The way to "save the planet" is to not drive. Driving a 5000# vehicle around thinking you're doing good for the environment is just the marketing genius of the car industry in 2016.
In Germany, solar power is much more widespread, and so it is more likely that a German electric vehicle user would be riding in a vehicle charged from solar power. This is not to say anything about solar power or Germany, but rather to speak to the flexibility of the electric vehicle. Electric vehicles can depend on an infrastructure running on nuclear energy, or anything else, making it extremely adaptive to the ecological and energy needs of the future.
On the other hand, traditional combustion engine vehicles absolutely depend on fossil fuels, and they depend on a massive infrastructure that is specific to supplying fossil fuels. For a traditional combustion vehicle to shed its utter dependence on fossil fuels would mean finding an alternative and abundant fuel source to combust, and even then it would require a highly specific infrastructure to deliver those alternative fuels.
This is absolutely false. Lithium is not toxic to mine at all. It isn't even "mined".
http://cleantechnica.com/2016/05/12/lithium-mining-vs-oil-sa...
> Electric cars cause pollution
They cause zero pollution when you have solar panels on your roof and the car is properly scrapped after you're done with it.
> The way to "save the planet" is to not drive.
This is silly and impractical.
Realistically, at present most EV owners will not charge their cars from solar panels but from the utility mains and that means coal-generated electricity in many if not most areas.
Car manufacturing involves a tremendous investment of energy to mine and produce steel, aluminum, rubber, plastics, and electronics. Recycling itself consumes more energy, and in many cases raw virgin product is cheaper than recycled.
Not driving is impractical. Driving less, when possible, is worth considering.
Right now if you need to buy a car, the most environmentally friendly choice is probably a used (no new manufacturing) fuel-efficient conventional car.
[1] A friend of mine who owns one said the only thing worse than the 20 minute charge time is waiting 20 minutes to plug into an available spot.
[2] http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/pdf/sec17.pdf
Actually it would be a lot more efficient if your friend charged at home or at work rather than drive all the way to a supercharger station.
You would do well to point your friend to this PSA [1] by Elon Musk and J B Straubel during the Q&A at Tesla's shareholder meeting some months ago.
Unless you factor in manufacturing.
There's also a ton of energy going into the cracking of crude into its constitutions parts before it even enters the supply chain for use in ICE vehicle.
Further, centralized power generation does a much better job at filtering and removing toxic elements from its discharge stream than gasoline/diesel vehicles filtering mechanisms do.
Notwithstanding the above, fossil fuel electric plants can be removed from the grid and replaced by cleaner energy solutions without having to replace or modify the consuming vehicle.
Here's a question for you. If suburbs are "the least optimal configuration", then why did urban sprawl occur in the first place? Why did so many people leave the cities and sought bigger homes on wider lots?
Modern urbanism is very opposed to urban sprawl because of those and many other reasons. Transport is just one aspect of it.
I'm not sure that higher pollution is innate in lower densities, or whether that is due to the specific way our suburbs are designed today, and the technologies (such as ICE for transportation) that we use to enable them. It feels like an engineering problem.
And sure, putting everyone into a giant anthill might make it cheaper to contain and dispose of all the generated pollution. But then we should be honest and admit that it's about cost, not about what's best.
Small businesses - I don't think there's any innate value to them, in a sense that we need as many as we need to serve our needs, but there's no "right" for any particular small business to be viable in a world with changing conditions. If suburbs can sustain fewer small businesses, so be it.
Segregation is an orthogonal issue. I think you meant stuff like "white flight", but it is a symptom rather than a cause. If you prevent people from moving away, it will not resolve the tensions that make them desire to move - indeed, it may well exacerbate them.
What you refer to as "modern urbanism" sounds like an ideology that insists that it's the right solution for everyone, and those who disagree should be forced into it for their own good. I think that different people have different preferences in this aspect, as they do in most others, and that any approach should, ideally, try to respect those preferences, rather than ignoring them, or pretending that they are irrelevant.
In a car oriented suburb where you have to drive to literally every location you have to try extra hard to get even a basic level of exercise.
FWIW, the suburb where I live is on the edge of a wilderness area. There are several great walking, cycling and hiking trails within a 2 mile radius. Some of those are fairly steep, too, so even one mile provides a good workout. I find that I engage in these activities far more often than what I lived in a large city, and had to drive for quite a bit before getting anywhere bigger than a tiny block-sized park.
The alternate future would have seen everyone living in dense urban areas paying most of their wages as rent to the descendants of gilded age land owners.
edit: spelling
Which is what is happening now anyway. The suburban sprawl merely delayed it by a few decades (okay, maybe half a century, to be generous), but all the underlying issues with it are still there.
Because humans are irrational.
Gentler answer: Because of a variety of social, political, and economic pressures. For example, quick list because I really shouldn’t be spending time on this:
* Social: Running away from black people.
* Political: Spreading out the population in case of nuclear war. Accommodating population growth without the headache of having to tear down any existing building. Giving the white flight voting bloc the housing that they think they deserve.
* Economic: A fad in having housing physically separated from jobs and other commercial activities, like the current ridiculous fad of flat UI design in software. Objectively worse, but that’s what you get paid to build and favorable financing to buy.
What I care about is that suburbs are not sustainable. The climate change crisis is acute now, and I look at the per capita use of energy, water, and infrastructure (how many miles of roads per capita, how many miles of driving per capita, how many miles of water pipes per capita, how much water usage per capita), and on no measure are suburbs better than dense cities. Take away debt financing for the infrastructure, which eventually does stop working, and I don’t think most suburbs would physically survive.
One other point I wanted to address. One negative side of sprawl is how it affects natural environments - but, again, does it really have to, or do we do it just because it's the easiest and cheapest way to implement it? It feels like living less densely could actually be beneficial for the environment if done right, compared to the cities. Consider: a metropolis will always carve a chunk out of nature and replace it with a dense grid of roads around high rises, completely ruining the ecological system in the affected area - heck, our cities even have their own microclimates now, because of how much heat we pump out at once in a single place.
On the other hand, a single residence does not have a significant impact; and if you space them out sufficiently, you can preserve the original environment in that space between. Infrastructure is trickier and more invasive, but we've seen some trends towards more localization recently (e.g. with residential solar, composting etc).
Who knows, perhaps we can actually make this description from "The Diamond Age" a reality?
"The prevailing architecture here, among those who had not adopted neo-Victorian precepts, was distinctly subterranean; as if these people were somehow ashamed of their own humanity and could not bear to fell even a handful of the immense Douglas firs that marched monotonously up the tumbling slopes toward the frozen, sodden ridge of the Cascades. Even when it was half buried, a house wasn't even a proper house; it was an association of modules, scattered about here and there and connected by breezeways or tunnels."
If you moved cattle or poultry around like we move people, you'd get fined and put out of business. Deservedly so, because of the risk of spreading disease and wiping out whole crops of valuable animals. But people, not so important I guess.
If people are living farther away from their jobs, you're likely to get more congestion, not less.
Does this effect overcome the added amount of cars on the road from people who can now drive that wouldn't be able to before? I'm skeptical.
Incidentally, I was talking with a government transportation engineer recently, and that's what keeps them up at night - trips that are too long or just too inconvenient today become doable with self driving cars.
AFAIK none of the current autonomous control technology coordinates in any way with other vehicles or any kind of central control facility. Human drivers using Waze is probably the closest approximation of that to date.
There's the rub