The problem with electric cars is charging infrastructure in cites. An electric bike or scooter can be brought indoors to charge.
Next best thing is to move cars to the edges of districts in urban areas. Create big parking spaces, covered in solar panels and equip them with chargers. Design them in such a way that everybody can walk in 5-10 minutes to their home from these parking spaces. In the space that we save this way we can have cycling lanes and trees. Of course, every house should still be reachable by car, if only just for mail delivery, for moving, for doing groceries etc. And people with handicaps should be able to get a permit to park near their houses.
I know one such district near me and its lovely. And one big city in the Netherlands is planning to build a new district in this way for 10000 people, it should be amazing to live there.
When you couple this with drastic improvements to public transport, I think we can move to pretty much ideal cities within a single generation, without abolishing cars and too much inconvenience. It is much easier for newly build districts, but I think this concept can be retrofitted to existing areas very well, if you can find enough parking spaces or garages at least.
But I think they should be completely removed from some very common actions, anyone capable of walking/cycling/using public transit going for non-essential trips of less than say, 5km, should not be allowed to use a car.
Definitely anything under 1km should not be allowed. Those distances are easily walkable or bikeable. Of course, this will require that the built environment allows walking or biking (guess what, that makes for amazingly liveable environments, so it needs to be done anyway).
Anything between 1-5km is debatable, but those distance are easily bikeable and it takes about the same time, especially in a city. Similar problem with walkability/bikeability. At these distances public transit also becomes a solid option.
Anything between 5-10km requires either great bike lanes or at least decent public transit.
Anything over 10km is fair game for cars. Though for good to great public transit corridors, that's definitely a very viable option.
I think if we somehow manage to enforce this, we'd be in an amazing place, including for drivers. Because a huge chunk of the non-essential traffic would be just taken off the roads, leaving roads MUCH emptier, so whoever is still driving would get to where they need to a lot faster.
As EVs become more popular, big name stores should start adding a few chargers to their parking lots.
Apartment complexes could add them to entice maximum capacity too.
Start by spacing them mostly near housing, and spread them to replace more parking meters as usage increases.
It is also expensive to not switch off of ICE vehicles.
Or, an enterprising landchad could realize they can charge 10% more kWh than people actually pull (blaming efficiency losses), along with a healthy margin for "maintenance".
Lots can go wrong.
Pre-empting, obviously many places still require cars, but we shouldn't codify cars into the building code. It makes everything that bit more expensive, and it's a waste of valuable city real estate.
At the moment the cost per square meter in Melbourne and my city means a single carspace is worth more than my salary. That's ridiculous.
Yeah its sounds great until you need mass transport system to support this idea which means only mega cities can benefit the most when tier 2 and tier 3 cities is having a hard time investment
see: japan
If anything, properly built small cities and towns are actually even better for public transit, since they're small. You don't need to cover a lot of ground.
Heck, everyone talks about self-driving taxis. Self-driving trains and buses, that's where it's at, actually. A decent chunk of the cost (and limitations) for public transit is the need for human drivers. Self-driving buses could have longer routes, could drive around the clock, etc, etc.
Ah, forgot, they could also be much smaller, but still cost effective. Think 10-15 places for smaller routes. That would do wonders for connectivity in more remote places.
Agreed, with the caveat that everything is crazy expensive now so smaller cities struggle to afford to build even a small amount of rail. We had excellent public transport in the 1900s, it was torn up for the automotive revolution, and now we can't afford to put even a 10th of it back. We struggle to put an extra station into an existing line, let alone new lines.
One of the big issues is that property is so expensive in the modern west that buying up the land to build is prohibitively expensive. The old game of private rail companies making money off property around public transit stops isn't working here at least, because property is already so unaffordable, there's no room for price growth.
(Edit: not that these necessarily need car parks, but they'll need to wait somewhere when they're not carrying passengers)
This claim has been made for years now and a number of big companies like Google, Uber and Tesla have tried to jump into this market, but does this hold up?
I vaguely recall a self driving taxi service being active in some areas, but how are they doing?
Anyway, static routes and stations work fine for big parts of e.g. the Netherlands, but you need a good structure of bus routes and transit hubs. It's a fact that it takes longer than driving for most trips though and IMO the cost should be a lot lower, but that's the tradeoff made.
It's not even remotely competitive, and for that reason private cars are used for some ridiculously high proportion of journeys (90% of passenger miles overall).
In the UK only 17% of commuters use public transport, and 5% use "other" including bicycle/motorcycle/taxi.
I think a lot of what you're saying can be solved with cheaper ebikes and better bike infrastructure. Even the rain :-)
If it rains a lot you put on a big bike poncho, which turns you into a big sail and slows you down, and that's where the <<e>>bike part of ebike comes in, since you pump up the assist and still go fast.
The consensus seems to be on my side in spite of lower share of total commutes, because housing near stations is significantly more expensive. From that I infer two things, public transport is desired, and there's not enough of it to support demand.
This is only because of the suburban sprawl we built not being compatible, but I agree it is a problem to solve one way or another.
Nothing in your argument goes against what I think edwcross's proposal was: "IF an apartment has parking, that parking must have charging."
Heck. I arrived by train from London to a town where I found the busses to the start of my walk were basically non-existent. Fortunately a taxi pulled up as I was trying to find a taxi service by cell as the train station didn't have any staff.
One of the positive things labour has done is allowed local authorities more control over this, which should help - I can also imagine them being very bad at communicating this if it does.
Of course I'd prefer a bunch more investment too, more train lines and go ahead with many of the previously touted tram schemes.
Most people who own a car in cities in Europe also use it for long commutes to visit family in weekends or on holidays, often crossing borders. Range is then a problem since most families can afford only one car so edge cases matter. Maybe the wealthy Benelux and Scandinavia have top EV charring infrastructure but a lot of central, eastern and southern Europe is lacking.
Also there is some possibility that there is no power at for example summer home...
Not based on where I live. Many people I know routinely drive hundreds of KM on a weekly basis to their families and renting a car for that doesn't makes sense.
If I punch the same trip into one of the EV trip planners online and set the car even to something meh like an MG4 with the 51kWh battery, which is cheap EV that doesn't charge very fast, it's telling me I'd have to stop 4 times (instead of 3 times) and for 1.5 h total (instead of a bit less than that).
I don't know what you do for a living or how much you hate traveling, but for me this is a non-issue. I make maybe 1-2 trips like this a year (and <10 trips around 500 km) and spending like 15 % more time on the road is something I wouldn't even notice, much less care about.
This was pretty rare for us, though we had family that did 12 hours trips in 2 segments with the same frequency. They already stopped for lunch, so they could in theory have gotten away with only charging then, not adding any time to their trip, but more reasonably it would add an extra 30 min to each leg.
Interested to know how often this stuff happens in the EU.
Maybe the wealthy Benelux and Scandinavia have top EV charring infrastructure but a lot of central, eastern and southern Europe is lacking
But it turns out that the Lidl that we go to has a charger, there are like 10 chargers on the 110 km trip to our families (and they both live in houses with driveways, so "granny charging" is available). Our last two holiday stays were in hotels that had chargers.
Just looking at the options, it doesn't seem like range will be a factor at all. And we're actually looking at cheap cars with 50 kWh batteries, not even the current high end.
However, many parking lots have slowish AC chargers nowadays, so it's very convenient to have the car charge for an hour or two while I do my shopping or whatever.
Basically, it's the difference between having to wait specifically for a charge or whether I'm doing my own thing and charging the car as a bonus.
Just look at this:
https://www.newsflare.com/video/704902/e-bike-battery-explod...
There are a lot of videos like this that shows the devastation of charging electric bikes or scooters indoor.