- Greatly reduced air and noise polution
- Much more pedestrian friendly, walkable streets
- Put the enormous amount of land reserved for parking in these expensive areas to better use
- Fewer pedestrian deaths
If you look at experiments like Barcelona, these types of changes usually result in resounding success.
I have lived in cities where I _needed_ a car to do anything or wait for hourly buses + walking several miles.
I've been living in a city where I just use public transport (with a baby + wife) and I have only rented a car twice in 3 years, once to do a house move and another time to visit friends in a remote countryside location.
Demand more from local governments or move to a location that provides adequate transport as a service.
Cities could be built for people first, a concept familiar in Europe but mostly alien in North America.
It's easy to advocate to ban a thing if you don't do the thing! You see all the negatives of other people doing it without receiving any of the positives of doing it yourself.
You find it easy to ban because you would not be personally affected.
Personally, as someone who doesn't own a pet, it would be easy for me to firmly support the banning of all pets from many cities on the basis that they poo in public and attack people. That would be easy to support not because it's the right thing to do (which it might be!), but because I don't own a pet.
Much less true in some European cities though. I don't have a car and I can't say it's taken effort to not have.
I see the benefits. I get it. But I'm prepared to sacrifice it all because it's completely unsustainable. But I'm not going to do it alone. We all have to do it.
Fast, cheap mass transit is possible, but the large auto makers won't let it happen unless it's over their rotting corpses.
Touting the benefits won't sway the opinions of people whose livelihood depends on them not understanding the wastefulness of car culture. We're talking about fast, safe, clean, cheap, sustainable, and rugged mass transit on a scale and timeline that our entire world has never come close to accomplishing. Entire cities would have to be remapped. We're talking tens of millions of skilled to highly skilled trades jobs backed by battalions of desk jockeys greasing the cogs at what would inevitably cost in the trillions.
So, while I respect your opinion, it's not one based in reality. There's a lot of political and economic baggage to unwind before such massive projects that threaten so many massive balance sheets could ever gain major political support. National recreational drug legalization, regulation, and commercialisation is far more likely.
Germany is often cited as the most heavily automotive leaning economy. WP says the industry employs around 800k people. Germany's total workforce is cited at 44 million.
Some of that workforce would be categorized as being in the industries of manufacturing, engineering services, chemical products, electronics, etc.
In Michigan, for example, there are many hundreds of non-automotive companies who rely on nearby automakers for virtually 100% of their contracts.
If you release the accelerator, does it decouple the engine from the wheels?
As the other person mentioned, the quote you are citing means that you shouldn't spin the wheels of an automatic while the engine is not spinning. The input shaft of an automatic transmission typically drives the transmission's lubrication pump. If you spin the output shaft of a transmission of this design without spinning the input shaft, you are rotating the mechanism without lubrication.
On the topic of living near a main road: I suggest you to move away from it as fast as possible. If I could change one thing in my past, it would be that I was living near a main road as well. It was far the worst decision of my life :(
I lived in Mexico City for a few years and the pollution there is over the top bad. I'm talking almost as bad as Chinese cities. They have all these ancient horribly polluting busses that spew out huge amounts of pollution. If you replace all of those with electric buses things would dramatically improve.
Public transport and last mile delivery are actually ripe for hybridisation and electrification because they spend a lot of their time stopped.
As for long haul delivery—take the Tesla Semi and add a small diesel electric generator. Now it can go all day and still emit far less than regular trucks. This, not pure electric, is where disruption will happen.
Untrue. You're thinking of CO2, where this is debatable (for my city I ran the numbers, our diesel buses fare much worse than my EV per passenger).
A modern EV will always beat a diesel bus at total emissions per passenger, simply because it doesn't emit most of the harmful stuff.
> As for long haul delivery—take the Tesla Semi and add a small diesel electric generator. Now it can go all day and still emit far less than regular trucks.
Most trucks in cities cover only small distances.
When I said "last mile delivery" I am referring to trucks in cities which cover small distances. Thus I don't understand what your point is when you reply to me with "Most trucks in cities cover only small distances."
When I said "As for long haul delivery..." I am speaking about trucks outside of cities by definition. I referenced trucks which travel short distances in the prior paragraph.
I'm sorry but I think you might have just entirely failed to read my post as it was written. Hopefully you were not having a stroke at the time of replying as I wish you to be well and uninjured.
Then why did you disagree with my post calling for electrified public transport (by pointing out how it emits less per passenger)?
> When I said "As for long haul delivery..." I am speaking about trucks outside of cities by definition.
I was very specific in my post about "delivery trucks in the cities". I don't see why you felt you needed to explain to me something about long haul delivery, it's not relevant.
> Hopefully you were not having a stroke at the time of replying as I wish you to be well and uninjured.
Hopefully you don't expect me to read another of your posts or reply to one ever again. Grow up.
The moment you add a specific date, I suspect this does become polarizing. Many would like gas cars to be gone in 10 years, others 50 years, and others whenever it becomes cost effective.
In reality, the world will continue chugging along on gas for some time until the entire economic equation flips. We're still not ready for that, and I don't think it's going to happen in the next decade.
Oil is still what the market chooses.
(Obviously that isn’t trivial.)
This article from 2015 sums it up pretty well: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Is-There-Enough...
Edit: and to add, I don't want to attack you personally but the kind of "market will take care of it" thinking you shown here is exactly the problem. The market will just exhaust our lithium reserves in a few decades if let on its own. I'd even argue that the market should be excluded outright from limited resources at this point.
No serious person claims that. The bogus article you linked to doesn't even claim that. Lithium is as common as copper in the earth's crust; the USGS estimates 13.5 million metric tons of it. We are presently limited only by the scale of current lithium mining operations.
"Rest assured, Earth has the lithium. The next dozen years will drain less than 1 percent of the reserves in the ground, BNEF says. But battery makers are going to need more mines to support their production, and they’ll have to build them much more quickly than anyone thought."
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-lithium-battery-futu...
By the time we get anywhere close to dwindling natural resources, it's likely that opportunities for lithium recycling will ramp up.
And we are not even accounting all the pollution caused by the production of batteries.
From Forbes[0]:
"The drawbacks of the mining industry itself have weighed heavily against the rise of batteries. Mining rare earth and heavy metals emit large amounts of emissions whilst also having a noticeable impact on the environment. Around half of lithium mining comes from brine extraction while the rest is hard rock mining, which has even more damaging consequence to the environment."
Finally to charge these battieries, we will still be using dirty energy sources for the foreseeable future, since renewables are nowhere near to be enough to stop using coal/gas/biomass.
I stand convinced that the only way we have is to rethink entirely our habits of transportation.
[0] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/10/electr...
2.) nuclear power emits greenhouse gases indirectly: (a) construction/decommission of the power plant, (b) mining and extraction of Uranium, (c) contamination of nuclear waste.
Besides, in a world with a surplus of nuclear energy, much of the plant construction and mining could be performed using nuclear generated electricity rather than burning diesel.
Whenever somebody suggests a solution to some part of the puzzle people say this. I don't know if you are suggesting we do nothing or that we ban vehicles on roads entirely.
Its probably best we all try to get off our holier than thou horses and acknowledge that we all are slaves to our wants and want a comfortable lives. Perhaps then we might be able to have a productive conversation on how to truly save this planet (as if the planet needs saving rather than ourselves).