If somebody comes up with electric cars that are small and standardized, small enough to carry you and your groceries, and not to be a victim of the elements (rain, heat, cold), then you can call me a believer.
However, if you have ever had a no commute life- whether it be full remote, or a walkable commute- I think you may just happen to flip your tune. It is a simple delight. If we could build a world around this I think we could be doing something really meaningful and beneficial for society as a whole.
Think grocery stores, doctors, etc all within walking or public transport distance. Imagine if you only needed your car to go visit friends that were far away or to go visit some place that's hard to get to.
I have experienced the full spectrum. I've had a super commute from Olympia to Seattle. I've biked to the train station and ridden with my buddies down to Kent. I've walked 8 minutes to the library where I was an intern. I currently work from home. Cars are a burden on society- one I accept because I occasionally like to take the dogs to the beach or go hiking, but believe me, life is better the less car you can involve in it.
I also happen to enjoy having a cheap old truck as a hobbiest activity. Still, I only drive it on occasion and I love every minute of it. But it is amazing to not depend on it.
My favorite is my current life... easy parking right in my driveway, short drives to stores with ample parking, short drive commute to work with ample parking.
Walking is great, but lugging groceries sucks, even if the store is close. It sucked when I lived in an apartment where I parked in a parking lot and had to walk my groceries from the car up to the elevator to my apartment.
A car is just easier, assuming light traffic, short drives, and good parking.
It's most that for those who choose a fully urban life, when do we start to deemphasize these vestiges of auto centric culture that sort of took over before cities understood what they were doing.
Are we talking 3-5 min walk close? Just want to establish whether you actually lived in the kind of place people are talking about here.
A 5 min walk with groceries shouldn't be burdensome. A 25 min walk would be.
This seems related to the general decline in fitness of the American population, assuming OP is American. Grip strength has declined massively since the 1980s.
A short walk with bags shouldn't be hard or even unpleasant for the typical adult.
It was a lot easier when it was just for me. I now get enough groceries per trip that there is no way I could carry them all home by myself.
And that’s precisely the problem, because cars don’t scale well. Suburbs surrounding large growing urban areas in the US are often clogged with traffic. Just look at the Bay Area.
You could say the solution then is to decentralize and make it so everyone can have the light traffic car commute. Aside from possible environmental impacts (Who knows, there might not be any with all the reduced traffic from this scheme), I don’t think this is realistic right now; humans have clustered around cities for literally millennia.
Edit: I live within a few minutes’ walking distance from several grocery stores. Typically I just buy a bag’s worth of groceries at a time. Physical ability differs, of course - but that’s another argument for reducing car use in my view, so you can clear the roads for the people who truly need the car.
You could also say that the solution is to get the government to stop micromanaging what people do on their own property thereby freeing people from the need to build parking when it is not economical to do so thereby creating the political will for good public transit.
Also the decentralize idea is not too far off. I think the DC metro area, Pennsylvania and the New York suburbia are great in that sense. You take your car to the commuter train station and off you go into the city. It is the best tradeoff without having to do something radical.
So now the question is: on what criteria would you deserve this privilege more than others?
Cars have obvious downsides, urban sprawl and the resulting commutes are obviously out of control and the extremes of car centric city planning are obviously bad for society. That being said, the opposite extreme of striving to completely eliminate the greatest mobility tool ever invented strikes me as just as insane and depressing. City planning should work towards sensible compromise and incremental improvement, not wildly oscillate between opposite extremes every few decades as every generation of planners gets stuck on a new fad.
Sure you can live like that, just like you can survive without electricy, but I honestly do not ever want to do that anymore.
I have an asthmatic child and I live in a big city, so yeah, on my list, somewhat curtailing your right to pollute around goes after my right to not have to bring him to ER with a crisis at 3 in the morning. That is a problem electric cars won't fix, by the way, they'll just move it around.
I can do most of my groceries by going downstairs and walking. I can get to the city center in 40 minutes using public transportation. During that time I can look up stuff on my phone without endangering anyone's life, I don't have to worry about finding a parking spot, and I don't have to worry about a bunch of expenses that a car brings. I think your car (and car-centric urban development) is making you less free than me.
[1] Related: Molecules of Freedom https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/29/energy-depa...
"Moving it around" here generally means moving it to electricity generation sites - ie places where people don't live. That's a huge benefit already.
And moreover it's much easier to de-pollute electricity generation infrastructure than to de-pollute fossil fuel cars.
I'm no kind of electric car fan. I'd much rather see cars die off wholesale, leaving only well-invested public transport and personal transport for the less able. I don't own a car of any sort and plan never to live more than s 15 minute walk from my place of work. But electric cars are still a huge positive step for urban environments.
So electric cars still have a lot of particulate emissions, thought less so in environments where they have lots of opportunity for regenerative braking.
Study highlights:
A positive relationship exists between vehicle weight and non-exhaust emissions.
Electric vehicles are 24% heavier than their conventional counterparts.
Electric vehicle PM emissions are comparable to those of conventional vehicles.
Non-exhaust sources account for 90% of PM10 and 85% of PM2.5 from traffic.
Future policy should focus on reducing vehicle weight
Part of this is that we already spent a lot of deliberate effort on reducing emissions from engines. As the study notes:
> Before the introduction of air quality standards, exhaust emissions used to be a major source of PM, especially for diesel cars (Miguel et al., 1998). Since then, PM emission standards for vehicle exhausts have become increasingly strict and now all new diesel passenger cars are fitted with a diesel particulate filter (DPF). Bergmann et al. (2009) found that DPFs are very effective at reducing PM emissions, lowering the emitted mass of PM by 99.3%
So go early/late. I used to exclusively ride the train and subway before I moved out of the city and I assure you rush hour congestion is not limited to cars.
>I can do most of my groceries by going downstairs and walking. I can get to the city center in 40 minutes using public transportation. During that time I can look up stuff on my phone without endangering anyone's life, I don't have to worry about finding a parking spot, and I don't have to worry about a bunch of expenses that a car brings. I think your car (and car-centric urban development) is making you less free than me.
Good for you. Observation indicates that that there are no shortage of people who find cars worth the trade-offs. The better public transit is the fewer a proportion of the population they will be but as long as we have roads we'll have cars. Subways and trams didn't eliminate carriages and I don't see why things would be different today.
>That is a problem electric cars won't fix, by the way, they'll just move it around.
The solution to pollution is dilution!
Electric cars would be a massive improvement.
I don't know if the personal automobile is one of the best inventions...it's built on the back of climate change and has led to less efficient infrastructure and less efficient society in the name of slight convenience. If carbon was priced properly based on its negative externalities, cars would be a LOT less attractive.
Inside city bounds, small trucks could be replaced by horse-drawn carriages; they'd be clean (clean_er- horses still er, produce waste) and large trucks should never be allowed in the same areas as pedestrians and bicyclists anyway.
I'm not saying that the current pace of life in very big cities could be maintained in this way, but just the reduction in emissions would probably make up for any short-term financial loss.