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Comment by wffurr | Hacker News Reader

Yet another reason the real answer to the climate crisis isn't EVs - it's public transit, bicycles, e-bikes, scooters, e-scooters, walking, etc. All these other modes are much lower impact on the environment than purchasing and operating an EV, much less an ICE.

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You have to add "redesigned cities" to that list. Electric vehicles are almost as much a patch for ICE cities as they are a replacement for internal combustion.

I don't think most actual cities would need to be wholesale redesigned; plenty of urban planners have proposed plenty of incremental ways to successfully re-tool cities to favor humans over automobiles. And it has successfully happened in the past - see Amsterdam, for example, or (admittedly to a lesser extent) Montréal.

I would love to see a city in the Western parts of the US accomplish this mainly because of how difficult of a task it would be. The majority of people live >15 miles from downtown areas. Mass transpo can only be generously described as an after thought. I've played SimCity, and if you did not place your subway/train/bus stops efficiently, the citizens did not use them. That plays out in real life as well, except it is much more difficult in real life to just break out the bulldozer to re-engineer the city to make it more mass transpo friendly.

"Simple" things like good bike lanes and traffic calming enable cities to redesign gradually, and of course this is largely already happening (perhaps too slowly) in many cities.

Some cities in mainland Europe are like this already. They make cars unnecessary. Even bikes, as you can walk everywhere.

I'm talking about midsized cities (100-300k inhabitants) that are really compact thanks to 4-8 levels in every apartment block and ubiquitous use of lifts.

Lifts are the disruptive technology. They make energetically efficient cities possible and cheap.

I also find these cities much more nice to live in. Nice parks, avenues and shopping streets. I guess they are the heirs of the Hellenic tradition of valuing meeting squares a lot.

In contrast, as much as I like other aspects of Anglo-Saxon societies, their terraced or detached house model is energetically unsustainable, and yields both liveless suburbs and downtowns.

>Lifts are the disruptive technology. They make energetically efficient cities possible and cheap.

Are lifts really as efficient as escalators? An escalator is constantly moving (unless it's malfunctioning), so there is no wait to continue moving. An elevator on the other hand is not. Maybe it depends on the number of floors? I can see an elevator being faster going from ground to floor 40 rather than zig zagging floors from ground to 40. Does anybody use "express" escalators that skip floors allowing for faster transit to higher floors?

> Are lifts really as efficient as escalators?

I wouldn't be surprised.

> An escalator is constantly moving (unless it's malfunctioning), so there is no wait to continue moving.

That wastes energy but makes it time efficient for users (in terms of latency). OTOH, escalators are slow compared to most lifts/elevators, which means total trip time efficiency isn't good unless you are only going a floor or two or are competing with an elevator that stops a lot, where the latency gain may still beat the loss of vertical speed. Which is why escalators tend to get used where you've got lots of traffic volume but they aren't going up/down lots of floors.

I used to work in an office building with escalators that are powered off at night -- there was some sort of motion sensor about 10 feet before the escalator that would power it on when someone approached, you'd have to be running to reach the escalator before it reached normal speed.

So on-demand escalators are possible, just rare.

In the daytime either they kept them on all the time, or maybe there was enough constant demand to keep them running as I never saw one powered off during the day.

I thought on-demand escalators were the norm, from subway to malls I don't think I have ever seen an escalator that not my on-demand.

But I can't say I've put a lot of thought into it.

Are you thinking of elevators, maybe?

There are maybe a few hundred on-demand escalators in the whole world, and millions of normal ones.

I definitely want to hear where you got an estimate that there's less than a thousand on-demand escalators in the entire world.

No. And I've personally used at least a hundred on-demand escalators just in my city.

They're more efficient because of reduced frictional losses, the contact point of an elevator is a pulley at the top of shaft and a couple guide rails. The guide rails are mostly there to provide lateral support. As for latency you can design around it, modern tall buildings will usually have multiple elevator banks that service different floors. A lot of engineering can go into designing the dispatching for elevators.

That reminds me of https://play.elevatorsaga.com. Have fun!

Escalators in Incheon airport start when you approach and stop when you exit.

Not just Incheon, all around South Korea.

In Germany most of them also stop (and sometimes fail to start when you approach...)

Many or most of them, at least in Munich, are reversible as well.

Our hospital used to have lifts that didn't stop at floors. The had no doors, you just jump on them and get off. They were intended for staff only, to quickly get between floors so slightly out of view of the public. They were replaced a few years ago though. Mabe too many accidents?

Were they paternoster lifts? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster

Yes, that's the ones. Never heard the name of them, thanks!

Much is made of the "self-driving" part of autonomous vehicles, but I think "self-parking" could end up being just as significant. Imagine if there was no longer any reason to mandate parking capacity for planning and zoning purposes; you drive to your destination, and your car goes and parks itself (paying/negotiating automatically if needed), and returns when summoned via phone.

This sounds like high amounts of traffic: a bunch of people being dropped off and being picked up at arbitrary locations with the cars then having to go to and come back from various other bottlenecked hotspots.

I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion right away.

You open up a lot of free space if you can take away street parking, which could also significantly alleviate traffic, for example with dedicated lanes for small-personal battery powered bikes, scooters, etc.

It’s also not necessary for vehicles to travel several miles to find parking. Typical urban parking is designed so the average person is walking maybe a couple hundred feet maximum? That’s a lot of localized parking. If the car was traveling just a few thousand feet on average to find a lot, that’s not a lot of extra parking-miles traveled, but still a paradigm shift in parking process.

Also, you eliminate the issue of people circling the block trying to find parking, which is adding slow traffic in dense areas.

Finally, it’s likely the vehicle is not going to park, but rather off to pick up its next ride.

At the most optimized, there are pickup and drop off points at every block where someone gets out, and immediately someone else gets in, and off the vehicle goes to the next stop.

> Finally, it’s likely the vehicle is not going to park, but rather off to pick up its next ride.

Yeah, a managed fleet system could have very different congestion characteristics, but the proposal was specifically that self-parking might be a game changer on its own. At that point it's basically valet parking, and you still have to stash the cars somewhere, and they still have to go back and forth between that somewhere and wherever the passengers got out.

You get rid of the circling but I don't think you get rid of queuing and grid backups.

There's a lot of automatic parking in Tokyo and other cities in Japan.

Drive up to the building, which has space for just one car in the "lobby".

Get out of the car, enter data into the console. Your car then enters the building and is stored by a robotic system.

Later, do the same in reverse.

> Typical urban parking is designed so the average person is walking maybe a couple hundred feet maximum? That’s a lot of localized parking.

Typical urban parking outside of car-centric US cities is "your car takes up as much space as your apartment/hotel room/office cubicle, where the hell do we have space to put it?" For someplace as crammed as Manhattan, the parking isn't "around the block", it's on the other side of the traffic choke points.

> Finally, it’s likely the vehicle is not going to park, but rather off to pick up its next ride.

I don't buy that. Traffic patterns in large cities end up showing a distinct bimodal pattern: there is a large influx of people into the central business district in the morning, and then a large outflux of people in the afternoon. If I'm commuting by self-driving car, and I get in at 8:45-ish, there's going to be no demand for my car since everyone who needs to be in work by 9:00 is on the way.

You can see this in systems that are already optimized to move people en masse to/from cities: commuter rail and bus systems. Large city railroad stations often have rail yards for train storage near their downtown hubs simply to store the trains during the day.

You can also see this with bike and scooter shares. Bikes and scooters clump up at hubs that enter the transit system in the morning and empty out in the evening commute.

It would be a lot of traffic, but circling the block to find a parking spot is already such a huge contributor to traffic that it might still be a net win

That doesn't work in many low density areas (prime example is American suburbia). So your answer for those people is to make them move to a more dense area that can support such solutions. Which isn't a bad idea, but it's a much harder thing to accomplish.

Ebike/scoot to transit hub, trains to commercial areas. It’s not rocket science.

Bikes and scooters are great (provided there are safe riding lanes and trails) until there's any weather. If I have to show up at work looking presentable then biking through a downpour simply isn't an option. If there's any sort of snow or ice on the ground then biking simply isn't an option.

Yes. You also need to factor in things like having young kids. Before I had them taking an ebike to a train would make perfect sense. Now though, without a car it would be incredibly difficult to get them to daycare and make it to work on time without waking up before Dawn.

You can't put the kids on the ebike to daycare? Seems like that would be faster and easier than dealing with a car.

Just wait until you start in on the total mess that is school drop-off when every parent decides they have to drive their kid to school. Much faster to breeze past the stopped traffic on a bicycle, unstrap the kids and send them on their way, and bike to the train.

Not every one has only two kids. It's going to get awfully tough for those with four or five without a minivan.

So when you get to that edge edge case they drive a mini-van. No one is saying ban cars, just use them less.

https://bikeportland.org/2012/06/28/with-six-kids-and-no-car...

This seems like one of the consequences of the decision to have so many children.

Only three kids, but it was never a problem not to own a car, here in a city with good transportation and where riding with a kid front and back of bicycle is normal.

It's not hard to wear rain gear or budget some time to clean up once you arrive at your destination. Any sort of plan to encourage active commutes should also include facilities in workplaces for this sort of thing.

Snow and ice: not as big a problem as you think. Cities and towns can plow and salt bike paths even easier than they do streets. You can also put studded tires on bicycles if you're in a particularly snowy area. See Oulu, Finland or Winnipeg, Canada for cities with plenty of winter cyclists: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/feb/12/ice-cycles-no...

I think when he says "show up looking presentable", it may be that he needs to be in suits or business casual, preferably unwrinkled. Also, I am exceptionally disinclined to bike through below-zero weather, snow tires or no (referring to the hypothetical canadian). Let alone Texas summers, which regularly hit 105 this time of year. I don't care if there are showers or not, it's just darn unpleasant to be outside this time of year.

Sub-zero weather isn't too bad down to maybe -10C. After that, it's pretty brutal.

I do try not to take superfluous trips on my e-bike above maybe 95 though.

Since he's talking in F (e.g. 105), when he says sub-zero, he means -18C or lower. Or did you mean -10F?

Ah okay fair enough. I'm from the US, but lately I've been playing a game with temperature set in C, and am used to working in C from talking with a bunch of international people in programming chats.

Yeah sub -18C is extremely cold. Definitely not cycling out there. I don't think I've ever seen below 0 Fahrenheit where I live.

Not wanting to is a really reasonable position, as it is with 100+ degrees. Lots of parts of America get that cold for a solid chunk of the year, so if people can't take a bicycle, how would you build a system to accommodate that kind of a load spike?

I cycled to work for years in the Netherlands (down to -5C in winter) and Australia (frequenctly 35C+ in summer). The secret in both cases is:

(i) keep appropriate clothes at the office;

(ii) wear suitable cycling gear (as the Dutch say, there's no such thing as unsuitable weather, only unsuitable clothing);

(iii) find a way to shower at work;

(iv) be good humored when weather or other mishaps occur...

A German guy told me that was a German expression.

Which one of you is right?

Sounds like Dutch humour and phrasing to me, but I've heard Germans use "There's no such thing as poor weather, only poor preparation"

I was actually joking. I wouldn't be surprised that the expression is used in many places that experience inclement weather.

I claim this as the Norwegian "Det finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlig klær."

Seeing as my version is a rhyme, it's obviously the superior one.

-5C isn't particularly cold. Would you have been out in -20C with gusty winds and drifting snow? How do I get those appropriate clothes to the office, and where do I store them? Can't be all wrinkled -- and these days you may not even have an assigned desk. And I can be good humored, but will my boss be?

Really, though, if we consider bikes safe enough for transportation, why can't we have ultralight enclosed EVs?

(i) nope, I'm not crazy; (ii) in your Ortlieb bike pannier or backpack; (iii) commandeer a cupboard in a quiet corner; (iv) if your boss isn't good humored, it's time to change jobs, or change the boss; (v) because they blow away in a strong wind.

(i) There are plenty of places where it gets down to "only" -5C or -10C where it would still be practicable; you're giving worse case scenarios but those don't apply everywhere. We can do what we can where we can. (ii) Bring it in your pannier or backpack (buying wrinkle-free helps as well).

* https://www.londoncyclist.co.uk/how-to-carry-a-suit-on-your-...

Where do you store your car?

Assuming your car takes up 12sqm * 2m I assume you'd find plenty of space to store some panties replacing your wet ones ;)

If we managed to get 80% of the people living in places where the weather is mild and the topography mostly flat to switch from car commutes to bike commutes we would already have changed large parts of the world.

95 and 105 degrees are suprisingly different, especially with sun. 95 you can stay in the sun and will burn, but won't get heatstroke (probably). 105 you will get heatstroke unless you hydrate about 1/4 gallon/hr of water and get to shade in a reasonable amount of time.

And speaking of burns, I burn really easily. I've tried the super-oily disgusting stuff and every thing; more than 30mins of direct noon-day sun and I usually burn. I am not getting skin cancer, thank you very much.

(i) This part is very defensible, depending on company culture.

(ii) I don't know what this would be for cold, but I assume you can layer. Heat, you can only remove so much.

(iii) "Find a way" is not a great defense.

(iv) Easier said than done, and similar to iii in that they both boil down to an over-all sentiment of "deal with it".

Cycle in with your lycra and then change into your work clothes. I've pedalled in -10C and 35C in Toronto.

Showering at work isn't necessary either: sweat is odourless, and the stickiness comes from bacteria. So you can actually shower before cycling to get things clean and you'll be fine the whole day.

In some ways we're actually ourselves too much:

* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/550291/beyond-soap-...

Based on my experience dancing, the trick of showering before exercise only works for about 4 hours if you're wearing cotton or wool. Lycra gives you about two. When you're dancing for more than four hours everybody is stinky and exhausted and nobody cares. At the office? Make sure to schedule your meetings in the morning, and definitely avoid supper meetings.

1. Cycle in, perhaps working up a sweat.

2. After cooling down a little, change out of potentially stinky commuting clothes into your work clothes.

This seems to work for me, and given the characters I work with, they'd let me know if there was a problem without any qualms.

Do you think people don't cycle in the rain? Just get a waterproof and waterproof trousers.

The Dutch don't seem to have a problem:

* https://www.iamexpat.nl/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/biking-safe...

* https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/cycling-in-the...

In Toronto I cycle from April to December, rain or shine. I know folks that also do it January to March, but I can't be bothered to buy the extra insulation layers so I take transit.

I have two panniers: one for my lunch and the other for my rain gear:

* https://www.rei.com/c/cycling-jackets/f/f-waterproof

Have you ever attempted to ride one of these through snow?

Also, how would something like this work with little kids?

Biked in snow plenty of times. It's fine. Also cities can plow bike trails even easier than they plow streets.

Plenty of bike options for little kids. Seats, trailers, box bikes, etc. etc.

How can they plow bike trails easier than streets, especially in the case where the trail is not attached to a street?

In my city there is often street parking during non-rush times, and so parked cars can get in the way of the plows and so it may be hard to clear.

On a bike trail there are no such obstacles: just push the snow to the side.

Use smaller plows. They can be fitted to ATVs/quads.

You're assuming a "commercial area" (i.e. a downtown core) that is any less spread out than the suburbs. In a lot of car-centric American cities, it's just a continuous sprawl where the residential sprawl gets called "suburbs" and the commercial sprawl gets called "downtown", without any increase in density.

Or build out infrastructure in those areas too. In suburbs, there's plenty of room for separate bike paths and trains. It doesn't require everyone to move into Soviet-style superblocks and towers.

Trains don’t work in suburbs not because of space limitations - there just aren’t enough paying customers per mile of track to make the economics work.

There are not enough taxpaying residents to make roads work, either. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/4/30/my-city-has-ma...

You NEED roads though. Even if you can reach 100% of the city through walking and public transportation, what do you do when you move? Take a train trip for your sofa, and another for your dining room table, and so on? How do local stores and restaurants get their goods delivered? How do you get packages larger than an envelope delivered to your home? How do emergency services and fire rescue reach your home?

Do towns exist with public transportation but no roads?

Heh, yeah. The 'apartment living on a bike' hypothesis is really at odds with itself in this sense, I feel.

If you own and live in a place long term then you can slowly bring materials to it, build up furniture, etc, it all works and makes sense.

But really this all seems to be based on hyper-specialism. The moving company is the only one allowed to use the roads. You've no space for tools or materials, so no DIY, get the joiners in. And so on and so forth.

Personally I find that really depressing. You may as well just plug yourself into the wall and turn on VR.

You need _some_ roads, but not to the extent of your typical suburban sprawl. Where I live (Vancouver, Canada), there are sufficient roads for most travel, but the city also has relatively high quality public transit and decent bike routes. I don't think GP meant that a city should have no roads, but rather that transportation infrastructure is almost always going to be an expenditure for a city. America has simply chosen to prioritize cars over other transportation options.

Higher density minimizes the need for cars.

This is a typical neighborhood road in Berlin

https://www.google.de/maps/@52.4463121,13.309308,3a,75y,244....

This is a road in central Tokyo

https://www.google.de/maps/@35.705447,139.7784828,3a,75y,260...

This is a random road in San Mateo

https://www.google.de/maps/@37.5600243,-122.3067183,3a,75y,3...

You need roads, but you don't need roads that as wide as those in American urban sprawl

I feel almost agoraphobic when I look at pictures of suburban USA. I think it's a combination of flat landscape, low buildings, wide roads, no mature trees (your example notwithstanding) and no real features on the horizon.

Off topic, what's going on in the Berlin example? The whole left side of the photo looks like it's been redacted, are the homeowners requesting their houses be removed?

German privacy laws \o/

When the street view cars came to Germany, so many people requested redactions that the whole project got cancelled. Only the biggest cities have coverage and it hasn't been updated since 2011.

Trains work fine in the suburbs, when the burbs are built around the belief trains either will, or do exist.

Not everyone can ride bikes, and trains just take you from one place where you don't want to be to another place where you don't want to be.

Most of the places I want to be are right next to subway stops. Just because you live somewhere with garbage transit doesn’t mean transit is inherently bad.

> Not everyone can ride bikes

And those unfortunate souls will have to buy cars, but the roads will be much less congested now that most are on bike paths. A single free lane is faster than three packed ones.

There's a rehab hospital here in Boston that does assistive bike rides. They have a wide variety of bicycles and tricycles and can get just about anyone out there pedaling with either hands or feet.

Yes, pretty much everyone can ride bikes. Or scooters. Or velomobiles. Or hang gliders. There is some human-powered vehicle out there for everyone.

We just have to get out of this local maxima based around driving oil-burning SUVs.

It's been entertaining to read the discussions (below) about how to make this practical. So far, it looks like the only way to make this work is to a) live in a city, or rebuild your suburbia into a city, and b) construct your entire life around riding that bike - choose a job with a tolerant boss, spend extra hours every day showering and changing clothes after biking, etc.

I'd rather drive an air-conditioned car, sit in traffic for that hour or two, and enjoy my private backyard (however small it may be).

Instead of constructing your life around a bike you construct it around a car. You can't commute to work any other way, if it breaks down you are bound to mostly Uber as a backup strategy to get anywhere.

Except those car-centric environments you live and work in are a more effective gate to keep the poor out than the grandest gated community. Almost no where else on the planet is the idea of a city being a tiny urban core surrounded by hundreds of miles of single family houses in spiraling one lane streets of sprawl the norm. Its a purely American fixation on centering all human activity around cars. And for your benefit, even - the world would be alight in a raging inferno if we ever tried to globally house everyone in quarter acre single family houses with 4 hour single-occupancy car commutes every day.

It's more accurate to say that life has been optimized for convenience and net happiness, and that ain't a bike.

> construct it around a car

I don't, actually - it's that a car is far more useful than a bike. I drive 25 minutes to work; I haul (5 bike-ride-loads of) groceries several miles to my house; I visit friends anywhere from 1-5 hours away; I casually drive into the city and back. Even if I felt like riding 10 miles each way, rain or shine, or using public transit, it takes so much less time to drive my car, and I have to either find multiple clever solutions to each of the other activities I use the car for, or just go without.

My car gives me freedom from limitations; bicycle dependency only adds to them. To use a bike instead of a car, I have to fundamentally adjust my life, in every way for the worse.

You don’t seem to able to wrap your ahead around the fact that driving appears to give you more freedoms only because you live in a city that was designed around cars, not because cars are inherently faster or more convenient. The convenience of the car is an artifact of city planning decisions, not a universal truth.

Example: do you realize how preposterous the idea of driving several miles to get groceries is to someone who lives in a real city? If I want to get groceries I walk to the grocery store two blocks away. If I don’t like that grocery store I walk to the other one four blocks away. Or the other other one five blocks away. It takes me less time to walk to the grocery store than it takes you to drive to yours. The counterfactual to a 10 mile drive is not a 10 mile public transit ride, because without car-induced sprawl everything would be much closer and you would have to travel much shorter distances to have access to the same amenities and see your friends.

Public transit is also not slower than driving in a city with proper transit. I don’t own a car and almost every single journey I take is either short enough to walk, or faster on transit than in a car. It takes me 10 minutes to get to work on the train, the same drive would take half an hour due to traffic.

A car enables cities in less hospitable environments to be inexpensively populated. Where I live it’s regularly above 110. You’re not cycling in that. Population density is too low for light rail, and only the mentally deranged and hopelessly poor ride the bus, making a greater disincentive for anyone else who wants to bear a 15 minute wait in 110 degrees.

For actual numbers, my commute is 20min by car, 2.5hr by public transportation, or 1.2hr by bike. Public transportation would need to be no more than 40min for me to consider it, and I’d only consider it because I wouldn’t have to drive. Once self driving cars arrive, I’d never consider public transit, even if driving were twice as long.

> driving appears to give you more freedoms only because you live in a city

I don't live in a city, just like half the population of the US. You assumed that, and now the rest of what you wrote is irrelevant.

80% of the US population lives in a city.

That is nowhere close to true, unless you are counting suburbs as cities.

Many, probably most, people don't want to live in density as high as that. They value greenery or simply the space to not have a neighbor breathing down their neck. What you consider preposterous is a tradeoff with other goals in mind.

The ongoing urbanization of the world seems to be a counterargument to that.

Also, density is what enables greenery. Endless rows of detached single story houses with a lawn is what kills natural landscapes.

Will there be grocery stores every four blocks in your bike structured city?

> Will there be grocery stores every four blocks in your bike structured city?

Sure:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/205+Roncesvalles+Ave,+Toro...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roncesvalles,_Toronto

There are already neighbourhoods and cities like this. Do you know how many vegetable/fruits stands there are on the above street? Plus a couple of delis, a fish market, dry cleaners, four banks, a library, a BBQ joint, a couple of pizza parlors, pharmacies, dentists, optometrist, etc. The tram / street car tracks you see connect to a subway station.

Plus everyone on the residential side streets have a backyard, many have garages connected to lane way:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Westminster+Ave,+Toront...

This is how we used to build cities.

Cars are present but optional. If you want one you can still have it, but they're are not needed.

Just because you design a city in a bike-friendly way does not mean you have to get rid of cars.

Amsterdam is a perfect example of this: cars have not been completely eliminated, just de-emphasized. Making cars a nice to have instead of a need to have.

The detached home is much more the centerpiece than the car.

The car is the currently most convenient way of enabling the detached home, but I think you'd have an easier fight of providing transportation alternativers there than of convincing everyone to give up the yard and privacy and everything else there.

It's not the only possible way, and most vehicle trips are still relatively short (https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips) so I sure hope we can do it with last mile + transit vs self-driving cars.

Yes, sustainable population growth is based around a fairly high population density and dropping a car-centric lifestyle.

> enjoy my private backyard

This is a misconception I see all the time. Living in a city, and even in an apartment, does not preclude having a private backyard. The choices are simply not just "detached house" or "skyscraper".

I live in an apartment, don't own a car, yet I have a private backyard large enough to grow trees or build a decent DIY shop.

You can have high density, with front and backyards, with a garage (connected to a lane way), that supports public transit. Toronto was built this way in the pre-WW2 days (see Street View):

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Westminster+Ave,+Toront...

These houses are a bit pricey now, but that's because urban living has become fashionable again. From the 1950s to 1990s prices were a lot cheaper because all of the demand was for white picket fences in the suburbs.

You can reasonable build reasonable density, where public transit is possible, without going to Manhattan- or Tokyo-like densities. Perhaps put some mid-rise (5-10 stories) buildings on the main arteries, but the side streets can be quite smaller-scale.

Plenty of travel (both commutes and long distance travel) which is too lengthy for bicycles / scooters, but doesn't have public transit servicing it.

So build the transit. It's cheaper than highways and doubly so when you factor in the private vehicle cost borne by users of those highways.

Electric rail transit is significantly more expensive than highways, and operational costs are really high if you're trying to offer frequent service on less trafficked routes.

Public transit is cost effective for urban cores and commuter rail routes to those urban cores, but everywhere else it's simply not economical.

I think that's GP's point: Instead of investing in EVs, we should be expanding public transport to reduce the dependencies on personal vehicles in the first place.

Who is "we"? I don't know about where you are, but where I live, there is tons of public transport, with more being developed all the time, but nobody wants to use it because the design of the area is fundamentally unsuited to mass transit. If we spent 1/10 the time and money making infrastructure for EVs, everyone would be able to have one already, but we don't. We keep trying and failing to make public transit work.

Okay, fine, we should build out public transport and start designing city and suburban features around public transport.

Is that satisfactory?

A lot of the reason for those long commutes is that housing in dense, urban areas served by public transit is too expensive. Affordable housing is a climate change issue.

Interesting article from CityLab on why plugging public transit EVs into a city can be more challenging and expensive than originally planned: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/06/electric-bus-...

"That’s what Philadelphia discovered when it decided to expand its existing fleet of e-buses with newer models—ones that featured bigger batteries. The city failed to recognize in the early planning process that it would be prohibitively expensive to acquire land in its busy downtown area for charging stations along the bus routes. So they decided to install all the charging infrastructure in the bus depots."

The MBTA found that CNG buses had the lowest lifecycle cost and cost per greenhouse gas reduction. Diesel-electric hybrids have maintenance issues, and battery electric and hydrogen buses have significant capital costs which makes it difficult to realize the significantly lower operational costs.

https://www.abettercity.org/docs/Alternative%20Propulsion%20...

However, even pure diesel buses are much more efficient at moving people than single-occupancy vehicles.

It's also worthwhile to note that a real plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions would necessarily include substantial capital outlays: not just bus charging infrastructure but grade-separated rail, dedicated busways, bus rapid transit, cycle and scooter infrastructure, etc. etc. Not to mention all the other climate adaptions that need to happen at an infrastructure level.

I bicycle, ride buses & trains, I have an e-bike and I love it. But realistically we have between ten and thirty years to fix all this. That's not enough time to reinvent the entire world from the ground up, so in addition to the technologies you list I am also hopeful for EVs, synthetic fuel, and so forth.

Or carbon-neutral liquid fuels for use cases where you absolutely need an ICE-type vehicle with 300+ mile range. e.g. synthetic gasoline or biofuels. Unfortunately, those fuels really need a carbon tax to be competitive with fossil fuels.

It’s never going to be a one size fits all solution. While all the things you mention work for “some” people, an EV is the best option for “some” people.

Yeah, which is why it's such a huge problem to jam cars everywhere, even places they don't belong like city centers.

Like old people, or people who don't want to fall down and break a wrist or hip.

(and then there's what elon musk says -- all lease return model 3's will be added to the tesla automonous taxi network)

> Yet another reason the real answer to the climate crisis isn't EVs

If our objective is to significantly reduce carbon emissions from people moving from point 'A' to point 'B', fully electric vehicles are a red herring solution. It's more realistic and cheaper to focus on plug-in hybrids. That way you can achieve 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from driving 4-wheeled vehicles without requiring new infrastructure or requiring people to drastically change their habits.

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/14/reducing-carbon-emissio...

Actually, the switch from incandescent to LED street lights could easily smooth this over.

The old incandescent street and traffic lights were frequently hundreds of watts, on long chains over large distances.

This can be repurposed to car charging with little in the way of power delivery redesign.

I 100% agree, not only are they much lower impact on the environment but from an implementation perspective are far simpler. I find it kind of funny that people talk about the future of travel and transit being automated electric cars that can pick one person up and take them to another predetermined place without the passenger's intervention. I immediately think it kinda sounds like a bus or a train. I think we have gotten into the habit of falling so in love with convoluted high tech solutions that we overlook the most basic and straightforward answers to these deep problems

Agree. I have an ebike and commute 8 miles each way. It's been fantastic and I arrive home in the afternoon feeling fresh despite it being 95F out.

Hopefully (from a convenience standpoint) driverless will be the solution. Could still be zero emissions. Hard to imagine half the country migrating to denser areas within 30 years.

And yet, public transportation is not the same. Americans love their cars because we are a very independent people who appreciate the ability to go where we want, when we want. An EV could at least conceivably be a replacement, though that will be difficult until they can charge in a time comparable to that of a gas station fueling and go as long or longer. I don't want to have to plan around some schedule set by a committee.

Issue number two: other people. Public transportation is not as nice as a car because you are not insulated from others. I can run my AC nice and high and listen to a pod cast in peace and quiet in my car, even if I've got to deal with jostling cars on the outside. In a train/bus/etc, you never know what you'll get. Half the time there's some one with music blasting, or cussing loudly. The other half they guy next to me smells awful or takes two seats because he's a land whale. If by some miracle neither of those things is true, all the seats are taken. Public transportation sucks,

I like my car, and see no personal reason to switch to a less-comfortable and less-available form of transportation for the sake of some one else's political win.

Public transportation takes a lot of time.

It doesn't necessarily lead to an efficient workforce.

The hour of commute time saved by driving could probably be translated into percentage points of GNP for a country.

I'm not sure how any of this contradicts my comment. Or were you agreeing?

I was agreeing.

If you live somewhere with good public transportation, it is much, much faster than driving. Trains don’t have to sit in traffic.

Using public transit as your main mode of transportation is not the same as swearing off cars entirely. If you live somewhere with good transit you can get to 99% of the places you want to go without a car with no additional inconvenience. You can take the train to work, bike to the gym, walk to the grocery store, and then when you want to head out to the mountains you can hop into your car (or a rental).

You can reap the environmental benefits of switching mostly away from cars without sacrificing your freedom to drive to the small number of destinations that are not convenient to get to by other means.

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