Most restaurants have a way to signal the kitchen that an inspector has arrived and they'll quickly toss everything they are cooking into the garbage because it's cheaper than getting a fine. Former mayor Bloomberg's planned crack down on soda drinks was more about issuing fines for not serving precisely 8oz of liquid - though the next mayor dropped it and all the special order measuring cups for the health inspectors went to a warehouse.

I've witnessed a fleets of NYPD tow trucks clearing out streets of UPS and Fedex trucks. They know what time the delivery companies hit various parts of town and they are ready for them.

Recently the New York fire inspectors have started fining landlords for debris in the hallways (debris = amazon deliveries left at the door). So now if the delivery comes to the door you have to get it before the building super throws it away to save the landlord from being fined, if it gets left by the mailbox then the food delivery people steal it on their way out. No winning.

About ten years ago there was a good samaritan going around feeding parking meters to keep people from being fined. He was arrested and taken to jail. They let him go without charges but not before he spent the weekend - because the person who processes releases doesn't work on weekends they said. I think he sued and ended up settling out of court.

Someone else in this thread pointed out "the city does not make getting the payout easy and it requires many hours of follow up to maybe get paid." So now we should be at least a bit cynical, and start asking questions about why it's so difficult to get paid. Maybe legitimate reasons like verification that they aren't just making it up I guess? If a fine is issued though then can't we simply assume the person reporting was being honest? Who benefits from a difficult collection process?

A difficult payout process disincentivizes reporting, but only after you discover the hassle of it. So this could be a quick cash grab w/ dismal long term benefits once the word spreads. They should definitely fix that (assuming they want to).

NYC's arbitrary enforcement schemes should make even the most ardent statist cringe.

The police said it’s usually a two-for. The people get paid to dispose of bulk items that the sanitation department won’t accept then they dump it in someone’s driveway and pocket the cash. Then they come back a few days later to see if it’s still there, if it is then they know the house is unoccupied and they’ll come gut it for copper. Luckily I came home before anything else happened.

The streets all smell like piss and walking at night means seeing tons of rats.

The subways are absolutely disgusting and there's always a car that reeks of shit (you can tell because that car will have far fewer people than the surrounding cars).

I don't know if New Yorkers have never visited any other cities, or if they're just so blind from all the NYC-exceptionalism (Ayy if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere!!!) but that city is disgusting.

A subway car that’s vacated due to smells, while it happens, is extremely rare, and the average station is just as clean as any I saw in Rome or Paris. There are definitely exceptions to that, and the worst case is worse than what you’d see in the rest of the developed world, but it’s still an exceptional experience to see something or smell something terrible in the subway system.

I’m always going to new events, parks, restaurants, museums. Transportation’s extensive, cheap, and quick for the most part. There are rivers, beaches, woods, bays. Biking is becoming a real joy with all the new bike infrastructure. Love the new outdoor dining scene, the people, incredible amounts of architecture styles.

And besides, we upgraded from piss smell, to weed smell! Much better.

I have experienced pretty much everything in GP’s post (although the way they go on you’d think it’s a near constant which I don’t think is true even in the rougher neighborhoods like Brownsville that I’ve lived in) at some point or another… they’re just not the parts of NYC that I focus on I guess.

That’s what I think about when I’m in NYC, and sure I see the piles of trash… I just don’t really care. It’s a necessary part of having a gigantic megalopolis. Are there downsides? Certainly. Calling it Stockholm Syndrome when I and many others in my situation have both lived elsewhere and could leave tomorrow? That just seems like a laughable failure to see things through a different view point than you have.

It’s fine not to like a place, it’s the whole “I don’t like it so you must be deluded by ‘if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere’ and have Stockholm Syndrome” part that seems a bit like a mindset that’s not great at accepting other view points or ideas.

there are many other giant megalopolises in the world that somehow manage not to have giant piles of trash everywhere. london and tokyo for example. demand better from your government.

this is fine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWZk24MA7TE

“The streets all smell like piss” genuinely sounds like a take from someone that visited midtown while on a three day conference and then left. There are some disgusting streets, no doubt. There’s too much trash on the street on trash days. On rare occasions a subway car has homeless people in it and it smells. None of this is great by any means. But the idea that all New Yorkers are walking around smelling piss 24/7 and saying “huh, guess it must be like this everywhere” doesn’t pass any kind of sanity test.

Reminds me of the Principal Skinner meme: “am I wrong? No, it is the eight million inhabitants of NYC who are all wrong”

Some streets do smell like piss at some times. The building superintendents periodically hose off the front sidewalks to wash away the dog urine, especially during the hottest parts of the summer. Especially on nice streets.

in my city we somehow contrive not to have any streets at all smell like piss, ever. in the civilized world we stopped using streets as outdoor latrines over a century ago.

Then, I think we can pin-point exaggerations from objective truth. I admit, when I visited NY, it was very nice but we went around central park and such.

I just dislike this law, this is a great way to make NY city worse - pitting citizens against each other. There are other ways to solve this issue through proper law enforcement channels.

Unfortunately for New York, the closest they have is NYPD, which I don't think I've ever heard anything good about - but have heard plenty of bad.

Cleaning the subway cars overall is a joke - they have people with mops at the terminus stations and they get 30secs to 2 minutes to mop the first and last cars before they go out again. All the cars in the middle just accumulate debris and stains until the train is taken out of service for regular maintenance.

One side effect of the pandemic is I have to leave the apartment so infrequently that I can take Lyft everywhere and still come out ahead of what I used to spend on metrocards - I don’t miss riding the subway at all.

Better than the old pollution from the 1970s.

When I first came to the US, in the late '60s, or early '70s (I think I visited before moving to the US), we came on a ship, which docked in New York.

My mother brought me out onto the deck, one night, to smell New York. We couldn't see the lights yet, but I remember that nasty, metallic stench.

In most places, when an identifiable group of people, (e.g. city government employees) is such a bunch of jerks to everyone they would normally be abused right back until they stop being jerks.

Imagine if the government of Detroit acted that way. The inspector would come out to find their car on blocks three days a week and nobody would admit to having seen anything.

* Illegal parking and idling are out of control throughout the city. This has been the case for years, but it’s reached new heights since the pandemic. Trucks and cars often idle because they’re parked illegally.

* The city DOT, for a variety of reasons, is reluctant to redesign streets to prevent this behavior (e.g. by adding loading zones)

* The police are reluctant to ticket for this behavior, and frequently idle in their police cars throughout the city.

If a bounty system feels desperate/problematic, it is. Our city agencies have failed to deal with this problem and people are pissed about it. My hope is that this program is a bandaid until larger structural issues with the DOT and NYPD are addressed. We’ll see.

Walk down any street in Greenwich Village and you'll see a plethora of $100k+ cars. We continue to subsidize parking for literal millionaires because Dave in Crown Heights is afraid if we get rid of street parking in Greenwich Village they're going to come for his parking space next and he can't afford paid parking. Why does Dave need a car at all living in Brooklyn? Good question...

So we have people who park in the same place without moving for 11 years [1].

[1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-york-street-bookselle_n_9...

I'm not defending the vast street parking problem (although you underestimate how many of those cars parked in Greenwich Village are actually not residents there at all but traveling from outer boroughs or LI or NJ). But it's a little bit more nuanced than, rich people with all the cars.

The amount of cars in Manhattan swells considerably during the week due to commuters, for one thing. You can observe the traffic patterns on Google Maps each direction on the FDR, Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, etc.

Maybe resident parking permits should be considered.

Sounds like Dave is right to be worried. In the span of one sentence you went from mocking the notion that some people are defending millionaires’ parking because of a slippery slope that would lead to them losing their own parking, to begging the question on why this non-millionaire even needs a car.

Edit: It feels like something along the lines of: “Don’t be crazy, we are not coming after your parking stall. We are coming after your car.”

This question bugs me quite a bit, mainly because it shouldn't matter why someone needs a parking space; there are many valid reasons that I'm sure you could think of if you spent even a minute thinking about it. If someone does actually need a parking space, there should be some way to have one that takes into consideration scarcity and other market forces so Dave can decide whether it is worth it to live there/continue living there based on his own needs and means. Many cities have systems for this that usually involve permits that need to be paid for and while I'm sure none of them are perfect, it's better than subsidizing spaces or outright banning them. And if the locality decides that there just can't be any parking spaces, so be it, but it should not be because those deciding are completely lacking empathy and are so unimaginative that they can't think of a reason why someone might want something as benign and common as having a car in a city. Driving, parking, private car ownership, etc as a whole and clearly imperfect, but the reality of public transportation, especially outside of cities and in the United States, is abysmal.

Street parking is figuratively the third rail of nyc politics.

": in effect : VIRTUALLY —used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible"

DeBlasio is said to have been very loose on parking enforcement of 'placard abuse' as they call it. It's pretty obvious downtown during the week and also downtown Brooklyn. The City picks winners and losers just like that.

[0]: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/01/14/up-next-for-dot-city-...

Couldn't they just park illegally and not idle. I'm a driver who's parked illegally many a time and never even considered leaving the engine idling. Do you get some sort of ticket exemption if the engine is going?

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.

I kid, I'm down for this sort of citizen engagement when it comes to externalities.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Pareto Distribution: 20% of the Y cause 80% of the Z

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

Assuming that the OP is talking exclusively about asthetics when they specifically mention winter performance is bad faith.

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).

Is there a source for this claim? Also, what year is the modern engine cutoff? 2000 or 2010?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

Ths city's boroughs spent millions of pounds marking and building cycle lanes which are useless if there's no penalty for using them as a disruptive free parking spot. Having similar detection and penalties to cars parked in the middle of a road would improve traffic flow.

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.

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 rodent and decide to accept the capex, now in just few years it start to be economically interested. E.v. are still too expensive for their MTBF but I'm pretty sure in few years with energy prices that keep skyrocketing they'll became interesting. As a result I'll spend far more than without the neoliberal economy but still far less then embracing it. Most who live in classic homes and cities will simply have no choices: they'll sell their own homes to some private giant that will rebuild them in new homes for who can afford to buy or rent, or to the State in exchange of provided social housing at provided condition reaching the (in)famous "In 2030 you'll own nothing" from the World Economic Forum agenda. If you are in the UK I suggest Mark Carney (ex head of UK national bank) book "Value(s): Building a Better World for All" it's essentially written black on white, of course, with different tones, but equal picture for the future.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s like dude… this isn’t some secret loophole to getting to park somewhere that’s not allowed because another place is inconvenient.

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.

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.

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.