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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
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They also don't factor in the greenwashing of using solar panels to cover wasteful cars, when it would be much better for the environment to not have a parking lot to put solar panels over.
It sucks that for the past 50-100 years, places have been built somewhere on the scale between favoring cars to outright hostile to any other form of transportation. On the plus side, most of these places are so shoddily built that it is cheaper to tear them down than to maintain them. So destroying suburbia and replacing it with walkable neighborhoods is actually quite profitable for everyone except the car industry, not to mention beneficial for everyone living there.
We're not getting rid of parking lots at e.g. hospitals any time soon, and big unshaded parking lots are fucking miserable environments.
Sure, we shouldn't put solar panels above most parking lots, but they're utterly obvious for the aforementioned situations.
Why the fuck would you want a parking lot at a hospital? Imagine surrounding a place where every second matters and where tons of people have physical disabilities with a massive field of useless metallic obstacles that everyone has to move around and can get murdered by. Can you imagine someone who needs to be driven having to walk all the way across a parking lot because the spots closer by are all full. Can you imagine being blind or old or anything else that makes you unsuitable for driving but perfectly capable of taking public transit and having to ask someone for help and cross a fucking parking lot to get medical care?
Or... Imagine instead if the default way of going to a hospital was to take the subway, with a level boarding station right beneath the hospital with elevators that can take you immediately to the right department. And in the rare cases that someone needs to be driven to a hospital, the taxi or ambulance doesn't need to dodge the hundreds of people who were perfectly capable of walking or the giant metal boxes they leave behind.
I don't think suburbia even needs to be destroyed and left fallow; anything with a motor smaller than a car works fine with car infrastructure, as long as there's not shittons of cars. It can just be densified by building regular parks or buildings where the parking lots were if the use of cars were restricted. My current motorbike gets 100mpg, my old one 160, and there's some electrics I've seen that easily keep up with traffic.
Unfortunately, and I learned this relatively recently, motorcycles are worse for GHG emissions than cars because of catalytic converters (and probably just better combustion in general).
Agreed on electric, though.
Euro 3 went into effect in 2007, nearly all bikes made in the last 20 years have cats.
As far as combustion goes, there's way more variability between a nc750 revving to 6500, a Ducati reving to 16500, and a Honda Wave with 110ccs displacement. You can probably get a lot of answers.
Even the worst, most pollution inducing motorcycle on the planet doesn't hold a candle to my 90s truck.
Hell, even most modern trucks are better despite being massive, considering the improvements to fuel efficiency and such...
Arguing a motorcycle is worse because one specific area of its carbon footprint is slightly higher than cars depending on model of both is weird to me.
And I don't remember the last time I saw a motorcycle without the obvious cat hugging the engine before it winds to the muffler. Note: usually the motorcycles I get to see close are people who are more environment conscious than your average redneck. I'm sure the shop down the road specializes in removing them. I KNOW they offer "diesel tuning services" to let people "roll coal" so it wouldn't surprise me...
I saw a few in Osaka, but yeah its quite rare even on 90s bikes.
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Do you have any links to any recent info? This link makes it seem like its still not great, bit it like to see actual hard data.
https://gearjunkie.com/motors/motorcycle-vs-vehicle-emissions