Electric cars are a type of vehicle. Public transit is a type of transportation system that include many different types of vehicles and can include electric cars.
You’re comparing apples to orchards.
Horses are even more sustainable and renewable. And tasty if done right.
also a 2nd hand ICE car is more sustainable than a new EV
You are technically correct, but I think this fact is often used by new car purchasers to soften the blow: “Someone will buy my old car / this one when I’m done.” Actually committing to the implications of this fact is difficult.
Yeah in a world where transit isnt a shit show. In my city transit will take you 2 hours to get home when a car will take 20 minutes
This is true for dense cities, but not in more rural and semi-suburban areas.
That’s great if public transport goes from near where you are to near where you want to be, in a reasonable time.
For me that’s not the case. Anywhere I want to go takes 27 changes over at least 5 hours for a net distance of three miles; it’d be quicker to hop backwards blindfold on a bent pogo stick.
people who argue for public transport argue for better implementation of it (and also city planning that supports it). the idea isn’t for everyone to just stop using cars in favor of public transport even if the public transport system is absolute shit. it’s for systemic support of public transport in such a way that commuters would willingly choose it over being stuck in traffic in their little metal boxes for hours.
it’s a criticism of the system, not the people.
That’s what decades of car centric urban design does to everyone; any transportation other than a car is treated as a second class
While there’s something to that, it’s also a difficult fact that rail is just harder than roads, and by extension more expensive. You have hills? You are going to need to do tunnels and bridges for the rail because you can’t turn that sharply and you mustn’t have more than 1.5% grade. For road, just snake it around and up and down the hills.
You have a source and destination that not many people will be using? It’s cost prohibitive to run a whole train or bus to cover that route.
Now it’s one thing when the population distribution was based around settling around the harsh realities of needing to be along viable transit paths, but when a great deal of the population settled with the assumption of roads, you are going to have a hard time sorting out transit routes without mass resettlement.
Of course, if you apply mass transit to cities and nearby areas you’ve gotten the worst of the troubles solved and it’s viable for mass transit. But cars are just part of the equation for longer hauls.
While I agree that we need a national public works project worth of new modern trains.
Anyone who says stuff like this should be forced to drive 10 hours across the US first.
Anywhere to anywhere. Drive for 10 hours. Then plot your completed course on a map of the lower 48. Just to demonstrate how monstrously fucking huge this country is. So they understand that while trains are amazing. They aren’t the panacea some seem to think.
Anyone who says stuff like this should be forced to drive 10 hours across the US first.
I am gonna be honest, this is such a lame, US exceptionalism line that people in the US repeat ad nauseam as if it adds anything to the conversation.
Nobody is saying for the couple of people living in North Dakota that they can’t keep their truck and drive around everywhere, the transportation needs of people that live in rural places like this are vanishingly small compared to the problem we are talking about here. We are talking about MASS TRANSIT so places that actually have enough people for major industry, and for major movements of people and material that can actually clog transportation networks. Why when people try to have a conversation about the economic centers of the US that actually make this country run do people obsess about the guy living in the middle of nowhere Kansas who can go on happily driving a pickup for the rest of eternity and who has no impact on the places that actually matter in the US in terms of transit?
Nobody lives in most of the US, so no the fact that those parts of the US exist does not make the US uniquely difficult to make mass transit for because “it is too big”, you just make the mass transit where the high population density is. Deep red rural government-handout states can continue to be based entirely around cars, great, it really doesn’t affect much of the US population because most of the US population doesn’t live in those places and don’t desire to go to them.
Great now that we have been over this, please never throw this line out lazily again, it adds nothing.
Nobody lives in most of the US,
Wow. Talk about overused lines of delusional bullshit.
Twinsies I guess?
Please never say this absurd nonsense again. For your own benefit.
“nobody lives in most of the us” is a factually correct statement.
Do it again. And go by state. See how spread out people really are.
why are you asking for a less granular map? I’d have preferred to give you a more granular map as an increase of detail would just make the point even more clear.
Exactly
that’s not a counter argument to better public transportation. That’s a supporting argument for public transportation.
It takes about 10 hours to drive 688 miles from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City, an actual distance of 580 miles.
For more than double that distance, at 1238 miles, a high-speed train from Hong Kong to Beijing takes 9 hours.
“The US is way too big for trains and public transit to be feasible” is a lousy excuse for poor infrastructure and planning.
I 100% agree. But the whole “build trains AND get rid of cars” thing will not actually work.
It’s not about getting rid of cars entirely. It’s about prioritizing other modes of transport that are more efficient at moving people for 90% of daily trips they need to make.
Cars will still exist, they will just not be most people’s first choice for going to/from places. Ideally they exist more as a tool for specific situations where needed, such as work that covers a broad/rural area and requires large/specialized tools.
10 hours only gets you 1/3 across the US. I drive that regularly. The US is huge, and so many places you could never get to in a train like you mention. Hell even any of the proposed train routes anywhere only touch the surface of anywhere in this country. If you live in a city, and never leave, it only occasionally travel to another major city, sure a train or a bus work, I spent 8 years without owning a car, I know more then most how limiting it is.
Are the roads any better?
So in part, yes because of that’s what we spent the money on and also yes, because we can do things with roads that we can’t do with rail.
With rail, you generally don’t want over 0.5% grade, maybe 1.5% grade. With roads 5% grade is considered no big deal, 8% for freeway ramps, and mountain roads commonly being 15-20%. Also turns can be much tighter with roads.
It’s much much cheaper to do roads, particularly through hilly or mountainous terrain.
In a car I am in constant conflict, constant in risk.
In a plane I am but a commodity, worth only my payment.
In a bus we are a union, to endure together, and one another.
In a train we are a tribe, fortified in goals, interests, as philosophers of old.
Hate to break it to you, but you’re a commodity on the train and bus too.
Very true, but a happy commodity.
I don’t know what buses and trains you’ve been on.
Okay I mayyyy be glossing over the occasional pee stains, bad scheduling, overly expensive tickets, and occasional fella high out of his gourd taking the occasional break from his hazed trance to scream at me because I’m secretly the devil.
Just the colors of life I say.
US public transportation is pathetic, but prior to the 1960’s it was quite extensive only to be destroyed by the oil and automobile lobbyists.
And if they’re hadn’t thrashed the railcars, the cities might look wildly different.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Thing is, we are where we are now. We can’t just tear down all the cities and start over. We have to deal with what we’ve got.
I mean, Europe hasn’t torn it’s cities down (well not all of them and not for rebuilding purposes anyway) despite managing to utilise good public transport.
Then again guess your point is rather that American cities were built stupidly car centric and that somehow those can’t be replaced with any sort of public transport?
Working from home is the best. Not everyone can do it, but those who can, should be allowed to. Return to office isn’t for us, it’s for them.
Working from home is the best.
Very difficult to build class solidarity when you’re atomized to the point of not even seeing one another’s real faces.
You don’t have to do that at work. You can do that at the library, bar, farmer’s market, etc. In fact, I’d rather do it with people near where I live, instead of people that share the other end of my commute.
You don’t have to do that at work.
:-/
The place you spend half your waking hours?
You can do that at the library, bar, farmer’s market, etc.
Do you have a job?
Do you have a job?
I don’t currently. Are you hiring computer programmers? I’ve got 20+ applications sent out via Indeed, but I haven’t found one yet.
Even when I was employed, I still visited the library, a few bars, and the saturday farmer’s market. While I don’t think visiting the bar is necessarily a must, you really should participate in your local library and farmer’s market. Connecting to your community is important.
Are you hiring computer programmers?
We are, in fact.
I’ll shoot you a DM.
Holy shit, if my comment turns into this dude scoring a position at your company, I’m sending you a Christmas card.
I get why you’re digging at them, but there was a period in my life I went to the bar after every workday. Now I have a child. But back then, that’s just how I met new people and socialized. Now I… just don’t really meet new people. Maybe I’ll start meeting other parents soon when it’s kindergarten time, but that’s about it.
I think this depends most on what kind of city you live in. I had an 8 minute walk from office to bar, and a 4 minute walk from bar to home. And the bar was on the way anyway.
I agree, but, this country, unfortunately, is built around cars now, and I certainly can’t walk to work as it would take hours, same with biking.
We need more public transportation, but we also need electric cars.
You also need to fix the karen problem that plagues society. I don’t like getting called a slur or “go back to where you came from”, and its very bad when you’re stuck inside the small space as them. (By “karen” I don’t mean just white women, but the attitude of some people, anyone can become a karen)
We really need to eliminate karen mentality.
I really fucking hate that a normal ass female name became a synonym for “entitled person”
Walking/biking > public transportation > used EV > used IC with decent fuel economy > new EV > new or low fuel economy IC.
A lot of cities were designed around cars. In Cities Skyline you can just bulldoze entire neighbourhoods and completely change the roads and transit. Unfortunately in real life you can’t easily bulldoze people’s homes, and transit networks can take a decade to build.
Global warming is a problem now, and perfect is the enemy of good enough. We know EVs aren’t the ideal solution, but it’s important part of a solution that involves improved transit, better quality of life in dense population centers AND EVs for neighbourhoods that were built in a car-centric past. Maybe in 100 years the suburbs won’t exist and there won’t be any need for cars, but if we wait 100 years to have perfectly designed transit friendly neighbourhoods we’ll all be fucked.
It’s also collectivizing the solution rather than expecting us each to address the problem on an individual level that doesn’t change the status quo one iota.
