This court ruling just allows German cities to ban diesel cars, so whatever a city decides to do, is possible as long as it isn't challenged by the public or there is a new law.
I go by bike to work every single day. It's 8.5 km one way, today morning was -9C outside and while my beard was full of ice, I biked my way to work. On the way to work, there was a sign: "Achtung, erhöhte Feinstaubbelastung!" - "Attention, high fine dust pollution!"
I don't understand why my health should be at risk for something I don't produce.
Regarding a ban of certain cars: I think German cities can still make it work. There is public transportation in most cities. It's also reasonable to allow trucks at least at certain times. It's also reasonable to allow diesel cars with 2 or more people inside or allow diesel cars at certain times.
This is a time to have a conversation about how we want to live in the future and every mayor has to think hard about what (s)he want for the citizen of her/his city.
I'm totally sympathetic to the end goal, I would just like to see a realistic approach and the GGP's call for an outright ban on vehicles in the present is not supportable.
The biggest problem I have with various 'green' parties is that for the most part their solutions are bordering on the militant and do not take in to account the various complications that will need to be dealt with in order to implement the final vision.
I cycle a lot, wear out a couple of bike tires in a year. I also drive a lot, live in a small town outside of Amsterdam. So I think I see the world from both sides and a life-long interest in green technology (windmills, solar) as well as electric vehicles has given me a pretty good ground level of knowledge about all this stuff.
There is one part of me that would very much like to see this car-free city of the future come to pass in my lifetime, I'd probably move there in a heartbeat if it were done properly. But if it were done improperly I highly doubt it would fly and it would likely end up being undone and that would cause a setback we can not afford.
So better to think really hard about how to make this work, prepare plans that are properly wrought through in such a way that they work for everybody and in ways that do not accidentally kill the thing they are aiming for.
Keep in mind that cars were not thrown into cities without reason, and that at the time they were invented the bicycles were already there as well. The car mostly displaced the horse because it was cleaner.
The time when things went wrong is roughly the 1960's (for Europe at least) when suddenly a car was within reach of everybody that wanted one and the cities were ill prepared to deal with that. By the 1970's the disaster was already complete and traffic became a mess. It's been downhill from there so we definitely will need to make changes.
In my experience to date it takes roughly as long to get out of a problematic situation as it takes to get into it. Any major changes on time-scales of less than a few years will lead to trouble, a realistic transition plan would probably run for a decade or more.
What is absolutely possible is to ban cars from certain areas for certain times. And the thing is, VW and the other car manufacturers are the guys at fault. I'm pretty sure they will have to pay a big price for their downplay of the scandal.
Politicians will say whatever they want to get people to vote for them regardless of whether or not their plans are actually realistic.
The electrical car is doable as a complete replacement, but not overnight. It will need a lot of work and time before this can be a reality, but step-by-step we might get there.
If you know German, there is a video on what it costs to use wind and solar energy in Germany's energy network: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV_0uHP3BDY
This isn't news for the Germany's big four power grid operators: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Stromnetz-unter-Druc...
What would happen when there are lots of e-cars in one street: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Elektroautos-koennte...
How many Tesla PowerWalls would you need to have Munich's power covered for one week? I'm really to lazy to translate it, so I just paste it from my email:
Laut Google hat ein 4 Personen Haushalt im Jahr einen Stromverbrauch von 4.000 kWh.
Ich rechne einfach mal mit 50 Wochen im Jahr, an denen so ein Tesla-Speicher verwendet wird. Dann benoetigt die Familie im Mittel 80 kWh pro Woche (Winter ist dabei schon nicht dabei). Bei 13.5 kWh, die so eine Tesla PowerWall speichern kann, braucht diese Familie also 6 Stück davon, um eine Woche von jeder Energiezufuhr abgeschnitten sein zu können.
Jetzt hat Muenchen aktuell ca 1 430 000 Einwohner. Man braucht als ca 2145000 von diesen Tesla Walls und dann ist vermutlich der Erdvorrat an Metallen, die man darin verwenden kann, aufgebraucht. ;-)
The diesel scandal is the following: people like to drive big cars like SUVs. A car in the 90s weighed maybe 500kg. Now a new SUV weighs 3t. To drive this, you have to have a diesel engine. A diesel engine can be relatively environmental friendly if you add enough AdBlue. But AdBlue isn't cheap and the AdBlue tank takes up space in the car. So VW, Bosch, and the other German car manufacturers switched of the AdBlue as soon as the car detects it's not in a testing setup.
We were more environmental friendly in the 90s only because our cars didn't weigh as much.
So, can we replace fossil fuels in energy generators?
A lot of countries like Brazil build new nuclear reactors to generate energy. The problem is, the waste is going no where. Maybe it's possible to send the waste to the backside of the moon, but the risk of an exploding rocket seems too high for me.
Solar energy does generate only energy when the sun is shining. That's maybe 12h a day and it depends a lot on the location on earth surface. The problem of storage and transportation of energy isn't solved yet.
Wind energy is massively changing. It can generate a lot of energy in a short time period and the next week there isn't even a breeze. It's hard to switch power plants on and off as fast as the wind is changing.
I was thinking, there should be Tesla Power Walls or similar technology next to decentralized wind and solar energy generators. But I really doubt it is possible to switch of all fossil energy.
I'm not sure what to do about this. Lobbying and investing in renewable research might not be enough.. but is there anything else really?
But not everybody is that lucky and plenty of professions will require you to be in places where public transportation is not an option. An interesting reversal of intentions is happening between the cities of Almere and Amsterdam. Almere and Amsterdam are connected very well through public transport and many people will take the train into Amsterdam each day from Almere. The Amsterdam public transport system is reasonably good and services most of the areas with corporate activity. The fact that Almere has a large and skilled professional population caused some clever business people to move their operation to Almere. Initially those companies were staffed with people living almost exclusively in Almere itself. But now people from Amsterdam have started to commute to Almere in the morning causing a substantial amount of traffic the other way because the Almere industrial areas are not as well serviced with public transport as they probably should have been.
The best combination for such transportation that I've found is to take a small folding bike along on the train, this gets you within a few km of where you need to go and then it is an easy bike ride. But this option is not open to everybody, and it almost closed for me too due to a self inflicted bike accident.
Amsterdam is just about ideal for cycling, Copenhagen is the other EU city that really gets this right and Helsinki gets a lot of credit from me for being almost there. But the majority of EU cities have a very long way to go to make the bicycle the best form of transportation and even in Amsterdam bicycling is anything but safe (mostly due to scooters and taxis).
Amsterdam could probably get away now with closing off the center for traffic completely, say from Munt to central station and east to the Cruqius mill and west to Haarlemmer poort. They would have to build some more underground parking though because that would lose the main new parking garage at Oosterdok.
Maybe in a couple of years, time will tell.
For all the faults around Europe with traffic, I think they did far better adapting to cars than the UK. Mainly by preserving some of the alternatives better.
The Netherlands has infinitely more sensibly integrated public transport, and provision for cycles than we will probably ever have. At least that's my perspective as an occasional visitor.
Postwar rebuilding here gave us internal combustion as the answer to all, leading to much, now regretted, removal of rail lines and trams. Not forgetting the many people-hostile choices like cutting communities in two (e.g. Mancunian Way) and giving residents a motorway right above the house (Birmingham, M6). Trying to undo those choices always comes with a bill in the £bns for the shortest length or rail or tram.
I'd recommend a brief history of cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands. It was actually quite poor here, too. i.e., it wasn't culture naturally shaping a cyclist-first traffic regime throughout Dutch history, it were conscious policy decisions to uproot a car-friendly traffic regime and make a decades-long effort for change. The Dutch system sucked in the 50s and 60s and it changed its policies in the 70s, which took off only in the 80s.
https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/focusing-bi...
A modern society requires some amount of pollution to function. This has been reduced, and we should work to continue to reduce it, but generating/storing/transporting energy (as well as many other activities) generate some pollution. Some of it we directly benefit from (powering our homes, getting food on our tables), but others are indirect (pollution to produce/transport medical equipment when we aren't the ones using it). Given this, one can think of it as a tax on your health for the benefit of society.
Of course there are issues with ensuring people pay their fair share, that people aren't over burdened with the taxation, and that the revenue is being efficiently utilized.
Some highly economically productive cities in Europe have similar bans on private vehicles in the centre, and function perfectly well.
The towns that have banned vehicles completely that I am aware of are all small and have simply set up a major parking lot right next to the access road into town. For the ones that I am aware of this was a practical thing to do because the streets in winter were already more or less useless due to the snow and the inclined roads so it was a relatively minor step.
A nice example of such a town:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saas-Fee
Pop. < 2000, car free since the 1950's.
Taxis buses and other cars are used for transportation to remote areas of the island.
So I think that you both are right, and it is just a misunderstanding on the time-frame that this changes will happen.
Oh, sorry about that, forgive me for speaking my mind in a public forum, and out of turn at that. Would you like a position paper with references?
I claim things because I've been interested in transportation for a very long time and have read up on the subject from countless sources. There are a whole pile of reasons why you can't just overnight remove all traffic from cities. For one you're still going to have to supply the cities which means you will need to keep all road and other infrastructure in one piece but with a far smaller tax base available to pay for them, you will have numerous exceptions to your rule (due to for instance people with handicaps, emergency vehicles and so on), there is the small detail of a lack of public transport capability, the fact that public transport is not usually practically usable when you need to transport more than a small bag of stuff and so on. Another issue is that if the larger part of the alternative transportation methods will use electricity that we will need more grid infrastructure, charging points and generating capacity, all of which will not spring into being overnight.
Simplistic solutions such as 'ban all cars' from one day to the next will have serious side effects and you're not going to win this battle by making such idiotic suggestions. Society is like a super tanker, the minimum turning radius is large and if you try to exceed that limit something will break.
'Plans with regarding alternative means of transportation' require time to be implemented and require actual alternatives.
Amsterdam has been slowly but surely pushing vehicles out of the cities inner center with a combination of tax pressure, changes to infrastructure, improved public transport and so on, it's been going on for decades and the effect is very clear. If they had done this any faster there would have been too little time to adapt for all the individuals and businesses depending on mobility.
It's akin to how you change a large technological system: the agile method applied to society. Large uncontrolled swings in direction will not be manageable and will result in only one of two things: some kind of disaster or a reversal. If you don't want either of those you are going to have to be a bit more patient for a proper solution.
Let me start by summarizing the facts to get this straight. Germany does not generally ban diesel cars from cities. Some cities plan to ban diesel cars in limited areas and under certain conditions. These conditions are non-exclusively such that if door to door businesses is necessary you are still free to go with your diesel car.
You claimed that "the German economy would crash" as a response to a comment that asked for "Next: Petrol cars please.", which in turn was a comment to the article with headline "Diesel cars can be banned from German cities, court rules".
Germanies economy wouldn't just crash when german cities were able to ban petrol cars. What happens depends on when what bans are imposed and with what accompanying measures.
You don't name a single accompanying measure the cities that are planing. You don't name what exactly is banned. In the absence of knowing these facts, no conclusion can be drawn.
Also, neither I, nor the comment you responded to beforehand, nor the article of the thread mention banning all cars. Where did you get that from? Did you just made that up?
The metaphorical analogies don't convince me, because they seem to be based on intution and not on science.
I don't disagree with the other very interesting points you bring up. Surely, they need to be considered. I'm quite sure any city that plans a ban has thought about them and then some more, and has come up with solutions.
Cheers from a random person on the internet!
Edit: Plus German car industry will crash either way because most people work not in building cars, but motors, electronics, transmission etc. which are mostly redundant with electric cars.
A. No cars, clean air!
B. Don't do this, economy will crash
A. Doesn't scare me, economy will crash either way, keeping cars will not prevent a crash.
Also if you're a lawyer
"An AI just beat top lawyers at their own game" https://mashable.com/2018/02/26/ai-beats-humans-at-contracts...
AI is great but it's hilarious to think much will have changed in 5 years. Have a look at the results from the Stanford Question Answering Database if you want to see how far there is still to go.
Sound reasonable and good to you? I mean you do believe in what you're saying, yes?
What's your email address so that I can mail you the contract?