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Comment by justrealist | Hacker News Reader

I hear a lot of people saying "the future isn't X" when they really mean "I wish the future wasn't X".

The future absent radical change of cultural heart clearly is personal EVs. You don't have to like it, but it's the direction 99% of countries are moving and clearly normal people do want it.

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I'm widely doubtful about personnal EV. The renewable energy production chain growth this year is already slowing down, and we will probably be 20-30% under the net0 objectives in renewable production by 2030. Objectives that did not take into account metal availability either, so we could fall of behind really, really quick.

> 99% of countries

A large percentage of the world's population commutes on mopeds/scooters.

> A large percentage of the world's population commutes on mopeds/scooters.

That is due to lack of money not lack of desire.

If you asked the moped/scooter riders if they would rather have a car, they would choose a car.

As countries become more developed and wealthier, more people will be able to afford cars and car use will increase.

Scooters are probably the most rapidly electrifying class of personal vehicle.

Yes, but the comment I was replying to was referring to car EVs, not scooters.

people _think_ it's what they want because it's all they know.

cities should be pushing for alternatives because they're better in literally every possible way, except convenience.

better for our safety, for our health, for the environment, for less noise, for the cost, for a sense of community, for the saved space, and so on.

> cities should be pushing for alternatives

Most are, but a massive number of Americans live in sprawling suburbs and small-to-medium sized towns, not cities. Most of those places are ill-suited (to the extreme) for mass transit and other non-car options - yet they are perfectly designed to handle cars.

63% of Americans live in an urban area having a population density greater than 1,500 per square mile. There's no agreed-upon definition of "sprawl", but it's generally computed at being under 2,000 residents per square mile. None of the people collecting this particular data used that definition, they used 1,500.

Even so, some 2/3 of Americans live in areas that would benefit from pursuing alternatives.

As someone who has driven around a lot of this giant country, that 2/3rds number sounds hopelessly optimistic. Most places that fit that criteria are still remarkably ill-suited for mass transit solutions. Because they were deliberately designed that way.

Yeah, there's more to it than just population density. There also needs to be a sufficient density of walkable places for people to take transit to, and that's also missing in much of American suburbia. Bog standard suburban strip mall is way too spread out and buried in a sea of parking lots. They're simply not designed around pedestrian travel.

Suburbs are not that badly suited to mass transit. It costs more per person than in denser cities, but most suburbs are dense enough to support great mass transit, and it would be cheaper than the cost of cars.

However great is key. This means you need great operations: including worse case waiting time everyone should be 15 minutes or less from a place where they can find plenty things to do in the community (stores, parks, schools); and a transfer to express service to elsewhere. If you don't have great transit: people in the suburbs can afford a car, and traffic isn't a problem so they will just drive. Note that this is a higher level of service than many downtowns get.

The above is very very expensive. However cars are very very very expensive.

When I think of the hilly suburbs of California, I cannot imagine a system that could convince even a fraction of those people to give up cars, no matter how elaborate or well-designed. But the design of those streets and the terrain make them extremely well-suited for cars. So instead of devising some radical and expensive re-design of the thousands of suburbs in America, autonomous cars seem to solve the problem quite elegantly. And there's nothing stopping people from tacking their autonomous car or taxi to a train station for more urban-oriented travel.

It's probably going to be financials... The most common argument against suburbs is that they aren't self sustaining at paying for the services/infrastructure/utilities they consume.

That is the most common argument, but they have been successfully doing it for more than 100 years. It is time to kill the argument, when you dig in you discover they are using some really weird definitions of self sustaining. (they don't count money that comes in from other sources even though everyone gets it all the time)

I mean, 99% of countries absolutely not. 1 big wealthy country, absolutely yes.

Literally every country that moves from low to middle income, or middle income to wealthy, gets more personal vehicles because it's what people want.

Denying this or misunderstanding human nature will not get you closer to mass transit, you have to first understand what motivates people before trying to convince them of another path.

Owning a personal vehicle, is not inherently at the expense of mass or public transit.

Building cities and infrastructure that precludes anything other than personal vehicles - that what forces people to use them primarily.

Human nature wants convenience. A personal vehicle is not always the most convenient transport method.

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