Or just don't buy a car.
Personally, I've lived in many cities, suburbs, and rural areas in the northeast US (population-dense, relatively friendly toward ecological initiatives) and tried to use public transit whenever possible. My experience is that public transport outside cities is practically nonexistent. In cities, there are only buses and they're annoying/slow/don't go where you need them.
Only now that I live in the immediate vicinity of Boston do I have useful public transit options, yet still, owning a car is a necessity to get to anything outside the city.
A typical suburb in the US will have no public transportation, and be so sprawled out that bicycling or walking between places would be impossible for a working adult.
In America, most suburbs are bad for walking, actively hostile to biking, and have either no public transit or nearly unusable public transit.
The cities are usually not much better, either. Only a handful in the US have public transit that can even be called decent, let alone good.
In the US only.
I wonder if 30 to 40 years from now, we'll be having the same convo about electric cars that we are having about recycling plastic? Something that seemed good on the surface, but masked all kinds of externalities.
I mean, at least electric should be a bit better than ICE in daily use. But will making these things at scale in the first place cost too much in the way of carbon production? Or other forms of pollution that we as consumers don't even know about yet? You may say, "well it was your job as a consumer to know the impact your purchases were having." But I'm just not that knowledgeable about that stuff. I don't know if a billion electric cars are bad or good? And it might not even be the cars, just the fact that we have to make the roads may be polluting somehow? Or whatever? It's just too much for a consumer to know. Should I be buying electric? Or supporting mass public transit? Which is better? Or is it just a question of which is worse? There's a lot to think about there.
Or maybe it's just me?
If a car is needed it depends how you're planning to power it.
This answer[0] does a great job of looking at the energy inputs of building a car. I thought the up-front cost would be higher but the emissions from producing a car are comparable to the emissions of using the car for a few years.
So if the choice is between a used ICE car and a new EV and charging it with renewable energy, it's (surprisingly) probably worth buying the new EV.
If you're planning to charge it with power from a coal plant though you should probably get the used ICE car.
[0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-is-required-to-build-a... [1] https://ecf.com/news-and-events/news/how-much-co2-does-cycli...
That depends. There are streets in the UK so polluted that jogging on them, breathing in lots more bad air, is actually worse for you than not jogging. Similarly, the violent accident rate for bicycle commuters is scary. I don't know of any regular commuter who hasn't been to hospital at least once.
Having said that I have had a hospital visit.
There are certainly parts of the US where a car is necessary, but 90% is pushing it. It may well be that 90% of people think that they need a car, though.
Being car-less in America is hard, I lived in a the suburb of a main city and if I was to use transit options to get to work I would have spent 3 hours a day on commute alone. That's simply not feasible. Similarly I used to work a job from midnight to noon (and a year later noon to midnight) and there simply was no feasible transit option for such a schedule, and with the sprawling nature of the suburb carpooling wasn't much of an option either.