Unless there's a ramification of electromagnetism that I'm missing, cars that do the bulk of their braking through regeneration require their conventional brakes to absorb far less energy, reducing the particulate matter generated.
And unless the mass transit is tireless, it will be even heavier. Tire wear and this microplastics go up with the square of axle weight, so individual transportation is actually better from that standpoint.
But mass transit carries more people per wheel, and the weight of the bus does not scale linearly with the carrying capacity, so it doesn't automatically follow that "individual transportation is actually better...". I doubt that 50 EVs carrying one person each generate less tyre wear than one bus carrying 50 people.
>Road damage is a function of the power of 4[1] generally.
Per axle. So for instance, if you're comparing an 18-wheeler to a 4-wheel car you have to compare (truck-weight/9)^4 to (car-weight/2)^4. Or ((truck-weight/9)/)car-weight/2))^4
So if a bus was an 18-wheeler, it would be about 16x the wear units, /32 passengers brings it to half.
It doesn't make a difference for the bus you linked, since it's also a 4-wheeler like cars, but if we cared we could add more axles to buses.
But, why don't we do that already? Apparently...
1) regulations don't require it
2) we sort of already do; some buses have rear wheel bogies that have 4 wheels of which 2 are kept raised at lighter weights. Which is basically all the time because regulations don't require it.
3) more wheels reduces fuel efficiency (and costs more money), obviously
4) wheels take up space and reduce passenger capacity, which make the bus less efficient if you don't care about road wear
5) buses have a much more consistent weight load than trucks, since ~30 passengers would be only 3 tonnes of difference.
I'm wildly out of my depth on buses/trucks here, so if a mechanic could chime in on bus/truck weight distribution and wheels that'd be great.
Roads are for walking, bicycling and repair/cleaning/utility/emergency services. Deliveries go by subterran pallet-delvicery networks, to be last-miled by freight-cycles. Mass-transit by rails. Long-transit by maglev or air.
This only works where the population has a very high average IQ (ability to understand second and third order effects of long expensive projects), no anti-social behavior (no corruption or theft in public works projects), with politicians whose interests align with the people. Unfortunately we live in a world where you will be stabbed to death and robbed for walking down the sidewalk holding a $20 bill openly in your hand.
The 10 number is for literally one person, I'm also discounting their mass (this isn't a precision exercise).
If you add 5 people to the car, call it 80kg per person so your you goto about 2.2 tons, then the damage number would be about ~24, but divided by 5 you end up with 4.8 (so a fully loaded car does about half the damage per person compared to one with a single occupant).
The thing is of course on some level this is large scaling factors applied to small numbers - i.e. tires still don't fail that quickly anyway, neither do roads.
Conversely it is actually weird to see that on this one metric, numerous self driving EV taxis is actually better.
Subways produce a ton of particulate too. Stations are always dusty and transit operators don’t seem to care about investing in better ventilation for the platform.
You can do the same by engine braking with a stick shift, tapping the break only to hold you still at the end if you really wanted to. And the car could be a 2000lb subcompact.
