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Comment by TomK32 | Hacker News Reader

Heating is one thing we have tackle, but also transportation which uses up 27.1% of energy in German. Individual transportation should be a main target, we would all shift from cars to public transport or bicycles. About 40% of distances driven with cars are shorter than 5 kilometers, a distance that's perfect for a bicycle. On top of that, car owners tend to underestimate the cost of their cars[1]

[0] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/energie/energieverbrauc... [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01118-w

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Yeah, targeting individual transport with inefficient public transport and bicycles while restarting abandoned coal power plants and abandoning running nuclear power plants is going to work wonderfully indeed.

> inefficient public transpor

What do you mean inefficient?

Multiple things can be done at the same time on the country scale. Improve bike infrastructure and public transit, encourage EVs for those that have to drive, decarbonise energy generation, electrify heating and industry, etc.

public transport can be efficient if done correctly and funded accordingly (Japan, Switzerland)

I'd like to add Singapore because they buy their excellent MRT trains from Germany.

maybe, I was just in Switzerland and people said that Japan is even better in terms of transit. If Singapore has reliable prioritized public transport, then yep, it's cool. What shocked me the most is that in Swiss, all tickets for any transport can be bought in a single app, and if you don't want extra hassle, you don't even need to buy it, just press a button and the app will calculate by gps what you need to pay. This + super precise arrival times...

Not one single kind of rolling stock in Singapore's MRT is made in Germany. Why do you just claim random things like that as if it were true?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Singapore_MRT_and_LRT_...

Literally the 2nd item on your list is C651 made by Siemens which has design and headquarters in Munich, Germany.

Also a quick Kagi search could have pointed you at "Siemens Mobility awarded contract to deliver CBTC on Singapore’s 8th & longest fully-underground MRT Cross Island Line" ;)

Okay I give you that. I was wrong about zero. 19 trainsets out of a total of 594. 3%. And those were manufactured in Austria (like I said), not Germany. But yes Siemens is HQed in Munich. So I guess they bought them from there. True.

Not sure how one can interpret "Singapore because they buy their excellent MRT trains from Germany" and then those excellent trains are a mere 3% of Singapore's trains (with the vast majority being Chinese and Japanese. Even the French trains are more than 3x as many). But hey, whatever.

The linked article might help clarify things. The percentage of power from coal and nuclear power were both down considerably:

“The electricity production from lignite was down 21 percent, hard coal was down 23 percent, natural gas was down 4 percent, and nuclear declined by 57 percent, compared to 2022 values.”

With individual transport, you move ~2 tons of metal for a payload of one person, a weight/person ratio of 2.

With high-speed rail, you move ~400 tons of metal for ~450 people, a ratio of ~0.9. [0]

This does not even account for factors such as inherently more efficient transmission from steel to steel vs rubber/concrete and the more efficient electric engines of a modern train compared to the combustion engine. Neither does it account for the fact that rail goes at more than twice the speed.

How is public transport the inefficient option, again?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_3

You forget that most people don't live or work next to the rail station. That makes rail inefficient in the only way that matters to most people - their time.

(I say that as someone who takes trains to work most days.)

I think trains going twice as fast as cars and not being impacted by traffic goes a long way in making up for the last mile problem - even if you take a bike for that piece, overall you're gonna be much faster than if you're stuck in rush hour traffic.

Plus, in the context of the looming climate catastrophe and the energy crisis caused by a war of aggression by our former primary energy supplier, that concern seems really petty anyways.

People don't live near rail stations because we have been subsidizing cars for fifty years while letting the rail network crumble.

They don't ?

Plenty do, or live a short bus journey away.

How is it a fair comparison to make the automobile have only one person but the rail car completely full? Rail cars are very rarely anywhere near full. Infact, they have to be run nearly empty most of the time in order to have a schedule good enough that enough people to fill the car up are willing to rely on it.

> transportation which uses up 27.1% of energy in German

There is a difference between primary energy and usable energy. An ICE car is 20-30% efficient while BEVs are +90%. Electrifying all transports will vastly lower the primary energy use.

I would like to see you cycling 5 km in the Alps against the wind in the rain. Cycling is fine. I do it 7 km to the work. But only because it is flat. And only when the weather is fine.

I've never really understood the point of comments like this. So, there are conditions where cycling isn't feasible. Sure. Does that mean people in general couldn't use bicycles more? No, of course not. Did GP suggest that everyone that lives within 5km of work must bike every day. No, not that either.

For every solution it's easy to find a situation where that solution doesn't apply. So what? That doesn't mean the solution is worthless. Last I checked, the Alps didn't cover all of Germany - did they move recently?

"Alps" was a pars pro toto. See here for a complete list of mountains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mountain_and_hill_rang...

And this are the raining days: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1892/umfrage/... It is raining more than half of a year in many cities.

Fair enough, and thanks for teaching me the term "pars pro toto". Today I was one of the lucky 10k :)

"Synecdoche" is probably the more common term.

> I've never really understood the point of comments like this.

As a Dutchman who doesn't enjoy cycling, especially alone (for function rather than leisure), I do see their point. It's just not an alternative for me. I'll put up with it if it's <1km of flat land with safe infrastructure, but beyond that I'm opening up a public transport planner. Also in NL, most trips are >1km and/or carry more freight than fits in a backpack or on the rack (?bagagedrager) (could take the bike in hand and hang your bags from the handlebars, though).

I'm happy to pay a bit extra for Climeworks to take the CO2 out of the air again that was added while building the wind turbine for my electricity-powered method of transportation.

But to each their own. Cycling is also healthy, especially if we'd no longer be surrounded by combustion transportation. I'm all for bicycle infrastructure and promotion.

I use a bike to get around pretty much whenever I can but I'd be the first to admit cars are suitable for a far wider range of journey types, and it's not exactly surprising that in most countries in the world people prefer to drive cars over riding bikes. The best we can realistically hope for is ensuring that whatever barriers exist now that discourage people from cycling (safety concerns typically being #1) are addressed and minimised. Though certainly in the case of Germany you can compare it to two of its neighbours (to the west and north) and reasonably conclude more can be done to promote cycling as a way to get around in towns and cities.

I'd love to see me cycling 5 km in the Alps, too.

The proper Alps, not the bit I went up when trying to take an ill-advised shortcut up a minor hill a thousand kilometres into EuroVelo 15.

Hardly any call for it in the context of "commuting", given the combination of low population density and low employment density.

Electrically assisted bicycles are a real game changer for the short to medium commute, especially when the wind or the terrain is against you. Note that biking in the Alps isn't really a problem in Germany, more so in Switzerland or Austria. But even in the Alps the single villages are rather flat because they are built in the mountain valleys.

I'd like to see you drive your sedan through just 4 miles of Colombian Amazonas Jungle. See: Cars are impractical!

An e-bike would be the solution (not when it rains or snows, of course).

I'm fine with people in the Alps taking their car when it's raining and windy. That still leaves 99% of the population who can take their E-bike for short trips.

Oh you picked the wrong guy for your comment: I worked 10km away the winter before and got out the door at 6am, cycled to work and left a 5pm to cycle back home, often when it was dark again.

It's only a question of the right outfit, not the weather, otherwise everyone on the Bahamas would cycle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdz6FeQLuHQ

> Heating is one thing we have tackle

we have _to_ tackle or we have tackle_d_?

duh ...

i am german and i find sloppy use of language annoying especially if it invites orthogonal interpretation. people should reread what they write publicly and then fix it if necessary.

Are you seriously shaming a non-native speaker for their English right now? smh…

eagerly waiting for you to respond in German

"Englische Sprache, schwere Sprache."

(There's a saying which surprised me when I moved here: https://lal.de/blog/deutsche-sprache-schwere-sprache/)

This is why so many are fed up with Germany and especially Germany's current government. You know, maybe people don't want to bike in a country where it's too hot in the summer, too icey/cold/snowy in the winter and where it rains constantly in the other two seasons?

This whole attitude of "I tell you how to live your life because reasons" is preposterous.

Biking all year is perfectly possible in most of Germany. There are enough good clothes to counter bad weather, snow and especially ice keeps getting rarer. Biking adoption depends most of the infrastructure and also whether your peers do it too. It has also many positive health side effects.

So? Take the bike when the weather is nice and the car when it's not nice. That still reduces the kilometers you drive by a lot. Nobody forces you to bike when it's 40°C or -20.

People aren't telling you how to live, they're saying that certain current practices are inefficient in a way that causes harm. An extreme comparison would be a murderer-for-hire telling the judge "don't tell me how to live my life, this is a free country!" but that's kinda what that sounds like. You're free to do what you want, yeah... until it harms others.

Individual transportation will always remain an option, but it might be prohibitively expensive for most people to be their main mode of transport when one has to refund the environmental damage it adds.

As for cycling specifically, you and me both as I said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36601619 We agree there, but it's not going to be compulsory to cycle...

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