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#automobility

1 post1 participant0 posts today
Public
BellingenNSW

Highway expansions and road widening
How America (Australia) Can Break Its Highway Addiction

"After a century of rampant roadbuilding, the U.S. highway network is ubiquitous, dominating the American landscape in bucolic rural settings as well as dense urban ones. Rather than being a tool for mobility, it has become a monument to an auto-centric lifestyle that fouls the air and depletes the public coffers. Neither the country nor the planet can afford to keep expanding it."

"At the federal level, even asking questions about the collective climate impact of highway building appears verboten."
>>
slate.com/business/2024/08/con
#Sprawl #roads #highways #expansion #cars #automobility #industry #asphalt #Motordom #MobilityDesign #ClimateBreakdown #pollution #NSW #CoffsHarbour #bellingen #GlenifferRoad

The 14-kilometre Coffs Harbour bypass project for $2.2 billion. That's a lot of cycle and footpaths. What active mobility?
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BellingenNSW

How Europe crashed its car industry
Short-sighted policy gave China the upper hand

"The production and consumption of cars have long marked decisive junctures in Western political history...Symbolically, cars represented historical progress conceived as individual and democratic freedom." >>
unherd.com/2025/01/how-europe-
#cars #CarIndustry #deindustrialization #TheWest #progress #energy #transition #Fossilfuel #automobility #EV #democracy

UnHerd · How Europe crashed its car industryBy Helen Thompson
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BellingenNSW

Australia's lack of fuel security

"Our way of life
depends upon cheaper oil and fuel coming from overseas, but it does so at the cost of our security and resilience...The thought of not having food in cupboards and fridges or prescription medicines would likely exercise people's minds a lot more than the ill-informed thoughts they had during COVID about toilet paper." >>
abc.net.au/news/2025-01-07/aus

Tangled up in oil in Petrotopia
mastodon.au/@Bellingen/1137730
#energy #vulnerabilities #fuel #FossilFuels #cars #oil #petroleum #fuel #mobility #dependency #EnergyDependency #Australia #infrastructure #automobility #roads #malls #highways #Petrotopia #PetroMelancholia #CarDependency #MobilityDesign #ClimateBreakdown #transformation #societies #MiddleEast #FuelSecurity #MSO #WayofLife

The First Fleet Ships bringing supplies
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BellingenNSW

Tangled up in oil in Petrotopia

Imagine life on an Island that has to import 91% of fuel from overseas.
And the entire matrix of the place has been set up for oil dependency a century ago.

Without a car there is no mobility (in Petrotopia)
Without a car one can't get stuff (made /transported by fossil fuels)
Without a car one can't get to work or other places
Without a car one can't drop off the kids
Without a car one can't empty the dogs
Without a car one can't go for a walk
Without a car /mower one can't do the endless lawns
Without a car/ boat/ plane one can't re-create or have a holiday

Australia is reliant on imports for around 91% of fuel consumption.
australiainstitute.org.au/post

Bondre, N. (2023). Petromobility and Energy Coloniality in Puerto Rico: Reading Luis Rafael Sánchez’s La Guaracha Del Macho Camacho. Green Letters, 27(2), 219–238. doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.
#energy #FossilFuels #cars #oil #petroleum #fuel #mobility modernity #dependency #EnergyDependency #Australia #islands #infrastructure #automobility #roads #malls #highways #Petrotopia #PetroMelancholia #CarDependency #MobilityDesign #ClimateBreakdown #transformation #societies

The Australia Institute · Australia 91% reliant on foreign oil: Research ReportA new research report by The Australia Institute has revealed the country has only increased its reliance on imported transport fuels since the federal
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BellingenNSW

Declining reading rates in Australia

Australians are reading less than other countries. They are buying and reading fewer books than people in many other countries. Why?
Car dependency, sprawling suburbia and a public transport desert do not allow for a culture of reading (while commuting).
>>
theconversation.com/australian
#books #reading #culture #cars #sprawl #commuting #mindsets #harm #automobility #PublicTransport #PublicHealth #MobilityDesign #FossilFuels #dependency

The ConversationAustralians are reading less than other countries, a new report shows. Why?Reading rates in Australia are falling – and price might be less of a factor than we think. We look at how Australia compares internationally, and what other countries are doing to boost reading.
Public
Mikko Tuomi

Despite the widespread harm caused by #cars and #automobility, governments, corporations, and individuals continue to facilitate it by expanding roads, manufacturing larger vehicles, and subsidising parking, electric cars, and resource extraction.

One in 34 deaths are caused by cars and automobility with 1 670 000 deaths per year.

Cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people since their invention. sciencedirect.com/science/arti

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BellingenNSW

The tyranny of automobility and sprawl

While the Bellingen /Gleniffer area is transitioning from an ‘idyllic tourist town’ into a ‘normal Aussie suburb’ (of Coffs Harbour), road congestion gets everyone stuck in traffic.

Car dependent motorists in their SUVs and bloated oversized trucks demand more and wider roads, larger car parking and a right to pothole-free roads for their 'sports utility vehicles’.

Extreme commuting for the necessaries of life are conducted in big private vehicles powered by fossil fuel. An aggregate of ugly big-box stores (large format retail, Coffs) with hostile giant car parks deliver what consumers desire. These consumption hubs are mostly inaccessible to pedestrians and can be dangerous ‘non-places’ (Marc Augé).

The mobility design of old school traffic engineers responds to the sprawling expansion with more of the same: more roads, wider roads and bypassing the last bypass. They call it ‘upgrades’.

As the latest $2.2 billion highway or forest road ‘upgrade/s’ are blasting their way through the landscape, they are silent about the ‘public bads’: the destroyed biodiversity habitat, the downgraded neighbourhoods, the violence and the polluted biosphere.

The ‘normality’ of automobility, or the 'car in the head' in petromodernity together with regulatory inertia make a transition to alternative land uses, energy systems, mobilities and ways of being a challenge.

#sprawl#suburbia#mobility
Public
BellingenNSW

Transport within earth system boundaries

"A sustainable mobility and transport system requires assessment of its impacts on climate, land, water, aerosols, amongst others, to ensure that it operates within safe and just boundaries."

Within a finite ecospace "transport (road, rail, air, water) using fossil fuels needs to be phased out as soon as possible to avoid too much of a transgression of the 1.5 °C target."
>>
Gupta, J., Chen, Y. & Rammelt, C. Transport within earth system boundaries. npj. Sustain. Mobil. Transp. 1, 5 (2024). doi.org/10.1038/s44333-024-000
#FossilFuels #transport #pollution #EcoSpace #PlanetaryBoundaries #limits #climate #roads #cars #mobility #automobility #MobilityDesign

Public
BellingenNSW

Recycling toxic car tyres through the body and the environment

When tyres are used, tiny particles of rubber are released and accumulate on road surfaces. These particles can be washed away by rainwater into storm drains, ultimately ending up in nearby water bodies such as rivers, lakes, and oceans.The particles contribute to a range of negative health impacts including heart, lung, developmental, reproductive, and cancer outcomes.

Tyre wear particle (TWP) are generated by contact between tyre and road surface during driving, acceleration and braking.>
sciencedirect.com/science/arti

Tires are a complex source of pollutants including whole tires, particles, compounds, and chemicals. As they wear, tires emit pollutants via atmospheric, aquatic, and terrestrial pathways.>
sciencedirect.com/science/arti

Tyre wear particle emissions have outweighed those from the exhaust and are potential for microplastic pollution.>
sciencedirect.com/science/arti

Tyre wear particles pollute the environment, the air we breathe, the water run-off from roads and has compounding effects on waterways and agriculture.
imperial.ac.uk/news/243333/pri
#cars #roads #vehicles #EVs #speed #machinery #pollution #FossilFuels #microplastics #harm #regulation #automobility #TRWP #TWP #toxicology #ecotoxicity #PAH #water #runoff #waste #food #health #risk

SUV parking on tree roots, Church St. Bellingen
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BellingenNSW

How sound can boost beneficial soil microbes to heal nature

By this, we mean barriers to protect ecosystems from potentially undesirable noises. For instance, we’re asking questions such as:

do traffic and industrial noises harm the ecosystem?
>>
theconversation.com/the-biodiv
#noise #vibration #pollution #roads #cars #trucks #loggingIndustry #ecosystems #soil #Biodiversity #FossilFuel #machinery #automobility

Soil, also known as 'dirt'. No road is ever wide enough.
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