The removal of the off-street parking mandate will also impact EV adoption. Parking is already difficult to find in many older Portland neighborhoods.
Edit: You need a place to plug-in your EV at night.
Edit: You need a place to plug-in your EV at night.
Not only do the very old still drive, many prefer it because they’re old.
Go talk to some old folks. I did when I put together a community funded Tesla Model 3 rideshare for them in a retirement community. The pool is their preferred exercise method to walking, especially in inclement weather (you ever walk a mile in the July Florida/Texas/Arizona heat? I have in all three, and I would not recommend it).
EDIT: @jeffbee Responding here as HN has throttled my comment replies.
> That's contrary to all available data. People over 70 are the least-likely group of adults to have drivers' licenses and have the highest public transport mode share or any group, take the fewest trips, and travel the smallest distance per day. The elderly are arguably the people who stand to gain the most from compact patterns of development.
And yet, they choose to live in low to medium density areas that require an automobile versus urban areas. Behold the revealed preference!
https://www.prb.org/which-us-states-are-the-oldest/
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/time-series/de...
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
https://i2.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/...
Not in the US! It's pretty common for them to continue driving until they have enough accidents that they're dropped by their insurance company.
https://www.businessinsider.com/young-people-drivers-license...
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/i...
The Florida retirement developments figured this out a long time ago: electric golf carts.
If I recall correctly in one they even recently conducted a golf cart based political rally in support of a presidential candidate.
Exercise?
Outside of the obvious downsides to a car centric culture, the united states would definitely have healthier people if it were feasible to walk to more destinations. And I don't mean this just on an individual fitness level either. Getting out of the car and actually walking and interacting with people is an important community aspect, which this country severely lacks.
...if not for the actual practical problem, which is that for a lot of people living in dense urban areas, there's no way to keep an EV charged up. Street parking and surface lots don't have chargers, old parking garages and almost all new parking garage construction doesn't have chargers, apartment buildings or shared houses with official or ad-hoc parking don't have chargers.
I have that problem myself: I'd probably have replaced my car with an EV already if only I actually had somewhere to plug it in.
However I agree with the rest of your comment. My wife and I looked into plug-in hybrids (all the tax credit, none of the range anxiety) but there's no place to charge it so we just got a regular hybrid.
Electric bicycles by contrast take up the same space as any other bicycle.
I agree that getting rid of government mandated parking will decrease government-subsidized car storage (which is good across the board). Sure that will affect EVs, but it will also affect ICEs equally.
Having a driveway/garage allows you to charge your EV while parked. An ICE you can just park wherever.
[1] although, my plugin has very good range on gas, and next to nothing on a full charge, so I really only charge if it's free, gives me good parking, or to exercise my backup generator.
I think the sentiment is good but I see it going wrong quickly unless you have some way to ensure that every neighborhood gets at least enough charging to adopt EVs in the first place.
As for on-street parking, I don't feel particularly inclined to subsidize (via my tax payments) parking for the public's gross overuse of cars. I'd rather my tax dollars go to transit and alternative infrastructure.