We have to face the music: Converting gas cars to electric will only fix a small fraction of all the problems caused by cars. Redesigning cities so that most people won't require a car to work and live is the real solution.
I am very much against cars in cities, just like you, but this is an independent topic.
If you try to fight climate change by banning cars you will run out of time and lose both fights.
Most people, having grown up with cars from parents and peers, can't imagine anything other than a car-centric life. The distances are too far, the bus comes once an hour, and biking is too dangerous. So getting an electric car might be the only improvement that they can think of. Especially given the upfront cost of electric cars and their reduced convenience for long road trips, it's easy to feel that they made enough personal sacrifices for the sake of the common good.
While electric cars are a somewhat bitter pill to swallow, the real bitter pills are things like ending exclusive single-family detached house zoning, increasing density, allowing mixed residential-retail-office neighborhoods, converting car lanes to bike or transit lanes, building rail lines (which can easily take a decade), offering decent inter-city train service. I fear that electric cars offer an easy "personal responsibility" band-aid that exhausts people's willpower to demand more substantial collective change.
> Don't hijack the climate emergency for your political agenda.
What's with this accusation?
Those seem to be the people who push the car-less idea the most, because it meets their world view, but doesn't work once you step outside the downtown bubble.
But what I think they want are solutions to the parking, traffic, and other issues that stem from city overpopulation and/or planning mismanagement of cities.
As an outsider I agree cities need to rework how they handle cars (idling in traffic for an hour to go 10 miles, parking being hell, etc.) but it's a specific problem to cities (some more so than others)
I was lucky, since I lived in town, but my childhood friends would come to school by bus. It took them 3h to get here, the motorist had to cover all the tiny villages along the way, and time adds up. If we didn't have those buses (most of them were vans), well then, I don't think most kids would get their lessons.
Who had cars though? No problem.
But yeah, it's difficult to employ a system on a rural area.
I have a friend who lives in a small village of roughly 3k people. If you step out of her backyard, you step into a winefield. You have to close the windows when they're fertilizing the fields nextdoor with dung.
I can reach her in half an hour plus three minute walk with trains that go every 15 minutes (half-hourly after 8pm, hourly after midnight).
Somehow this is possible all over the world, except in the US where it just an inevitable impossibility, just the way things are. I dare say, the people who are actually in a bubble here are the North Americans who have never seen or lived in a city that is anything except a square mile of skyscrapers surrounded by an endless sea of car-dependent single family houses and desolate concrete parking lots.
I don't know why cities don't have better public transportation. Maybe because voters don't hold their local officials accountable when they mismanage public funds (California's $80b train fiasco)
I do know cars are needed in rural areas for many reasons and aren't posing any sort of a problem.
Fix the cities. Transit, traffic, and parking is a mess, but it has nothing to do with cars, they are a symptom, it has more to do with population and public spending.
China is huge too. Russia is gigantic. The US was huge before the 1950s too.
The terrible city sprawl of the US is not a law of nature, but specific post WW2 city design policies that could easily be reversed at any time.
> I don't know why cities don't have better public transportation.
It's the same policies. Take the minimum parking requirements: you can't have multiple shops accessible from one station because every shop needs to be surrounded by a walking distance worth of parking. You need to duplicate your entire network because things like corner stores don't exist, meaning there are basically no trips within residential areas. Allocating almost all budget to cars for the last half century has lead to severe loss of experience with designing transit. The Buy America clause says that foreign companies must set up temporary factories in the US whenever someone orders a trainset from them.
There's lots and lots of things, but they all originate with car-centric post-ww2 policies.
And takes many hours to travel the same distance as a 20 minute car ride. People who say "just hop on public transportation" live in the top percent of cities where that actually makes sense.
How about less cars, less power use, and return to 1980s or 60s standards of technology?
Maybe build quality of the assembly, but definitely not the build quality of anything mechanical! Modern cars have ludicrously better reliability than anything from the 60's to 80's. A car not making it to 100k miles is a rare exception these days, even with somewhat abusive upkeep.
We don’t need to regress to solve the climate emergency. That’s attacking the problem from the wrong side and alienating people.
Agreed, we should do it for the quality of life benefits.
The climate fix is a bonus...
What kind of things were you thinking of?
The problem is that some of these are working against each other. Electric cars means much much higher electrical energy needs - perhaps needing to even double the current grid. And that works against the need to decomission fossil fuel plants.
As such, significantly reducing car usage seems like a much safer bet than achieving a 0-carbon grid that is double the size of the current one in ~15 years.
They're literally batteries on wheels.
Sure there are some ideas that EVs which don't see too much use could be used to discharge back into the grid, but that is hard to organize and destroys the battery much more quickly.
Australia has heated water overnight att off peak times for years with ripple signals because otherwise the coal plants wouldn't run efficiently.
They don't need to use that domestic hot water to feed electric energy back into the grid, they just need to use it to avoid calling on the grid when they would otherwise have added to peak load.
EVs are batteries on wheels, with computer chips and internet connections to tell them the best time to charge. All the pieces are there and in actual use for decades.
Now, let's assume this problem were solved, and now we start replacing all fossil fuel power plants with renewables + storage. Unfortunately, we are also replacing ICE vehicles with BEVs at the same time, which require massive amounts of extra electrical power to replace the power they were getting from oil. Suddenly, we can no longer close all of our fossil fuel plants, because all of the growth in renewables is consumed by BEV charging.
The problem you're discussing - handling variable load - is somewhat secondary. It's a significant practical problem if you're adding new solar and wind to the grid without closing down old fossil fuel generators, which is what everyone is mostly doing currently, so it is a very discussed problem. The problem of ensuring reliability from a renewable-only grid is so complicated, no one is really tackling it yet, especially since they can barely construct enough new renewables to handle all the extra new load from growing industry + BEVs.
The big question is politics: even in cities where many people use transit, the political class favors cars.
This isn’t a universal truth - I know a ton of people who do that (I bike more) - but rather a policy decision. Driving has been massively subsidized for a century so it’s not surprising that it often works better but other choices are possible.
> As for how much cheaper is the bus I am not sure, last time I've taken one it was $1.5 for each leg, of course, this depends on location
Okay, that’s still 20 trips a day before you’re at AAA’s _average_ cost of owning a car. If we chose to offer better service, I’m sure more than a few people would pocket the difference — the primary deterrent for most people is when service is infrequent and inconsistent.
>Okay, that’s still 20 trips a day before you’re at AAA’s _average_ cost of owning a car.
It might be so if they amortized TOC but when you already own a car the additional cost of travel per mile is much cheaper than buses charged 15 years ago or so.
You pay less in taxes than it costs to maintain the roads — the U.S. average is about half.
Public space is reserved for driving — legal categories like jaywalking were created to remove other users from those spaces — and land owners are required to dedicate substantial amounts of space for parking, most of which is either not charged to users at all or at far below market rates (this is famously a cause of congestion as people drive around longer looking for street parking since it's so much cheaper). Even businesses like bars whose owners don't expect their customers to drive are in many cases forced by parking minimums to provide spaces, which means everyone is paying for that parking even if they don't benefit from it.
Employers can offer free parking as a job perk with no tax impact but cannot do the same for transit or bike commuters.
There are also a lot of social costs which come back to the idea that we've built the world around the idea that everyone has to drive everywhere: we're extremely reluctant to take away unsafe drivers' licenses, drivers are not required to carry enough insurance to adequately compensate people for serious injuries, cities are typically much slower to repair pedestrian infrastructure than car infrastructure, sidewalks, curb cuts, etc. are often not ADA compliant to leave more room for drivers, etc.
I don't think so. Quick search shows that states and localities spend $200B per year on roads, the US alone tax revenue from just individual taxes is roughly ~40% of 4T i.e. $1.6T. What sources do you use to support your claim?
>Public space is reserved for driving — legal categories like jaywalking were created to remove other users from those spaces — and land owners are required to dedicate substantial amounts of space for parking, most of which is either not charged to users at all or at far below market rates (this is famously a cause of congestion as people drive around longer looking for street parking since it's so much cheaper).
I don't think you are being serious, there much more legal categories against drivers: speeding, DUI, dozens of kinds of illegal parking etc.
And would need some source on the parking below market rates and land owners required to provide free parking. I own land, I am not required to provide parking to anyone, least so for free or below market rates. Parking requirements for public accommodations is not subsidizing anything it just taking reality into account and prevents patrons from crowding nearby streets with their cars as well as using parking space from other businesses.
See also: https://tuftsdaily.com/opinion/2011/11/01/editorial-end-park... , https://frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/opposite-just-subsid... , https://frontiergroup.org/reports/fg/who-pays-roads , https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/03/06/heres-how-driving-is-... , https://www.google.com/search?&q=how+is+driving+subsidized
Bicyclists do use roads, but need much less space - far less than the half of the road their taxes pay for even for the cyclists who don’t own a car. Nobody needs a 6 lane road for bicyclists - even a single lane can handle more people than would fit in cars on that kind of wide road.
The underlying problem here is the spatial inefficiency of driving: you need far more public space for the same number of people and that requires more expensive infrastructure to build and maintain than it would if people primarily used active travel or transit.
The fairest way to pay for the infrastructure which is required to support a predominantly private-vehicle based model would be to fund it entirely by user fees, which would also handle the case of larger vehicle owners paying more to reflect their greater use, but because that model has been subsidized and often legally required for so long most people aren’t even aware of how much that’s true.
They do, it's called "sidewalk".
>Their taxes are subsidizing roads they are at best sidelined on, and in many cases have their experience made worse and riskier for.
Even if they don't walk on the streets and only walk by unpaved footpaths they might be still using roads to get their food and clothes shipped to them.
>Bicyclists do use roads, but need much less space - far less than the half of the road their taxes pay for even for the cyclists who don’t own a car. Nobody needs a 6 lane road for bicyclists - even a single lane can handle more people than would fit in cars on that kind of wide road.
But they pay zero extra tax regardless of the space they use when they don't own a car. So I am not sure what the point you are trying to make here. A one lane road is not free, somebody has to pay for it.
>The underlying problem
I got it in the first 1000 posts on HN from anti-car people, I just have not seen "driving is subsidized" yet so I had been asking what is it based on.
[0] https://www.911metallurgist.com/scrapped-starter-motors-alte...
That is simple to say, but what does that actually mean? I think some cities simply wouldn't exist if being navigable without car was a requirement. People will never move around Phoenix like they move around Amsterdam.
There are not many cities in Europe that are predated by the ubiquity of cars.
1. Shops/bars/cafes/etc in residential areas.
2. The replacement of existing housing stock with multiple residences.
1. Create smaller town centres within the suburbs
2. Increase the density of the suburbs so that serving them with public transport becomes more economically viable.
It was all built to work around the automobile as primary transport. There's no patch fix.
The question is, how disadvantaged are public transit projects given the barriers imposed by the existing choices that have been made, and the marginal cost and benefit of that project compared to existing choices?
Sprawl is difficult to cover with public transit, so you end up with a system that costs 2x as much, covers 1/2 as much area, and takes 2x as long to go anywhere. The most successful public transit systems in the world area all places where driving is car is not a viable alternative for many. In a world of 10 lane highways and free parking in a sea of strip malls, it's going to be hard to convince people to stand at a transit stop.
I agree there's a problem with cars in cities, but there's not a problem with cars elsewhere.
Electrifying cars and trucks helps diversify how they are powered and keeps the logistics industries and tourist industries humming.
It also helps public transportation, taxi services, etc.
Cars in cities is a local problem, not a federal or even state one.
What are those local solutions though? Trains for sure, use Japan as the model. Privatized but government controlled, cheap, clean, safe.
Scooters? Those are an eye sore, they are laying everywhere, but are useful. Maybe at least bike racks for them?
And a result of this inevitably will be huge winners who invest in sustainable ways of being and huge losers tied to old ways of doing things.