You can't have bigger markets in smaller areas with cars because the cars take up so much space. Public transport gives access while still allowing for density, which provides a much larger market. The only ones losing out are the auto makers and oil companies.
I live in GA outside of Atlanta and rent is already tough. I've been to cities with not exactly amazing but serviceable public transportation (various parts of greater NYC and Chicago) and loved them. I've tried to use busses elsewhere, though it often meant 3 hours wasted to go to work, with similar time wasted after (hourly buss schedules and multiple transfers).
I have an electric car now, work from home, and try to avoid having to drive much, but there isn't much more I can afford to do atm. An bike would be nice but even that'll take money I'm still recovering, and some places I go to even just a couple times a month has no public transportation. I'd love if it did, but I have to use EV for now.
I think when most people decry EVs, we're not talking about individual EV owners but the system which forces basically everyone to move around by personal vehicle. Sure, they'll be the occasional person who says, "I bike 28km to and from work at a very physical job where I often work overtime. I have to share the road with traffic. I don't know why everyone can't commute by bike," (this was the gist of a comment I read on reddit years ago). However, most people understand that changes can't just be personal responsibility.
With the information we have about your life, it sounds like you made a reasonable decision. If you can continue to be mindful about the decisions you make and advocate for a better world when you can, I think you're doing a great job!
When we lived in L.A., we were near a train station. My wife sometimes took the train to work and sometimes drove. Even in L.A. traffic, it took her half the time to get to work by car because of how far away we lived from where she worked. It really sucked, but that was the reality. She had to get up at 4:30 am to take the train and 6 am to drive. She did carpool, which is better than driving alone, but it's hard to convince people to get away from cars if you have to make sacrifices to your day like that.
I'd call them less a solution, more an attempt at harm reduction.
And the only things they'll properly resolve are tailpipe emissions and idling noise. At least one of which is of no concern when dealing with the externalities of car traffic.
If you really want to solve the environmental impact of transportation, you minimise the need for transportation. Put homes and workplaces close together, offer mass alternatives for the pairs where you really do need motorised mobility solutions, and minimise the number of situations where it's more convenient to take a car. Ban on-street parking and heavily tax off-street parking. Need to park your car in the city? Hope you can afford to pay an arm and a leg. Oh, you can't? Looks the Park & Ride at the train station two towns over is the nearest alternative. Don't worry though, the trains go six times an hour and a day ticket is, like, four quid max.
[...] Put homes and work locations close together [...]
The best hope for that to have marginal improvement is a move towards remote work, mostly feaseable for white collar activities.
Anything else is constantly pushed outside and away from residential areas.
I know a few stupid examples of very well planned and thought out industrial parks and long time industrial sites forced to vacate because residential were built 2 or 3km away and residents did not enjoy the movement going back and forward (not through the residential areas, mind that) of trucks and other machines or the sounds coming from a factory when the conditions were just right to carry it over the distance. Needless to say companies simply moved away or closed down activity and the previously complaining residential areas became high unemployment areas.
It's the same absurd reasoning behind people building houses in the middle of nowhere and then demanding power, water and communications connections.
Hello, I'm Albertan. Stop saying this. Our governments maintain roads in between these cities every year, there is no reason they couldn't have been train lines instead. Roads are far more expensive than many realize.
Once upon a time, all cities were connected by train, and we ripped it all up to build roads instead. Sure, it's going to cost money to build these up again -- that's what happens when we make a mistake, we have to pay for it in one way or another. But connecting smaller towns and cities is not the herculean impossible task that people seem to want to pretend it is.
There ARE major urban areas in North America. People are not evenly spread out across the landmass equally. Connecting these first is obviously the goal, because that will take care of 70% of the problem already. And always remember not to make perfect the enemy of good - even if we stopped there we'd be in infinitely better shape than we were before.
We've done a ton of that. The Acela is great, I've ridden it a bunch. But that kind of thing doesn't scale as efficiently as you would hope. It can serve corridors of people, but not huge continents of hundreds of millions all that well. There are to many places to be.
Look mate, if you're going to shove the "tHe stATeS arE ToO bIG, thus wE cANNot SOlvE The transIt ProbleM" rhetoric on us, please find another place to wallow in your lack of trains while assuming car industry rhetoric as undeniable fact.
Also, your claim has been debunked and reclarified so often that I'm not going to begin to explain just how wrong you are.
You guys are all idiots. A bunch of Europeans lucked into an infrastructure that works with twice the people in half the space, and you act like it was an intentional and smarter design decision in anticipation of a climate crisis. You shipped your most insane people off your continent to become Americans, and their shitty Calvinism has made everything that has always been terrible about Northern Europe even worse.
Now you want to act like anyone who thinks what you propose isn't exactly easy (or democratic) is some kind of corporate fascist. Fuck off, the lot of you.
Solution to what though? Emissions are reduced but not eliminated: when accounting for greenhouse gases emitted during production, EVs start outperforming traditional cars only after 5+ years of use (depending on the type of car). And other factors like tyre dust and road maintenance (due to EVs' higher weight) or resources needed to replace/recycle old batteries are not even included in that balance.
EVs might still be a net positive when compared with traditional cars, but both pale in comparison to public transport and infrastructure oriented towards bikes and pedestrians.
That’s really only because most of our electricity is still produced through fossil fuels. As we move to renewables, that equation will shift rapidly toward net positive much before 5 years. And that’s not accounting for any technological advances (like sodium ion batteries) that happen in that time.
The 5 year figure is from a German study and is based on the German energy mix (which is indeed quite dirty). So yeah, that number will hopefully decrease. But even with that, the "up-front" emissions in EV production are a major issue that is tough to solve and rarely made transparent by EV manufacturers.
The main source is battery production and related to the mining and refinement of their raw materials (source, source). The exact emissions are hard to quantify. That being said, the lifetime emissions of battery EVs are still significantly lower, so it's still a net benefit. For a bigger picture, you can check the references here and here.
I don't think they're even a solution. They're just another scam like hydrogen fuel cells were. They exist to keep people from pushing for the real change we actually need... Just like the decade we lost because people bought the hydrogen fuel cell grift last time.
Oh man, waiting an hour or so for a bus in -30℃ weather is great. Then the bus is inevitably late because it's Edmonton (where public transit doesn't seem to get public funding) and you get to enjoy the great outdoors for another thirty minutes. I'm surprised I still have my toes...
I'm so glad my parents gave me their old truck so I don't really have to deal with that shit any more.
The problem with electric cars is that they're a distraction. They make people think they're part of the solution when they're only partly addressing one of the many problems cars cause. I'm not against people buying them assuming that they're in a position where they need a new car, but advocating for electric cars as a solution is wrong. I read the OP like this, not how you read it.
oh buzz off with your weird essay filled with jabs and fallacies and bad faith. actually I just reread it and I have to ask: what the fuck is wrong with you? you're acting like a white guy who hears two black people talking about racism and leaps in to say "stop calling me racist!" you think this post is calling you out? what the actual fuck is wrong with you?
NO ONE IS SAYING YOU ARE PERSONALLY MORALLY WRONG FOR DRIVING A CAR TODAY IN 2024
that's the whole fucking gist of this entire guy's essay, folks. he thinks criticizing EVs is a personal attack on him and people who don't currently live in walkable cities
I agree this kind of post may play in favour of ICE manufacturers and oil companies but I disagree with the comparison you make between EVs and tobacco patches. EVs are produced and sold in order to replace ICEs in the exact same segment. They do not impact peoples lives significantly and will not change anything in the way cities and activities work now. The example you give is the epitome of a work/life organization which was only made possible by the massification of individual motorized transportation, with all the negative externalities listed in the OP. Yes individual cars are going to be needed for many reasons in the future. But we need to work collectively to make them less convenient and less needed in everyday life.
So the entire metric for 'shithole' to you is based on how many people ride electrified trains? Really? Nothing about, say, their economy or their standard of living or their record on human rights or anything like that?
And the country with the flawless human rights record is what? Iceland because there's no one to oppress since everyone's related to everyone else? Great. The rest of 200-some other countries are shitholes by that measure. Again, not the best metric.
Let's talk about your country now. Where do you live? Will you even volunteer that information?
Riot control vehicle lpt :If you just fill the water cannon tank to half full instead of topping up you save quite a lot over time due to reduced litre/km consumption
Emission laws made big trucks easier to produce than small trucks in the US, I miss the days of the short bed pickup. Still like my 98 taco and use it for hauling hay.
My supermarket does this: if you go shopping with public transport, then you can ask the cashier to have someone deliver the just purchased groceries to your house for 5 euro
Not really, if you're doing your weekly shop all in one go (especially for a family), it can make sense that your weekly shop can be more than you can carry and thus you need something to help you carry it. I wouldn't want to lug 4-5 bags of shopping onto a bus where I'm going to piss someone off because I placed them on the seat, nor do I want to try to balance all that on the handlebars of a bike where a single fuckup or pothole I can't see will lose me lots of money in shopping.
I don't personally do those sorts of large shops, but people are busy and literally schedule this in their week so it's not insane.
Or hey, maybe more people could shop online? With well planned routes it could be more efficient than lots of people all travelling to one place.
Internal combustion engines in standard small size convert 19.65-22.1% of their energy from thermal to kinetic.
The ratio of electron throughput from battery to electric motor can be as LOW as 88% but hovers between 92-98% efficiency.
Even if you had a fuel cell in the back, running electric motors quintuples (5×) the standard energy efficiency owing to the principle of energy quality type preservation in conversion (High to High vs Low to High):
Jevon's Paradox states that improved efficiency of something will only increase its use, and in this case, electric cars will in fact, correlate to car use, and increased mineral demands.
This is a problem you cannot solve endemic to humanity.
The "when transporting a large number of people" is quite a caveat. Sure ok high saturation of public transport / walkable cities is probably achievable with high population density, but in rural / regional areas it's just not possible.
I think you missed the meaning of inefficency on this matter...
While it is undeniable that electric cars have a better supply-to-engine energy efficency than combustion cars, you can understand that they are equiparated in the meme as "equally bad" if you think outside of the box labelled "rubber wheels on high friction asphalt transporting usually a single individual".
Compare that with a tram or a train, transporting multiple passengers with the same electric engine but also steel-on-steel friction on the wheels and the difference between an ICE and EV vehicle becomes a mere approximation error; god I can do the math for you if you want, but I bet even a disel bus with a lot of passengers has a better efficency/passenger ratio than an EV.
So 1 electric car = 4 less carbon liquid fuelled cars worth of pollution.
Also I think this is a bit misleading: if I buy an EV this won't magically destroy 4 (where is this number from?) already existing carbon liquid cars, it merely means you avoided adding 1 other ICE car to the total.
I mean, Jevon's Paradox works because the increased efficiency leads to decreased costs. It's unclear if that's going to be the case for electric cars because the hardware needed to get to that high efficiency is so expensive, and mostly made cost-effective by government assistance (I.e. eletric cars here in the UK do not pay road tax).
I'm also not sure if lowered costs would massively change the number of drivers (at least in the developed world) in the EU there's one car for every two people. We're not going to see that become 5 cars for every two people just because the efficiency increases, demand is too inelastic.
I live in Scandinavia, in one of these walkable cities.
Everyone has a car. Why? Because relying on public transport or walking/biking everywhere is not practical. It's just reality.
That's fair enough. I also own a car, but I try to use alternative means of transport (bus, bike, walk, skateboard) whenever possible. It's the prioritisation of cars over all other modes of transport where I have the issue. My city is riddled with car filled streets criss-crossing all over. There's a plan to take one of the most shop focused streets and make it walkable. It would mean that I would be able to get to work almost the whole way on it. I hope it goes through
I'm not disagreeing with you or most people here for being annoyed by everything being build around car usage.
I just don't see it realistically change. You'd have to rebuild most cities from the ground up and invest ungodly amounts of money into several modes of public transport in every city. It just won't happen.
I've had to use public transport to get to a job I loved in a neighbouring city, due to not having a car at that point. Where a drive with the car would have taken me about 20 minutes one way, the bus+train combo I was forced to use was 1,5 hours including waiting times. It was so draining that I quit that job after 6 months.
If this is the choice you need to make, people will take that car every time because you can't rely on jobs being available within 20 minutes of walking or public transport, most cities aren't build to offer jobs+housing+shopping within a small radius for all the people living there.
The part about going to your job is totally valid. Some jobs can be worked remotely or partly remotely now, but that doesn't apply to all professions, so that is something to keep in mind.
In terms of not being able to realistically change the current cities, many of the best walkable cities prioritized cars first and then changed. It took decades, but they eventually achieved it.
There's this presentation I found after doing some research on the 15-minute cities conspiracy theory, and it was a really interesting talk about how towns and cities can be changed into slower, more accessible ones. It's an hour long but there's a 5 minute segment where it discusses cases where cities have changed from car-based to a more walkable one, in this case Amsterdam and Pontevedra (in Spain).
I recommend checking it out. Here's a link with the timestamp of the start of the section about those cities:
In the section before this one, he discusses the cost of other transport modes versus cars. Building and maintaining infrastructure for cars is waaaaay more expensive than for other methods, so cost isn't an issue. I've included the slide below.
It does, because the batteries for electric cars have a reliance on rare earth metals.
Lol the downvotes are hilarious. We will not solve climate change with electric cars. Public transit in walkable communities with niche uses for cars and trucks are the only way forward.
As seen in the Wikipedia article, sodium ion batteries also require rare earth metal anodes, or toxic materials like mercury which is also bad. Better than lithium ion, but still generally not great. The best option would be aluminum air batteries, which should be easily accessible and are extremely recyclable
perhaps you'd be interested in the fact that I grew up in a very rural area. The nearest city was Rochester, MN, roughly 30 minutes away if you were going 70 in the 55 on US 52. I agree that rural areas will need cars to go from their houses to towns and cities, but I've thought extensively about public transit in rural areas, and I think it's far easier than folks think.
The battery tech is starting to move away from rare earth, with LFP not using cobalt and sodium-ion not using lithium. And in any case, emissions are by far our most pressing problem compared to issues with rare earth extraction.
This is why people hate liberals, and why liberals often migrate over to conservatism: no matter how right you are, there's always someone happy to crap on you for not being right enough.
Don't shit on EVs for merely being one of many solutions that all need to be engaged with. It's not like without EVs, so many people would be rushing to areas of greater density and riding public transit, so your message is not helpful in achieving what you want, and actively angers your allies.
Ah yes conservatism, the famous side of rational thinking and anti-bias thoughts, such as avoiding the perfect solution bias
Your comment having so many upvotes is disgusting
I think both sides are lacking nuance here. If you shit on people getting electric vehicles or just thinking of getting one because that's not far enough: fuck you. But also, for people that just switched or are thinking of getting one but then see something like this and slam into reverse and say "I'm gonna support ICE cars till the day I die to spite those overly hostile woke liberals": fuck you too.
People should be able to take the information in a more nuanced way, and should stop swinging from extreme to extreme which has led to the current fucked state of politics
I don't doubt that that's the case, but I'm just pointing out (humorously) the absurdity of someone who is purportedly a principled individual who cares about things like climate change, civil/human rights, equality, bodily autonomy and most importantly democracy changing to the side that is openly against all of those things because people can be harsh and nasty on the internet sometimes.
Like, if someone really was so flimsy with their morals that they could bend so easily, did they ever really care in the first place? Or were they just looking for an excuse to blame the other side for their fecklessness?
I shit on liberals mostly because of their notions on 'altruistic capitalism'. As soon as they purchase an EV, they think they're out there saving the world and most don't think critically past that.
I really have to agree that it's posts like this that made me give up on left wing politics, in certainly not right wing but I see no hope for the left until fundermental problems are fixed which I don't believe politics or media is capable of addressing.
Further I am absolutely convinced a large portion of the loudest voices on climate change are so obsessed because they desperately want it to be the big doom that fucks up all the impressive things other people are achieving.
Yes that's exactly what I said and exactly everything that went into my thinking, congratulations you're exactly the sort of binary thinking ideolog that makes any sort of political progress impossible on the left.
Again you're just yelling slogans that have nothing to do with what I said because you're absolutely incapable of having a reasonable conversation on anything of substance. This is a perfect example of what we're talking about.
In fact, low speed electric cars are quiet enough that they've considered putting speakers in them to alert pedestrians and make the absence of feedback less disconcerting for drivers.
We're so used to ICE cars that they've contemplated making electric cars pretend that they have an ICE.
They already do this in Europe and other countries where mixed car/pedestrian environments are more common.
Electric cars must have some form of audible signature, usually a quiet whirring sound.
You can be happy about the step in the right direction and still acknowledge that it is by all means a half measure.
The reason this makes people so unhappy is we have a clock on our planet due to the amount of carbon we're releasing.
It's doubly frustrating when we've had the solutions to these issues for a long time but lobbying by the motor industry has kept them out of hands of the public.
I think fear grips people at every angle and none of us are brave enough to accept bold action for positive change in our society. It seems like most people are just retracting instead.
I vaguely remember that "Ye" (formerly Kanye West) once said something like he formed a think tank to build a city but the thing stopping his team was that "Ye" didn't understand any of the concepts and he ran it into the ground.
I want public transportation, I think everyone wants it at this point but no no one understands why we need it. They all just want to escape.
(This message was brought to you by the new 2024 Ford Escape: just hit the road and escape to paradise)
There's no comparison to the personal freedom of having a car versus being dependent on others to ferry you around. That's why America will always be built around our great car infrastructure. We will never give up our freedom to roam our huge awesome land.
Nothing like freedom like actively removing people from having multiple choices of transit by making illegal to build anything that isn't dependent on cars.
Nothing like freedom like being forced to spend thousands on a several ton machine to do any task outside your home.
Nothing like freedon like being forced to pay predatory insurance to private corporations in order to be legally allowed to drive your vehicle.
Nothing like freedom like being dependent on oil companies that actively lobby against you in order to drive the vehicle that you are forced to own.
Nothing like freedom like having infustructure that denies poor people and disabled people from participating in society.
Nothing like freedom like having no independence if you are too old, too young, too intoxicated, or too disabled to drive.
Nothing like freedom like being forced to have a license issued by your government in order to be independent.
Nothing like freedom like being forced to use a vehicle that spies on you and collects information such as your sexual activity, immigration status, 'private' conversations, location, and much more.
And here again we see the typical attempt to put words in somebody's mouth. I never said anything about what poor people deserve, that's your words, not mine.
When you don't have a substantial rebuttal, you just make up a strawman argument.
IMO everyone, regardless of economic stature, deserves every form of freedom legitimately available in society. For this example, if a poor person couldn't afford a car I would suggest a cheap used motorcycle. I've bought a couple of those, one was $900 and the other was $2500.
This is incredibly insane when you consider the cost incurred to maintain a vehicle. No poor person would do this in the right mind it would be nothing but a debt trap. It's shameful that public transit is downright near illegal and most metropolitan areas in North America and it is the best solution get over it
I would argue that a fast, frequent and comprehensive public transport system gives you more personal freedom. Being able to easily get around without having to worry about piloting a heavy vehicle, without the burden of maintenance, and being flexible once out due to not needing to worry about where you're storing your car. Plug the gaps with (electric and/or cargo) bikes for shorter trips and car share for longer ones and you have a much better, more equitable transport system.
All public transport vehicles are heavier than my personal vehicle though. Also public transport doesn't provide the freedom of choosing any destination that you want, and taking yourself there on your own schedule. That's what I was talking about.
You aren't piloting a public transport vehicle, a professional is and you are free to not worry about it.
A frequent and comprehensive public transport system does allow for that freedom, without all of the burdens of car ownership. Bikes and car share can be used to fill in the gaps when the public transport isn't comprehensive enough.
I'm sure this is unpopular this community but I feel like "fuck cars" folks are either living in a dream world where public transport can answer everyone's transportation needs.
If you live in a city with all the amenities you need where public transport is good and economically viable sure, "Fuck cars", but if you don't...
If you only have the option to drive and it looks like it will never change where you live, then yes, driving electric is better than driving an ICE car. You're not the problem for needing to live your life with the limited options you have access to. However, that does not mean the intrinsic problems with cars disappear the instant they become electric, and this meme is mainly meant to respond to the techbro people who think just because electric cars exist now it makes transit obsolete or it solves literally everything wrong with cars in general, and use that to actively resist public transportation or attempt to turn public opinion against it. I should have added additional context to make that clearer.
Well I do drive electric now but I could not get by without a car. Honestly I would love it if public transport were viable for everyone. In London and Zurich I have experienced public transport that worked. Where I live a 1 hour car journey can mean a 3 or 4 hour trip by public transport and only if you are travelling at the right time of day. Unfortunately I don't necessarily get to choose when I make some of those trips because it is part of my job.
Unfortunately here, public transport is slow, expensive and unreliable here.
I know electric cars don't solve everything, and maybe this meme is not exactly what I'm responding to, but for a lot of people, public transport is just not a viable alternative.
Like I said I know it's not going to be a popular sentiment here.
I'm not a farmer, my nearest grocery store is 8 miles away. It's rural and the cost of living is extremely cheap. it also snows a ton and often drops to sub zero temps.
It doesn't. But that's okay, because nobody gives a shit about special snowflakes way off the tail end of the bell curve like you -- solving the problem for the 80% of everybody else, for whom reasonable solutions do apply, is plenty good enough!
Demanding that any solution be perfect enough to solve it for literally everyone including you is just bad-faith reactionary bullshit.
Bad example that you provided. I do not lease or make payments on my car. I may be on the end of the been curve but you save assume every person ever pays what's in the articles headlines.
Using the calculator literally provided in the article you are citing my monthly cost for my car is $120. A lot less than the $1000/month they say as an average.
I'm also saving way more than that per month in rent by living where I do outside of a town or city.
You assume your proposal is an "easy" solution.
The main reason I live here in the first place is because the surrounding cities, that do have amenities and public transport, are much more expensive to live in.
Is not that the town I live in is large in area, it's quite walkable, it simply doesn't have much.
It also reminds me of a guy I used to know who said he didn't need a watch. Claiming he didn't need to know the time that often. But what did he do? He asked everyone around him what the time was instead. Quite often. Oh and he was usually late to class.
Why am I telling you about him? Because it is the same sentiment as "I don't need a car, if I want to see my friends (and relatives) I simply ask them to travel to me."
You are clearly pointing one if the real solutions to individual motorized transportation, which is shared motorized transportation. In my area, people constantly borrow vehicles, equipments, tools and so on.
Not a bait. I guess I belong to a small group of people who decide to make life-changing commitments in order to minimize their impact on the environment.
Why? Cars are more inefficient than nearly every other mode of transport, whether we're talking energy efficiency, space efficiency or cost efficiency. Only air travel is worse. But those modes make up for that in some circumstances by being fast, convenient and flexible.
Because the infographic isn’t comparing cars to other forms of transit. It’s comparing one type of car to another. Electric cars are incredibly efficient, for what it is.
this entire chart is invalid in terms of it though, as half of it is comparing just basic traits of cars as a whole, I believe that was the point of the chart(at least in the way OP is using it). It's intent is to try and persuade people away from cars, but it does a poor job doing so since it lacks an actual decent alternative in the chart. I think it would be more accepted if they added it in comparison to alternatives such as rail (but ironically that system also shares similar traits to cars).
Paved roads disrupt rainwater movement as they physically block water from permeating and also have fast flowing storm drains. They have been shown to significantly reduce groundwater replenishment and increase the speed and volume of run off into rivers and streams, which exacerbates flooding risks.
You forgot about the material extraction and carbon emissions for manufaturing a new electric car. Can someone link the data for it please?
Edit: The article in below reply says it best. Lithium extraction and manufaturing emissions for electric cars are bad for the environment but still dozens of times better than ICE cars lifecycle emissions
It heavily depends on the battery technology used in that particular vehicle and the economy of scale. The emissions reduce as the build batches increase
Someday I am going to get a used adventure bike, and modify it to be a hybrid capable of electric only at low speeds / low acceleration, and charge that with solar panels.
Why not an electric bicycle?
Theyre astoundingly overpriced for what they are.
Why not public transportation?
Well obviously use that whenever possible, but I like the hybrid concept because if you run out of fuel, you can do electric running, or if power goes out, you can charge batteries or run important equipment via the gas motor going through a transformer into a battery yada yada.
That and it'll be useful to be able to cruise around on said motorcycle when our modern american civilized society finally collapses into chaos.
I am all for urban redesign projects and locally sustainable diverse economies and all that, but i dont have faith enough of that will happen quickly enough to basically make it totally safe to just stay in one particular metro area.
EDIT: I suppose maximum utility apocalypse bike would also be capable of running on ethanol, and maybe even somehow whatever the proper name for the fuel refined from fast food restaurant grease is, forget the name. Ive heard it makes your vehicle smell like french fries though lol.
Ebikes aren't actually overpriced. Unless you buy them from Specialized. All those components are actually just that expensive. I can tell you this for sure because I compared the cost of building my own electric bike and buying a prebuilt one and I ended up going prebuilt.
I agree with you from the perspective of actual parts costs.
I probably should have specified this a bit better, but when I say they are overpriced for what they are, this is more what I mean:
(disclaimer I do not have total comprehensive knowledge of the entire ebike market, please correct me if I am wrong)
Generally speaking I see ebikes going for something like $1k to $3k, and generally speaking you get a top speed of about 20 to 25 mph, and a fully electric unassisted drive of about 40 miles, unless you pay a good deal more for bigger batteries/more advanced drive train, basically.
Sure, this is neat amd useful for people who do not need to move long distances.
But I guess you could say I dont fall into that use case demographic.
And I can get a used motorbike with significantly greater speeds, range, and greater off road capabilities in that same price range.
That's fair. I live in a city of 100k people with bike paths or lanes to ~70% of where I'd want to go. So my life is on an ebike. I truly believe they are an important part of the solution to the problems car dependence caused.
I can tell you for sure that my ebike is cheaper in 3 years than a motorcycle in 1 because I first, don't pay for gas, second, do all my own repairs and maintenance (I can't do this on a motorcycle - I learned about my bike after getting it), and third, no secret fees like registration, insurance, or licensing. I paid 2,000 upfront for my ebike and with the price of my bike and all of my owning costs combined it isn't even hitting 3,000 altogether. I've been able to save MASSIVELY because of this. Ah, and I take it out in the winter time as well. There's been a lot less snow this year for us but I still don't see motorbikes out when I'm on my ebike.
So I will unironically shill for ebikes because I believe in them as car replacements, since I live that life.
Car fires from ICE's are magnitudes more common and cause more damage every year because of this. If you spent half a second to search this you'd find that reports indicate that per 100,000 vehicles sold in their respective powertrains in their lifetime, 25 electric cars catch fire, and 1,530 gas vehicles catch fire. While searching this, something that caught me off guard and surprised me was that hybrids are even higher, 3,475! The more you know.
I think that the solution is automated rail transit. Being in a dedicated place with lower likelihood of encountering people removes nearl every issue that self-driving cars have. Being automated means that 24/7 schedules are possible. If there are enough trains and high enough saturation, need for cars and even taxis is removed.
One train transports 100s of people, the driver is a fairly low proportion of the cost. And there's other members of staff that are required even in a fully automated system. (network monitoring, security). Removing the driver is a nice step, but it doesn't fundamentally change the economics of rail transport. If a route is uneconomic, that's going to be the case without a driver too.
Removing the driver mainly removes barriers to running late - meaning things like drunk driving can be significantly reduced since transit in the US is virtually non-existant at drunk'o'clock, effectively pressuring people into bad decisions when their judgement is the poorest.
If a route is uneconomic, that's going to be the case without a driver too.
Infrastructure is vital to economic and other activity. It needs to be treated as an investment or necessary cost, not a business. Doing otherwise inevitably results in collapsing bridges, toxic spills, and other symptoms of neglect as corners are cut to maximize profit.
We're in agreement that night trains are a good thing, but you should push for them whether or not your trains are driverless.
You misunderstand my use of economic. Everything has a cost and a benefit which can theoretically be calculated, with infrastructure like transit that benefit extends beyond fares. Typically governments will do this calculation when deciding whether to pursue a new project, they include all the planning, construction, running costs, and externalities e.g. climate impact, and all the benefits from fares, economic activity, new opportunities for industries and development, ect. This produces a cost benefit ratio. In my research with transport, the best value projects are local safety improvements like cycleways, sometimes the ratio is as good as 10. Large public transport projects are maybe 1-2, and large motorways are usually less than 1. My point was a train driver is a small cost that isn't going to significant affect this. Of course, this analysis often gets ignored and the overpriced motorway gets built anyway.
I can imagine them being cheaper and I only would use people to transit other people when you can have 40 people or so. Where security on big vehicles like bus or train need more caution. A person driving a single person feels like a waste of time or smth. Driverless cars could also be more efficient in routing.
Several years ago, I considered an EV, got sticker shock, and slowly backed away. I wound up with an ebike instead. What happened with the latter is it turned out I really loved that thing and rode it far more frequently than I would have imagined. It's not a total car replacement, to be fair, but it handles most trips.
Today, EVs are still expensive, though there are more options and a bit more competition on price. But to make them worthwhile, you need to drive a lot so that you get back some of that initial investment in savings with charging vs fuelling. This means I am not really the demographic for EVs anymore, since I don't drive enough. It's so weird… I guess I'll just keep that 2006 ICE around until it dies, which might be awhile yet considering how slowly the mileage is ticking up.
prices are not where an average person could go out and buy one in the usa $7.25 is still the minimum wage not to mention rising costs of insurance and property taxes and some states tack on extras fee for certain things and some insurance companies are leaving states making the cost jump even more
cheaper gasoline vehicles are barely affordable if at all for most even used ones
what about the battery and materials having to be mined and what have you
are the workers from material gathering to the final build paid a fair living wage
in some places such as tennessee the charging stations for electric are shutting down
Honest question. Does anyone here have enough humility to understand there's a similar checklist of things an automobile solves?
Now it doesn't mean it's the right solution but particularly in North America due to lack of XYZ automobiles are king.
It's very easy to go "hurr durr automobiles bad" but do you understand the multitude of reasons why we use them? All the things that need to be improved or fixed before we entertain the alternatives?
Saying this as a car owner who takes public transit far more than other car owners.
For the appearance of XYZ we need a policy and cultural change, and for that we need to be very vocal about how stupid and inefficient cars are (i.e. hurr durr automobiles bad).
"Does anyone here have enough humility to understand there's a similar checklist of things an automobile solves?"
Firstly, this feels a very confrontational way of phrasing the question. It carries with it the assumption that you are right and everyone else is wrong, which I don't feel is a helpful way of approaching a discussion.
Yes, of course people realise that car ownership is the only viable solution for individuals at the current time. You have engaged with a community who are passionate about and engaged in urban planning, so they are going to be more switched onto the challenges than most.
The entire point is that on their own they are not a sustainable solution long-term. They are hugely inefficient energy and space-wise, their infrastructure causes massive damage to the communities they carve through (see this Guardian article for a breakdown of some NA case studies), and they currently cause a huge amount of environmental damage.
So, the question becomes: how can we remove the need for car ownership? There's a host of ideas, from better high speed rail links to eliminate long-distance trips, to micromobility and demand responsive transport for short-distance, to better constructing our cities to begin with to allow for amenities to be walkable. Are we going to eliminate car use in rural areas? Of course not; there's no point running a bus service for a village of 10 people and a goat. Can we eliminate 99% of car trips for those in built up areas, improving air quality, walkability, and accessibility? That should absolutely be the goal.
Yes. Nobody is suggested we should ban all cars everywhere.
Cars are incredible. I do trips to remote places all the time that would be impossible without cars. There's no better way to transport 5 people and their gear for a week to a place that's 100km from the nearest small town.
But for 1 guy commuting from the suburbs to work in the city every day in their SUV? Fuck that, the system is broken to even entertain that as a possibility.
And I'll tell you right back that people don't care about your list here. You want to get people onboard start pivoting the conversation. "yaytransit" is far more positive and forward thinking than "fuckcars".
In fact, the responses I've gotten already are a good indication of how deluded this community is. You're not here to promote change, you're here to scream into the wind.
So I guess consider that more a failing on my part.
Riots and protests don’t need your approval or applause. They happen because the majority of people are too complacent. If everyone was already aboard we’d just do those things, you know. You probably don’t understand this, because you never stuck out your neck for anything in your life.
I've noticed that people often imagine that they know what kind of person I am, because in their minds it makes it easy to build up a strawman version of a person that fits their preconceived ideas of the "bad guy" that's opposed to their dumb ideas. Here you go again, doing that. But in reality, all you know is that I made fun of your idea of rioting against cars.
People can read your other comments as well, you know? Your account is a textbook about insecure masculinity, Mr. „I am the man other men wish they could be“ 😂
My favorite part about this sub is how everyone acts like the entire world is able to just stop having a car and be able to carry on normally about their lives as if cars haven't been forced into nearly all infrastructure plans globally since this inception. Like it's every citizens personal choice that nobody built a functioning transit system in the many decades before they were born, or that the place they can afford to live is too far from the place that pays the wages they need to live is too far to bike or bus to.
Like, push for fewer cars and less car centric design, but also stop being a fucking cunty dick about it.
Oh I'd love to hear your explanation for why it's irrelevant, and what crucial oversight I've made that you've managed to in your extensive 16 hours on Lemmy.
Ur comment is irrelevant to this post, as this post is merely talking about the inefficiencies of electric cars. It has not even mentioned the humans driving these cars. Had that been the case, your comment would've been relevant.
This post is an attempt to dispel the myth that electric cars are somehow better than ICE cars. Do you see why your comment is dumb?
Your reading comprehension and understanding of English vocabulary is about on par with your lemmy account age.
Til things like "urban sprawl" are inefficiencies inherent to electric cars, and the lengthy list of these inefficiencies are definitely not drawn parallel to ICE in order to suggest that people should instead drive neither as the underlying theme of the post, particularly given the theme of the sub, which I am able to observe because I've been here longer than 16 hours.
Your reading comprehension and understanding of English vocabulary is about on par with your lemmy account age.
Are you really trying to discredit someone else's argument by using their "lemmy age"? Like... are you trying very hard to be this guy?
Now I'll still assume that your argument is in good faith and respond accordingly. So let's recap.
The post listed the inefficiencies of electric cars besides ICE cars. The underlying message was that electric cars only solve a very very small problem that ICE cars have, but still possess most of the issues of ICE cars. Hence, we need a much better alternative (trains, wink wink).
To this, you replied saying that this community unfairly criticized car owners. According to you, the infrastructure is the biggest one to blame rather than car owners. Which I would only partially agree (as most car owners still support car centric infrastructure). Of course, if there's not train in your city, you can't ride one! But you definitely can lobby for one. Your implicit biases against this community due to those one or two crazy posts skewed your perception in weird ways.
This post is most definitely directed at the tech bros (or the Tesla fanboys), according to whom the solution for GHG emissions from the transportation sector is electric cars. I hope that you agree that this is a dumb argument. This post merely makes fun of this argument. This community is not a monolith, you know... It is thus very important to take the context of every post within itself.
You could've argued against/for this idea. Instead, you put up something weird and irrelevant like "this community is dumb for blaming car owners". You might be right, but it just diverts away from the topic of discussion. Why not create your own post explaining your position? It's like going to a post saying "We need to increase the minimum wage" on a lefty community and commenting "but the lefties are commies". This MIGHT be true, but it is not at all relevant to the discussion itself, is it?
Public transit would be great if you didn’t have to ride with other people. That’s my real problem with it in America at least; there are always loud and gross people aboard. My town has phenomenal bud infrastructure, but people drive because it’s faster, and because you don’t have to be around undesirable people.
Maybe public transportation where each person or group could ride in their own automated pod, which would be publicly owned. That way you could still go skiing/hiking/etc, since mass transportation to those places is very difficult due to low volume.
or you could bring in headphones to public transport like the rest of us
also lmao "public transportation where each person or group could ride in their own automated pod", you're either advocating for taxis or straight up segregation
And is there a better solution? And don't give me that public transportation bullshit, it's a bad solution in most cases and is already in place anyway.
The problem is that it isn't a matter of cars vs busses. It's a matter of urban design in general.
Public transit gets better as density goes up. A bus that drops you off at a giant-ass Walmart parking lot with nothing else but two drivethroughs in walking distance isn't very useful. A bus that drops you off in a neighborhood with 4 dozen shops, a dozen restaurants, 4 bars and 3 coffee shops within a 5 minute walk is way more useful.
By contrast, density makes driving worse. Density means more people are driving the same way you want to go. More people in cars means more traffic on the road with you. Designing for cars pushes you to low density sprawl.
Just building public transit isn't the solution. Just building public transit in a typical American suburban sprawl makes something about as compelling as a Ford F150 in Vatican City.
You have to fix urban design - stop building stroads and start building streetcar suburbs again.
Then it isn't good enough yet. People will use public transport when it's better or cheaper than a car. Dedicated bus lanes to bypass car traffic should be in place, to encourage using busses that create less traffic. Trains should be reliable, frequent, and cheap for longer distance travel. This stuff is all do-able with just a small amount of effort, and has been done and successful in other places, but it requires governments to stuff huffing gasoline.
What kind of public transport? And how is it implemented? The devil is in the details for this stuff.
Free bus tickets do nothing if the buses are stuck in traffic with no bus lane so often that people go "fuck it" and take the car anyway, because it's more convenient.
Free metro tickets do nothing if the routes don't go where people want to go.
Free train tickets do nothing if the trains don't leave frequently enough to have options and/or are stuck waiting for freight trains to pass.
There's any number of non-monetary reasons that public transport might suck, but there are solutions for them.
I mean, step 1 would be forcing the suburbs to pay the actual cost for their own power lines, plumbing and sewage, roads, phone lines, etc. Since as it stands, most of that cost is subsidised by the highly productive inner city, and that infrastructure is far cheaper per-person in dense neighbourhoods than it is in suburban tumours (sure, live out there if you want, but accept that you will either be paying a fortune for the infrastructure upkeep that supports you, or accept lower-class, cheaper infrastructure. I have a great aunt and uncle who live out in the countryside, and they have a dirt road, a septic tank and a rainwater tank, only their electricity and phone lines are comparable to what you get in cities, because it literally does not make economic sense to run paved roads or plumbing out to where they live).
Once people have realised that single-family housing with paved roads, sewage, plumbing and reliable electricity is well outside the economic reach of the vast majority of people, UPZONE. Demolish suburbs to replace them with far denser urban neighbourhoods, ones made up of townhouses, apartment blocks and mixed residential/commercial buildings. Change the zoning laws so that anyone can start a commercial business out of the front yard. Designate parks and other community areas in between your blocks of apartments and townhouses so that nobody is ever more than 15 minutes' walk away from one. And for those who still want to live out in suburban sprawl, make the transition to being more self-sufficient easier.
Then, you have a city dense enough that you can start running vast amounts of public transport through it. Not just busses, but trains and trams as well. A train is more or less the ideal form of fast transportation along a known, unchanging transport corridor, with far more energy efficiency than anything that runs on tarmac, the ability to hit highway speeds inside city limits, and the ability to be extended almost infinitely. They can also be run from overhead power lines, no need for batteries or internal combustion engines. Oh, and the same lines you run urban rail along can also be used for freight trains, so they can replace both car journeys and freight truck journeys.
When you have dense cities with well-designed and extensive public transport, you can get almost anywhere with just one transfer, your bus/train/tram comes often enough that you're never at the stop for more than 10 minutes, and even a trip from one edge of the city to the other will rarely be more than an hour. Plus, you don't have to pay attention to the road, nor pay for fuel and maintenance.
Source: I live in a city where you can sharply draw a divide between the pre-car and post-car zones, and the pre-car zones are mostly like how I describe, while the post-car zones are suburban sprawl shitholes that might have a train station if they're lucky
"Sure, the planet is unfit for human habitation now, but at least we got to have lawns in front of our houses and meat every day until the world ended"
Stopping climate change requires drastic action, rethinking how we live every aspect of our lives, and the wastefulness of suburbs means they must go, just like the internal combustion engine and the animal agriculture industry. How will you justify to future generations that you left them with a ruined world, all because you and those like you were too selfish to give up your current style of living?
Additionally, they are provably a blight on cities. They cost far more to maintain than they produce, since they lack any serious commercial activity, so no taxes, and the spread-out nature of them means that any infrastructure is far more expensive per person. You wouldn't even need to actively demolish them, just cut off all maintenance, and watch them rot. Plus, they keep literally bankrupting cities, so often there is no choice, the money is no longer there to maintain them.
Sure, go right ahead and get to work on that plan then. I'm sure everyone in the suburbs will agree to give up their homes and land and move to the dense urban Soviet-style shitholes that you envision as the perfect way to live.
Right is possible if economy is local. Left is actual real life because of capitalism needs bigger markets in in small areas for maximing profits.
You can't have bigger markets in smaller areas with cars because the cars take up so much space. Public transport gives access while still allowing for density, which provides a much larger market. The only ones losing out are the auto makers and oil companies.
Trains
Don't bother mate, the people in this community don't live in reality.
Hello. I used to live in Bremen which is an economy hub in Germany. It's pretty much image #3
They're a solution, not the solution indeed.
Sorry, chief. We don't do nuanced thought in this community.
They are a patch, not a solution.
I live in GA outside of Atlanta and rent is already tough. I've been to cities with not exactly amazing but serviceable public transportation (various parts of greater NYC and Chicago) and loved them. I've tried to use busses elsewhere, though it often meant 3 hours wasted to go to work, with similar time wasted after (hourly buss schedules and multiple transfers).
I have an electric car now, work from home, and try to avoid having to drive much, but there isn't much more I can afford to do atm. An bike would be nice but even that'll take money I'm still recovering, and some places I go to even just a couple times a month has no public transportation. I'd love if it did, but I have to use EV for now.
I think when most people decry EVs, we're not talking about individual EV owners but the system which forces basically everyone to move around by personal vehicle. Sure, they'll be the occasional person who says, "I bike 28km to and from work at a very physical job where I often work overtime. I have to share the road with traffic. I don't know why everyone can't commute by bike," (this was the gist of a comment I read on reddit years ago). However, most people understand that changes can't just be personal responsibility.
With the information we have about your life, it sounds like you made a reasonable decision. If you can continue to be mindful about the decisions you make and advocate for a better world when you can, I think you're doing a great job!
When we lived in L.A., we were near a train station. My wife sometimes took the train to work and sometimes drove. Even in L.A. traffic, it took her half the time to get to work by car because of how far away we lived from where she worked. It really sucked, but that was the reality. She had to get up at 4:30 am to take the train and 6 am to drive. She did carpool, which is better than driving alone, but it's hard to convince people to get away from cars if you have to make sacrifices to your day like that.
I'd call them less a solution, more an attempt at harm reduction.
And the only things they'll properly resolve are tailpipe emissions and idling noise. At least one of which is of no concern when dealing with the externalities of car traffic.
If you really want to solve the environmental impact of transportation, you minimise the need for transportation. Put homes and workplaces close together, offer mass alternatives for the pairs where you really do need motorised mobility solutions, and minimise the number of situations where it's more convenient to take a car. Ban on-street parking and heavily tax off-street parking. Need to park your car in the city? Hope you can afford to pay an arm and a leg. Oh, you can't? Looks the Park & Ride at the train station two towns over is the nearest alternative. Don't worry though, the trains go six times an hour and a day ticket is, like, four quid max.
The best hope for that to have marginal improvement is a move towards remote work, mostly feaseable for white collar activities.
Anything else is constantly pushed outside and away from residential areas.
I know a few stupid examples of very well planned and thought out industrial parks and long time industrial sites forced to vacate because residential were built 2 or 3km away and residents did not enjoy the movement going back and forward (not through the residential areas, mind that) of trucks and other machines or the sounds coming from a factory when the conditions were just right to carry it over the distance. Needless to say companies simply moved away or closed down activity and the previously complaining residential areas became high unemployment areas.
It's the same absurd reasoning behind people building houses in the middle of nowhere and then demanding power, water and communications connections.
Quid: you're British. Great.
You're smaller in area than Texas. It's a little easier for you to stay close to everything, you're never more than 70 miles away from the sea.
Hello, I'm Albertan. Stop saying this. Our governments maintain roads in between these cities every year, there is no reason they couldn't have been train lines instead. Roads are far more expensive than many realize.
Once upon a time, all cities were connected by train, and we ripped it all up to build roads instead. Sure, it's going to cost money to build these up again -- that's what happens when we make a mistake, we have to pay for it in one way or another. But connecting smaller towns and cities is not the herculean impossible task that people seem to want to pretend it is.
There ARE major urban areas in North America. People are not evenly spread out across the landmass equally. Connecting these first is obviously the goal, because that will take care of 70% of the problem already. And always remember not to make perfect the enemy of good - even if we stopped there we'd be in infinitely better shape than we were before.
We've done a ton of that. The Acela is great, I've ridden it a bunch. But that kind of thing doesn't scale as efficiently as you would hope. It can serve corridors of people, but not huge continents of hundreds of millions all that well. There are to many places to be.
How odd, russia has plenty of walkable cities in the largest country on earth.
Look mate, if you're going to shove the "tHe stATeS arE ToO bIG, thus wE cANNot SOlvE The transIt ProbleM" rhetoric on us, please find another place to wallow in your lack of trains while assuming car industry rhetoric as undeniable fact.
Also, your claim has been debunked and reclarified so often that I'm not going to begin to explain just how wrong you are.
You guys are all idiots. A bunch of Europeans lucked into an infrastructure that works with twice the people in half the space, and you act like it was an intentional and smarter design decision in anticipation of a climate crisis. You shipped your most insane people off your continent to become Americans, and their shitty Calvinism has made everything that has always been terrible about Northern Europe even worse.
Now you want to act like anyone who thinks what you propose isn't exactly easy (or democratic) is some kind of corporate fascist. Fuck off, the lot of you.
Solution to what though? Emissions are reduced but not eliminated: when accounting for greenhouse gases emitted during production, EVs start outperforming traditional cars only after 5+ years of use (depending on the type of car). And other factors like tyre dust and road maintenance (due to EVs' higher weight) or resources needed to replace/recycle old batteries are not even included in that balance.
EVs might still be a net positive when compared with traditional cars, but both pale in comparison to public transport and infrastructure oriented towards bikes and pedestrians.
That’s really only because most of our electricity is still produced through fossil fuels. As we move to renewables, that equation will shift rapidly toward net positive much before 5 years. And that’s not accounting for any technological advances (like sodium ion batteries) that happen in that time.
The 5 year figure is from a German study and is based on the German energy mix (which is indeed quite dirty). So yeah, that number will hopefully decrease. But even with that, the "up-front" emissions in EV production are a major issue that is tough to solve and rarely made transparent by EV manufacturers.
What's the upfront emission of EV production that makes it that much of a detriment compared to ICE production?
The main source is battery production and related to the mining and refinement of their raw materials (source, source). The exact emissions are hard to quantify. That being said, the lifetime emissions of battery EVs are still significantly lower, so it's still a net benefit. For a bigger picture, you can check the references here and here.
US energy is 40% renewable already. Solar is the fastest growing energy segment.
In my county, our electricity is 2/3 sourced from hydropower, so an EV has significant impact on emissions relative to an ICE car.
I don't think they're even a solution. They're just another scam like hydrogen fuel cells were. They exist to keep people from pushing for the real change we actually need... Just like the decade we lost because people bought the hydrogen fuel cell grift last time.
Oh man, waiting an hour or so for a bus in -30℃ weather is great. Then the bus is inevitably late because it's Edmonton (where public transit doesn't seem to get public funding) and you get to enjoy the great outdoors for another thirty minutes. I'm surprised I still have my toes...
I'm so glad my parents gave me their old truck so I don't really have to deal with that shit any more.
The problem with electric cars is that they're a distraction. They make people think they're part of the solution when they're only partly addressing one of the many problems cars cause. I'm not against people buying them assuming that they're in a position where they need a new car, but advocating for electric cars as a solution is wrong. I read the OP like this, not how you read it.
oh buzz off with your weird essay filled with jabs and fallacies and bad faith. actually I just reread it and I have to ask: what the fuck is wrong with you? you're acting like a white guy who hears two black people talking about racism and leaps in to say "stop calling me racist!" you think this post is calling you out? what the actual fuck is wrong with you?
NO ONE IS SAYING YOU ARE PERSONALLY MORALLY WRONG FOR DRIVING A CAR TODAY IN 2024
that's the whole fucking gist of this entire guy's essay, folks. he thinks criticizing EVs is a personal attack on him and people who don't currently live in walkable cities
I agree this kind of post may play in favour of ICE manufacturers and oil companies but I disagree with the comparison you make between EVs and tobacco patches. EVs are produced and sold in order to replace ICEs in the exact same segment. They do not impact peoples lives significantly and will not change anything in the way cities and activities work now. The example you give is the epitome of a work/life organization which was only made possible by the massification of individual motorized transportation, with all the negative externalities listed in the OP. Yes individual cars are going to be needed for many reasons in the future. But we need to work collectively to make them less convenient and less needed in everyday life.
Ah yes, Canada. Well-known the world over as a 'shithole country.'
So the entire metric for 'shithole' to you is based on how many people ride electrified trains? Really? Nothing about, say, their economy or their standard of living or their record on human rights or anything like that?
You implied it when you suggested, to my reply that Canada might not be a shithole country, that it was due to the whole train thing.
And the country with the flawless human rights record is what? Iceland because there's no one to oppress since everyone's related to everyone else? Great. The rest of 200-some other countries are shitholes by that measure. Again, not the best metric.
Let's talk about your country now. Where do you live? Will you even volunteer that information?
The problem is people got the idea that they need a 3 ton truck to do grocery shopping
Sure maybe a mega SUV as a daily driver is not right for everyone, but I just can't live without the extra leg room and riot protection!
Riot control vehicle lpt :If you just fill the water cannon tank to half full instead of topping up you save quite a lot over time due to reduced litre/km consumption
Emission laws made big trucks easier to produce than small trucks in the US, I miss the days of the short bed pickup. Still like my 98 taco and use it for hauling hay.
The idea that you even need a car for grocery shopping is insane.
My supermarket does this: if you go shopping with public transport, then you can ask the cashier to have someone deliver the just purchased groceries to your house for 5 euro
Not really, if you're doing your weekly shop all in one go (especially for a family), it can make sense that your weekly shop can be more than you can carry and thus you need something to help you carry it. I wouldn't want to lug 4-5 bags of shopping onto a bus where I'm going to piss someone off because I placed them on the seat, nor do I want to try to balance all that on the handlebars of a bike where a single fuckup or pothole I can't see will lose me lots of money in shopping.
I don't personally do those sorts of large shops, but people are busy and literally schedule this in their week so it's not insane.
Or hey, maybe more people could shop online? With well planned routes it could be more efficient than lots of people all travelling to one place.
If you live in a dense area with more local shops, you'll probably be doing more frequent, smaller shops throughout the week.
Disagree on inefficient.
Internal combustion engines in standard small size convert 19.65-22.1% of their energy from thermal to kinetic.
The ratio of electron throughput from battery to electric motor can be as LOW as 88% but hovers between 92-98% efficiency.
Even if you had a fuel cell in the back, running electric motors quintuples (5×) the standard energy efficiency owing to the principle of energy quality type preservation in conversion (High to High vs Low to High):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_transformation
So 1 electric car = 4 less carbon liquid fuelled cars worth of pollution.
What you're actually looking for is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Jevon's Paradox states that improved efficiency of something will only increase its use, and in this case, electric cars will in fact, correlate to car use, and increased mineral demands.
This is a problem you cannot solve endemic to humanity.
I think the point is that compared to public transport when transporting a large number of people, they are inefficient.
The "when transporting a large number of people" is quite a caveat. Sure ok high saturation of public transport / walkable cities is probably achievable with high population density, but in rural / regional areas it's just not possible.
A reasonable comment in this community? Get out!
I think you missed the meaning of inefficency on this matter...
While it is undeniable that electric cars have a better supply-to-engine energy efficency than combustion cars, you can understand that they are equiparated in the meme as "equally bad" if you think outside of the box labelled "rubber wheels on high friction asphalt transporting usually a single individual".
Compare that with a tram or a train, transporting multiple passengers with the same electric engine but also steel-on-steel friction on the wheels and the difference between an ICE and EV vehicle becomes a mere approximation error; god I can do the math for you if you want, but I bet even a disel bus with a lot of passengers has a better efficency/passenger ratio than an EV.
Also I think this is a bit misleading: if I buy an EV this won't magically destroy 4 (where is this number from?) already existing carbon liquid cars, it merely means you avoided adding 1 other ICE car to the total.
so, a box I keep my bike in? :D
When is it efficient to carry several tons of steel with you to pick up eggs and milk?
I mean, Jevon's Paradox works because the increased efficiency leads to decreased costs. It's unclear if that's going to be the case for electric cars because the hardware needed to get to that high efficiency is so expensive, and mostly made cost-effective by government assistance (I.e. eletric cars here in the UK do not pay road tax).
I'm also not sure if lowered costs would massively change the number of drivers (at least in the developed world) in the EU there's one car for every two people. We're not going to see that become 5 cars for every two people just because the efficiency increases, demand is too inelastic.
I heard a good saying the other day: "Electric cars are a solution for the car industry." Give me walkable cities please
I live in Scandinavia, in one of these walkable cities. Everyone has a car. Why? Because relying on public transport or walking/biking everywhere is not practical. It's just reality.
That's fair enough. I also own a car, but I try to use alternative means of transport (bus, bike, walk, skateboard) whenever possible. It's the prioritisation of cars over all other modes of transport where I have the issue. My city is riddled with car filled streets criss-crossing all over. There's a plan to take one of the most shop focused streets and make it walkable. It would mean that I would be able to get to work almost the whole way on it. I hope it goes through
I'm not disagreeing with you or most people here for being annoyed by everything being build around car usage. I just don't see it realistically change. You'd have to rebuild most cities from the ground up and invest ungodly amounts of money into several modes of public transport in every city. It just won't happen.
I've had to use public transport to get to a job I loved in a neighbouring city, due to not having a car at that point. Where a drive with the car would have taken me about 20 minutes one way, the bus+train combo I was forced to use was 1,5 hours including waiting times. It was so draining that I quit that job after 6 months.
If this is the choice you need to make, people will take that car every time because you can't rely on jobs being available within 20 minutes of walking or public transport, most cities aren't build to offer jobs+housing+shopping within a small radius for all the people living there.
The part about going to your job is totally valid. Some jobs can be worked remotely or partly remotely now, but that doesn't apply to all professions, so that is something to keep in mind.
In terms of not being able to realistically change the current cities, many of the best walkable cities prioritized cars first and then changed. It took decades, but they eventually achieved it.
There's this presentation I found after doing some research on the 15-minute cities conspiracy theory, and it was a really interesting talk about how towns and cities can be changed into slower, more accessible ones. It's an hour long but there's a 5 minute segment where it discusses cases where cities have changed from car-based to a more walkable one, in this case Amsterdam and Pontevedra (in Spain).
I recommend checking it out. Here's a link with the timestamp of the start of the section about those cities:
Dr Rodney Tolley: Fast Speed, Slow Cities
In the section before this one, he discusses the cost of other transport modes versus cars. Building and maintaining infrastructure for cars is waaaaay more expensive than for other methods, so cost isn't an issue. I've included the slide below.
Like, I get your overall point, but the whiskey to wine comparison doesn't quite work lol.
For starters, you'd have to drink a LOT more wine comparatively, which doesn't translate when going from ICE to electric.
It does, because the batteries for electric cars have a reliance on rare earth metals.
Lol the downvotes are hilarious. We will not solve climate change with electric cars. Public transit in walkable communities with niche uses for cars and trucks are the only way forward.
Hopefully there is a solution to that problem right around the corner.
As seen in the Wikipedia article, sodium ion batteries also require rare earth metal anodes, or toxic materials like mercury which is also bad. Better than lithium ion, but still generally not great. The best option would be aluminum air batteries, which should be easily accessible and are extremely recyclable
For you who live in the cities maybe. Personal vehicles will never be something rural people can function without.
perhaps you'd be interested in the fact that I grew up in a very rural area. The nearest city was Rochester, MN, roughly 30 minutes away if you were going 70 in the 55 on US 52. I agree that rural areas will need cars to go from their houses to towns and cities, but I've thought extensively about public transit in rural areas, and I think it's far easier than folks think.
The battery tech is starting to move away from rare earth, with LFP not using cobalt and sodium-ion not using lithium. And in any case, emissions are by far our most pressing problem compared to issues with rare earth extraction.
Just remember, the argument relies on not just getting rid of cars, but drastically improving public transport.
World peace is more likely given government attitudes towards public services!
This is why people hate liberals, and why liberals often migrate over to conservatism: no matter how right you are, there's always someone happy to crap on you for not being right enough.
Don't shit on EVs for merely being one of many solutions that all need to be engaged with. It's not like without EVs, so many people would be rushing to areas of greater density and riding public transit, so your message is not helpful in achieving what you want, and actively angers your allies.
Ah yes conservatism, the famous side of rational thinking and anti-bias thoughts, such as avoiding the perfect solution bias
Your comment having so many upvotes is disgusting
I think both sides are lacking nuance here. If you shit on people getting electric vehicles or just thinking of getting one because that's not far enough: fuck you. But also, for people that just switched or are thinking of getting one but then see something like this and slam into reverse and say "I'm gonna support ICE cars till the day I die to spite those overly hostile woke liberals": fuck you too.
People should be able to take the information in a more nuanced way, and should stop swinging from extreme to extreme which has led to the current fucked state of politics
This is a lot like this Bors comic https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/8/1786532/-Cartoon-You-made-me-become-a-Nazi
Do honest people really migrate to "climate change is fake and queer people are a threat" because someone was mean to them online? Probably not often.
Plenty of people said if Bernie wasn't the nominee, they'd vote Trump. Puzzle that one.
Keep churning that pipeline to fascism.
Oh no, some liberals were being mean to me on the internet. Guess I'll just vote against my own interests to spite them...
This is how a lot of people vote. Maybe they aren't converted right then and there, but it builds up over time. Humans aren't rational man
I don't doubt that that's the case, but I'm just pointing out (humorously) the absurdity of someone who is purportedly a principled individual who cares about things like climate change, civil/human rights, equality, bodily autonomy and most importantly democracy changing to the side that is openly against all of those things because people can be harsh and nasty on the internet sometimes.
Like, if someone really was so flimsy with their morals that they could bend so easily, did they ever really care in the first place? Or were they just looking for an excuse to blame the other side for their fecklessness?
Genuinely have no idea what you mean by that comment.
Who am I being mean to?
I think you're reading too much into this.
I shit on liberals mostly because of their notions on 'altruistic capitalism'. As soon as they purchase an EV, they think they're out there saving the world and most don't think critically past that.
I really have to agree that it's posts like this that made me give up on left wing politics, in certainly not right wing but I see no hope for the left until fundermental problems are fixed which I don't believe politics or media is capable of addressing.
Further I am absolutely convinced a large portion of the loudest voices on climate change are so obsessed because they desperately want it to be the big doom that fucks up all the impressive things other people are achieving.
Yes that's exactly what I said and exactly everything that went into my thinking, congratulations you're exactly the sort of binary thinking ideolog that makes any sort of political progress impossible on the left.
Again you're just yelling slogans that have nothing to do with what I said because you're absolutely incapable of having a reasonable conversation on anything of substance. This is a perfect example of what we're talking about.
Disagree on noise. Electric cars are quieter when going slowly and the main noise is engine, but louder when going fast and the main noise is tires.
In fact, low speed electric cars are quiet enough that they've considered putting speakers in them to alert pedestrians and make the absence of feedback less disconcerting for drivers.
We're so used to ICE cars that they've contemplated making electric cars pretend that they have an ICE.
They already do this in Europe and other countries where mixed car/pedestrian environments are more common. Electric cars must have some form of audible signature, usually a quiet whirring sound.
They should make it play the Jetsons car sound.
This place is the same as reddit, no nuance at all.
Ridiculous statement and this sub is militant in it's position it can't accept a step in the right direction.
You can be happy about the step in the right direction and still acknowledge that it is by all means a half measure.
The reason this makes people so unhappy is we have a clock on our planet due to the amount of carbon we're releasing.
It's doubly frustrating when we've had the solutions to these issues for a long time but lobbying by the motor industry has kept them out of hands of the public.
I really think we're too far in the hole here.
I think fear grips people at every angle and none of us are brave enough to accept bold action for positive change in our society. It seems like most people are just retracting instead.
I vaguely remember that "Ye" (formerly Kanye West) once said something like he formed a think tank to build a city but the thing stopping his team was that "Ye" didn't understand any of the concepts and he ran it into the ground.
I want public transportation, I think everyone wants it at this point but no no one understands why we need it. They all just want to escape.
(This message was brought to you by the new 2024 Ford Escape: just hit the road and escape to paradise)
I like my car. Nothing will change that opinion, because nothing beats having a personal vehicle.
There's no comparison to the personal freedom of having a car versus being dependent on others to ferry you around. That's why America will always be built around our great car infrastructure. We will never give up our freedom to roam our huge awesome land.
Nothing like freedom like actively removing people from having multiple choices of transit by making illegal to build anything that isn't dependent on cars.
Nothing like freedom like being forced to spend thousands on a several ton machine to do any task outside your home.
Nothing like freedon like being forced to pay predatory insurance to private corporations in order to be legally allowed to drive your vehicle.
Nothing like freedom like being dependent on oil companies that actively lobby against you in order to drive the vehicle that you are forced to own.
Nothing like freedom like having infustructure that denies poor people and disabled people from participating in society.
Nothing like freedom like having no independence if you are too old, too young, too intoxicated, or too disabled to drive.
Nothing like freedom like being forced to have a license issued by your government in order to be independent.
Nothing like freedom like being forced to use a vehicle that spies on you and collects information such as your sexual activity, immigration status, 'private' conversations, location, and much more.
Tell me you can't afford a car without telling me
I care about poor people so therefore I must be poor.
What a nonsense argument. Poor people don't deserve freedom of movement?
And here again we see the typical attempt to put words in somebody's mouth. I never said anything about what poor people deserve, that's your words, not mine.
When you don't have a substantial rebuttal, you just make up a strawman argument.
IMO everyone, regardless of economic stature, deserves every form of freedom legitimately available in society. For this example, if a poor person couldn't afford a car I would suggest a cheap used motorcycle. I've bought a couple of those, one was $900 and the other was $2500.
This is incredibly insane when you consider the cost incurred to maintain a vehicle. No poor person would do this in the right mind it would be nothing but a debt trap. It's shameful that public transit is downright near illegal and most metropolitan areas in North America and it is the best solution get over it
I would argue that a fast, frequent and comprehensive public transport system gives you more personal freedom. Being able to easily get around without having to worry about piloting a heavy vehicle, without the burden of maintenance, and being flexible once out due to not needing to worry about where you're storing your car. Plug the gaps with (electric and/or cargo) bikes for shorter trips and car share for longer ones and you have a much better, more equitable transport system.
All public transport vehicles are heavier than my personal vehicle though. Also public transport doesn't provide the freedom of choosing any destination that you want, and taking yourself there on your own schedule. That's what I was talking about.
You aren't piloting a public transport vehicle, a professional is and you are free to not worry about it.
A frequent and comprehensive public transport system does allow for that freedom, without all of the burdens of car ownership. Bikes and car share can be used to fill in the gaps when the public transport isn't comprehensive enough.
I'm sure this is unpopular this community but I feel like "fuck cars" folks are either living in a dream world where public transport can answer everyone's transportation needs. If you live in a city with all the amenities you need where public transport is good and economically viable sure, "Fuck cars", but if you don't...
If you only have the option to drive and it looks like it will never change where you live, then yes, driving electric is better than driving an ICE car. You're not the problem for needing to live your life with the limited options you have access to. However, that does not mean the intrinsic problems with cars disappear the instant they become electric, and this meme is mainly meant to respond to the techbro people who think just because electric cars exist now it makes transit obsolete or it solves literally everything wrong with cars in general, and use that to actively resist public transportation or attempt to turn public opinion against it. I should have added additional context to make that clearer.
Well I do drive electric now but I could not get by without a car. Honestly I would love it if public transport were viable for everyone. In London and Zurich I have experienced public transport that worked. Where I live a 1 hour car journey can mean a 3 or 4 hour trip by public transport and only if you are travelling at the right time of day. Unfortunately I don't necessarily get to choose when I make some of those trips because it is part of my job. Unfortunately here, public transport is slow, expensive and unreliable here.
I know electric cars don't solve everything, and maybe this meme is not exactly what I'm responding to, but for a lot of people, public transport is just not a viable alternative.
Like I said I know it's not going to be a popular sentiment here.
People are advocating for denser cities with better public transport, not for you to use the shitty bus in your suburb.
Haven't driven in over a decade, can confirm it's like living a dream
...then either you're a farmer or the area you live was built wrong and needs to be fixed.
I'm not a farmer, my nearest grocery store is 8 miles away. It's rural and the cost of living is extremely cheap. it also snows a ton and often drops to sub zero temps.
What my solution? How does this get fixed for me?
Did you know that most people live in cities? About 60% of North America live in what is considered to be a metropolitan area.
In most of these areas aggressive expansion of public transit is a no brainer.
It doesn't have to work everywhere to be a good idea
It doesn't. But that's okay, because nobody gives a shit about special snowflakes way off the tail end of the bell curve like you -- solving the problem for the 80% of everybody else, for whom reasonable solutions do apply, is plenty good enough!
Demanding that any solution be perfect enough to solve it for literally everyone including you is just bad-faith reactionary bullshit.
Bad example that you provided. I do not lease or make payments on my car. I may be on the end of the been curve but you save assume every person ever pays what's in the articles headlines.
Using the calculator literally provided in the article you are citing my monthly cost for my car is $120. A lot less than the $1000/month they say as an average.
I'm also saving way more than that per month in rent by living where I do outside of a town or city.
Well, can't you resettle in a more compact town?
You assume your proposal is an "easy" solution. The main reason I live here in the first place is because the surrounding cities, that do have amenities and public transport, are much more expensive to live in. Is not that the town I live in is large in area, it's quite walkable, it simply doesn't have much.
It also reminds me of a guy I used to know who said he didn't need a watch. Claiming he didn't need to know the time that often. But what did he do? He asked everyone around him what the time was instead. Quite often. Oh and he was usually late to class.
Why am I telling you about him? Because it is the same sentiment as "I don't need a car, if I want to see my friends (and relatives) I simply ask them to travel to me."
You are clearly pointing one if the real solutions to individual motorized transportation, which is shared motorized transportation. In my area, people constantly borrow vehicles, equipments, tools and so on.
Nice bait
Not a bait. I guess I belong to a small group of people who decide to make life-changing commitments in order to minimize their impact on the environment.
Why? Cars are more inefficient than nearly every other mode of transport, whether we're talking energy efficiency, space efficiency or cost efficiency. Only air travel is worse. But those modes make up for that in some circumstances by being fast, convenient and flexible.
Because the infographic isn’t comparing cars to other forms of transit. It’s comparing one type of car to another. Electric cars are incredibly efficient, for what it is.
this entire chart is invalid in terms of it though, as half of it is comparing just basic traits of cars as a whole, I believe that was the point of the chart(at least in the way OP is using it). It's intent is to try and persuade people away from cars, but it does a poor job doing so since it lacks an actual decent alternative in the chart. I think it would be more accepted if they added it in comparison to alternatives such as rail (but ironically that system also shares similar traits to cars).
It's a meme, it absolutely is comparing both kinds of cars to other modes of transport.
Still lots of tire noise at high speeds.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Wher train 😢
They're still just as noisy above 30 km an hour due to air displacement and tire on the road.
Depending on the ICE car, a similar EV can actually be more noisy, because of the heavy battery causing more road friction = more noise.
This is what I've learned the past year during my general acoustics course. Over 50 km/h EVs produce more sound.
train? ❌️ | ❌️
simple as.
Would be nice if this had trains and buses and bikes columns.
small amount of electric cars and mostly public transport
Paved roads disrupt rainwater movement as they physically block water from permeating and also have fast flowing storm drains. They have been shown to significantly reduce groundwater replenishment and increase the speed and volume of run off into rivers and streams, which exacerbates flooding risks.
from all the roads making flooding easier
You forgot about the material extraction and carbon emissions for manufaturing a new electric car. Can someone link the data for it please?
Edit: The article in below reply says it best. Lithium extraction and manufaturing emissions for electric cars are bad for the environment but still dozens of times better than ICE cars lifecycle emissions
You can't simply go with the manufacturing emissions, you have to look at the entire life cycle of the vehicles in question.
It heavily depends on the battery technology used in that particular vehicle and the economy of scale. The emissions reduce as the build batches increase
Not sure why they didn't include paints and their colors. You know, for more green checks.
Has doors and seats 😠: ✅
there are anti tyre dust tyres
TIL! That sounds awesome.
Can you buy them now or are they still being developed? Got a link? Looks like they're still working on it, I'm not seeing them online.
i dunno just remember reading them in a random book
At this point I have landed at:
Someday I am going to get a used adventure bike, and modify it to be a hybrid capable of electric only at low speeds / low acceleration, and charge that with solar panels.
Why not an electric bicycle?
Theyre astoundingly overpriced for what they are.
Why not public transportation?
Well obviously use that whenever possible, but I like the hybrid concept because if you run out of fuel, you can do electric running, or if power goes out, you can charge batteries or run important equipment via the gas motor going through a transformer into a battery yada yada.
That and it'll be useful to be able to cruise around on said motorcycle when our modern american civilized society finally collapses into chaos.
I am all for urban redesign projects and locally sustainable diverse economies and all that, but i dont have faith enough of that will happen quickly enough to basically make it totally safe to just stay in one particular metro area.
EDIT: I suppose maximum utility apocalypse bike would also be capable of running on ethanol, and maybe even somehow whatever the proper name for the fuel refined from fast food restaurant grease is, forget the name. Ive heard it makes your vehicle smell like french fries though lol.
Ebikes aren't actually overpriced. Unless you buy them from Specialized. All those components are actually just that expensive. I can tell you this for sure because I compared the cost of building my own electric bike and buying a prebuilt one and I ended up going prebuilt.
I agree with you from the perspective of actual parts costs.
I probably should have specified this a bit better, but when I say they are overpriced for what they are, this is more what I mean:
(disclaimer I do not have total comprehensive knowledge of the entire ebike market, please correct me if I am wrong)
Generally speaking I see ebikes going for something like $1k to $3k, and generally speaking you get a top speed of about 20 to 25 mph, and a fully electric unassisted drive of about 40 miles, unless you pay a good deal more for bigger batteries/more advanced drive train, basically.
Sure, this is neat amd useful for people who do not need to move long distances.
But I guess you could say I dont fall into that use case demographic.
And I can get a used motorbike with significantly greater speeds, range, and greater off road capabilities in that same price range.
That's fair. I live in a city of 100k people with bike paths or lanes to ~70% of where I'd want to go. So my life is on an ebike. I truly believe they are an important part of the solution to the problems car dependence caused.
I can tell you for sure that my ebike is cheaper in 3 years than a motorcycle in 1 because I first, don't pay for gas, second, do all my own repairs and maintenance (I can't do this on a motorcycle - I learned about my bike after getting it), and third, no secret fees like registration, insurance, or licensing. I paid 2,000 upfront for my ebike and with the price of my bike and all of my owning costs combined it isn't even hitting 3,000 altogether. I've been able to save MASSIVELY because of this. Ah, and I take it out in the winter time as well. There's been a lot less snow this year for us but I still don't see motorbikes out when I'm on my ebike.
So I will unironically shill for ebikes because I believe in them as car replacements, since I live that life.
Ebikes are not expensive. At least not the ones I have and see around town.
In Case of Electric-Car Fire, Half of Fire Departments Are Unprepared
the car fires for EV are very much a different thing.
Car fires from ICE's are magnitudes more common and cause more damage every year because of this. If you spent half a second to search this you'd find that reports indicate that per 100,000 vehicles sold in their respective powertrains in their lifetime, 25 electric cars catch fire, and 1,530 gas vehicles catch fire. While searching this, something that caught me off guard and surprised me was that hybrids are even higher, 3,475! The more you know.
Well, would be nice if we would have automatic Taxis. Less of the issues like Parking lots but still a lot of issues present.
I think that the solution is automated rail transit. Being in a dedicated place with lower likelihood of encountering people removes nearl every issue that self-driving cars have. Being automated means that 24/7 schedules are possible. If there are enough trains and high enough saturation, need for cars and even taxis is removed.
One train transports 100s of people, the driver is a fairly low proportion of the cost. And there's other members of staff that are required even in a fully automated system. (network monitoring, security). Removing the driver is a nice step, but it doesn't fundamentally change the economics of rail transport. If a route is uneconomic, that's going to be the case without a driver too.
Removing the driver mainly removes barriers to running late - meaning things like drunk driving can be significantly reduced since transit in the US is virtually non-existant at drunk'o'clock, effectively pressuring people into bad decisions when their judgement is the poorest.
Infrastructure is vital to economic and other activity. It needs to be treated as an investment or necessary cost, not a business. Doing otherwise inevitably results in collapsing bridges, toxic spills, and other symptoms of neglect as corners are cut to maximize profit.
We're in agreement that night trains are a good thing, but you should push for them whether or not your trains are driverless.
You misunderstand my use of economic. Everything has a cost and a benefit which can theoretically be calculated, with infrastructure like transit that benefit extends beyond fares. Typically governments will do this calculation when deciding whether to pursue a new project, they include all the planning, construction, running costs, and externalities e.g. climate impact, and all the benefits from fares, economic activity, new opportunities for industries and development, ect. This produces a cost benefit ratio. In my research with transport, the best value projects are local safety improvements like cycleways, sometimes the ratio is as good as 10. Large public transport projects are maybe 1-2, and large motorways are usually less than 1. My point was a train driver is a small cost that isn't going to significant affect this. Of course, this analysis often gets ignored and the overpriced motorway gets built anyway.
I absolutely did. Thank you for clarifying!
Yeah. Definitely the case.
Why does it matter if they're driverless or not? They still perform the same function and go off and serve other people when you're not using one.
I can imagine them being cheaper and I only would use people to transit other people when you can have 40 people or so. Where security on big vehicles like bus or train need more caution. A person driving a single person feels like a waste of time or smth. Driverless cars could also be more efficient in routing.
It should be automatic this year!... Ooh wait.
those green check marks, ill take both!
look how little that electric cars have to sacifice, while costing twice as much! so efficient!
EVERY INCREMENTAL IMPROVEMENT IS BAD BECAUSE IT'S INCREMENTAL.
ONLY INSTANTLY PERFECT AND COMPLETE SOLUTIONS PLZ KTHX
🥴🥴🥴
Several years ago, I considered an EV, got sticker shock, and slowly backed away. I wound up with an ebike instead. What happened with the latter is it turned out I really loved that thing and rode it far more frequently than I would have imagined. It's not a total car replacement, to be fair, but it handles most trips.
Today, EVs are still expensive, though there are more options and a bit more competition on price. But to make them worthwhile, you need to drive a lot so that you get back some of that initial investment in savings with charging vs fuelling. This means I am not really the demographic for EVs anymore, since I don't drive enough. It's so weird… I guess I'll just keep that 2006 ICE around until it dies, which might be awhile yet considering how slowly the mileage is ticking up.
I posted this to Reddit over a year ago.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/xw8qcb/new_ev_ad_just_dropped_oc/
Ok but this isn't reddit
Bravo
prices are not where an average person could go out and buy one in the usa $7.25 is still the minimum wage not to mention rising costs of insurance and property taxes and some states tack on extras fee for certain things and some insurance companies are leaving states making the cost jump even more
cheaper gasoline vehicles are barely affordable if at all for most even used ones
what about the battery and materials having to be mined and what have you
are the workers from material gathering to the final build paid a fair living wage
in some places such as tennessee the charging stations for electric are shutting down
All cars are expensive. What's your point?
if a green machine is better for the planet but out of reach for the average person then how does it help
The green option is walking, cycling and public transport, which are cheap. Cars are an inequality crisis just as much as an environment crisis.
Honest question. Does anyone here have enough humility to understand there's a similar checklist of things an automobile solves?
Now it doesn't mean it's the right solution but particularly in North America due to lack of XYZ automobiles are king.
It's very easy to go "hurr durr automobiles bad" but do you understand the multitude of reasons why we use them? All the things that need to be improved or fixed before we entertain the alternatives?
Saying this as a car owner who takes public transit far more than other car owners.
For the appearance of XYZ we need a policy and cultural change, and for that we need to be very vocal about how stupid and inefficient cars are (i.e. hurr durr automobiles bad).
"Does anyone here have enough humility to understand there's a similar checklist of things an automobile solves?"
Firstly, this feels a very confrontational way of phrasing the question. It carries with it the assumption that you are right and everyone else is wrong, which I don't feel is a helpful way of approaching a discussion.
Yes, of course people realise that car ownership is the only viable solution for individuals at the current time. You have engaged with a community who are passionate about and engaged in urban planning, so they are going to be more switched onto the challenges than most.
The entire point is that on their own they are not a sustainable solution long-term. They are hugely inefficient energy and space-wise, their infrastructure causes massive damage to the communities they carve through (see this Guardian article for a breakdown of some NA case studies), and they currently cause a huge amount of environmental damage.
So, the question becomes: how can we remove the need for car ownership? There's a host of ideas, from better high speed rail links to eliminate long-distance trips, to micromobility and demand responsive transport for short-distance, to better constructing our cities to begin with to allow for amenities to be walkable. Are we going to eliminate car use in rural areas? Of course not; there's no point running a bus service for a village of 10 people and a goat. Can we eliminate 99% of car trips for those in built up areas, improving air quality, walkability, and accessibility? That should absolutely be the goal.
TL;DR: hurr durr fuck cars
Yes. Nobody is suggested we should ban all cars everywhere.
Cars are incredible. I do trips to remote places all the time that would be impossible without cars. There's no better way to transport 5 people and their gear for a week to a place that's 100km from the nearest small town.
But for 1 guy commuting from the suburbs to work in the city every day in their SUV? Fuck that, the system is broken to even entertain that as a possibility.
And I'll tell you right back that people don't care about your list here. You want to get people onboard start pivoting the conversation. "yaytransit" is far more positive and forward thinking than "fuckcars".
In fact, the responses I've gotten already are a good indication of how deluded this community is. You're not here to promote change, you're here to scream into the wind.
So I guess consider that more a failing on my part.
Go ahead and try your riots against cars, see how far that gets you. I'm sure everybody will join you and applaud
Riots and protests don’t need your approval or applause. They happen because the majority of people are too complacent. If everyone was already aboard we’d just do those things, you know. You probably don’t understand this, because you never stuck out your neck for anything in your life.
I've noticed that people often imagine that they know what kind of person I am, because in their minds it makes it easy to build up a strawman version of a person that fits their preconceived ideas of the "bad guy" that's opposed to their dumb ideas. Here you go again, doing that. But in reality, all you know is that I made fun of your idea of rioting against cars.
People can read your other comments as well, you know? Your account is a textbook about insecure masculinity, Mr. „I am the man other men wish they could be“ 😂
Congratulations on taking public transport far more than most car owners you must be very proud
My favorite part about this sub is how everyone acts like the entire world is able to just stop having a car and be able to carry on normally about their lives as if cars haven't been forced into nearly all infrastructure plans globally since this inception. Like it's every citizens personal choice that nobody built a functioning transit system in the many decades before they were born, or that the place they can afford to live is too far from the place that pays the wages they need to live is too far to bike or bus to.
Like, push for fewer cars and less car centric design, but also stop being a fucking cunty dick about it.
Oh I'd love to hear your explanation for why it's irrelevant, and what crucial oversight I've made that you've managed to in your extensive 16 hours on Lemmy.
Ur comment is irrelevant to this post, as this post is merely talking about the inefficiencies of electric cars. It has not even mentioned the humans driving these cars. Had that been the case, your comment would've been relevant.
This post is an attempt to dispel the myth that electric cars are somehow better than ICE cars. Do you see why your comment is dumb?
Your reading comprehension and understanding of English vocabulary is about on par with your lemmy account age.
Til things like "urban sprawl" are inefficiencies inherent to electric cars, and the lengthy list of these inefficiencies are definitely not drawn parallel to ICE in order to suggest that people should instead drive neither as the underlying theme of the post, particularly given the theme of the sub, which I am able to observe because I've been here longer than 16 hours.
Are you really trying to discredit someone else's argument by using their "lemmy age"? Like... are you trying very hard to be this guy?
Now I'll still assume that your argument is in good faith and respond accordingly. So let's recap.
The post listed the inefficiencies of electric cars besides ICE cars. The underlying message was that electric cars only solve a very very small problem that ICE cars have, but still possess most of the issues of ICE cars. Hence, we need a much better alternative (trains, wink wink).
To this, you replied saying that this community unfairly criticized car owners. According to you, the infrastructure is the biggest one to blame rather than car owners. Which I would only partially agree (as most car owners still support car centric infrastructure). Of course, if there's not train in your city, you can't ride one! But you definitely can lobby for one. Your implicit biases against this community due to those one or two crazy posts skewed your perception in weird ways.
This post is most definitely directed at the tech bros (or the Tesla fanboys), according to whom the solution for GHG emissions from the transportation sector is electric cars. I hope that you agree that this is a dumb argument. This post merely makes fun of this argument. This community is not a monolith, you know... It is thus very important to take the context of every post within itself.
You could've argued against/for this idea. Instead, you put up something weird and irrelevant like "this community is dumb for blaming car owners". You might be right, but it just diverts away from the topic of discussion. Why not create your own post explaining your position? It's like going to a post saying "We need to increase the minimum wage" on a lefty community and commenting "but the lefties are commies". This MIGHT be true, but it is not at all relevant to the discussion itself, is it?
Look closer
Public transit would be great if you didn’t have to ride with other people. That’s my real problem with it in America at least; there are always loud and gross people aboard. My town has phenomenal bud infrastructure, but people drive because it’s faster, and because you don’t have to be around undesirable people.
Maybe public transportation where each person or group could ride in their own automated pod, which would be publicly owned. That way you could still go skiing/hiking/etc, since mass transportation to those places is very difficult due to low volume.
or you could bring in headphones to public transport like the rest of us
also lmao "public transportation where each person or group could ride in their own automated pod", you're either advocating for taxis or straight up segregation
That only helps so much when DJ Cool and his gang of bruvs crank out tingy crap at 200% volume from a cheap bluetooth speaker.
Ideally, public transport needs more funding and more onboard security to help calm that sort of thing down
I’m advocating for publicly owned automatic taxis
Sounds like trains with extra steps to me
Fuck off, that's a societal problem.
Fix that first, it's a minor thing in modern countries
And is there a better solution? And don't give me that public transportation bullshit, it's a bad solution in most cases and is already in place anyway.
The problem is that it isn't a matter of cars vs busses. It's a matter of urban design in general.
Public transit gets better as density goes up. A bus that drops you off at a giant-ass Walmart parking lot with nothing else but two drivethroughs in walking distance isn't very useful. A bus that drops you off in a neighborhood with 4 dozen shops, a dozen restaurants, 4 bars and 3 coffee shops within a 5 minute walk is way more useful.
By contrast, density makes driving worse. Density means more people are driving the same way you want to go. More people in cars means more traffic on the road with you. Designing for cars pushes you to low density sprawl.
Just building public transit isn't the solution. Just building public transit in a typical American suburban sprawl makes something about as compelling as a Ford F150 in Vatican City.
You have to fix urban design - stop building stroads and start building streetcar suburbs again.
It's only an in place solution in some places in Europe, not in the US. When I was living in the UK I didn't need a car. I did in the US.
Subsidised public transportation. If you are scared of "Socialism" have it funded by a business tax as businesses will be the main beneficiary.
We have subsidised public transport in my country. Traffic is still a problem.
Then it isn't good enough yet. People will use public transport when it's better or cheaper than a car. Dedicated bus lanes to bypass car traffic should be in place, to encourage using busses that create less traffic. Trains should be reliable, frequent, and cheap for longer distance travel. This stuff is all do-able with just a small amount of effort, and has been done and successful in other places, but it requires governments to stuff huffing gasoline.
Don't understand the desire of some people to have your little personal couch on wheels and no strangers around
What kind of public transport? And how is it implemented? The devil is in the details for this stuff.
Free bus tickets do nothing if the buses are stuck in traffic with no bus lane so often that people go "fuck it" and take the car anyway, because it's more convenient.
Free metro tickets do nothing if the routes don't go where people want to go.
Free train tickets do nothing if the trains don't leave frequently enough to have options and/or are stuck waiting for freight trains to pass.
There's any number of non-monetary reasons that public transport might suck, but there are solutions for them.
The walkshed of public transit is also really important.
People aren't going to take a train to a parking lot...
Free public transport?
Also, imagine how much worse traffic would be if everyone had their own car.
I mean, step 1 would be forcing the suburbs to pay the actual cost for their own power lines, plumbing and sewage, roads, phone lines, etc. Since as it stands, most of that cost is subsidised by the highly productive inner city, and that infrastructure is far cheaper per-person in dense neighbourhoods than it is in suburban tumours (sure, live out there if you want, but accept that you will either be paying a fortune for the infrastructure upkeep that supports you, or accept lower-class, cheaper infrastructure. I have a great aunt and uncle who live out in the countryside, and they have a dirt road, a septic tank and a rainwater tank, only their electricity and phone lines are comparable to what you get in cities, because it literally does not make economic sense to run paved roads or plumbing out to where they live).
Once people have realised that single-family housing with paved roads, sewage, plumbing and reliable electricity is well outside the economic reach of the vast majority of people, UPZONE. Demolish suburbs to replace them with far denser urban neighbourhoods, ones made up of townhouses, apartment blocks and mixed residential/commercial buildings. Change the zoning laws so that anyone can start a commercial business out of the front yard. Designate parks and other community areas in between your blocks of apartments and townhouses so that nobody is ever more than 15 minutes' walk away from one. And for those who still want to live out in suburban sprawl, make the transition to being more self-sufficient easier.
Then, you have a city dense enough that you can start running vast amounts of public transport through it. Not just busses, but trains and trams as well. A train is more or less the ideal form of fast transportation along a known, unchanging transport corridor, with far more energy efficiency than anything that runs on tarmac, the ability to hit highway speeds inside city limits, and the ability to be extended almost infinitely. They can also be run from overhead power lines, no need for batteries or internal combustion engines. Oh, and the same lines you run urban rail along can also be used for freight trains, so they can replace both car journeys and freight truck journeys.
When you have dense cities with well-designed and extensive public transport, you can get almost anywhere with just one transfer, your bus/train/tram comes often enough that you're never at the stop for more than 10 minutes, and even a trip from one edge of the city to the other will rarely be more than an hour. Plus, you don't have to pay attention to the road, nor pay for fuel and maintenance.
Source: I live in a city where you can sharply draw a divide between the pre-car and post-car zones, and the pre-car zones are mostly like how I describe, while the post-car zones are suburban sprawl shitholes that might have a train station if they're lucky
"Demolish suburbs" LOL what the fuck. Y'all anti-car people are so delusional. Get a life and concern yourself with realistic pursuits instead.
Yes, I did enjoy it.
"Sure, the planet is unfit for human habitation now, but at least we got to have lawns in front of our houses and meat every day until the world ended"
Stopping climate change requires drastic action, rethinking how we live every aspect of our lives, and the wastefulness of suburbs means they must go, just like the internal combustion engine and the animal agriculture industry. How will you justify to future generations that you left them with a ruined world, all because you and those like you were too selfish to give up your current style of living?
Additionally, they are provably a blight on cities. They cost far more to maintain than they produce, since they lack any serious commercial activity, so no taxes, and the spread-out nature of them means that any infrastructure is far more expensive per person. You wouldn't even need to actively demolish them, just cut off all maintenance, and watch them rot. Plus, they keep literally bankrupting cities, so often there is no choice, the money is no longer there to maintain them.
Sure, go right ahead and get to work on that plan then. I'm sure everyone in the suburbs will agree to give up their homes and land and move to the dense urban Soviet-style shitholes that you envision as the perfect way to live.
Tell me you’ve never been outside of your crappy state and have never seen a European city nor ever seen a modern European apartment.
You do understand other countries have actual buildings that consist of more than some wood and styrofoam, right?
"Is there a better solution? Before you answer, don't"