No reasonable people are expecting someone that lives rural to bike into town. Going between rural homes and cities is one of the places where personal cars are unavoidable. Ideally, they drive to the edge of town and park next to a subway station that they take most of the rest of the way.

Imagine how much cheaper cities could be if 2/3rds of the real estate wasn’t parking? Also, moving doesn’t necessarily mean going to New York. It can also just mean moving closer to your job in a small town. Which would also be easier if you could turn all the parking lots into homes.

The problem is not the people who live far from decent public transport but those people who live in the city and uses it every day, on city, all roads are always for vehicles like cars and trucks, instead to be for pedestrian and for bikes. On bad connected places a car can make sense but most of the people in city have cars when they rarely go outside, they could rent a car and would be cheaper for them for those days they need to move away. About EV, I think we still have the same problem, but the waste it generates keeps on ground instead flying on air.

What does the picture represent?

So the implication here is that we can’t get rid of cars everywhere, so we shouldn’t reduce the use of cars anywhere?

reform zoning at the state level and put in protected bike lanes literally everywhere. also kind a lot of people can do a little biking. I can so some trips by bike in by inner ring suburban area

How much of the population lives in those areas? I can’t imagine it’s more than 10%.

Good luck convincing people to give up their horses for these new fangled “automobiles.” Did you know this “gasoline” is highly flammable? A horse go go anywhere you can, and doesn’t need a “road.” Who’s going to pay for, build, and maintain these “roads” anyway?

Brought to you by Herman Luddite, Horse Breeder.

EVs do something - they’re better than ICE. But we’re wasting a lot of money on them that could go towards better public transit. We desperately need less cars and the EV vs ICE debate can distract from that - I think that’s why you see so much of a pushback against EVs.

But it’s also really dumb to go the other way and focus so much on EVs, isn’t it? Why replace our cars with slightly-different cars, build a whole new charging infrastructure for them, and then phase them out, say, another 40-50 years down the line? It’s not just tailpipe CO₂ emissions at issue, it’s poor land-use causing a major housing crisis, it’s the cost of cars skyrocketing out of financial reach of many people, it’s habitat destruction causing populations of wild animals to crash and many to go extinct, it’s particulate matter from tires causing human maladies like dementia and cardiovascular disease, it’s an epidemic of social isolation and loneliness, it’s traffic violence killing over a million people a year, it’s sedentary lifestyles leading to diabetes and cardiovascular problems, it’s CO₂ emissions from manufacturing cars and building the infrastructure that they need, it’s the large-scale use of fresh water for manufacturing, it’s the loss of autonomy for children, it’s municipalities going broke trying to maintain car-centric infrastructure, it’s the burden on people in poverty needing to buy and maintain a car, etc. etc.

I mean, the ultimate solution is to have cities and towns that don’t force us to get in the car to drive everywhere, for every little thing, every day. There’s little meaningful difference between transitioning cities away from ICE cars and transitioning cities away from electric cars. We could just start now, and maybe Millennials might be able to see some benefit before they retire. EVs are fine as a stop-gap measure while we work on that, but I see them being treated as the main event.

This is a good way to put it. If you’re in the market and need a car, ICE you are knowingly hurting the planet a lot. Buying an EV you’re at least not making the planet worse.

Easier said than done in a lot of American cities and burbs. I’ve tried to go without a car, and it just hasn’t been practical.

I’m on the edge of a denser American metro that actually has a subway, and when I ditched the car for some of my jobs, I added several hours of commute to my day, and it honestly started to wear on me physically.

When I have the money I’ll probably jump over to an EV. It seems like the most reasonable solution for where I live and work.

I’d go broke without a car. I live close to work but shop in the suburbs. The price of groceries at the “bodegas” are shockingly offensive.

EVs probably have around 1/10th the lifetime emissions of a gas car

Do you have a source for that because that’s radically better than any number I’ve heard. Most analyses I’ve seen have been more like 40-60%.

It’s basically “refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle” except for cars it’s “refuse, cycle, public transport, car pool”

Nuclear power is alright if you disregard it turning two cities into wastelands for a century.

Another point is that cars, car infrastructure, and car oriented development is one of the single most wasteful ways to use land. Building smarter cities with alternative transit systems, mixed use areas, and actually using all 3 dimensions like many newer cities in China could protect so much habitat from needlessly being destroyed. There’s hardly any truly wild land left on the east coast, it’s hard to tell what things used to look like now that practically everything is covered in suburbs and strip malls.

Yeah that’s what people being annoyed at the push towards EVs seem to always misunderstand, too. It’s not about immediately throwing all your current stuff away. It’s the same with heat-pumps for heating: Should you immediately throw away your gas furnace you installed 2 years ago? Of course not. Should you get a heat pump if you need to replace your heating anyways? Hell yeah!

The criticisms are also that companies use slavery to acquire the materials to make EVs. And they don’t work well in the cold (see current cold snap in Canada), the lifetime of the batteries aren’t great, and we still need to destroy huge swaths of land to create cars, park/store cars, and drive cars.

EVs are only going to save the car industry. To fix it requires a redesign of cities (see Strongtowns, not justbikes, city beautiful, etc.).

EVs are not good for the environment. They’re less harmful than ICE cars but that doesn’t mean they’re not harmful.

I like your post, but regarding China, you are dead wrong. They are the country that hast adopted electric cars the most, even more than Norway. There are also lots of videos on youtube of travvelers being surprised about this, seeing lots and lots of car brands that they (and me) never heard of before.

which going in reverse is 100+MPG.

Holy cow, why don’t people drive in reverse all the time?

/s

What kind of 80s shitbox are you driving that gets 50 MPG? Are you using Imperial gallons or driving a hybrid?

How does one convert MPG to KWh? Electricity generation takes numerous forms with notably different efficiencies converting input to output…

There are a TON of issues with EVs as a first line approach to emissions. Manufacturing emissions is a big one, admittedly that one will come down as infrastructure gets up to date with what we have already for vehicle manufacturing.

A much more important factor, however, is the fact that the individual’s contribution to emissions is negligible. It doesn’t really matter what we, as private citizens, do when corporations or billionaires produce so much carbon emissions. When Taylor Swift’s JET ALONE produces more carbon annually than 1000 individuals driving their car daily, it doesn’t matter one iota what kind of vehicle the average joe drives.

We need infrastructure, and we need governance. Pointing the finger at regular guys and saying you’re the problem because you drive a combustion engine is folly at best.

I’m sorry, did you just handwave away indirect emissions? You do understand that the vast majority of our energy production still dumps large amounts of CO2 in the air?

What we need instead of EVs is well designed walkable cities with mixed use buildings where one no longer NEEDS a car.

If all you need for 95% of your travel is your legs or a bike, most people will actually just opt out of owning an expensive vehicle that they no longer need.

What we need is good a public transportation system in the form of busses for middle range and trains for long range transportation.

EVs is little more than a patch to keep the status quo on horribly designed cities.

In the Netherlands I could go everywhere (and did go everywhere) walking, or by bike. I sometimes used a train for longer distances but in the end I didn’t need a car for anything.

Shifts power source to the grid. Grid can use different sources for energy production.

Such an excellent point, which I hadn’t seen mentioned before. It means we can have more control over those sources. Thank you.

with hand crank windows

I want hand crank windows back anyway. Faster and more reliable. So frustrating when the “auto complete” aspect of modern car windows means I cannot easily get the window half way closed or only a crack open. But I must be in the minority on that.

Yep. An important rule for most “things” if not life, is one big “thing” is almost always more efficient than many smaller ones. An example would be one large power plant serving many EVs, instead of many combustion engines for each vehicle. Applies to buses and trucks too, one bus is more efficient than many cars, one 18-wheeler truck instead of 50 pickup trucks, etc.

I think pretty much anyone would agree that pervasive public transit with pervasive coverage and short wait times would be pretty much ideal.

I hate to be cynical but I can’t see us getting there any time soon in the US. Mainstream American culture is so delusional about the idea that we’re all RUGGED INDIVIDUALISTS that the idea of touching people is utterly repugnant.

I would love to dream of a world where this could happen, and maybe I should stop dreaming about self driving cars and start dreaming about this instead :)

Meanwhile, public transit everywhere in the US besides Manhattan is utterly abysmal and even in cities like Boston where public transit is decent-ish most people who can drive do.

Those who can’t either take a taxi/Lyft if they can afford it, and if they can’t afford it they suffer. It’s the American Way.

Meanwhile, let’s also face that EV’s have to carry around large batteries. One advantage that ICE cars do have is the power density [J/kg] of petroleum fuel is leaps and bounds better than that if a lithium battery. This means that EV’s are likely to produce more road noise from rolling, the dominant source of noise above 50 km/h, as well as more wear to the roads, since wear is a function of vehicle mass to some pretty high power. (I thought it was m^(4), but I’m not sure)

On top of that, while EV’s don’t have any tailpipe emissions, the power that they need still needs to come from somewhere. Thus the carbon emissions for use are a function of the national power grid of the place where you’re charging your car.

Thus, A) if cars are already a fairly small part of the transportation mix, B) steps are taken to further improve the quality and availability of alternatives to cars, and C) the power grid is dominated by nuclear power and/or renewables, then EV’s could be better for the environment.