The First Quieter Megacity, Thanks to Electric Vehicles
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
In Germany the Deutsche Umwelthilfe has to literally sue ever city separately to force their hands to do something about pollution. Bavaria simply ignores the court orders. Efforts to improve bikeability and public transport plan on multi decade timelines. Here in Berlin there are plans to extend the subway that are older than I am and are still being discussed. Electric busses are somehow not suitable for cities outside of China, we're still "evaluating options".
In an effort to be all-inclusive, and generally not upset anyone, we're getting almost nothing done while China just steams ahead.
I'm probably being a bit hyperbolic, but you get the idea.
While we're all enraptured by the tomfoolery of our political "leaders", China is building. Who knows if it'll all work out, but you can't blame them for trying. Whereas you can certainly blame us for being paralysed.
The chinese are really conscious of this - it's why they are investing so heavily in reducing corruption, which is the archetypal sign of people 'working around' the system.
It's possible that with new technology, they'll succeed - but traditionally, non-democratic projects don't work out because the official channels are useless, and the center doesn't know what the periphery is doing.
People will behave as long as the economy is growing, but as soon as it contracts, everybody will start turning to crime or politics.
I am extremely sceptical about such claims. Claiming to fight corruption is usually more of PR stunt. To really fight corruption you have to do institutionalized changes, such as increasing transparency, which is painful for most of regimes on Earth. Fighting corruption without changing the system is busy work and reality show.
For instance, after the first gulf war, they started extensive military reforms, presumably seeing how Saddam's gigantic, tank-heavy, cold-war era army fared against new technology, and seeing that the same could happen to them.
I think time and time again, they've moved very fast to neutralize threats - and as I see it, there are few that would be more pressing than general disillusionment, the normalization of graft and cynicism. It's this culture that really killed the USSR.
When nobody believes in your system, it doesn't matter how absolute your power is, or how utterly defeated your enemies are. Everybody in your administration will be essentially working for themselves, and stealing everything that isn't bolted down.
No. The problem is lobbying to keep vested interests intact. Lobbying is fundamentally, "More money = more voice". Western democracies have become corrupt all the way to the top with lobbying, stifling growth, ingenuity and engineering
I think we can have both: lobbying at a macro level, and bikeshedding locally. Or some blend of.
Why wouldn't they? Why should a government have the power to end a legitimate industry, which contributes massively to GDP and society's well-being, without a long changeover process?
And btw, the car industry could have taken the lead in the development of alternative engines instead of optimizing for next-quarter profits.
I'm all for reducing emissions.
Having said that, let's be frank about air quality having improved immensely over recent decades. Back before the (ICE and electric) cars became a thing, the inner city air and rivers were much more heavily polluted, by coal & wood heating, and outflow of untreated sewage. It's only thanks to significant surplus, provided by high efficiency, in turn provided by modern technology & science - including transportation - that we can invest heavily into actively (scrubbers) and passively (more involved, but cleaner processes) reducing pollution.
So yes, we want to reduce emissions, eventually doing away with most, or all, ICE and other oil consumers. But the technology necessary, and the required economic surplus, is pretty much provided and accelerated by the cheap and portable energy generators in cars and others, fueled & lubricated by petrol and other fossil fuels. Ditto smaller, lighter products made of plastics and other materials we currently manufacture partly off of crude oil.
Path dependence, let's consider the whole picture.
Hybrid electrics were well into development by the 90s. The Prius was launched in 97. There was a hybrid race car in Le Mans just a year later. Less than 10 years later and the German manufacturers were leading the field for hybrid technology in racing. Technological development doesn't happen by magic, it takes time.
Because of external costs.
When it turned out radioactive toothpaste kills people it was banned. When it turned out CFCs destroy ozone layer they were banned. The only reason petrol is treated differently is - our economy depends on it. This will eventually change, we can work to make it happen faster or not.
If we don't - all the external costs that could be avoided are our fault.
That aside, why are the costs less-bad? It's not like they'll stop making cars, it's just a different drivetrain. I'm sure there will be costs to the transition, but how do you figure they are worse than the external costs?
Public transport is cheaper, more ecological, saves time for everybody in traffic jams. What's the cost? That you have to drive to work or school with other people in same vehicle? You will get used to it. I have to die earlier because of all the shit that's in the air and car industry doesn't care.
And that's just the first step, then you can tax internal combustion engines increasingly.
As for the car industry - who cares? It's not like we cared about horse industry when cars appeared. Let them adapt or die. Government should protect citizens, not corporations.
We care about industries such as this because they contribute massively to the public purse, provide stability to entire regions via employment, and make products that much of the world relies on right now.
> It's not like we cared about horse industry when cars appeared.
Horses weren't banned to encourage a car industry to emerge, users gravitated towards cars until eventually horses were superfluous/a burden.
That only worked because the people making money from selling horses weren't the same people who developed cars.
The cars will still be made. They'll still be bought. Making them will still require jobs.
You're doubling-down on a false premise that killing ICE cars means killing car industry.
Tesla makes only electric cars and employs 46 thousand people.
As Tesla shows, Mercedes, BMW, GM, Ford etc. could be making 10x more electric cars today and they would sell if they were any good.
So in the interest of keeping our planet fit for human living we should nudge them in the right direction. If company A can't be bothered, then company B will emerge to take its place.
Most of the world doesn't produce cars. Why should they care? They are still using cars, wasting their lives in traffic jams and dying early because of air pollution. Many of them will have to migrate because of climate change.
> Horses weren't banned to encourage a car industry to emerge, users gravitated towards cars until eventually horses were superfluous/a burden.
What does it change? Industry died. Societal costs were there. Nobody cared.
If polluting industries would pay for my allergy medicines, my replacement lungs, my relocation costs due to rising sea levels, etc, hey, that'd great. Let them pollute and let the market sort it out (as it most certainly would, given the prices they'd have to charge to cover their enormous expenses). However, they do not. So I am (and you are) forced to subsidize them. Incidentally, I never voted for subsidizing pollution, so I guess my remaining option is to "artificially terminating" it.
The actual cause is that currently Everyone has to move to the big cities I'd imagine lots of Berlin Hipsters would not be so complacent once the DUH sues them because their Altbauwohnung wastes precious space and energy and pollutes the city air.
If there was any leadership in a political leader here in the West we'd have done something similar already.
My city soundscape has mostly hidden the sound of engines, save the rare Harley or Hemi. The sounds that penetrate the air (for me) are of both buses and cars blasting horns, music blaring, tires screeching, and the zooming of cars through air. That, and people taking loudly/yelling/screaming, the sounds of barking dogs, car alarms, fire truck/ambulance/police sirens, and air conditioners kicking on next door, and of course sounds from neighboring apartments.
But that's nice that the buses run quieter now.
Is every bus turning emitting these sounds ? Seems crazy to me.
I'm in America and I've never heard these. I think it may be something unique to that poster's city?
Heavy traffic and stop-and-go at traffic lights are the worst (no surprise), avoid those if possible.
At Shenzhen Eastern Bus Co., one of BYD’s three bus-fleet partners, the monthly electricity bill of 17 million yuan is one-third of what its diesel bill used to be. The company has 15,000 employees and 5,800 buses, which use seven charging stations. Most of the buses are charged at night, when electricity is cheaper, though they sometimes have to top off in the afternoon. Each bus takes about three hours for a full charge and has a range of 250 kilometers (155 miles).'
These are coal powered buses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#Co...
And the generators can be further away from cities,
And the generators can be replaced with renewable or nuclear power without requiring any changes to the vehicle fleet.
I'm all for hybrid vehicles but there is something sinister about this flamboyant pr piece about the benefits of EV's...I just don't see enough infrastructure or tech maturity for the foreseeable future
All the negatives, none of the positives ... "sinister PR piece" ...
When you have the extraordinary financial resources that China has and your coal use is climbing despite nearly consuming more coal than the rest of the world combined, it's not enough to add renewable energy, you must aggressively remove coal. China isn't doing that and they never said they would. Their public plans include decades more of coal consumption near present levels.
Greater Asia Pacific is consuming four times the coal of the US and EU combined (representing nearly $40 trillion of GDP).
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-energy-coal/corrected-...
(Sorry, jwz)
There's a joke in the cleantech space about how people in cleantech can't even understand how energy efficiency, solar, batteries, or EVs affect them, so how the hell can non-cleantech people understand the benefits of what we do.
Overall, we need help. We have the tech and the vision, but most of the cleantech space needs help on the marketing, education, and execution.
From the article:
* began exporting its vehicles to the U.S. BYD has inked deals to supply electric buses to Facebook Inc.’s sprawling headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., the transit authority in Long Beach, Calif., and the campuses of Stanford University and the University of California at Los Angeles. The most recent victory came in August, when BYD won a bid to supply all Georgia government entities with EVs.
The company is using the immense financial backing at home to its advantage. A $9 billion credit line from China Development Bank, for example, is helping BYD place electric monorails in Brazil, Egypt, and the Philippines.
And government grants that cover a third of the cost of building an electric bus.
It's hard to imagine any of the Western democracies doing this, in the near future.
(My phone's autocorrect tried to replace Futian with Durian!)
https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-2010/electric-two-wheele... .
This mega trend went pretty unnoticed in the West.
Can't post this often enough.
Despite all big cities been keen on banning them
They think that mopeds are poor mans mean of transport and should not be allowed in big cities to not to shame the country.
Every peasant should drive Benz S600 to show country's affluence to foreigners.
I know, that's beyond schizo...
Chinese certainly will though.
Tesla isn't laser focused on high-end exotic cars, look at the Tesla Semi for example, and energy storage.
I think Tesla's existing targets are more a product of their limits to production scale than anything else.
EVs have more route flexibility, and don't need expensive infrastructure, but they need expensive (and polluting) batteries and spend idle time charging.
The city I live in ponders EV-Trolleybus hybrid. I can routinely see them minding their business with poles down. Still I'm not really sure if they'll waste a lot of time manually setting it up and down and whether pure EV is a better idea.
The few tram lines are all in outskirts of the city.