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Comment by 1270018080 | Hacker News Reader

I know this forum is chock full of Tesla drivers, but cars are the ultimate blight on the planet. Electric cars aren't good for the environment, especially when supporting them with highways, charging stations, maintenance etc. I can't help but think what would happen if every public dollar spent on EV infrastructure was spent on reducing car dependence instead. Every dollar put towards cars is like technical debt but for infrastructure. It's immature.

$100M in buses and dense housing would be so much better. You'd think a state like Oregon would be able to figure this one out too.

I've always seen this as an opportunity to fix the problem that is cars.

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I get what you're saying and agree in theory, but there are a couple of issues that I take with a couple of those assertions...

EVs aren't good for the environment, but they're better and will get better for the environment at scale. Recycling/chemistry will improve, petroleum bi-products dependencies reduced, so on.

We would still need most of the same infrastructure for buses, trucks, delivery vehicles, although all that extra torque and battery weight is going to make this a lot more expensive to maintain. But we're talking about increasing that torque and weight moving buses, trucks, etc to electric anyways.

I'm sure charging stations will be orders of magnitude better for the environment than gas stations (run-off, refueling trucks, idle-waiting, etc). We'll need this for all the buses, trucks, etc anyways.

Maybe most importantly in my eyes will be time-sharing vehicles, although not restricted to EVs. There is a chance that in the future that we'll get by with fewer cars on the road by sharing them. Most cars sit around doing nothing for most of the year. Imagine how much concrete, plastic, metal, money... might be saved by just doubling a vehicle's utilization. Imagine 3X, 4X,...

Unfortunately/fortunately, the car has become an integral part of our ecomony and way of life. I think we're decades, if not a century away from being able to replace them.

I agree almost entirely. I am open-minded to the idea that there's some amount of transition-to-electric that is positive, but it's entirely in terms of the counterfactual question. Are we switching gas to electric (which itself isn't entirely helpful in every respect but definitely net helpful) or keeping private cars when we'd otherwise be moving away from private cars? Surely it's a mix. But given that we have limited resources, we should be pushing almost entirely on the move away from car-dependency, so to the extent that electric car funding is taking away from that, it's a bad thing.

Electric cars are not a solution to enough of our problems, and they are indeed enabling the continuation of most of everything terrible about car-dependent planning.

FWIW, the best resources for these topics I urge everyone to check out are r/fuckcars and YouTube channel NotJustBikes and the non-profit Strong Towns (all of which are actually not just knee-jerk anti-car incidentally)

Right; they're likely better for the environment than ICE cars (certainly in terms of direct carbon emissions), but they're still not good for the environment or for us. For example, tire dust alone is still an issue whether the cars are electric or not:

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-10-02/califor...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171215105310.h...

Cities need to be thinking more about how they can make it more possible for people to get around without a car in the first place.

I hear you, but after COVID public transit is essentially dead in the US. It was barely funded to start with, but now that pandemic showed us the government could essentially turn off your ability to move… yeah no way.

People don't all live in one place, and the perfect is the enemy of the good.

> every public dollar spent on EV infrastructure was spent on reducing car dependence instead

In comparison to transit funding, road costs, or even housing subsidies in cities for the poor, spending on EV infrastructure is a rounding error.

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