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Got invited to carting on the weekend. Can't stop thinking that it would be one of the things to go in the case of the worldwide socialist revolution. Due to pollution and all
They can be redesigned to be less ecologically harming, I'm not an expert on go karts or pollution, but I think the issues can be in the tracks and how much space they take for an entertainement, which could perhaps be fixed by making the track a park when it's not being used, modifying the vehicles and the road surface, like by looking at the image here there's a lot of unnecessary stuff
That seems rather efficient in terms of space. Making race tracks of any kind multi use is tricky. At least with full size tracks (think 5km road length or so) park area can definitely be made in and around, but cart tracks are pretty compact. In that image I don't see anything that can be cut out while maintaining safety and functionality. Some races also use temporary road circuits but that brings in other issues from the massive effort required to set up and take down for just one event per year.
I think the primary pollutants from car racing in general are exhaust and micro-plastics (rubber from the tyres wears off on the road and gets into the environment). Both can certainly be mitigated.
Even so, I wonder to what extent we'll allow polluting activity on a small scale for hobbies and entertainment. Of course polluting just for fun isn't necessary (fireworks for example) but amateur/hobby sports definitely have a place in a socialist society.
They could also develop electric go-karts as well. They don't need to be powered by fossil fuels. My local go-kart place is just inside a big warehouse and they just move tires around to make differently shaped tracks, that could certainly be an option for it rather than building a whole dedicated racetrack.
this already exists
If we banned cars and introduced free public transport, go-karters could have the roads practically to themselves without needing bespoke racing tracks that only have one use. There might be pedestrians and cyclists but the cyclists are used to it because of cars and pedestrians are slow, so easily avoided.
Electric carts go brrrrrrrrr
They'd have to be ground effect based or something as well, because of the tires and flooring
What's wrong with the tires and flooring?
They let off rubber dust and plastic particles into the atmosphere
Okay but the amounts must be pretty minuscule right? I mean compared to regular cars? How many go kart tracks can there be in the entire world? Can't be more than ten thousand.
Oh for sure, and the number of karts themselves is likely lower than that of regular cars, plus they've smaller engines anyway.
But it's more in terms of what the other folks mentioned as "pollution as entertainment", like fireworks. Can't help but wonder if the future generations will look at the entertainment of our era the way we do at things like fox hunting (the one with the hounds) or human sacrifice
Some amount of pollution is inevitable. The natural environment has the capacity to absorb and deal with it up to a certain amount. The problem is that the scale of modern society is so huge that the amount of pollution we are producing is orders of magnitude more than the environment can absorb. The use of cars as it is currently practiced is not sustainable. But if we eliminated the use of cars for transportation and were only left with forms of entertainment like go-karts that probably would be sustainable.
One thing i am sure of is that the number of go-karts is not just "likely lower" but certainly much, much lower, as in many orders of magnitude lower. So these two problems are really not even comparable.
Out of curiosity i tried doing some rough maths on this.
First i looked up how many go-kart tracks there are in the world and didn't come up with a definitive answer, but i did find that there are around 1.5k in the US.I think it's safe to assume that since this form of entertainment was popularized in the US and the US has the culture most obsessed with cars that the US would have the most by far on a per capita basis. I also don't think that go-karting is very widespread in the global south, so we're left with only the "developed" world and out of that the US likely makes up the largest chunk. Putting all this together I think that even my 10k upper limit is probably too high an estimate.
What is the average number of go-karts that a track owns? Again i have to estimate but i would say it's probably somewhere between ten for the smallest tracks and a hundred for the biggest. Though even the biggest tracks probably can't fit all of their vehicles on the track at one time. And like cars they also aren't running 24/7. So all in all i think you could estimate that there are maybe somewhere in the vicinity of 250k actively used go-karts in the world.
As for cars, i've seen put the total number of cars in the world at something like 1.5 billion, 20% of which are in the US (which i expect to see reflected in the proportional number of go-karts, possibly even more skewed toward the US and Europe since i don't know how popular go-karting is in Asia). I don't think this number includes heavier vehicles like trucks that are mainly used for transportation. Anyway let's say that of those only 80% are actually being frequently used and the rest sit mostly idle. That still leaves us with 1.2 billion.
I know this was all basically a bunch of very rough estimates but i think it's safe to say there are at least five thousand times more cars than go-karts in the world.
Nah, f1 can hit the bricks. A little put put engine that runs on a thimble of high test fuel but still feels like you are wrestling a cheetah is perfect. Picture one of those little beasts with a tiny electric motor several of your drunkest comrades. That is what Stalin fought for.
Well said