Hacker News Reader

Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

It's much more realistic, especially in the US with its absurdly low average population density, to switch to EVs than it is to retrofit the entire country to not rely on vehicles.

I don't think the "change all of our infrastructure" option is even realistic, to be honest. We can barely maintain our existing infrastructure in too many cases, let alone rebuild it all.

View on HN

Population density is misleading. Vast majority live in urban and suburban areas. Urban areas can handle things just fine without cars (and really they need to stop catering to car transit, remove highways that go through downtowns, and eliminate parking options), suburbs just need to have zoning fixed so there are things like convenience stores or a local doctors office in your neighborhood. If you live in a rural area and want to drive a car everywhere that's perfectly fine, but we need to move away from focusing on what a small percentage of people do and focus on serving most people instead.

Suburbanites will certainly oppose this as well, but eventually economic physics will force them to change their habits regardless of what they want.

> We can barely maintain our existing infrastructure in too many cases, let alone rebuild it all.

Right, which is why doubling down on cars is bananas. We already can't afford to maintain all of these roads, let alone build new ones or expand. Fortunately, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. Repurposing existing highways to initially allow for bus rapid transit alongside personal automobile transit, for example, can help. We probably need a nationwide moratorium on new road construction for 20-50 years to really get things back in a good state.

> We already can't afford to maintain all of these roads

and water treatment, and sewage system

I can't help linking a NJB video when this topic comes up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

"the replacement cost of all infrastructure in Lafayette, something that you would expect to happen over about one generation, was about $32 billion. ... Yet the existing tax base was much less than that."

---

I don't think it can change though, given that majority of the US lives in the suburbs. They can vote to stop you from changing their precious lifestyle.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33258087

Yea... and I'm going to go ahead and state water and sewage treatment are way, way more important than adding another 5-lane highway so someone can live 40 miles away from where they work.

For me again it's just a question of whether we will manage the change or whether it'll just be a big disaster.

(Tangential) How did you estimate the effort required in getting people to switch to EVs? Genuinely curious - I’ve been thinking lately about how much of the country seems to be ideologically resistant to any sort of progress.

It’s an interesting problem to me, once you fold in people’s behaviors.

Let market economics drive the behavior/buying decisions. Sure there are edge cases but for the most part EVs are more convient, comfortable, cleaner. The downsides are long recharge times during road trips and initial upfront costs. Studies show a lot of promise in improving charge speed and cost in the near future.

> Let market economics drive the behavior/buying decisions.

I think this makes sense, generally speaking, but the problem is that this isn't a "market" in the overall sense, only in choosing between vehicles. Gas and oil infrastructure for example has a lot of government involvement, so will charging infrastructure. So you can't really let the market decide here because the competition isn't really there.

> absurdly low average population density

Do you mean the total population and the total land area? Doing the division that's an absurdly low number, but probably an irrelevant one. Most trips don't go that far.

The real problematic "low density" is suburban neighbourhoods.

Fewer trips (no daily commute for many, delivery vs. shopping, etc.) seems like the likely way to reduce demand.

Even if you cut every driver's usage in half, it's still a hefty 21.5k GWh/y. Not an insignificant amount.

EDIT: Corrected units from kWh/y to GWh/y.

21.5KWh/yr is a rounding error compared to most US homes. Its $1.93 worth of electricity at my house. Tons of homes use ~1,000+kWh/month. There's also no way an average US EV would use 21.5kWh in a year, that's not even a month's worth of usage cut in half.

I get about 3.5mi/kWh in my EV. If we cut the average yearly mileage about in half to ~6,000mi, that would be ~1,700kWh at my driving efficiency, plus a bit for charging losses. Even at 4.5mi/kWh it is still ~1,333kWh.

Sorry, switched G for k in my response. That's my bad.

43,000 GWh/y for all CA EVs at the average miles per year per vehicle.

Total CA generation is 200,000 GWh/y.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com