As much as I celebrate metros… This city is built in the middle of a desert and only exists because of an immense amount of oil being burned to power gigantic desalination plants. It is hardly sustainable even with a metro.
Honest question. Does anyone here have enough humility to understand there’s a similar checklist of things an automobile solves?
Now it doesn’t mean it’s the right solution but particularly in North America due to lack of XYZ automobiles are king.
It’s very easy to go “hurr durr automobiles bad” but do you understand the multitude of reasons why we use them? All the things that need to be improved or fixed before we entertain the alternatives?
Saying this as a car owner who takes public transit far more than other car owners.
For the appearance of XYZ we need a policy and cultural change, and for that we need to be very vocal about how stupid and inefficient cars are (i.e. hurr durr automobiles bad).
And I’ll tell you right back that people don’t care about your list here. You want to get people onboard start pivoting the conversation. “yaytransit” is far more positive and forward thinking than “fuckcars”.
In fact, the responses I’ve gotten already are a good indication of how deluded this community is. You’re not here to promote change, you’re here to scream into the wind.
So I guess consider that more a failing on my part.
And I’ll tell you right back that people don’t care about your list here.
You != People
“yaytransit” is far more positive and forward thinking than “fuckcars”.
Huh, it’s almost like there is room for more than one community and angle to achieve things.
Do you know what brought change to the Netherlands, which was an extremely car centric country once? Riots. Pure and simple „fuck this shit“ riots in the streets.
how deluded this community is.
Sure, everyone who disagrees with you is „deluded“.
So I guess consider that more a failing on my part.
Riots and protests don’t need your approval or applause. They happen because the majority of people are too complacent. If everyone was already aboard we’d just do those things, you know. You probably don’t understand this, because you never stuck out your neck for anything in your life.
I’ve noticed that people often imagine that they know what kind of person I am, because in their minds it makes it easy to build up a strawman version of a person that fits their preconceived ideas of the “bad guy” that’s opposed to their dumb ideas. Here you go again, doing that. But in reality, all you know is that I made fun of your idea of rioting against cars.
People can read your other comments as well, you know? Your account is a textbook about insecure masculinity, Mr. „I am the man other men wish they could be“ 😂
“Does anyone here have enough humility to understand there’s a similar checklist of things an automobile solves?”
Firstly, this feels a very confrontational way of phrasing the question. It carries with it the assumption that you are right and everyone else is wrong, which I don’t feel is a helpful way of approaching a discussion.
Yes, of course people realise that car ownership is the only viable solution for individuals at the current time. You have engaged with a community who are passionate about and engaged in urban planning, so they are going to be more switched onto the challenges than most.
The entire point is that on their own they are not a sustainable solution long-term. They are hugely inefficient energy and space-wise, their infrastructure causes massive damage to the communities they carve through (see this Guardian article for a breakdown of some NA case studies), and they currently cause a huge amount of environmental damage.
So, the question becomes: how can we remove the need for car ownership? There’s a host of ideas, from better high speed rail links to eliminate long-distance trips, to micromobility and demand responsive transport for short-distance, to better constructing our cities to begin with to allow for amenities to be walkable. Are we going to eliminate car use in rural areas? Of course not; there’s no point running a bus service for a village of 10 people and a goat. Can we eliminate 99% of car trips for those in built up areas, improving air quality, walkability, and accessibility? That should absolutely be the goal.
Yes. Nobody is suggested we should ban all cars everywhere.
Cars are incredible. I do trips to remote places all the time that would be impossible without cars. There’s no better way to transport 5 people and their gear for a week to a place that’s 100km from the nearest small town.
But for 1 guy commuting from the suburbs to work in the city every day in their SUV? Fuck that, the system is broken to even entertain that as a possibility.
Oh man, waiting an hour or so for a bus in -30℃ weather is great. Then the bus is inevitably late because it’s Edmonton (where public transit doesn’t seem to get public funding) and you get to enjoy the great outdoors for another thirty minutes. I’m surprised I still have my toes…
I’m so glad my parents gave me their old truck so I don’t really have to deal with that shit any more.
I agree this kind of post may play in favour of ICE manufacturers and oil companies but I disagree with the comparison you make between EVs and tobacco patches. EVs are produced and sold in order to replace ICEs in the exact same segment. They do not impact peoples lives significantly and will not change anything in the way cities and activities work now. The example you give is the epitome of a work/life organization which was only made possible by the massification of individual motorized transportation, with all the negative externalities listed in the OP. Yes individual cars are going to be needed for many reasons in the future. But we need to work collectively to make them less convenient and less needed in everyday life.
oh buzz off with your weird essay filled with jabs and fallacies and bad faith. actually I just reread it and I have to ask: what the fuck is wrong with you? you’re acting like a white guy who hears two black people talking about racism and leaps in to say “stop calling me racist!” you think this post is calling you out? what the actual fuck is wrong with you?
NO ONE IS SAYING YOU ARE PERSONALLY MORALLY WRONG FOR DRIVING A CAR TODAY IN 2024
that’s the whole fucking gist of this entire guy’s essay, folks. he thinks criticizing EVs is a personal attack on him and people who don’t currently live in walkable cities
So the entire metric for ‘shithole’ to you is based on how many people ride electrified trains? Really? Nothing about, say, their economy or their standard of living or their record on human rights or anything like that?
And the country with the flawless human rights record is what? Iceland because there’s no one to oppress since everyone’s related to everyone else? Great. The rest of 200-some other countries are shitholes by that measure. Again, not the best metric.
Let’s talk about your country now. Where do you live? Will you even volunteer that information?
I am now deeply curious about the deleted comments. All countries have their flaws and past mistakes, Canada's no exception, at the end of the day. The thing is what we're doing now to improve and reflect on these mistakes of the past going forward.
The problem with electric cars is that they’re a distraction. They make people think they’re part of the solution when they’re only partly addressing one of the many problems cars cause. I’m not against people buying them assuming that they’re in a position where they need a new car, but advocating for electric cars as a solution is wrong. I read the OP like this, not how you read it.
Ever wonder why this thing can only go 55 MPH? Yup, my Magnum dong! Nothing slows down a truck like moving around that hunk of meat, let me tell you! Now about our date.
My favorite part about this sub is how everyone acts like the entire world is able to just stop having a car and be able to carry on normally about their lives as if cars haven’t been forced into nearly all infrastructure plans globally since this inception. Like it’s every citizens personal choice that nobody built a functioning transit system in the many decades before they were born, or that the place they can afford to live is too far from the place that pays the wages they need to live is too far to bike or bus to.
Like, push for fewer cars and less car centric design, but also stop being a fucking cunty dick about it.
Oh I’d love to hear your explanation for why it’s irrelevant, and what crucial oversight I’ve made that you’ve managed to in your extensive 16 hours on Lemmy.
Ur comment is irrelevant to this post, as this post is merely talking about the inefficiencies of electric cars. It has not even mentioned the humans driving these cars. Had that been the case, your comment would’ve been relevant.
This post is an attempt to dispel the myth that electric cars are somehow better than ICE cars. Do you see why your comment is dumb?
Your reading comprehension and understanding of English vocabulary is about on par with your lemmy account age.
Til things like “urban sprawl” are inefficiencies inherent to electric cars, and the lengthy list of these inefficiencies are definitely not drawn parallel to ICE in order to suggest that people should instead drive neither as the underlying theme of the post, particularly given the theme of the sub, which I am able to observe because I’ve been here longer than 16 hours.
Your reading comprehension and understanding of English vocabulary is about on par with your lemmy account age.
Are you really trying to discredit someone else’s argument by using their “lemmy age”? Like… are you trying very hard to be this guy?
Now I’ll still assume that your argument is in good faith and respond accordingly. So let’s recap.
The post listed the inefficiencies of electric cars besides ICE cars. The underlying message was that electric cars only solve a very very small problem that ICE cars have, but still possess most of the issues of ICE cars. Hence, we need a much better alternative (trains, wink wink).
To this, you replied saying that this community unfairly criticized car owners. According to you, the infrastructure is the biggest one to blame rather than car owners. Which I would only partially agree (as most car owners still support car centric infrastructure). Of course, if there’s not train in your city, you can’t ride one! But you definitely can lobby for one. Your implicit biases against this community due to those one or two crazy posts skewed your perception in weird ways.
This post is most definitely directed at the tech bros (or the Tesla fanboys), according to whom the solution for GHG emissions from the transportation sector is electric cars. I hope that you agree that this is a dumb argument. This post merely makes fun of this argument. This community is not a monolith, you know… It is thus very important to take the context of every post within itself.
You could’ve argued against/for this idea. Instead, you put up something weird and irrelevant like “this community is dumb for blaming car owners”. You might be right, but it just diverts away from the topic of discussion. Why not create your own post explaining your position? It’s like going to a post saying “We need to increase the minimum wage” on a lefty community and commenting “but the lefties are commies”. This MIGHT be true, but it is not at all relevant to the discussion itself, is it?
Diesel trains are much more environmentally friendly than EVs. Diesel emissions become less of a problem when one engine carries hundreds of people. And diesel doesn’t even pretend to be good for the environment.
prices are not where an average person could go out and buy one in the usa $7.25 is still the minimum wage not to mention rising costs of insurance and property taxes and some states tack on extras fee for certain things and some insurance companies are leaving states making the cost jump even more
cheaper gasoline vehicles are barely affordable if at all for most even used ones
what about the battery and materials having to be mined and what have you
are the workers from material gathering to the final build paid a fair living wage
in some places such as tennessee the charging stations for electric are shutting down
It does, because the batteries for electric cars have a reliance on rare earth metals.
Lol the downvotes are hilarious. We will not solve climate change with electric cars. Public transit in walkable communities with niche uses for cars and trucks are the only way forward.
As seen in the Wikipedia article, sodium ion batteries also require rare earth metal anodes, or toxic materials like mercury which is also bad. Better than lithium ion, but still generally not great. The best option would be aluminum air batteries, which should be easily accessible and are extremely recyclable
perhaps you’d be interested in the fact that I grew up in a very rural area. The nearest city was Rochester, MN, roughly 30 minutes away if you were going 70 in the 55 on US 52. I agree that rural areas will need cars to go from their houses to towns and cities, but I’ve thought extensively about public transit in rural areas, and I think it’s far easier than folks think.
The battery tech is starting to move away from rare earth, with LFP not using cobalt and sodium-ion not using lithium. And in any case, emissions are by far our most pressing problem compared to issues with rare earth extraction.
Am German, can confirm. Parking garages do indeed exist here. Germany is very car centric, but fortunately not as bad as the US. Our cities do also have mostly working public infrastructure that makes it possible for lots of people to get to the Christmas market and drink several mugs of mulled wine without the need for overly huge parking garages.
It seems rare, that the whole train station was closed (probably not one of the bigger cities) and you must have stayed rather late, while christmas markets usually already open in the afternoon (or even earlier) and the sun sets early in their season, so there’s plenty of time to enjoy them while they are most beautiful (at night) and still make it home by train in a lot of places.
That being said, in more places than you’d expect, you won’t find convenient train connections after midnight, if at all. That makes using public transit almost useless for partying. I remember living in a somewhat rural area as a young partygoer and if I wanted to go to the city for partying, the choice was to either go home before the city folk even really started going, or keep partying until the clubs closed and then hang around with the punks at the railroad station to wait for the first train in the morning. Having a designated driver and going by car was the usual option.
While its nice to take holdlidays, I dont think its reasonable to shutdown necessary public infrastructure on holidays. Imagine if the electricity and water systems also shutdown on holidays.
I can imagine them being cheaper and I only would use people to transit other people when you can have 40 people or so. Where security on big vehicles like bus or train need more caution. A person driving a single person feels like a waste of time or smth. Driverless cars could also be more efficient in routing.
Yes! And you know what, at that point, given the size of a minimum viable car, we could use some kind of algorithm to match people that are going similar places, and put them together to be more efficient. And I bet we’d find that a lot of the large scale transit patterns are common large parts of the population, so we could even use some kind of segregated, higher speed, more frequent vehicle for that.
While we’re at it, we might as well just warehouse some of these vehicles around places where the common cores end and start, and then we would only have to match one end of the trip.
I think that the solution is automated rail transit. Being in a dedicated place with lower likelihood of encountering people removes nearl every issue that self-driving cars have. Being automated means that 24/7 schedules are possible. If there are enough trains and high enough saturation, need for cars and even taxis is removed.
One train transports 100s of people, the driver is a fairly low proportion of the cost. And there’s other members of staff that are required even in a fully automated system. (network monitoring, security). Removing the driver is a nice step, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the economics of rail transport. If a route is uneconomic, that’s going to be the case without a driver too.
Removing the driver mainly removes barriers to running late - meaning things like drunk driving can be significantly reduced since transit in the US is virtually non-existant at drunk’o’clock, effectively pressuring people into bad decisions when their judgement is the poorest.
If a route is uneconomic, that’s going to be the case without a driver too.
Infrastructure is vital to economic and other activity. It needs to be treated as an investment or necessary cost, not a business. Doing otherwise inevitably results in collapsing bridges, toxic spills, and other symptoms of neglect as corners are cut to maximize profit.
We’re in agreement that night trains are a good thing, but you should push for them whether or not your trains are driverless.
You misunderstand my use of economic. Everything has a cost and a benefit which can theoretically be calculated, with infrastructure like transit that benefit extends beyond fares. Typically governments will do this calculation when deciding whether to pursue a new project, they include all the planning, construction, running costs, and externalities e.g. climate impact, and all the benefits from fares, economic activity, new opportunities for industries and development, ect. This produces a cost benefit ratio. In my research with transport, the best value projects are local safety improvements like cycleways, sometimes the ratio is as good as 10. Large public transport projects are maybe 1-2, and large motorways are usually less than 1. My point was a train driver is a small cost that isn’t going to significant affect this. Of course, this analysis often gets ignored and the overpriced motorway gets built anyway.
In fact, low speed electric cars are quiet enough that they’ve considered putting speakers in them to alert pedestrians and make the absence of feedback less disconcerting for drivers.
We’re so used to ICE cars that they’ve contemplated making electric cars pretend that they have an ICE.
They already do this in Europe and other countries where mixed car/pedestrian environments are more common. Electric cars must have some form of audible signature, usually a quiet whirring sound.
I’m sure this is unpopular this community but I feel like “fuck cars” folks are either living in a dream world where public transport can answer everyone’s transportation needs. If you live in a city with all the amenities you need where public transport is good and economically viable sure, “Fuck cars”, but if you don’t…
I’m not a farmer, my nearest grocery store is 8 miles away. It’s rural and the cost of living is extremely cheap. it also snows a ton and often drops to sub zero temps.
It doesn’t. But that’s okay, because nobody gives a shit about special snowflakes way off the tail end of the bell curve like you – solving the problem for the 80% of everybody else, for whom reasonable solutions do apply, is plenty good enough!
Demanding that any solution be perfect enough to solve it for literally everyone including you is just bad-faith reactionary bullshit.
Bad example that you provided. I do not lease or make payments on my car. I may be on the end of the been curve but you save assume every person ever pays what’s in the articles headlines.
Using the calculator literally provided in the article you are citing my monthly cost for my car is $120. A lot less than the $1000/month they say as an average.
I’m also saving way more than that per month in rent by living where I do outside of a town or city.
Not a bait. I guess I belong to a small group of people who decide to make life-changing commitments in order to minimize their impact on the environment.
You assume your proposal is an “easy” solution. The main reason I live here in the first place is because the surrounding cities, that do have amenities and public transport, are much more expensive to live in. Is not that the town I live in is large in area, it’s quite walkable, it simply doesn’t have much.
It also reminds me of a guy I used to know who said he didn’t need a watch. Claiming he didn’t need to know the time that often. But what did he do? He asked everyone around him what the time was instead. Quite often. Oh and he was usually late to class.
Why am I telling you about him? Because it is the same sentiment as “I don’t need a car, if I want to see my friends (and relatives) I simply ask them to travel to me.”
You are clearly pointing one if the real solutions to individual motorized transportation, which is shared motorized transportation. In my area, people constantly borrow vehicles, equipments, tools and so on.
If you only have the option to drive and it looks like it will never change where you live, then yes, driving electric is better than driving an ICE car. You’re not the problem for needing to live your life with the limited options you have access to. However, that does not mean the intrinsic problems with cars disappear the instant they become electric, and this meme is mainly meant to respond to the techbro people who think just because electric cars exist now it makes transit obsolete or it solves literally everything wrong with cars in general, and use that to actively resist public transportation or attempt to turn public opinion against it. I should have added additional context to make that clearer.
Well I do drive electric now but I could not get by without a car. Honestly I would love it if public transport were viable for everyone. In London and Zurich I have experienced public transport that worked. Where I live a 1 hour car journey can mean a 3 or 4 hour trip by public transport and only if you are travelling at the right time of day. Unfortunately I don’t necessarily get to choose when I make some of those trips because it is part of my job. Unfortunately here, public transport is slow, expensive and unreliable here.
I know electric cars don’t solve everything, and maybe this meme is not exactly what I’m responding to, but for a lot of people, public transport is just not a viable alternative.
Like I said I know it’s not going to be a popular sentiment here.
Someday I am going to get a used adventure bike, and modify it to be a hybrid capable of electric only at low speeds / low acceleration, and charge that with solar panels.
Why not an electric bicycle?
Theyre astoundingly overpriced for what they are.
Why not public transportation?
Well obviously use that whenever possible, but I like the hybrid concept because if you run out of fuel, you can do electric running, or if power goes out, you can charge batteries or run important equipment via the gas motor going through a transformer into a battery yada yada.
That and it’ll be useful to be able to cruise around on said motorcycle when our modern american civilized society finally collapses into chaos.
I am all for urban redesign projects and locally sustainable diverse economies and all that, but i dont have faith enough of that will happen quickly enough to basically make it totally safe to just stay in one particular metro area.
EDIT: I suppose maximum utility apocalypse bike would also be capable of running on ethanol, and maybe even somehow whatever the proper name for the fuel refined from fast food restaurant grease is, forget the name. Ive heard it makes your vehicle smell like french fries though lol.
Ebikes aren’t actually overpriced. Unless you buy them from Specialized. All those components are actually just that expensive. I can tell you this for sure because I compared the cost of building my own electric bike and buying a prebuilt one and I ended up going prebuilt.
I agree with you from the perspective of actual parts costs.
I probably should have specified this a bit better, but when I say they are overpriced for what they are, this is more what I mean:
(disclaimer I do not have total comprehensive knowledge of the entire ebike market, please correct me if I am wrong)
Generally speaking I see ebikes going for something like $1k to $3k, and generally speaking you get a top speed of about 20 to 25 mph, and a fully electric unassisted drive of about 40 miles, unless you pay a good deal more for bigger batteries/more advanced drive train, basically.
Sure, this is neat amd useful for people who do not need to move long distances.
But I guess you could say I dont fall into that use case demographic.
And I can get a used motorbike with significantly greater speeds, range, and greater off road capabilities in that same price range.
That’s fair. I live in a city of 100k people with bike paths or lanes to ~70% of where I’d want to go. So my life is on an ebike. I truly believe they are an important part of the solution to the problems car dependence caused.
I can tell you for sure that my ebike is cheaper in 3 years than a motorcycle in 1 because I first, don’t pay for gas, second, do all my own repairs and maintenance (I can’t do this on a motorcycle - I learned about my bike after getting it), and third, no secret fees like registration, insurance, or licensing. I paid 2,000 upfront for my ebike and with the price of my bike and all of my owning costs combined it isn’t even hitting 3,000 altogether. I’ve been able to save MASSIVELY because of this. Ah, and I take it out in the winter time as well. There’s been a lot less snow this year for us but I still don’t see motorbikes out when I’m on my ebike.
So I will unironically shill for ebikes because I believe in them as car replacements, since I live that life.
Our ebike takes about the same amount of time as driving for most of our trips and nearly halves public transit time to some places we go. It was about 2k, and for that price it has been an actual steal. I think we put about 1.5k miles on it in the first year, and cost wise I think it’ll break even at about double that.
It doesn’t sound like ebikes are overpriced, it sounds like you don’t find value in what an ebike does. And that’s totally ok, especially if you’re advocating for making your community more healthy and doing your best to live that way too.
It is a real shame that ebikes weren’t subsidized like electric cars are, that would have changed the equation a lot for folks who are more on the fence and could have started a shift where more people want safer places to use their new bikes.
Edit: just read your reply to the other folks, you get it. I gotta wake up more before I start commenting
Ebikes are great for a lot of people, but my particular desired use case for a vehicle makes them less than ideal.
That being said I am the kind of person who would also just enjoy the challenge of actually hybridizing some kind of motorbike on both a conceptual amd mechanical level, as well as the skills I can learn from that, and probably a lot of people just want to buy something that more or less just works, which is of course entirely reasonable.
You forgot about the material extraction and carbon emissions for manufaturing a new electric car. Can someone link the data for it please?
Edit: The article in below reply says it best. Lithium extraction and manufaturing emissions for electric cars are bad for the environment but still dozens of times better than ICE cars lifecycle emissions
It heavily depends on the battery technology used in that particular vehicle and the economy of scale. The emissions reduce as the build batches increase
fuck_cars
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