Always important to remember in this debate: electrification of transport is not just about carbon and climate. It’s about public health, not to mention public sanity.
The filthy noisy combustion engine was never compatible with dense cities, which is where most people live these days. Anyone who has been to one of the few places in the world where urban transport has been completely electrified will testify to the difference it makes to be free of the internal combustion engine. It’s night and day.
Let’s not lose sight of the wood for the trees.
Let’s not lose sight of the wood for the trees.
I agree.
I wish my city would ban the loud sport cars.
They dont even have to be sport cars, they might just use a modified exhaust (you can add a thing at the end of it and you can make noise very very cheaply)…
And motorbikes.
Controversial take (for this community): Electric personal vehicles were the catalyst for the electrification of commercial vehicles. So while it doesn’t address the problem of car-centric infrastructure, EVs have had a net positive impact on the environment by converting fleet vehicles to less polluting options as well as taking diesel trucks off the road.
Kind of, right? That depends on a great many assumptions, and if you adjust them slightly, you get a different result. For example, if the U.S. were to switch from SUVs to small sedans and hatchbacks, the CO2 savings take many more years to obtain.
In other words, OK sure go EV, but the main targets should be what they always were: drive less, and drive small cars. Oh, and don’t be fooled into thinking EVs solve a problem when they don’t.
Plus, even if you reduce the number of cars by 50% you still need to replace the other 50% on the road so the EV industry needs to grow
Well said.
The conservatives where I live shit blood absolutely any time any changes are made to roads to make them even slightly more pedestrian and bus/bike friendly. Preventing accidents/deaths and generally having a more usable, inviting environment for anyone that isn’t a car is unacceptable if it adds even a second to their commute. Go live on the fucking highway if you like it so much.
They have been brainwashed by car and oil companies.
That doesn’t excuse their ignorance, but it does highlight that the public information component will be very expensive to fix.
Tax rebates for massive luxury electric SUVs but you’re on your own if you want to buy an e-bike worth less than the total tax rebate for an EV. Most places won’t even build infrastructure for anything other than cars. My city has roads with no sidewalks that go straight to downtown and some newly built suicide bike gutters along a major stroad.
Some states have programs, I know Cali has a program for ebikes https://www.ebikeincentives.org/
Though I will admit most of Cali is not bikeable (at least socal imo, norcal is better)
Here’s a list from what I could find online on it. https://tstebike.com/blogs/new/unlock-savings-2025-u-s-state-e-bike-tax-credits-and-rebates
I wish there was some way you could sue the government for doing this.
Lol
As long as a majority of Americans live in suburban areas, car dependency will continue.
If suburbs were developed to be people-centric, you really wouldn’t need a car for 99% of your daily tasks. Most trips by car are very short, and can very easily be replaced by non-car modes of transportation.
The argument I usually hear from car-brains is that we have to pRoTeCt RuRaL cAr DrIvErs.
That’s not even true. E-bikes solve the low density suburb problem. You just need to actually build out appropriate bike lanes and trails. Suburban neighborhoods aren’t unfixable.
Many millions of Americans spend at least an hour commuting to and from work every day. I don’t think they’re going to want to do that on an e-bike.
Your vision is too small. What do you think the biggest problem is for deploying transit to suburbs? The last mile problem. You can have a train to the suburbs, but people still then need to drive from the train station to their home. With an e-bike, that solves this problem.
Sure, you can cite some hypermiler that commutes 2 hours across rural land between cities, but now you’re just masturbating to edge cases, the equivalent of someone that justifies buying a giant truck because they move a couch once a year.
E-bikes solve the last mile problem of transit. Look at how trains and bikes actually work in countries like the Netherlands. People tend to bike to the train station, ride the train, then take a bike to their destination. With an e-bike, your train stops only needs to be within a couple of miles of both your start and destination. E-bikes make solve the problem of the incompatibility of low-density suburbs and transit.
How am I going to bring home groceries for my family of 4 on an E-Bike?
I used to do something like what you’re describing. I would drive my car to a light rail station then take the train into the city to work. I suppose what you’re talking about is just replacing the car with an e-bike. That’s fine, but I don’t see a huge difference in this scenario between an e-bike and an electric car, especially since I wasn’t just driving to the light rail station, I was also driving to the grocery store and to restaurants and to the houses of friends and family, etc.
Now, if I had lived in the city nearer to my work, and to stores, and restaurants, and shops, etc, an e-bike would have made a lot more sense.
Most people in suburbia have a stores within a reasonable e-bike distance of them. And yes, there isn’t a ton of difference between the e-bike and an electric car in that context. Which is the entire point! The difference is that one costs a minimum of $30k, while the other can be had for less than $1k. And for the resources to build one electric car, we can build dozens of e-bikes.
The difference is that one costs a minimum of $30k, while the other can be had for less than $1k.
That’s true, yet I still think many people will opt to spend the additional money for a car. They’re covered and climate controlled, and they offer more passenger and cargo capacity. In the Netherlands, which you mentioned as an example of a country with high e-bike adoption, there are still millions of cars. I’m sure there are fewer cars than there otherwise would have been, but cars are still very much in the transportation mix. Not a bad thing, necessarily. I definitely think it has reduced car dependency - cars are no longer as much of a necessity - but cars are not eliminated.
As long as new housing is built in suburbs due to zoning, people will continue to live there.
All of the housing in my city that is near downtown or near business districts is either abandoned, run down, or gets converted into businesses.
True dat. I remember how quick they were to start criticizing remote work. Saying how it isn’t fair to the office building owners when people work from home. Less traffic & congestion was probably one of the few upsides of the pandemic to me.
bUt oUr pRoFit MaRGiNs!
why not both
The money wasted in electric car subsidies is much better spent on mass transit and cycling and pedestrianization initiatives, all of which move far more people at much less cost per person. Electric cars are being posited as the solution (as opposed to drastically improved mass transit) because that’s the only way auto companies can stay relevant and maintain their supremacy
It’s all about protectionism for an obsolete car industry. If we legalized golf carts, and ATVs, most families in the suburbs would buy one of those. They’d use it for groceries, school runs, dentist appointments, and getting coffee down the street. Their main car would sit idle the majority of time, because it’s a hassle to drive a large car. It would make living in suburbia someone more tolerable, as you would see your neighbors more in golf carts.
Also we should be looking to reduce car use because car infrastructure is incredibly expensive and environmentally destructive.
Electric cars still need ashphault, make tire dust, require salted roads. Roads will still have surface water run off contaminated and artificially heated damaging natural water ways. Roads will need to be repaved more often due to EVs weighing more.
By the end of day, we are barely getting ahead environmentally with EVs if at all. Some EVs like an electric hummer will generate more carbon through their lifecycle (production, use, and disposal) than an ICE compact car.
So what do you suggest? No cars allowed at all? Even in European countries with strong public transportation cars are still useful and allowed (except in crowded city areas). It’s hard to imagine life out in the boonies without access to a car…
I think we should pursue better public transportation primarily, but I also think efforts to make electric vehicles better are an important piece of the puzzle to transporting ourselves sustainably.
I claimed reduce car use, not no cars at all. If we cut car trips in half in favor of walking, biking, or transit thats a huge improvement. Car dependancy has other issues as well with land use causing sprawl and strip malls, which often sit abandoned and a new development is built further down the road. I think reducing car use and improving density and livability of cities goes hand in hand.
As much as I would love for the modern world to be able to reduce its car dependency, unfortunately in places like North America that is just straight up impossible, even with public transit places are just too far apart.
The vast majority of car trips are done locally. Most people aren’t driving from Dallas to New York to get their grocceries, go to the gym, or go to work.
Most people who live rural areas need to travel at least half an hour to get groceries, I am not talking about people who live in cities.
I think there needs to be an effort to advocate for reduced car use, many of the suburbs would be much nicer if people could be allowed to use golf carts on the roads. It would be a step in a better direction, break the obsolete car industry, and bridge to walk-able communities in existing burbs that can’t be easily or quickly redeveloped.
Yup. Even if we don’t reduce the number of cars, driving them less often is a massive benefit.
thanks, henry. your horrible ideas still echo throughout history to this day. elon’s taking notes.
I don’t even know about that. EVs are prohibitively expensive for most people, and will continue to be for a while, if the idea is to have electric monster trucks on our streets.
Now, unless the future of EVs in North America include those tiny, affordable EV cars, then they might save themselves. Good luck with that! LOL
This is an argument of scarcity. That scarcity (of money, in this case) is artificial, and created by those who won the last election to make the scarcity even more extreme.
The fact is we need both, and to get both we have to change ideas and to change ideas we need to get people onboard and a good way to get people onboard with clean renewable energy in the US is cars. It’s a gigantic fucking place and trains and bikes aren’t practical in some of it.
Your title is correct not the post you linked
