Take on the Going Car Free Challenge
Calling drivers across the UK, are you ready for a challenge? Summer’s here and the time is right for the Going Car Free Challenge – a month of climate-friendly travel.
Could you swap your daily commute or school run from the car to the bus? Or cycle? Could you go car-free for a day? A week? A month? How about talking to your friends and family about the importance of clean air, active travel, and people-friendly streets?
Join us Going Car Free from 1st – 30th June 2024. Those ready and willing to take on the challenge will be in for the chance of winning some fantastic prizes.
https://www.wearepossible.org/actions-blog/going-car-free-challenge
Pollution from tyre wear can be 1,000 times worse than exhaust emissions, SUVs make it even worse
Tight regulation of exhaust emissions by the EU has meant that new cars emit very little particle pollution. But tyre wear pollution is unregulated and can be 1,000 times worse, finds independent real-world testing experts Emissions Analytics.
Increased popularity of SUVs, larger and heavier than standard vehicles, exacerbates this problem – as does growing sales of heavy EVs and widespread use of budget tyres.
Fitting only high-quality tyres and lowering vehicle weight are routes to reducing these ‘non-exhaust emissions’
https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/pollution-tyre-wear-worse-exhaust-emissions
A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us.
It’s a nightmare situation on a highway: Your car hits a patch of ice and starts to skid. Unable to regain control, you panic as you veer toward the roadway’s edge.
In emergencies like this, guardrails provide a failsafe. As explained in a federal memo, a guardrail will “deflect a vehicle back to the roadway [or] slow the vehicle down to a complete stop.” Your car will probably be damaged, but guardrails can prevent something much worse.
But some modern vehicles can instead smash through these guardrails, new research demonstrates, sending their passengers hurtling toward a ditch, cliff, or whatever is on the other side. The problem is that thousands of miles of guardrails installed alongside American highways were designed decades ago, when vehicles were much lighter than the behemoths that increasingly dominate the U.S. car market. And cars are only getting heavier: Bulkier electrified versions of big cars are poised to arrive in the years ahead. The risk of huge vehicles tearing through guardrails is yet another reason to expect American car bloat to augur an expensive, and dangerous, roadway future.
https://slate.com/business/2024/02/car-safety-guardrails-bloat-electric-vehicles.html
Ever-wider: why large SUVs don’t fit, and what to do about it
Spurred on by rising sales of large SUVs, newly-sold passenger vehicles (i.e. cars) are getting one centimetre wider every 2 years (see figure 1 below). All the indications are that this trend will continue without regulatory action by European law-makers. The current EU maximum width applied to all vehicles, 255 cm, was enacted to limit the expansion of buses and trucks in the mid 1990s – and was never truly intended for cars. The limit fails to contain the trend to ever-wider SUVs (including pick-up trucks), and there is a compelling case to review it.
The average width of new cars in the EU now exceeds 180 cm, and around half of sales now exceed this figure. 180 cm is a key threshold because it is a frequently-used minimum specification for the width of on-street parking in Europe. When parked in spaces 180 cm wide, vehicles exceeding this width simply don’t fit. Vehicles which exceed their parking bay take space from those using the footpath, from vehicles moving along the road, or from both the footpath and the road.
Full report