I mean, the article only provides individual tips to fight the global problem of air solution. Extinguishing candles with a lid and avoiding incense won't do shit in the grand scheme of things. It's like putting a bandaid on an open leg fracture.
> IMO, cities should just ban almost all car traffic from the centres so people can live car free without being poisoned.
This would have a much greater impact on the problem for sure, but sadly nobody likes that, some people think owning a car is freedom while it's slavery.
put urban roads (and parking) underground, and use industrial scrubbers at air exchange. expensive but worth it. tax fossil fuels/carbon to subsidize this and internalize the environmental costs.
Where I live it takes several years to paint a pedestrian crossing. Even if we decided to put all traffic underground, nobody alive today would see that project finished.
Often things are said to the effect of it being weird that we're capable of spaceflight, but infrastructure is too hard and expensive. The lack of fluidity in the labor market, i.e. pinning people to a field or worse, a company, for a lifetime creates a lot of that inefficiency, I think.
I know the idea is that specialization is good for everyone, and people doing certain kinds of work should be good at it, but I think allowing more diversity in the types of work people do, more intermingling, and more fluidity are realistic goals with a lot of advantages. We already have a big problem in matching qualified people with jobs efficiently. If we get substantially better at that, we can do it more rapidly, and allocate resources much more intelligently, since demands change in every profession as things develop. I would actively welcome breaks in my knowledge work to do the many types of "dumb labor" I can do when it's useful. It's something to ponder.
i’ve had streets near me repaved twice, many repainted more than twice, and a water main under a street replaced/repaired twice, in the past 10 years, while other pothole-riddled streets nearby are still waiting their turn. it’s inscrutable why that is.
yes, but this way, we could have our (expensive) cake and eat it too. we could free up the above ground streets for electric buses, pedestrians, bikes, malls/parks, and the like, make cities denser/more walkable, remove asphalt/concrete to lower the heat island effect, add trees/plants everywhere, and all sorts of human centered stuff. it’s not so realistic (though the boring company may help with that), but what a vision it is!
To some extent yes. I remember one of my first experiences in Chicago taking the Metra Electric from Hyde Park to downtown and getting out at the north entrance which dumps you out at Lower Water Street, which is very disorienting if you are not familiar with the area.
That's a more ideal solution, but it's probably faster to move than for a city to make changes like that. You can try to stock up on food and grow crops to minimize driving.
IMO, cities should just ban almost all car traffic from the centres so people can live car free without being poisoned.