, as a point of reference. During the Trump years assumptions would have been made about the commenter. Now I think we're all coming to agreeing that we need police to do their jobs and to hold them to it, or we get articles like this one.
That same heavily-armed force you use to fight druglords doesn't have to be the same force used for routine traffic enforcement, and maybe traffic enforcement shouldn't automatically get people scanned for outstanding warrants and such. A broken brakelight need not escalate into an armed car chase. The same way the fire department is separate from police, maybe there needs to be other institutions for tackling different situations, with academies training for different tactics that don't always involved armed conflict.
Our one-size-fits-all policing might seem relatively harmless for middle-upper-class whites and Asians, but they can be outright deadly if you're black or brown. You never really know if you're just going to get a friendly warning or say the wrong thing and be killed. The way we do policing is relatively unusual in the developed world, and very violent, and encourages both arms races and a severe distrust in certain communities. Just reimplementing that sort of system is going to get us back to the same place... armed enforcers that serve one part of the citizenry at the expense of others.
It's sort of the same thing in NYC. The city council resorts to citizen reports because they can't get NYPD to enforce the law.
https://www.amazon.com/Officious-Busybody-State-Josie-Applet...
In Anglo-Saxon countries there is a new and distinctive form of state: the busybody state. This state is defined by an attachment to bureaucratic procedures for their own sake: the rule for the sake of a rule; the form for the sake of a form. Its insignias are the badge, the policy, the code and the procedure. The logic of the regulation is neither to represent an elite class interest, nor to serve the public, nor even to organise social relations with the greatest efficiency as with classic bureaucracy, but rather to represent regulation itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehTBd_XxMMM
This isn’t going to change unless we set the right incentives. For the people in this thread worried about violence against the reporter, I think it much more likely that drivers will simply get the message and turn off their damn engines.
You obviously haven't tried to ask a delivery driver in NYC why their truck is running... I have done it several times in the east village, and got nasty looks and angry responses every time. I wasn't even recording or anything, just walked out of my door and said "hey man, any reason you have to run your truck right now?" And I'm also a 6 foot, not-skinny, guy.
Probably doesn’t apply to most vehicles though.
We've always given a pass to cars for the unpleasantness they bring into a city because we figure there's no alternative, that's just how the city runs. But there are alternatives now, and people are getting fed up with the noise, smells and pollution.
Even without the very well document health affects, cars are just shitty to be around when you're not inside one yourself, I think it's fair that we'd rather not deal with them when on foot or in your own home when possible.
If you're in a particularly cold winter you might benefit from it but really that's a judgement call. If you live somewhere mostly above freezing and drive a modern car, you're probably good to drive from the moment you start the car. Unless you're about to go full throttle on a racetrack, should be fine.
I warm up my 96 Nissan before driving, but I just go easy for the first 5 minutes in the 2010 Nissan.
Many late 00's engines were also designed to turn off cylinders to improve engine efficiency, but that turned out not to be implemented very well and engines died from carbon fouling. Big problem with Honda in particular iirc, and people would routinely bypass it to save their engines.
Automakers have to comply with CAFE standards and other mandates, but at the end of the day there's no mandate that an engine made with gen-1 technologies will make it to 300k miles either. Automakers don't really care if your engine dies in 10 years or not, they've put out lemons before and they will do it again.
Early CVTs failed at extremely high rates/short lifetimes, for example, and early OAT coolants like Dexcool were notorious for eating up every seal inside an engine. Early high-compression diesels had about a decade of their fuel injectors being eaten away by the abrasive sulfur before the ultra-low-sulfur highway diesel changeover. These technologies are of course completely normalized and trustworthy today, but that's not much consolation if you're the one paying the repair bills on a gen-1 lemon.
For some reason "don't upgrade to a v0.0 release of a new major version of iOS" is common knowledge here but nobody wants to apply that same logic to cars. The general public gets it though.
Now that cars have got 10 years of stop-n-start under their belt it's probably more reliable but still, it's a challenging design criteria for an engine.
Not saying diesel fumes aren't a problem either, mind... we probably need to go electric in the long run. But at the same time, on the level of personal self-interest... it's probably better for your engine to not start and stop constantly. It's just bad when everyone is idling because they don't want to start and stop. Tragedy of the commons.
This heavily depends on the temp range you are discussing.
Lubrication is the least of your worries at certain temperatures. The engine block and pistons being too cold cause problematic expansion and contraction which can lead to block cracks or permanent engine knock issues from what I've seen. This will eventually lead to needing an engine replacement.
It's a trade-off, and nobody seems to have done the science properly - it's just mechanics and engineers guessing which effect is worse.
Is this sarcasm? I can't tell because it is literally the opposite of the truth.
Interesting to me, is that when idling down a hill it does not drop, but if left in gear going down a hill it does drop in temp. It can actually get itself below operating temperature in gear going down a hill. I presume because the heat being pulled out via pumping air through the combustion chamber is greater than the thermostat would allow to be pulled out via the radiator.
Pretty typical of engines of that vintage with hydraulic lifters.
> Interesting to me, is that when idling down a hill it does not drop, but if left in gear going down a hill it does drop in temp. It can actually get itself below operating temperature in gear going down a hill. I presume because the heat being pulled out via pumping air through the combustion chamber is greater than the thermostat would allow to be pulled out via the radiator.
I didn't think that would significant but I could be wrong. Is it a diesel or gasoline engine? My guess would be the thermostat is leaking or wrong temperature.
(Manufacturing a new car releases lots of CO2.)
If it's really just 20,000 miles then frankly it might even be one of the most effective ways to turn your dollars into reduced CO2 expenditure.
I did not claim climate-friendliness, but environmental friendliness though.
Also, it was my understanding that most of a (ICE) car can be melted and reused, so maybe the mining impact is lower but I don't know what the real world consequences are.
Not to mention all the other inequalities in society. They mentioned volunteering, If it’s good they should probably be compensated more than some worthless crypto tech bro for example, and should have a good van. But we have to work in the current system.
Until then, we need people to do what they can. We’re talking about commercial vehicles - either the owner will bear the cost, and make it clear to employees not to do it, or they won’t, and people will learn quick smart to turn off their engine anyway.
In 95% of cases, people aren’t doing it with the intention of being anti-social - they’re just not aware of it. This sort of enforcement scheme is the kind of thing that changes cultures, starting with polluting corporates.
I need to stop commenting late at night.
However:
- most cities, witch means most densely populated areas of the planet and where most peoples live, can't do that, simply there is no physical space.
- we probably can't produce enough batteries, in natural resources terms, to substitute all ICE cars, and keep producing them when after just 5-8 years initial batteries are dead (we still do not have viable way to recycle).
If you follow the press you've might have read things like:
- https://www.motorious.com/articles/features-3/uk-eliminating...
- https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vny5/glorified-electric-go...
etc witch clearly depict a future of a divided society: a small minority living in modern homes, with p.v. et al. to meet their energy needs, e.v., perhaps flying ones (witch might be cheaper than keep up a big road network in the actual climate change state) and the rest confined in modern smart cities, closely similar to factories or prisons, oh something like:
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...
- https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/how-w...
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/19/why-greeces-ex...
- https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/34827717.html
etc. I honestly do not know what can be our (humans) options so far, BUT certainly I do not like decisions made by those who are actually responsible of our tragic evolution. Personally I quit a large modern city toward a served-enough mountains area, building a new modern home, with insulation, anything electrical, p.v. with lithium storage to power and backup, with various backups (nearby water source, water recuperation at home, emergency/for pleasure airtight wood stove enough for heating the house etc) and the above depicted future society might be even good for me: as long as I can get services (food, tools, meds etc) my own personal life is already, still remain if nothing of that happen and can remain if such evolution happen, better than before, but such new society can't last longer. No society where too large part of population are pushed toward India's caste-alike isolation between cohort of people can really last much, especially in modern times where we need enough smart people to keep out tech up.
If you live in a city and thus don't have a private parking space, then you should be using mass transport. Cars don't work in high density areas.
I live in the country in the UK, I do have a bus, it runs 6 times a day and doesn't go in the right direction or right times for most purposes, but the total mileage we do is easily charged from an extension lead, and solar on the roof would provide more 15,000 miles of power over a year - far more than we use.
However the cost of both an electric car and the solar installation isn't worth it, because we don't pay externalities for the carbon production.
And do have also the ability to produce electricity with a usage pattern that permit self-charging the car? Electricity grid are a bit complex to be kept up, to be more precise generators need time to step up produced power and time to step down, that's why we make large enough grid to average the load on generators counting on a big enough user base to have a nearly constant load on the grid, small variations of loads can be sustained. Slowly charging a car, test on few friends cars, means around 15-20A witch yes is not exceptional BUT if many people charge their car during the night that means a spike load, a significant one, on the grid, something no actual grid can sustain. Remember: we do not have "big hyper-condenser batteries" to absorb a spike while generator step up and we do not have "energy sponge" to dump excess of energy once a load drop and the generator need a bit to lower it's produced power. That's the very same problem of domestic p.v.: if they are connected to the grid it's the grid that sustain initial spike while the solar inverter step up, and it's the grid sustain final spike receiving the excess of energy while the inverter step down. If your load surpass injection limits your inverter will disconnect loosing power completely to do it's best to keep a constant frequency on the grid.
We have invented the CONCEPT, since so far exist only on paper and small scale experiments, of smart-grids, to mitigate that big problem: in a smart grid nodes talks each others to say "hey, get ready to produce more energy, I'm about to soft-start from x to y", generators can potentially answer back "don't, we are overloaded" or "ok, we get ready for you". E.v. in the game can provide batteries + inverters to quickly intervene backing up the grid segment per segment. Similarly in case of disruption they can keep a house powered connected to it's micro-grid + anti-islandic system to avoid injecting to the grid. So far we haven't such networks, we have only ideas and experiments. It will take decades (one it's not enough, for all not so small countries) to implement them at a certain scale.
> If you live in a city [...] then you should be using mass transport.
Witch is an enormous issue alone: mass transport are very costly and very inefficient, they are efficient only when fully loaded, exactly when people do not like them for the crowd. But we need to move 24/7/365 not just in peak time, so public transports are complicated and bad in terms of energy saving and outcome service. They are pushed just because there is a hyper-push against personal ownership and autonomy at any cost. But the truth is that public transports are needed in dense cities, but are absolutely unsustainable and dense cities are. Some want them, just because dense cities means mass surveillance where very few can rule many easily, also making them dependent for anything. Even accepting that big liability in cities you still need cars: you have sometimes to go outside, you have to transport heavy/bulky stuff, witch can't be done on public transport. People who work in the city need vehicles just because a plumber, an electrician etc always need a not so small set of tools with him/her etc.
> However the cost of both an electric car and the solar installation isn't worth it
True, and that's why to push the Green New Deal they artificially hyper push up energy prices, both to finance massive private investments in energy production and transmission and to force people who can to buy the Green New Deal stuff and the others to starve sliding toward State subsides at State (of course, not Democratic state but one run by private neoliberal interests) rules. That's already happen. When I've made my new home I know it was not economically interesting BUT I've smell rod...
If the truck is 'idling' with the electricity flowing from its batteries, the pollution and climate impact is just dislocated in space and time to the power plant when the truck is charging.
If the truck is off, then there is no problem, but now ICE motors also can automatically turn off and on.
An EV engine just stands still. If people use power, they draw that from the battieres, however this energy is not wasted but employed for something useful.
True, if it's idling, but many (most? all new?) ICEs now automatically stop when the car stops.
Trash collection just dislocates rotting food scraps and garbage from city streets to a landfill. I think it's an acceptable arrangement!
I assume the vehicles are idling to keep the heater on, or the engine warm. Also, it seems like diesel is different from unleaded gasoline in terms of what engines can do or not.
Isn't that the major point (aside from get the heck out of the way) of these anti-idling laws? Reduce the localized noise and air pollution.
Also NYS gets a ton of electricity from carbon-free sources.
Currently only ~2% percent of vehicles sold are electric. Going to take 10 years just to get to 50% of sales. That's not even including commercial vehicles.
TLDR - it's going to take somewhat longer than that.
When I was in Adelaide circa ten to fifteen years ago I recall the local food and beverage manufacturers all had signs to the effect 'strictly engines off inside'.
Nothing worse than a workshop full of diesel soot, though the exhaust urea fluid (AdBlue) in the newer trucks does give it a distinctively more breathable aroma, so there's that.
Very annoying.
15 min, full film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJYaXy5mmA8
[0]: https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower
I mean, it's just constant non-sense. For example:
1. The guy is apparently completely unaware of the laws of his home-country, comically confused about everything.
2. Apparently he entered the country without exchanging his money for the local-system, then is constantly confused that his money doesn't work.
3. Apparently it's highly illegal to pay other peoples' fines (why?), but instead of just declining such illegal payments, it accepts them (why?), then sets off all sorts of dramatic alarms.
4. Unpaid fines stop peoples' cars instantly, even while driving down the road.
5. The last scene shows prisoners relaxing, sipping wine from wine-glasses. Even though they're prisoners, in a country where alcohol's illegal.
1. he's a visitor, who left the country years, seems like decades ago.
2. he's been away for decades? and now the country is no longer what it used to be?
3. artistic license to demonstrate a point? do you expect films to be some pedantic, step by step, black and white, logic device? It's art, and like life itself, it's not always logical. Fraudulent payments go through as well in real life, but clearly they shouldn't, because they are illegal? Perhaps some citizens are exempt from this rule, and so they allow payments, but punish those not allowed to pay? Perhaps there are many other reasons for it, say, why decline it, instead of taking that money, and fining the other person, that way the "criminal" has less money to begin with, and perhaps that was found to be the more effective punishment?
4. tesla can park itself, why can't it park itself automatically once you are found no longer fit to drive in transit?
5. they are "free". in a "prison". are they free in their "home? is there a difference? It really is the point of the entire short.
what it supposed to be? it's an award winning short.
a little more from director himself, on what this is: https://greekcitytimes.com/2021/03/13/utopia-youtube/
But that video's too much like, "If they pass this law I don't like, aliens will invade, earthquakes will shake, and volcanos will erupt!".
If you want to make a real point that people care about, it has to make sense. You can't just make up non-sense, cite "artistic license", and expect people to believe it.
As for legitimate reasons to leave it idle, I have no idea.
Air conditioning/heating
If you're talking about the cargo, the insulation will easily keep up over an hour or two plus of being stopped.
In the winter, it’s more common than putting gas in your car. It’s kinda odd explaining this though
We use ice scrapers. :) As a matter of self-reliance and/or common courtesy.
Defrosting the windows with the engine is really not nice, especially not when it’s a diesel with the fumes hanging in the winter air and going inside people’s windows and into baby carriages and kindergarteners’ noses.
If they really want to make a difference, they should enforce this against individuals too, not just companies. Lots of people leave cars idling when waiting in the heat/cold/rain. That adds up too.
(Besides: it's a strange thing to appeal to when one side is physically assaulting the other.)
>(Besides: it's a strange thing to appeal to when one side is physically assaulting the other.)
To many people there is not much difference between physical and economic damage. Add in the perceived personal disrespect and that's why you get fights.
Thanks, that should be all we really need to see here.
> The externalities should be charged where they occur
You can walk to the farm and negotiate with the farmer to buy from him rather than allowing it to be transported back by diesel, are you doing this or is this just more hypocrisy?
I've never said that I shouldn't be allowed to buy food. I simply believe that when I do, I should pay the true cost of it.
> You can walk to the farm and negotiate with the farmer to buy from him rather than allowing it to be transported back by diesel, are you doing this or is this just more hypocrisy?
You have an oddly black and white view of the world. There are plenty of things that I think we should change that currently benefit me. I can participate in the system while still recognizing its flaws and arguing that they should be fixed. I can't reasonably opt out of everything where I disagree with some aspect of it. Do you believe that politicians should vote against all bills that they disagree with any part of?
I think the wealthy in my country should pay more taxes than they currently do. I make more than the median income so this would probably result in me paying more taxes too. I can hold this view without donating part of my salary to the government. I'm against capital punishment. If I see someone committing a crime they could receive the death penalty for I'll still call the police. Do you believe that these views also make me a hypocrite?
A distinction without a practical difference. It's effectively impossible to buy food at the true cost. Therefore you don't think you should be allowed to buy food.
>If I see someone committing a crime they could receive the death penalty for I'll still call the police. Do you believe that these views also make me a hypocrite?
Yes. If you narc someone out to a system that metes out the death penalty and you disagree with it, then you're no better than the executors.
>I think the wealthy in my country should pay more taxes than they currently do. I make more than the median income so this would probably result in me paying more taxes too. I can hold this view without donating part of my salary to the government
Yes this is highly hypocritical. You want to demand others do something at gun-point that you won't even do voluntarily.
It’s like dude… this isn’t some secret loophole to getting to park somewhere that’s not allowed because another place is inconvenient.
You realize some people have to warm up vehicles on extremely cold days by letting them idle for 5-15 minutes. How are they supposed to accomplish this now?
Article has a js paywall so I'm unable to read if there is an exception.
It sounds a lot like you have a problem with your vehicle and should deal with it.
This ignores every laborer that requires heavy tools to complete their daily task. The people that keep your buildings and homes comfortable, for example, can easily have hundreds of pounds of tools.
So who, really, is the common man?
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140409.htm
It takes a serious disconnect from reality to make the statement 'There's no reason that anyone should need to use a personal car for commuting inside urban areas.' Either someone remarkably rich or naive.
Steve the Office Manager doesn't need a 2.5 ton pickup truck with a 6-foot-tall frontend that needs a forward-facing camera because the visibility is so shit that there's no way to avoid splattering all of the children on the 2 mile trip through populated neighborhoods between his house and office.
And yes, Steve is a representative buyer of big trucks these days. Actual working professionals want to be able to actually see where they're going, so they buy vehicles with short frontends and high capacity, like the Ford Transit.
A Edwards poll of Pickup owners in 2018 showed that 75% have never hauled anything, and 70% use the bed less than once a year (ie, never). The sales numbers bear this out as well, pickups with actual usable bed space are very unpopular, almost all the units that are sold have crew cabs, with about as much room in the back for hauling as a minivan with the bench down.
Another case of complete disconnect from reality. Many tradesmen use their own personal vehicles. If you want to call it a 'company car' because the commute involves transport of professional tools, then go ahead and play that semantic game.
>And yes, Steve is a representative buyer of big trucks these days. Actual working professionals want to be able to actually see where they're going, so they buy vehicles with short frontends and high capacity, like the Ford Transit.
Something you're so intimately familiar with, that you totally overlooked that there actually are reasons 'anyone should need to use a personal car for commuting inside urban areas.'
>Steve the Office Manager doesn't need a 2.5 ton pickup truck with a 6-foot-tall frontend that needs a forward-facing camera because the visibility is so shit that there's no way to avoid splattering all of the children on the 2 mile trip through populated neighborhoods between his house and office.
And you probably don't need to have your heat set past 50 degrees in winter or 90 degrees in summer, but I bet you use more energy than you need, helping destroy the environment and kill off animals. You don't need to buy lots of things, but won't someone THINK of the splattered CHILDREN!!!
>A Edwards poll of Pickup owners in 2018 showed that 75% have never hauled anything, and 70% use the bed less than once a year (ie, never). The sales numbers bear this out as well, pickups with actual usable bed space are very unpopular, almost all the units that are sold have crew cabs, with about as much room in the back for hauling as a minivan with the bench down.
The change in pick-up trucks to be massive oversized behemoths including those with large cabs is the result of mental illness of those passing CAFE standards which made it effectively illegal to produce a small efficient truck.
A personally owned vehicle used to commute your tools to work could semantically call a 'professional vehicle' if you want to play games, but it's still commuting with your personal vehicle.
And at the end of the day, are you really willing to strip people of the freedom to drive through an urban area?
People who "just want to feel in control" are, essentially, externalising the cost of their choices while having better options available to them. There's not an upside for anyone.
Whereas people who need to drive, where work couldn't be done at all if they didn't, would actually be more efficient if they had clearer roads to get around on. It would save them fuel costs and time.
Really though, I sense that your argument isn't in good faith. A nuanced look at this can easily see that some activities in a city require a vehicle to add value, and others don't. Lumping the two together and citing freedom (to externalise the cost of your choices on to others) is a little like using tradespeople as human shields.
Yes, for exactly the same reason as I'm willing to strip people of the freedom to practice shooting at elementary schools.
The winter temperature extreme in NYC is around -16F, not idling until the engine block warms would be a problem for most vehicles.
Today they aren’t as popular as they used to be, modern cars usually have no problem starting anyway. And most people are lazy to plug a cable so instead use the cars built in pre-conditioner, which sadly also burns diesel and smells even worse than when combusted through the engine.
More modern cars can also utilize the EV charger for this purpose. Another reason why hybrid or EVs are superior to diesel in the city.
So, GTFO with your need to warm up your engine for half an hour.
https://www.currentresults.com/Yearly-Weather/USA/NY/New-Yor...
That is generally implied by the word 'extreme'.
>GTFO with your need to warm up your engine for half an hour.
Nobody said 30 minutes anywhere in this thread.
The rest was nice stories we told ourselves to not feel our butts freeze.
I learned a long time ago not to put the burden of this specific comfort (warm car in freezing winter) onto my neighborhood. But maybe that is just me being raised with values towards being a good citizen and a potential good ancestor for the next generations to come.
we're all entitled to freedom under the law, and some people depend on cars to make a living.
I say this is a car-less NYC resident, bounty hunting culture is dumb.
People are entitled to freedom under the law, but society is free to enact laws that make idling illegal, even if it means some people's vehicles won't start in winter, or restrict vehicle traffic on certain urban streets, whether this pertains to 18-wheelers or a regular handymans truck. Though I'm sure some people will claim there is a constitutional right to getting everywhere by car, and so society is actually not free to do that.
Either way, I doubt there will be significant change. Car culture has a vice-like grip on society, there is no path whatsoever out of this particular local maximum. There may be gestures towards coexistence with other modes of transportation, but never at a significant cost to cars. And that just isn't enough.
state sponsored snitching is dumb
What you are talking about is not freedom. It is the opposite. It is egoism. You want to do as you please without (negativ) consequences for your actions.
Your freedom ends when it impairs the freedom of others. In this case the freedom not to be poisoned by your car's unnecessary (that is the important distinction here) exhaust fumes.
But yeah. Go on denigrating others by calling them entitled.
You argue (if one could call you polemic that) to be free of the (negative) consequences of your actions. Free to dump your externalities onto society and burden others with the fallout of you (unnecessary) actions.
That is not freedom my dear fellow.
"Externalities" is a useful economic concept but it's been hijacked by people who use it as "stop doing things I don't like".
If my comment woke you up last night, then I apologize for making it.
The main part of the engine that needs to be heated up when cold is the oil, so that the viscosity is low enough to allow it to flow to all the parts of the engine it needs to reach. Modern oils do not have any issues being viscous even when cold, just make sure you use the right oil for your vehicle & climate, and change it on schedule.
Diesel engines are usually physically bigger and the combustion temperature is lower than petrol, so it takes longer to heat up. The biggest issue with a diesel is actually starting it though, that's why in colder climates diesel vehicles usually have a Webasto or similar device to preheat the coolant for you which will make it easier to crank.
Of course there are exceptions to this advice if you live in extreme climates, but NYC is usually not that extreme.
Those jerks will park next to a playground while their diesel fumes blanket the area.
[0] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323426#causes
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4390771/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/04/car-fu...
https://phys.org/news/2019-02-pollution-deaths-linked-diesel...
https://www.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/CATF_Pub_Dies...
https://www.hazards.org/chemicals/fuming.htm
That last article itself cites 15 sources. The data shows significantly more deaths from diesel than asbestos and roughly or par with lead. Remember that those exposures last a lifetime, so the data lags significantly.
Not saying it's not bad, but this equivocation is just not accurate in my view. More deaths sure - because more people were exposed. Can you honestly tell me you would rather be exposed to asbestos or lead (no ppe)? Also, emissions controls have increased as has air quality since the 80s. I doubt this idea that the data still has lag left in it. We would expect to see the most impact at the higher exposure levels.
Obviously you personally would rather not be exposed to asbestos or lead but at the societal level 1000 people that are really really dead and 1000 people who are just normally dead aren’t that different. And honestly it’s worse for diesel having wide exposure because there are in between states between totally fine and dead and those affect more people.
We all know that car accidents are one of the top killers in the world, yet we don't ban cars outright. But that's because absolute numbers are big simply because billions of people drive cars: on a per-trip basis, they are actually not that bad.
The question was not which dosages of which chemicals would be more harmful for a short term exposure. That’s not relevant to answering the above question. In fact it likely has a different answer.
(For lag I’m referring to the lead/asbestos data. Exposure to these has been on the decline for decades but we’re still seeing deaths due to exposures 40 years ago), so they presumably cause an outsize number of deaths per year currently).
If you mean by perception only, then sure. These three things have existed together for a long time. If you eliminate the two more dangerous ones, then the remaining less dangerous/acute one will be next in priority and get the attention.
Again, tell me you'd rather be exposed to lead or asbestos.
In any case, under normal conditions, nobody is going to choose realilistic exposure levels of lead or asbestos over ambient diesel fumes.
There are plenty of events in history where stale air in a city along with significant pollution killed tens of thousands of people over a short period, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London.
But taking it to a philosophical level, what framework gives one the right to pollute? In my view, the opposite is true. Clearly, if a factory dumps toxic waste on your property, they are violating your property rights. I don’t believe anyone should have the right to pollute, based on the simple fact that any polluter violates another’s property. Our society of course isn’t quite there, but I believe we are sacrificing a rights by allowing pollution (even from ourselves), rather than the other way around (polluters having a right to pollute.)
But do you, for instance, run a Wifi access point at home? Do you use a cell phone? And you surely know how radios work: electromagnetic waves. To use your phrasing, "what intuition leads to anyone thinking that electromagnetic radiation is safe in large quantities?"
While we know something of electromagnetic radiation effects on health, we know almost nothing regarding long term effects of the type that have become our daily environment, because this level of exposure (wifi APs, cell phones) is a very recent phenomenon.
But, we could find out in the long run that they have a non-negligible effect on a part of the population that it may end up being classified as "pollution" in the future too.
The point is that people disagree on what are "large quantities" with exhaust gasses (even different governments do, which is why there are different standards), or where do we draw the line. Going with the extreme example can actually be counterproductive because it can easily be proven irrelevant.
The other problem with air pollution from cars is that it's conflated with global warming today (not saying it's not an issue, just that everyone wants to solve both problems at once). One can easily solve for one problem without solving for another (eg. allow only use of clean vehicles during peak hours as a pretty light restriction, to banning non-clean vehicles only in dense urban areas as a pretty strong one).
It can run off of a battery bank or the built in accumulator. Well insulated fridges are pretty efficient
Anyway basically there was no power at the festivals, it was usually just a parking lot at a local highschool, so they'd plug it in overnight. Not sure whether they had batteries/etc, but they were perfectly fine being out in a hot parking lot for 16 hours, no problem. And we were constantly in and out of the trucks selling ice cream which is not what a delivery truck was designed for.
These days it's the local taxi companies they have their teeth into, so I'm told.
Not only because it makes you miserable but also because there's always a risk when you start calling law enforcement on people.
Even this particular bylaw is clearly contentious in the comments here. Surely you can think of at least one law that you disagree with - imagine if there was a payout for reporting on it, and how that scenario could play out.
What you really mean is you want to infringe on the property rights of others, because you're unwilling to seal off your own property.
Personally, I can see both sides of the argument. I hope that most people can as well, even in today's polarized world, where sensationalism and tribalism abound. Ultimately, if one's action (privilege) poses a danger/risk to others, I tend to favor curbing that privilege, even if I don't like it. The key issue is the balancing act between the real danger/harm posed vs. the cost to privilege/right. In this instance, most people would agree that a city like NYC has plenty of privileged vehicle operators. So, curbing that privilege by limiting idling of diesel vehicles is more than acceptable.
I've vended ice cream from a bike
https://serprex.github.io/w/Ice%20Cream%20Biker
Ten minutes later, police appeared and arrested the driver.
The council wrote back and said the driver was trading illegally, and had been warned before.
(My colleagues made jokes about this for months.)
I texted several of my neighbors once. Completely polite and to the point “hey, there are dogs barking all day lately. Can you double check yours isn’t one? It’s really disruptive. Thanks!”
One of them passive aggressively never spoke to me again until they moved. The other texted me back berating me. How dare I even suggest their perfect dog…
I will call the cops anonymously from now on.
This is the reason ice cream trucks in my area only take cash. I haven’t seen a legitimately licensed ice cream truck in many years.
> Because you have to stand there for multiple minutes recording. Truckers will learn how to spot them.
I wonder... can you record a three minute video of a New York Police Department patrol car? If so, who pays for it?
Taxpayers.
For example,
> “I go out thinking I’m going to get assaulted,” said Ernest Welde, 47, an environmental attorney. “I’ve had my bags stolen by truck drivers. I’ve been physically assaulted. I’ve had to call the police a couple of times.”
>Another man, Eric Eisenberg, had a similar experience across town last year. An Amazon driver and two colleagues noticed Mr. Eisenberg pointing his phone’s camera at their idling truck, knocked him to the ground and held him down, according to a lawsuit Mr. Eisenberg filed in January.
There has to be some way to make Amazon.com pay for the actions of people who are working for them even if they are technically a separate LLC. The situation won't improve unless the CXO and the board at Amazon.com not some mid level or low level manager, not some contractor goes to prison for these things.
We already have a terrible mayor. Even the last mayor said something to the effect of they don't care about people stopping on the bus lane if they are actively loading or unloading. I am sure the new mayor will continue this policy.
Across the river in Jersey City, I've seen even police patrol cars do not care about engine idling laws. These laws probably don't matter if you are in the middle of nowhere in Kansas City but they are absolutely essential in New York City area. We need more enforcement, not less.
If I had to go to court and pay a fine for a guest who put out the trash incorrectly -- no warning, straight a ticket -- I have exactly ZERO sympathy for these engine idlers. They must pay. I'd say while we are at it, make the fines increasingly larger and force these law breakers to go to court and make them waste progressively longer amount of time with the court system every time it happens as well.
I once had to deal with an asshole double parked on a two way street forcing all of the traffic behind him to drive on my side and block the other direction. Did not GAF despite truck parking being available at the end of the block.
My complaint about unlawful parking is with people who put reflective vests on their dashboards. This is blatant corruption and we should not tolerate it.
I think we need a similar photograph law about unlawful parking and if there is a reflective vest or NYPD paraphernalia visible in the car, the fine goes up 100x regardless of whether they are NYPD / NYC employee.
It's wonderful.
"In the movies I’ve seen people who try to get out of a traffic ticket by telling the police officer they made a donation to the policeman’s ball, but those were comedies. I had no idea that not only does this exist there are official cards. In fact, the police in New York are livid that the number of cards is being limited."
Will fining other people make you feel better about the way you were treated?
All the more reason for EVERYONE to do it.
I propose while we are at it, we don't try to guess what is a "Legally authorized emergency motor vehicles" and complain about NYPD cars that are idling anyway. They can't kill us all!
https://www1.nyc.gov/nycbusiness/description/idling-regulati...
https://nycserv.nyc.gov/NYCServWeb/PVO_Search.jsp
I feel like there's far too much focus spent on chastising the sinners and not nearly enough effect spent creating vehicles where the common sense action is not to need to idle. Even hybrids may run their gas engines purely for the HVAC, we have a Prius and depending on the temperate and fan speed, it can kick on the engine even with full hybrid battery.
Let me ask this: Where is the article or city report that talks to the commercial drivers and seeks insight into WHY they're idling? Unreasonable time constraints? Cabin temp? Company policies? Let's dig into that. This "burn the witch" stuff never works long term, and we have to seek to make non-idling the rational choice not the enforced one.
It minds me a lot of these "cut speeding initiatives." They work, while they're going on, but success has been seen longer term by just re-designing roads to communicate the safe speed (e.g. planting trees, pinchpoints, et al[0]).
[0] https://nacto.org/publication/urban-street-design-guide/desi...
If we could get rid of diesel from commercial vehicles air quality would dramatically improve.
EVs are, of course, emission-free when idle. (Although, oddly, at least some Teslas still can’t open or close their windows when in the off-ish state.)
Cold air is more dense and contains more oxygen. At the same time, when the engine is cold gasoline is harder to vaporize and doesn't vaporize properly, and also can condense on cold engine parts. Running rich while the engine is cold allows additional gas to offset both of those issues.
When the extra un-combusted gasoline passes through, a secondary air injection system allows the fuel to be burned up before reaching the catalytic converter and does heat it up faster, but this is a secondary benefit rather than the primary benefit.
In that case you should prefer idling, rather than stopping the motor and letting it cool down.
I think the newer ones with the AdBlue tech prevents the soot from getting out.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W39yEt4R-SU
Just give it a few years for the whole thing to be economically viable and for them to convert their diesel trucks to EV trucks.
I don't know the underlying reason for that though. I always assumed it was some combination of using too much fuel for starting (more than what it would consume if it was just idling) and the starting itself being a complicated process. But I could be wrong.
But then, for trains there exists fully electric locomotives, so this looks like a solved problem in that industry. All that's left to be done is phase out the diesels (apart from electrifying the tracks itself).
You could of course add a second battery, but that would add a lot of weight and complexity for a not very noticeable benefit.
Be in a car with that temperature for an hour+. It’ll be awful for most people.
there’s a series of options that all fit. there needs to be a better argument against change other than repeating the fears we’ve heard others express. take some time to see if what people tell you is true
Assuming that the OP is talking exclusively about asthetics when they specifically mention winter performance is bad faith.
IMO Leafs do a disservice to the adoption of electric cars because many of peoples' gut reactions to buying an EV (what if I run out of battery! Does it work in cold weather? Will the battery last? What about resale value) are actually showstoppers for these glorified golf carts. There are more and more options for 200+ mile range EVs that will work for more than a niche subset of Americans, but "you can buy a leaf for cheap" isn't helpful and helps spread FUD about EVs.
Is there a source for this claim? Also, what year is the modern engine cutoff? 2000 or 2010?
Perhaps unrelated, but when turning on the engine for the first time in a while the Prius will burn gas to heat up the engine. You can prevent that too by pressing the EV button right after pressing the power button. (Or maybe you can hold it down while pressing the power button?) Not sure if it works all the time.
Actually it seems like many sinners are perfectly happy to blame only the delivery drivers, instead of applying this to other vehicles (their own) as well.
a) spend a large amount of time idling.
b) drive diesel a truck.
c) run a business that requires idling a truck (i.e. commercial trucking literally gets paid to idle).
Also, if the business requires the truck to idle to run loading, unloading, and processing equipment, then the law exempts them from the requirements while using that equipment.
Same with a boat oil changes - you either sit there for half an hour and maybe oil loosens up or you go for 15 minute spin around and it's ready for sucky sucky time.
The fines are levied through a judicial system similar to traffic tickets, so the check on these potential abuses is for the accused to offer evidence to the contrary. For example, if they were already fined for a violation occurring at a specific time that would be an excellent defense against a subsequent ticket.
14 people normal hours/normal weekdays are roughly 14*1800=25,200 hours/year.
The complaints, according to the article, are 12,000 per year.
That makes it roughly 2 hours/complaint.
At first sight it doesn't sound like the clerks are overworked.
Still turn them off if you don't need it running. Most modern diesels 2004+ are way more efficient in this regard in consumer vehicles and modern diesel trucks are better than they used to be.
Not that the above is historical. Modern batteries are much better. Direct injection engines start almost as fast as gas engines these days.
Source: I own a modern turbo diesel and read the manual.
The idea of people ratting on each other like this somehow does not inspire me. Doing it for free in egregious cases is ok in my book but the former in my view just plainly sucks.
Ratting on people is different. Sure if I see an actual crime (or at least what constitute one in my eyes) I'll report. But report for example my neighbor for building "illegal" shed - I think it'll hurt my inner integrity too much.
Similar, what we're talking about is an actual crime in NYC. It's illegal, full stop, to idle a commercial vehicle for more than 3 minutes. You might not want that to be the law, but that's a very difference stance vs. "it's not an actual crime."
Put it this way. I'll deal with it when I see it. For now this is too abstract for me. In any ways if they only do it because they get rat money I am not very fond of it.
>"Similar, what we're talking about is an actual crime in NYC"
And it is a crime to be gay in Barbados. So fucking what? If I was in jury I would go for nullification right away and fuck this law. I have my own moral compass and am trying to follow it in how I perceive other humans.
I am greatly in favor of allowing people to be rewarded for preserving the commons, whether that’s by helping police figure out who committed a felony, or by gathering evidence of ongoing traffic violations.
All things considered, this is about the best possible application of law enforcement: it's nonviolent, nonconfrontational, directly improves quality of life within the city, and pays everyone involved (including the city itself.)
If this proves to be an issue and not just a speculative problem, then let's empower drivers to report owners for malfeasance. Until then, I'm content to treat it as the hypothetical it is.
That… doesn’t seem like a large number? It’s 1,000 per month. This could happen once a day and be four blocks away each time. I see multiple trucks parked and idling daily in the same few blocks of a residential area of Seattle. If this is some kind of money making scheme, sure seems like they’re being really lazy about it and leaving money on the table.
This isn't the only virtuous revenue stream that the city throws away: it's an open secret that parking violations are basically unenforced for companies, and that the city will happily agree to cents on the dollar once you've racked up a few thousand violations.
This is super lousy.
Did these people forget that operating a motor vehicle is a responsibility and privilege, not an unlimited right, that their behavior has consequences for the general public (externalities like air pollution, collisions), and that they are required to follow the law when operating their vehicle?
So ... they're just like 90% of the posters in any HN thread where driving in excess of the speed limit on the highway is discussed then?
Responsability yes, but a privilege?
If public transport were abundant and pervasive everywhere in the world that would be true. Freedom of movement is a basic right and in a lot of places, you can not enjoy that right unless you have a car.
Most of the people were born with a pair of legs, which they can use to enjoy their natural freedom. A car is still a privilege for those, even if economics “require” them to own one.
[1] https://dmv.ny.gov/tickets/suspensions-and-revocations
The consequences you mention, feel more like a consequence of us demanding X amount of goods in our cities each day, and having no other infrastructure to get them there besides trucks, than the drivers individual malfeasance.
If the city cracks down in idling then either Amazon will relax the targets or nobody will fulfill them.
There might also be mechanical reasons. First, according to what I've read stopping and then starting puts more overall wear on the vehicle than idling unless we are talking about a long time between the stop and start.
Second, if they are going to spend all day alternating between short delivery stops and short drives to the next delivery they might have to worry about whether or not the battery would be able to handle all those starts. The short drives might not be enough to replenish the energy from the battery that was used for the start.
...is a contradiction in terms. People who report things to the responsible authorities rather than taking violent enforcement action themselves are engaging in exactly the behavior vigilanteism is defined in opposition to.
This is going to get ugly real fast. It creates division and disharmony in a community. No wonder people are getting angry about this.
Read history.
Irrelevant, because this isn't citizens policing each other. (Though, I will note in regard to your question that the alternative of having a distinct subculture separate from normal citizens that inevitably views themselves aligned against the citizenry policing the citizenry is far worse than citizens policing each other, but yet that's what we mostly do.)
> This is going to get ugly real fast. It creates division and disharmony in a community
Lawbreaking creates division and disharmony in a community.
> Read history.
I’ve read quite a bit of it; but I disagree with your implicit analysis, which attributes to a method of enforcement that most modern societies have chosen for some laws problems that stem not from that source but from the particular laws which certain repressive societies enforced using that and other methods.
that about sums up the problem for Americans and the world have in general.
We can condemn both, no?
> The IRS Whistleblower Office pays monetary awards to eligible individuals whose information is used by the IRS. The award percentage depends on several factors, but generally falls between 15 and 30 percent of the proceeds collected and attributable to the whistleblower's information. Awards can only be issued once a final determination can be made, and as such, award payments cannot be made until the taxpayer has exhausted all appeal rights and the taxpayer no longer can file a claim for refund or otherwise seek to recover the proceeds from the government.
Know someone with $100k of unpaid taxes? That's a $15k - $30k payout.
(edit) The report for 2020 - https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p5241.pdf
In 2020 they had 593 claims, 169 awards. They collected $472M and paid out $86M (18.3%).
This is down from 2018 where $1.4B was collected, and $312M payouts where given.
When you said whistle blower, I initially thought of workplace whistle blower.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounty_(reward)