Pretending like the largest economy in the world can just snap it's fingers and implement trains and public transit across a huge landmass is the biggest false solution out there.
Who said anything about snapping our fingers? The scale of mobilization required to replace our cars with EVs is staggering. While we’re making all these changes it’s a great time to look at how we can improve our cities for other forms of transport. Most people aren’t going across “a huge landmass” they’re going from the outskirts of a metro area to the center and back. A combination of transport, bike lanes and public ebike programs, and sound zoning laws and building incentives are absolutely worth discussing.
There is a chasm between “EVs are a false solution” and “we can snap out fingers and implement transit”.
How is the switch to electric cars a "staggering scale"? It is done as part of the natural renewal. Cars are driven for 10-15 years until they are scrapped and replaced with a new car. This should be electric the next time around. So the effort to build them is about the same as to build the next ICE car you would have bought otherwise. Yes, it requires retooling in the factories, but partially that also happens between car generations.
I am all for reducing the share of cars in traffic, but that will take quite some time and not replace all cars. So we need more environment friendly cars and those would be electric.
The system to build ICE cars has been around for decades. Building ICE cars at the replacement rate represents the status quo. But now all of a sudden we have huge demand for resources not previously required - lithium, cobalt, manganese, and graphite. This means new mining operations spinning up all over the world. At the same time, this new market opportunity has led to a whole bunch of new EV companies making new factories, and major retooling efforts for existing factories.
These changes are tied to the demand for a resource intensive new product in a way which barely compares to the established production of ICE vehicles using supply chains that are decades old. With all that this requires, we can certainly spend a little time thinking about painting bike lanes and subsidizing ebikes. You can make 80-100 ebike batteries or you can make a single electric car battery. We should really consider how diversifying our transport infrastructure could facilitate a faster change to electric transport while reducing our impact on the natural world.
Note that I agree with you - if we are going to have cars then they should ideally be electric. But some people see EVs as kind of an ultimate solution, and those people are mistaken. Which is why I and many others are screaming about the need to look at transportation in a holistic way rather than a one size fits all "replace ICE with EVs" approach. Cars were never ideal to begin with, lets not perpetuate old mistakes with a new resource intensive type of car.
I believe self-driving cars will partly solve this. Instead of waiting for a bus that leaves every 15 minutes, there is a car leaving every 30 seconds.
Instead of buying a car, you pay for a subscription. Instead of taking your own car you call a car to come at your house and pick you up.
Less cars standing parked at the parking lots at the office 8-10 hours a day. Less cars parked at the grocery stores. Less cars parked at home.
Less cars needed to be built to transport the same amount of people as today.
I’m imagining the dirty, smelly, damaged car that I get blamed for breaking which was actually ruined by the previous user. It turned up late as there were too few in my area due to an event across town. My ‘moderate user’ plan wasn’t a ’plus’ plan for priority access and anyway, I’ve been down ranked due to the damage I didn’t cause.
Customer service is non-existent and I can’t afford to pay to remove the down rank event.
You can build 80 ebike batteries for the same material cost as one electric car battery. If we focus purely on cars, we are seriously shooting ourselves in the foot compared to a diversified transport strategy. We still need electric cars, but I am saying we cannot view electric cars as the single one size fits all solution.
Also it is hard to imaging taking a car to the grocery store, shopping for ten minutes, and then waiting for a new car versus hiring the car to stay waiting.
It would be useful to look outside the US for both the opportunities as well as the limitations. I was recently downvoted for defending cars (EVs) and I was talking from a european perspective where public transport is very developed. Nevertheless there are limitations and always will be.
The population-weighted density of the U.S. is approximately the same as Europe, especially Central and Northern Europe. Standard density, the measure which leads people to believe the U.S. to be sparsely populated, is a useless metric, only suitable for questions like how much uninhabited land exists per capita.
However, similar density (standard or population-weighted) alone doesn't automatically make public transit any more politically or socially viable. According to an early paper on COVID-19 death rates, population-weight density (but not standard density) could explain cross-country variance in the initial rate of spread of COVID-19, but not the subsequent evolution of the pandemic. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.01167.pdf For the latter, the researchers needed to turn to the Hofstede cross-cultural measure of individualism to explain country variance.
That points to the more likely reason the U.S. has trouble with public transit--not because we live sparsely (we don't), but because of our highly individualistic culture. IOW, we don't like it. Indeed, as COVID-19 has arguably shown, as compared to many other countries, we would literally prefer to die than to be more pro-social.
Only because we haven't tried. We could absolutely lay electrified track between our population centers. We choose not to, because the automobile is so built into our collective culture.
Should we move to EVs while we're building trains? Of course. Have we started moving to EVs without any movement on trains? Sadly, yes.
California is trying. It was only yesterday that they eliminated minimum parking requirements, which stand in direct opposition to improvements to public transportation.
You may not realize it, but California's GDP is many times "most European countries." They have a way to go to catch up.
In case it wasn't clear, I am talk specifically about California high speed rail. The parent was we have tried to connect urban centers with rail.
This is because the US is no longer capable of infrastructure projects. There are number of reasons why and good articles on the topic if you are interested.
In the 1970s Amsterdam looked like pretty much any American city - it may have taken a few decades but changing the transportation focus of a city is an extremely accomplishable goal.
Amsterdam never looked like American cities, central Amsterdam doesn't even have roads where cars would fit.
Since 150 years an extensive tram network existed, with horse carriages like in many other European cities before it was electrified.
Every part of the city is walkable and always has been.
Few cities in the US are comparable, maybe New York but it's not really desirable to live there for a lot of reasons - being full of cars in a place where none should be being one of them.
The european cities have a problem with roads not broad enough for cars. In a city that have broad roads that fits more than four car lanes, you can easily split one lane off physically from the car road and make it into a two-way bike lane.
When the population are used to this and the car trafic goes down, the bike lane will be too crowded to be a two-way. Then you do the same on the other side of the street and make them both one-way roads with car lanes in the middle.
In our town they are rebuilding the bus stops on streets so if two busses stop, they will block the whole road for car traffic. The bikes can pass on the separate bike lanes though. This by design so people will choose bike instead of car. Not quite thought through though since this will also block blue-light traffic...
Population density is too low because cities were designed with cars in mind. 50% of the population lives in the suburbs where it is just too far to walk anywhere and even if you look at more densely populated places everything is still quite far away. Nobody wants to walk 20 minutes just to get from their house to the bus stop and even if they did, you can't make low intervals for bus routes work - much less outside of peak hours. But to replace cars by public transportation you need it to be reachable, high interval and ideally available around the clock.
Labor cost and cost of living is so high that it prohibits the existence of small neighborhood stores. I live in South America and have lived in many different places here, you can buy everything within walking distance wherever you are. In my neighborhood probably 5% of the houses have a small shop. Twice per week the streets turn into a market in different parts of the city. Even in the big cities you have small convenience stores operated by families in every corner. Public transportation is probably the best in the world, you can go anywhere without a car for very low prices - even for our income levels.
Europe is somewhat in the middle between these two. Public transportation doesn't get you everywhere and its expensive. Most small stores which existed 30 years ago are dead because of supermarkets and online stores. You still won't see extreme examples of a car-centered culture like public high schools with 5000 students and you can usually get to a smaller supermarket within 15 minutes. But having higher labor cost lead to more centralization.
Also keep in mind that the first thing people buy once they have money is a car, even if public transportation works. You see this in places like China. We won't get rid of cars anytime soon. The best outcome we can hope for within the next 50 years is driverless ridesharing.
Of course we could, the problem isn't the size of the landmass, the problem is the stubbornness of our brain mass.
We radically modified our country for cars in a very short amount of time. We can do the san with cheaper and more efficient transit methods in a shorter amount of time, for at least a core that covers 60% of people in very little time, if that is what we wanted.
Instead we have public processes that take five years to decide on installing a bike lane. We took all the inefficiency of centra planning, then took away the only advantage, speed of decisions.
Electric bikes and cargo bikes are having a very big growth world wide. They are ideal for taking over small trips under eight miles.
Whereas self-driving cars have the potential for taking over the bigger trips. A self-driving car does not need to park, so ideally it drops you of at a 'bus' stop nearby and you walk the part yourself. This also separates the cars from the urban centres and makes the self driving problem much less hard.
Most cars (and car batteries) are idle for 22+ hours a day. Mass transit isn’t the only optimization. We could gain efficiencies by making better use of the cars that are already sitting on our city streets through automation and on-demand car sharing.
Yet somehow things like Uber have worked out to be more expensive for consumers than taxis or private car ownership. Plus most people need vehicles during the same blocks of time, you can't load balance them (easily)
Rush hours are a thing... There shouldn't be such time if the demand was evenly spread, and that should be entirely possible after all nothing stops everyone from freely choosing their time of use of road when there is less users...
I'm looking forward to revisit this comment when we run out of raw materials for EVs and all the tooling and expertise to make ICE cars is long gone. Should be fun.
I'm assuming this statement is about the shortage of battery components and that over generational time scales we'll run out of the parts for that, since otherwise it's very similar components between ICE vs EV.
Lead acid batteries are recycled at a rate of ~99%[0], is there a good argument for why we won't end in a similar regulatory environment for other transport scale batteries?
I'm a big fan of non-car solutions (I just biked back from my neighborhood grocery store), but if someone's gonna buy a car, I'd rather it not be combusting continuously to run.
Indeed, and god forbid separate bike paths / infrastructure. The main complaint is that bikes don't pay tax / registration, but usually after I get them to agree that vehicles should pay in proportion to the damage (and commensurate repair costs) they inflict on the infrastructure and then show them this chart [0], they usually end up just resorting to insulting my "libtard values" or something. Cubic functions are not something I think they remember from school...
