Funny thing about horses - apparently when cities moved over to cars from horses they became safer. Because horses spook: and one spooked horse can spook the rest and you get a stampede.
Personally I’d rather be riding my horse from village to village over the hills - and I’m lucky enough to have had need to do that in real life. And I would prefer a city of bicycles to a city of cars. But my point (albeit meant casually) is that most of our solutions have downsides too, even the better-looking ones.
Funny thing about horses - apparently when cities moved over to cars from horses they became safer. Because horses spook: and one spooked horse can spook the rest and you get a stampede.
You seem cool enough / not carbrained that I’d like to suggest you to take a closer look at this. The perception of “horse -> car” as per transportation is pretty prevalent but it doesn’t really hold up in the sense this fun fact is often touted, it’s born out of a car based status quo applied backwards to horses mostly.
I’m happy to merit your insufficient-car-brains certification :-)
What quite do you mean? That horses weren’t used in the same way or for the same demographic as cars are now? Sure, and you also don’t refill them every 200 miles from the nearest highway hay-station. (Well, kind of…) But there were still horses clustered in many cities for a lot of the time, right? Where now there are cars? And as transport such as did use the one mainly transitioned to the other. I don’t suppose there’s hard, quantitative data on car-induced vs horse-induced deaths/injuries within cities at certain eras, but maybe someone has that data somewhere!
Actually, to go another step from your point: I suppose if cars, in their same number and usage, were traded for horses, then besides the epic problem of feeding them all, many cities would be far more dangerous now from the great horde of horses marching through every day!
I suppose if cars, in their same number and usage, were traded for horses, then besides the epic problem of feeding them all, many cities would be far more dangerous now from the great horde of horses marching through every day!
I’ll start off here: eh, maybe. Certainly a lot more full of massive amounts of poop everywhere, that was a common problem even with not every man, woman and child a horse, it’s where we got sidewalks from - so you could walk in not-poop.
Sure, and you also don’t refill them every 200 miles from the nearest highway hay-station. (Well, kind of…) But there were still horses clustered in many cities for a lot of the time, right? Where now there are cars?
Yes, but nowhere near the same extent. Check out old city street pictures from the 1910 and 1920s. Sure, you’ll see cars, they had been invented and hell, you still see horses, except pretty much all of them barring the ones with cops on it are pulling some thing or another. And also there’s trams and also there’s just a buttload of people walking - which is what most of them did.
The point I’m getting at is the notion that we basically just replaced horses with cars, for the most part, but that’s ahistorical. We’ve replaced horses and trams and walking and cycling - all of which were done a lot - with cars. People used and could use a variety of options, now, eh, not so much, they’re not really viable for a lot of people.
But then that’s not because cars are so inherently great for any and all transporation, it’s just we’ve built cities to accomodate cars first, foremost and nigh exclusively, to the detriment of everything else. You wouldn’t find me arguing to bring back the horses, but trams, cycling, walking? Absolutely.
Because we have pretty much gained nothing from cars. People still have roughly the same commute as before - they just live further away and travel the same time, except now the societal cost of doing that is 10x the price per trip. People have a time budget for travel, not a distance budget, and that’s stayed pretty much the same.
the notion that we basically just replaced horses with cars … We’ve replaced horses and trams and walking and cycling - all of which were done a lot - with cars.
Fair point
we have pretty much gained nothing from cars.
I don’t think that’s true, though. Cars bring a lot of utility; even the opportunity to live further from the workplace is not ‘no benefit’. After all, bicycles were hailed as the liberators of women, for much the same reason: ordinary women could have the freedom to travel further. I think what’s happened is that every gain is an opportunity for benefit; but also an opportunity for the greedy and powerful (not to mention lazy, deceitful, foolish, or any combination of the above) to take advantage of other people (and themselves) through. So (for example) cars bring the opportunity to work further from your house; and now many people are forced into living further from their work because employers/infrastructure expect it to be possible. Cars make it much easier to visit far-away relatives for festivals; now Americans must line up every year on Reddit to moan about Thanksgiving politics.
I will agree with you it’d be better if we restructured most transport away from cars and that we have - in principle - the options for a good solution (trams, bicycles, better-arranged-cities, etc). Still, what would the American dream be, without driving to your gym every week so you can run on the treadmill for half an hour ;-p
I’m certain dense human populations are better for the environment than non-dense human populations, because dense human populations need to be moved around less.
You’re basically advocating for human extinction in this comment.
As much as I agree, these are different things. EVs are fixing greenhouse gases. While the others are also bad things, they aren’t really global climate changers.
Not op, but the material gathering and building of EVs is far more energy intensive and resource intensive than gas cars. They do even out but it takes a number of years on the road depending on the vehicle.
Additionally they are very heavy which requires more infrastructure maintenance and therefore more emissions.
That is to say EVs are not a sure fire improvement and it depends on the car, the place you are, the supply chain producing your car, where it’s going to end up, and your own driving habits.
Or we could just invest in rail instead of doubling down on private vehicles. Then we can be sure.
Doesn’t need to be a “green energy paradise”, just a reasonably well connected first world country.
Take a look at Electricity Maps. Unless you live somewhere isolated or with very poorly developed grid infrastructure (or some central US states, apparently), you should see a non-trivial amount of electricity being generated by non-fossil fuels. For example, at the time of typing this 77% of the electricity I’m using is low-carbon and 50% of it is renewable.
That’s the kicker. EVs don’t have to rely on fossil fuels to operate (but they can make use of them depending on the grid infrastructure). ICE cars on the other hand are burning fuel wherever they go.
Walking or cycling will always be the least polluting means of getting around, but if you really need a car then you could do a lot worse than getting an electric one.
The problem is, the way I see it, all energy use is connected. Basically the problem we have is energy consumption grows faster than clean energy production. So requiring more green energy in this context still sucks. Even where I live where all of our energy is green (at least in the grid), extra energy can be sold either via selling it to other provinces/states, or by making deals with companies to do their production here where energy is cheap and green.
Energy is a commodity on a market. If you use it to inefficiently move people, you can’t use it for other things. Remember that to move a 150 lbs person in a car, you have to move about a ton and a half of car…
I’m really sceptic about that kind of metrics because many of them take carbon offsets into account, and carbon offsets are mostly greenwashing.
Power mix in the world right now is over 50% coal and gas, and only hydro is over a 10%. This is worldwide, so mix varies depending on where you are.
In the end EVs are no making a dent in power demand. They are increasing it. The percentage of fossil fuels is maybe going down but total fossil fuel consumption is increasing as our demand does. Green energy is only taking some of the slack from the increase.
EVs will be remembered as the thing we did to keep using cars and feeling good about it.
Except EVs still have a significant carbon footprint from their manufacture. So do train cars and buses, but to transport everyone in cars instead of public transportation would require orders of magnitude more materials, and therefore a much higher carbon footprint. Not to mention the poor land use that car dependency causes, which both leads to deforestation and impedes reforestation, which is a further climate change contributor.
EVs also have the ability to live longer. If an average EV is usable for twice as long as an ICE vehicle, its carbon footprint from manufacturing is already down to 50%.
So can transit vehicles, in fact they last even longer so I don’t see this as an advantage for EVs. In Vancouver, Canada for example, there are fully self-driving electric trains from the 80s that are still running perfectly fine today, and the only reason they’re getting scrapped soon is because they’re loud and uncomfortable compared to newer trains, which even then I personally don’t like the transit agency’s decision to scrap them because that’s super wasteful, they could probably run another 40 years with good maintenance.
I see them as “diet” cars. Similar to if someone is trying to cut back on sodas, switching to diet sodas is a net benefit. That’s not to say diet sodas are good for you or remotely healthy, they’re just less bad than the alternative.
Yeah, except the sweeteners they use to make diet sodas “diet” make those sodas just as bad, if not worse, than the originals. Which also works for the car analogy given the source of the energy most EVs use :/
Source? Because from what I’ve learned, they’ve studied aspartame so much now it’s almost silly, and it has never been proven to be “worse than sugar”. Though the sugar industry is really happy you believe otherwise.
A profoundly filthy coal power plant has multimillion dollar filtration the size of your damn apartment. That gross coal is scrubbed more than the gasoline from any vehicle possibly could be.
In a first world country it’s not possible to have an electric car as dirty per joule as a gas vehicle.
Further, the powertrain is direct and therefore dramatically more efficient, so on a distance basis you get an additional multiplier. That’s where the EPA MPGe comes from - total energy content of 1 gallon of gasoline, converted to range on the electric vehicle.
That’s about 33 kWh in one gallon, which is about half the total storage capacity of my Bolt EUV 2023 (65 kWh) which has about 240mi of range on a full charge, which is why the MPGe is ~120mi/gal, which for an equally polluting power source as a personal gas vehicle, is 5-6x cleaner. Public DC fast chargers are frequently exclusively renewably powered.
It’s impressive because literally every possible angle of your statement is hilariously incorrect.
Transportation (28% of 2021 greenhouse gas emissions) – The transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation primarily come from burning fossil fuel for our cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes. Over 94% of the fuel used for transportation is petroleum based, which includes primarily gasoline and diesel.2
To further break it down:
The largest sources of transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions include passenger cars, medium- and heavy-duty trucks, and light-duty trucks, including sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks, and minivans. These sources account for over half of the emissions from the transportation sector.
So the idea that transportation emissions from regular people is totally negligible compared to corporate excesses isn’t actually realistic. It’s a major chunk of it.
Exactly. Corporations ABSOLUTELY are a problem we NEED to fight. But its also not an excuse to pretend we’re all completely blameless. People get furious when you tell them we cant sit around and wait for climate change to magically fix itself or billionaires to magically become good and stop. But that WE are going to have to actually make changes and put our money where our mouths are
To be clear this isn’t quite my own argument; even though I am saying that transportation emissions are too substantial to be ignored, I am skeptical of “personal responsibility” type solutions. I think it would be better to approach this with stuff like taxing companies based on employee commutes, taxing oil, urban planning and improved public transportation.
Even those require individuals to do something though. Since the government and basically every corporation is entirely opposed to this. You still have to march and protest and call your representatives and fight for it. There’s no reality where this ever changes with no one doing anything beyond an occasional Facebook post. However, even if suddenly our politicians and billionaires all had a change of heart, the necessary changes to effectively combat this environmental catastrophy would mean a complete upheaval of our lives. Cars and animal products either cease to be made or are so expensive barely anyone can afford them. We’ll be using public transportation and bikes and eating mostly vegan diets and bringing our reusable bags to our zero waste grocery stores. Itd force people to do all the things that various groups are already trying to get everyone to do (and to be clear im not sitting on my high horse claiming i already do all that, because i dont) There’s no way through this where we solve the problem and it doesnt require all of us to change our own habits
the necessary changes to effectively combat this environmental catastrophy would mean a complete upheaval of our lives
Yes. But that doesn’t mean it makes sense to frame things as being about who is ‘good’ and who is to be blamed, or that the impetus for change should be personal initiative to adjust away from unsustainable lifestyles. What’s needed is uncompromising policy solutions, and ones that are designed by experts to actually have a direct impact. People often get confused about what matters and what doesn’t, and proportionality. For instance restrictions on plastic bags at grocery stores is totally negligible for climate change, and arguably makes the situation slightly worse. Meat consumption has a significant impact globally, but in a first world context is relatively insignificant compared to the other things we do to create emissions. The problem isn’t that people aren’t choosing to live virtuously, since even if they did many attractive definitions of virtuous would not produce the needed results, and realistically that is not a viable way for human behavior to be adjusted anyway. The problem is that the circumstances around us shape our lives, and impel us to live in an unsustainable way, and that is what has to change.
Basically I think it just has to be more things like, accepting that deliberately high gas prices are a necessary sacrifice for the wellbeing of humanity, rather than asking everyone to choose to drive less and pat themselves on the back when they manage it and feel shame when they do not.
It also destroys the very infrastructure that it’s trying to clear snow from. We eventually need to recognize that rubber wheels on asphalt simply isn’t a very efficient or durable method of moving large amounts of stuff long distances. Steel on steel is superior in both efficiency and longevity.
The reverse is also a thing, btw. Though it still uses special rail. But some Russian evil geniuses have made a road drive-able train before, and nobody even knows what for.
Which is why the real solution is PUBLIC transit, not private motor vehicle ownership of any kind beyond small electric personal mobility like an e-bike or scooter.
We eventually need to recognize that rubber wheels on asphalt simply isn’t a very efficient or durable method of moving large amounts of stuff long distances.
I disagree here, there’s in here for cars that’s hard to do otherwise. I think the problem is more that that is also not at all what cars are primarily used for. Like even in the US 60% of trips are under 6 miles and average occupancy rate is 1,5 persons. That’s a bike ride.
also, if the West did adopt EVs en mass (hard to even imagine), all those ICE vehicles aren’t just disappearing. They’re getting exported to the rest of the world as cheap used cars. Nothing has been “replaced”, you’ve just made more cars and more pollution.
@TheLastHero@Masimatutu Nah, there's not much intercontinental transport of used cars. Too expensive and complicated. If the West adopted EVs en mass there would be a lot less gasoline consumption there, and little increase elsewhere.
I disagree. The UN predicts the number of light duty vehicles to more than double by 2050, with 90% of that growth happening in non-OECD countries. Granted that would be a mix of new and used cars, but the vehicle trade is only regulated on the national level. That means there are considerable financial incentives to export abroad and take advantage of regulatory inconsistency.
For example, stricter emissions laws means that many cars may not be able to be driven at all in a country, but those laws do not exist elsewhere- that will cause an oversupply of cars that can’t be legally sold domestically, but demand for cars is only grow in the global south as their economies and standards of living improve. Logistic and shipping costs also get cheaper every year and shouldn’t be relied on as a economic deterrent, and it’s apparently already cheap enough for the US, Japan, and EU to export 14 million used vehicles between 2015-2018. Rich counties and their populations tend to replace their cars far before their economic life is over as well, and vehicle values depreciate far quicker in the OECD compared to elsewhere. There’s goi lot of economic pressure to
Cats reduce pollutants that contribute to smog that directly harm human health. But they do nothing to reduce the net carbon released into the atmosphere. In fact, by converting carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide they are hastening climate change (CO2 is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO).
I drive as little as I can these days, but I used to drive a lot in Chicago. Talk about aggression! It’s like a game everyone is playing and you get points by being the biggest asshole who.
I live in Portland now and driving here for the first time was a real eye-opener. Still terrible in it’s own ways! But at least the drivers seem to want to cooperate for safe trips all around, for the most part.
Oh wow! I wouldnt have guessed Portland would be any safer to drive than anywhere else, despite its reputation for being unique at… Well literally everything else. 😅
It’s not that perfect (public transport) is more difficult than good (electric cars). More often good is the enemy of perfect since the industry is lobbying for it and against the other
Local commuter rail, walkable cities, and nationwide high speed rail are all necessary to completely eliminate 90% of individual car ownership. We should be advocating for these systems of convenience which will make car ownership obsolete while incentivizing EVs while the infrastructure is built up, not demonizing EVs and making them appear as useless and a waste of time for helping fight climate change. Plus we need EV utility vehicles and trucks for professionals who need them to do their job.
Incremental steps are not personal EVs. They are diesel and electric buses. EVs eliminate 1 problem (tailpipe emissions) while creating 2 more (battery manufacturing, increased vehicle weight making road and tire wear worse, and making them more deadly - there’s others, take your pick) and not addressing the other hundred problems with car dependence.
Buses use the same infrastructure as cars. Bus stops are stupid cheap in comparison to anything else. And then, bus lanes can be implemented to prioritise buses and keep them from getting stuck in traffic.
Ok you try riding the bus everywhere with your whole family dude. That’s not happening. It’s incredibly inconvenient. Especially given the infrastructure we have.
I’m loving my electric car and hope you all get one.
Having been to the UK and Germany, it’s incredibly convenient and much quicker than driving in many cases. I’ve used the metro where I live and it’s also much quicker, the only issue is the closest bus stop is 20 minutes away by foot. That’s easy to fix though.
I live in the UK, and I can say it depends greatly on your circumstances.
In general, if you’re traveling between an outside town to a city it’s usually an alright experience.
However, if your commute is between two outside towns then you have to be lucky, otherwise a car ends up being the only real viable option. My work is about 15 miles away, and before I had a car I had the only option of a railway line that ran through my town. If that line ever had issues getting cancelled or on the train strikes were on that day I couldn’t get to work because to get my work was 2 buses and 2 hours to go 15 miles. The train ran once an hour and didn’t call at half the stops on a Sunday including the stop I needed for work so if it was a Sunday I literally could not get to work.
It’s not even cheaper than a car when I factor in leisure travel, many places I regularly go to take longer to get to by car and are usually a worse experience whether that be service infrequency, long layover times or services getting cancelled/being on strike.
Oh sure, I agree that it’s not always perfect, but neither is driving. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been randomly stuck in gridlock because someone got in a crash on the freeway.
The issue here is entirely that there is no choice that can be made. You either drive, or you don’t go anywhere. I don’t want to need a car, I want to want a car. Cars are convenient, but when they’re required to do literally everything then they’re a massive inconvenience.
If I was able to make a choice, I could share a car with someone else. As it stands, we both have to own one.
Having lived in Germany, you obviously didn’t meet enough people. They fucking love thier cars dude. Yeah their buses are better, but I was shown many people’s cars as if they were a child.
Oh sure, obviously people like cars, but in the cities we’d park and switch from car to rail because it’s significantly faster. I also stayed in the city for a couple of weeks and didn’t need a car at all.
Compare that to the US where you need a car or you die, even in the city, and it’s not even a contest.
I have an electric vehicle. I ride it everywhere in my city and it costs basically nothing. It’s an ebike. I’ve done nothing to it, it’s a normal 350w motor capped at 32 km/h. And damn does it feel so much better than driving in traffic.
The number one (by a long way) selling vehicle in the US is a massively over sized truck. Designed to be so heavy to avoid falling under emissions laws.
There is no electric vehicle that comes even close to that. You want those people interested in electric cars. They don’t give a single fuck about what your think about buses and nothing you will ever do in your lifetime will change that. Ever.
Getting people into EVs is an across the board incremental improvement in the exact definition of the word.
You’re right about the massive benefits of transit and trains in particular would be so amazing… but none of the people we want getting out of F150s give a single shit.
I don’t care about getting people into things. That’s a highly individualistic way to look at the problem. Car dependency is a societal problem, and marketing won’t solve societal problems. There needs to be a fundamental change in the way we (specifically the government) view transportation as a whole. (And as an extension to that, there also needs to be a change in regulation to close that loophole for light trucks.)
What’s important to me is getting lawmakers and those advocating to the lawmakers on board with funding public transit and making the streets safer for all people using them. Yes we need people on board too but really only enough to get these ideas in lawmakers heads as a major issue. A minority. The majority of people don’t understand or care and that’s fine, because their minds will start to change once they see it actually working. In the words of NJB, there are not that many car people, bike people, or train people. Most people just want to get to their destinations as quickly and efficiently as possible.
We don’t live in a direct democracy. 51% don’t have to explicitly agree to laws. The government passes laws that are bad for people and the majority disagree with all the time. Not saying the majority of people disagree, I honestly think they couldn’t care less. I’m just saying we don’t actually have to recruit hundreds of millions of people.
Unfortunately, a major part of this plan is going to have to restrict what oil companies are allowed to do and nowadays that’s seemingly impossible. Only seemingly though. Nothing is truly set in stone.
Not by choice 😂 I’m lucky to be retired early and have a bus system that gets me where I need to go. I’ll get another car when I can but I plan to still bus around for some stuff if I do.
We recently got amtrak back where I live, booked ahead of time (prices increase as the train fills up) I can DC for $30 round trip and nyc for $60 round trip. On my last nyc trip coming back, I was set up in the Cafe car on my laptop and chatting with people - one by one 3 of us busted our respective liquors out offering them around and made a party of it.
@Franzia@Facebones I have only driven three times in the past 13 years. It's one of the benefits of having lived in cities where you don't need a car to survive (Bogotá, Colombia; Genoa, Italy; and NYC). I wish your city can become like this soon, and you don't have to drive ever again!
I bet there are statistics on just how much space is wasted on cars (roads, parking space) but I don’t have them handy. It will probaly pretty maddening when only considering “urban” areas but I wonder if it’s more or less of 1% of the world’s total landmass …
That is because many cities/politicians refuse to enforce reasonable noise limits on automobiles. It should have never been legal/normalized to have exhausts loud enough to need hearing protection while outside of the vehicle.
those ppl will create noise at whatever cost lmao, I bet they’ll start attaching external speakers at some point to compensate for the lack of engine noise
Is this really substantial? With a skilled manual driver or a clever automatic gearbox, the majority of braking should be engine braking. It seems to me that regenerative braking is typically replacing what would be engine braking, the unplanned stops still use friction brakes.
Regen braking can be significantly stronger than engine braking. Unless your battery is at 100%, it can essentially replace all friction braking outside of emergency stops.
I see this argument a lot about EV’s being heavier. And while it is true (for now) the actual weight difference is fairly nominal when comparing two popular closely spec vehicles.
Curb Weight Toyota Camry 3310 lb. Tesla Model 3 3582 lb. +272 lb.
The report goes on to note that pm10 is still reduced in heavier EVs with a smaller tradeoff for increased pm2.5. There are nuances sure, but I still interpret this as a net positive on particulate matter and a step in the right direction. That is something we should not discourage in a world that is still struggling to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere. Fuck cars, but let’s try to make incremental improvements where we can.
Abstract: Assuming lightweight EVs (i.e. with battery packs enabling a driving range of about 100 miles), the report finds that EVs emit an estimated 11-13% less non-exhaust PM2.5 and 18-19% less PM10 than ICEVs. Assuming that EV models are heavier (with battery packs enabling a driving range of 300 miles or higher), however, the report finds that they reduce PM10 by only 4-7% and increase PM2.5 by 3-8% relative to conventional vehicles.
You could also potentially use them as a solution for more efficiently allocating energy, less by pumping energy back into the grid, and more by running home power from the car battery during peak hours, rather than having to produce too much energy during off hours, having to shut down the power during peak hours or provide limited access, or having to provide power for less people. You can make the power go further, and especially for renewables which have potentially less consistent energy production (the nice part being that peak demand roughly lines up with peak production for solar power, at least, in the summer). But none of that’s really an attractive proposition to the american car buyer who wants to travel as far as possible at the drop of a hat, and you have to make car batteries larger and the cars themselves less efficient to compensate for this power draw and power storage that may or may not be happening at any given moment, so it’s sort of self-defeating with the american car market.
Obviously, it isn’t really a more equitable or more efficient solution broadly than doing something like pumping water uphill. Or trying to limit demand in the first place by decreasing surface area of homes, by moving towards multiple units in one building, increasing r-values by using better building materials you could shell out for with a larger amount of occupants, yadda yadda urban design garbage. Stuff that generally is antithetical to car-centric infrastructure and thus electric cars. You also potentially run into problems where the as the grid as a whole becomes less relied upon, they make less money, and then the grid starts to fail further in a positive feedback loop. Poor people can’t afford rooftop solar and electric cars, because most of them can barely afford rent and aren’t really the ones making those decisions anyways.
Only at low speeds. At high speeds for a modern car the tyre noise is louder that the engine noise, and since electric cars are heavier they would be noisier.
And reduce the propping of petrostates
Replace mining oil with mining rare metals. Not a big improvement.
They also help normalise the usage of renewable energy (this is a factor that shouldn’t be overlooked, imo)
Why? Electric cars are causing a huge load on the grid and will continue to do so. In countries that haven’t managed the load and invested heavily in renewable capacity, those EVs are powered by fossil fuels.
They also do all those things much worse than transitioning away from car dependence.
And they give people an excuse to not move away from cars.
And they are so much heavier and deadlier than ICE cars at the same speed that they may actually actively discourage other modes, like walking or cycling.
edit: Look, I think every car should be an EV. And I also think there shouldn’t be many cars because cars still suck. Both can be true.
And they are so much heavier and deadlier than ICE cars at the same speed that they may actually actively discourage other modes, like walking or cycling.
whether a car has an ICE or a battery is the last thing on my mind when avoiding them
yeah and tyre abbrasion correlates with weight, which given the current trend of “Same car but now EV = lots heavier” that one’s just gonna get worse, same for brakes. Pretty much just trading exhaust particles for more particulate dust from tyres and brakes
@showmustgo@Masimatutu I wonder if the tires edison invented that were made from golden rod would have been any better. it was more profitable to make tires how we've been doing it for 80 years.
fuck_cars
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.