This is pure oil company propaganda. I hate cars with a passion and want a car free society. We will get there but it will take time. But We need to get rid of gas NOW.
Anyone who spews this kind of filth is literally the enemy.
Even if we ignore microplastics, steel wheels on rail are significantly more efficient than tires. Rail is just better unless you are going to places not traveled much.
An example of a very light high-speed passenger train is the N700 Series Shinkansen, which weighs 715 tonnes and carries 1323 passengers, resulting in a per-passenger weight of about half a tonne. This lighter weight per passenger, combined with the lower rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel rail means that an N700 Shinkansen is much more energy efficient than a typical automobile.
Are you saying that EVs produce the same CO2 as ICEs? Even if an EV is charged 100% off natural gas it will create less CO2 than an ICE. A gallon of gasoline is 33.7kWh of energy. This means a basic Model 3 has a battery with less than two gallons of gasoline worth of energy. They don’t idle, they don’t rev, they don’t make noise… all of these are significantly better for cities.
Then there’s the other shit about how ICE cars don’t just create CO2, they release a lot of other chemicals into the air that we shouldn’t be breathing and unlike a power plant, they do it almost always where people are.
The funny thing is, electric cars help with the tire/brake dust and mined materials issue. Regenerative braking reduces the wear on brakes, and electric motors provide smoother power delivery, which reduces tire wear. As for the mined materials, electric cars generally take more material to make, but they are also easier to recycle, and the batteries themselves are able to be recycled in to even better batteries that they were when brand new.
My brother in Christ, you literally have no idea how much stuff is made out of petrochemicals, do you? Try asphalt, industrial solvents, cosmetics, any real lubricant, fertilizers, pesticides, textiles, circuitry, detergents, insulation, PVC, paint, adhesives, roofing material, synthetic rubbers, as well as a ton of pharmaceutical products and food additives. And that’s not even an exhaustive list. Gasoline is a big part of the petrochemical industry, but it’s not the totality of it.
I do know how much we use petrochemicals. Gasoline is not a direct synonym for petrochemicals, it’s definition is fuel for combustion engines. None of the products you mentioned are made out of gasoline.
I really do not think so. Oil propaganda would support cars rather than be against it. I’m quite sure this is directed at the people who think EVs are a full solution.
Mate, the whole comic shits on cars as a whole, each and every part that electrics and gas both share. The only thing making electric better being tailpipe emissions and nothing else.
The messaging here is clear, eliminate the car as a concept for transport and stop accepting lukewarm solutions as anything but unacceptable.
No, I said it’s LIKE racism, meaning that it has similarities.
Literally NOBODY thinks that EVs are a “full solution” to environmental damage or climate change or whatever the whataboutism is about this week.
It’s only beneficial to put this argument forward for two groups: Car manufacturers and oil producters.
Then why is my neighbour down the street spewing this shit on Facebook daily? He is not a car manufacturer or oil producter.
No, it’s because he has been lead to believe that the smug EV people are going to take his vehicle away. He has bought the lie and now he’s spreading the arguments that will fragment car owners so that nothing will ever change.
The entire purpose is to split car users and preserve the status quo.
This is the fuck cars community. We should hate all cars equally. When I see other posters here repeating the lies from the car and oil industries, I have to point it out.
EVs are the only solution to getting ourselves out of this mess. We can’t ban all cars in the next few years like we can with all gasoline cars. Building proper public transport takes time, especially when it’s been sabotaged to such a point. We need to transit to a carless society through ev or it’s literally over.
Propaganda is a slimy business and their current strat is bash EVs and bring up nihilism. Regardless of your intentions, you are being their mouthpiece by posting this.
The only solution EVs provide is a pathway for automotive companies to continue to exist. They solve nothing and their existence continues to enable suburban sprawl, lack of public transportation, and the alienation of a car-centric society. You are trash for supporting EVs and you aren’t interested in a better world, one without cars.
EVs have about half the lifecycle emissions as a gas car, given today’s electric grid. Which is better, but not all that much better.
However: 80% of the US lives in metropolitan and micropolitan areas. 20% of the US is rural. You can build better public transit in cities and small towns, and stop doubling down on building shitty-ass suburban stroads and sprawl. But Farmer Joe is never going to bike 20 miles to the nearest Dollar General. It’s just not practical, and neither is putting a bus stop in front of every farm.
A car-lite world where Farmer Joe drives an EV to a farmer’s market that 95% of people walked, biked or took a bus to seems way better than either the status quo or a car-free world.
What did “farmer joe” do before cars I wonder? Plus it’s 100% fine if “farmer joe” still uses fossil fuels for his tractor and to drive into town. That isn’t a problem that is solved by EVs. that isn’t a problem that needs to be solved, and that absolutely isn’t the reason you are bringing up EVs at all.
Ironic talking about me living in a bubble when you are literally in a bubble every time you drive. Hope you are ready when the “social and political realities” make a car-centric society untenable.
I think we live in very different parts of the world. Where I’m from, it is quite self-evident that we have to transition to EVs, and most people in fact already do. However a lot of people seem to forget that EVs only solve part of the problem and that we have to think further, so from my perspective this comic can basically only be used for good.
But I do get that this could be used by reactionaries to push back against clean energy in places where such sentiments are common. However, I don’t think that’s a particularly big problem on the Fediverse.
That’s all true, maybe I’m overthinking it. I like his other work, the punch line just seemed prominently anti ev on this one and I think I’m developing a hair trigger for it. Most are a bit more reticent in my community and I’ve seen all kinds of arguments against EVs, some being they are just as bad for the environment so why bother.
I do agree it might lead to complacency, especially since most countries seem quite unwilling to tackle any kind of issues related to vehicles.
I love the childish smug energy of this comic which simultaneously suggests merely mitigating a serious problem is inadequate and also provides no proposed solution whatsoever. If solutions which have compromise because they are rooted in reality are a problem, I suggest finding a way to live in a world of fantasy.
Your right it is a childish problem because a child could think of the solutions you seem to be unable to, instead of cars we could use trains or bicycles, or just walk. Solutions from that fantastical world you lived in before you could drive.
It is straight up delusional to believe we could just flip a switch and not have cars anymore. And I also notice you still haven’t provided an actual solution outside of “just use trains, bicycles, or walk.”
Whenever I see takes like this, I just assume they aren’t from, or maybe have never visited, America. The majority of the country was built on the assumption of travel via automobile from public transportation (or the lack thereof) to urban planning to housing. For the country to function without cars, it would require massive renovations to rebuild cities vertically, install a vast and complex rail system, and completely alter the culture of work and trade. And we can totally do this, but it will be very expensive and take a very long time, and to suggest investing in EVs in the meantime is somehow foolish because it doesn’t fully solve the problem is a bit dense. You can do both at once, not that we are, to be fair.
Fully investing in sustainable public transportation and infrastructure is something that would have to take at least a decade, even with absolute maximum commitment. So, yes, anyone who thinks that you can “just switch to trains, bicycles, or walking” is incredibly naive and absolutely fantasizing. Not suggesting it can’t be done but we have to live in reality where cost, labor, time, and public interest are factors and those make “just” doing it a bit more complex.
I didn’t say we could just flip a switch, like you said it will be a long and difficult process, but it will take even longer if we continue to focus on evs as the solution. We could do both at once with unlimited funds and will but we don’t have that, there’s opportunity cost, each dollar we spend on ev subsidies is one not going to projects that can reduce emissions by a lot more like high speed rail and electric bus infrastructure, and currently were spending hundreds of billions of public and private money on evs while almost completely ignoring the other more sustainable solutions. The sustainability movement in the u.s. has very limited funds and public will, and to spend most of that on halfway solutions is short sighted. We need to focus all the resources we can into this because like you said, even with that it would take decades and were running out of time.
I do live in America and have for almost all my life. I have traveled all around this country and know that most of it is extremely car dependent. But my reaction to that is not the problem is so big, we should just do small incremental changes, it’s the problem is so big and were running out of time, we need to do a full 180 right now if I want future generations to not live in a hellscape.
All of this is also just about sustainability, cars are bad for a myriad of other reasons, like the comic says, along with discouraging exercise and exasperating income inequality, and anything that helps people realize how bad they are and denormalizes them is a good thing.
Death to the car, every car. It will kill is if we don’t employ radical solutions and just replacing every gas car with an electric ain’t magically saving the world.
Hell it might just make things worse, those rare minerals have to come from somewhere and have to go somewhere when we are done with them. I have little hope for any of this in a capitalist world.
I’m not unsympathetic to the fuckcars movement, but I have to ask about the road salt. When it snows and the roads are icy, what’s supposed to happen? What’s the plan for getting around, for getting to work, for getting to school? We can be using beet juice and other less impactful de-icing brines, but you still need the cars to get people where they need to go. Is the argument that people should stay home? Are we suggesting that colder climates just shouldn’t be populated? Busses need the road salt, too. Trains and trolleys de-ice their tracks. Even urban areas where you can walk everywhere need to salt the sidewalks.
This incidentally is why used school buses from Colorado are highly desirable in the skoolie community (a skoolie is a used school bus converted to a motorhome). In addition to the generally high-quality transmissions and retarders (essentially for handling mountainous terrain), the “sand” you use doesn’t promote rusting-out of the bus bodies like road salt does. In a sense, though, this is still bad for the environment: the extended lifespan of these vehicles keeps them on the road spitting out carbon dioxide longer then they otherwise would.
Where I live it’s common to spread gravel on the snow to increase grip. And then, of course, it is expected that everyone has the appropriate shoes and bike tires to not slip.
And even when salt is used, cars need a lot more salt per person than other modes of transport does.
If it’s cold enough to freeze the ground, I’m not riding my bike. First, having the right tires is one thing, but black ice and surprise potholes will eat your snow tires. Second, it’s going to be too cold to be out in the cold air for the several hours you need to bike to school or work.
Busses require the same amount of roads as cars. So you’re going to need the same amount of salt for busses. You might need less for sidewalks, but that’s only because people cannot walk as far as they can drive.
If everyone who normally takes the car would switch to taking the bus, all of a sudden you’d only need one lane in places where you previously needed two or three, because cars are very space-inefficient, so that makes a big difference.
Also, it’s not quite true that they’d require the same amount of roads. I don’t know about where you’re from, but where I live buses use about a quarter of the roads and you can still easily get anywhere by bus.
Additionally, salt isn’t used for rail vehicles at all.
I think public transit is important, good for the environment, and should be a much larger budget item everywhere.
But your math simply isn’t true everywhere. You can’t take 20 cars off the road and put them all on a bus, because those 20 cars aren’t going to the same place at the same time. Urban areas that already have busses blanketing the city and running constantly, the math works and you just need additional busses to up capacity. But for where I live, on the edge of suburban and rural areas, you’d need a thousand more busses on the road to cover every route and destination. And these are places where most roads are only one lane in each direction. The major highways would still need several lanes because of the additional busses to fill demand for additional routes, and smaller roads would need to be widened in many places to allow for the larger turning radius of a bus.
So you need the same amount of salt to cover the same amount of road. Maybe some areas could recapture a lane or two for bike lanes and pedestrians, but you still need to salt those, and they won’t have the benefit of being driven upon, which crushes ice and moves it out of the way. One or two slip and fall lawsuits later, and municipalities are just going to close them any time there’s a little snow.
Once again, I’ll say that the argument against cars is compelling. We should work to provide more public transit, because it is better for society to have reliable public transit. We should protect bike lanes, because it is better for our health and the environment, and encouraged freedom and development for adolescents. We should make more residential areas walkable because it is better for communities to be walkable. It fosters relationships among neighbors, encourages the support of local businesses, and improves the health and wellbeing of everyone who lives there.
Those are the arguments that get you there. Talk about the good it does, not the bad it doesn’t. People who don’t already agree with you will pick the one thing that doesn’t ring true and key in to ignore and dismiss the rest.
And even when salt is used, cars need a lot more salt per person than other modes of transport does.
Can I get a source on this? I’m not even sure what you mean by it, because salt clears active roadways as much as it does backroads, so how is this being measured “per person”?
Where I live it’s common to spread gravel on the snow to increase grip. And then, of course, it is expected that everyone has the appropriate shoes and bike tires to not slip.
You’re talking about pedestrians, but what about non-pedestrian traffic? The roads are more than just avenues to get to the grocery store, they’re also how the grocery store gets stocked with goods for rising out storms. It how the ambulance gets to you.
And what about the disabled or elderly? Can you get a wheelchair across the gravel?
For pedestrians and bikers, you need a lot less surface to deice, plus the lower speeds means it is not quite as vital to see all the snow gone directly. And yes, you will need roads for different purposes, but you would need a lot fewer of them, and with fewer lanes, if everyone wouldn’t take the car. Also, for supplying stores, a lot of the things trucks do can easily be done by trains.
Here in Canada there are definitely de-icing/ snow removal machines used on the tracks. Large propane heaters keep switches clear of ice so they can operate. Hi-rail trucks will go ahead of trains through the mountain passes to ensure the way is clear. During particularly bad snow storms they can use machines like this to clear the snow.
The trains will also release gravel on the rail to improve braking times.
When it snows and the roads are icy, what’s supposed to happen? What’s the plan for getting around, for getting to work, for getting to school? […] Are we suggesting that colder climates just shouldn’t be populated?
This line of questioning is really important, and it’s why I think there’s no addressing our devastation of the environment without digging deep into the assumptions of our society.
Society, as we understand it today, requires all of us going to work and school every day, no matter the weather, otherwise it doesn’t work. We can’t live like that. It just doesn’t work. We exist in the world, and our attempts to pretend like we are somehow apart or above it, that our daily lives shouldn’t be impacted by it, are destructive. We just can’t be in such a hurry all the time.
So yes, when the weather is bad, we need to slow down, focusing our efforts on our highest priority infrastructure, like ambulances, with everyone else taking a beat, or even pitching in. To do that, we need to rethink our society, because as things stand now, I agree with you, that’s not really possible.
This is why I think degrowth and socialism are the only human way through the climate crisis. Capitalism is a death cult of infinite growth that forces each of us to contribute to our own destruction every day because we have to get to work to live every single day.
Yeah, I think the argument is that you shouldn’t need the cars to get people where they need to go. This can be addressed two ways: either we don’t use cars or we don’t need to go (as far).
People should be able to travel with other modes that require less salt to deice, and cities could be built to not require cars for most trips. Salting sidewalks and bus lanes is better than salting those things plus roads and highways.
It’s also worth considering that yes, people should be able to just stay home. People shouldn’t be at risk of losing their job/home because they couldn’t safely make it into work. Parents shouldn’t have to rely on school as daycare.
I’d be curious to see if urban heat Island affects salt use. Maybe if we build dense enough, we don’t even really need salt to cover 99% of the population.
So…the issue isn’t cars, it’s capitalism? All we need to do to get rid of cars and all their negative effects is rearrange our country on a socioeconomic level?
Yes, capitalism is the root problem. Some people argue that you cannot overcome climate change under capitalism (and neoliberalism, specifically).
But I think it’s unlikely we’ll be able to change the underlying system without society collapsing in some way. Or a revolution.
However, I don’t think you have to get rid of capitalism to reduce cars and make a positive impact. Climate change is a scale: the more we do now, the less bad it will be in the future. So doing something is still better than nothing, even if it doesn’t solve the problem entirely.
Reducing cars (and therefore emissions) can be helped by improving public transport and increasing the number of options for transport. In many places, cars are the only way to get anywhere, especially in countries that focus on car infrastructure. Having the options to bus, train, bike, walk, or drive will reduce the number of drivers. In the case of bike lanes, at least in my country, there is evidence that adding bike lanes increases the number of cyclists (and therefore decreases the number of cars on the road). “Build it and they will come,” if you will.
I have a car, but I most often bike or take the bus. We can’t get rid of cars entirely; there are reasons people need them (tradies needing vans with their equipment, certain disabilities needing customized transport options, courier parcel delivery, etc.). But reducing the number on the road at any time is helpful.
Nevermind the fact it doesn’t snow enough for that to be a problem in most of earth. There are more methods of transportation other than those two and not every place needs to have the same transportation matrix.
Sure they can. I’ve been doing that for quite a few years until climate change warmed my city up so much that snow and ice don’t really happen anymore.
But are all sides of the car in the optimal angle towards the sun?
No, but neither are solar panels on houses. For the car, it’s ideal to park facing North/South. For stationary solar panels, it’s ideal to have solar panels mounted on a pan/tilt platform so they can always face the sun, which is rare.
No trees or buildings near your parking spot that could shade your car?
It’s pretty clear at my house, I have a designated outdoor parking space. Not perfect but definitely sufficient for my commute. At my work there aren’t any obstructions.
If these panels didn’t go into a car, someone else would mount them to a roof instead.
No, they developed and patented their own tech for curved solar panels.
Big hydrocarbon plants are more effective than the little ones inside cars. There’s still other factors to consider like mining of minerals that contribute to make EVs not good, but they’re a little less bad for the environment than the combustion kind even if your energy comes from bad sources
I always have felt like blaming cars, of all things, misses the bigger picture. 1 crude oil shipping vessel produces more pollution than the entirety of cars in America will for a year. Cars are one of the things that actually empowers individuals to live their individualized lives. Hell, some people live in their cars/rv/campers and it allows people to escape the rigors of daily life.
I agree we should take aim at making them more environmentally friendly, and take a harder focus on replacing plastic components with metal and/or other recyclable alternatives. If we could sequester carbon into them somehow that would be even better; but things like carbon fiber require nasty epoxies that are difficult to break down again once they need to be recycled.
The position of most people in this community is usually “Cars should cease to be the primary means of transportation for North Americans as soon as possible”. There are cases where cars and trucks are the only logical option, like rural communities, but in cities we should be aggressively against cars as a primary means of transportation. Nothing solves the the problems cars cause like replacing them with a train or bus or cycling
Even living in a European city with good bike and public transit options, I run into cases where a car is the only logical option.
Which is why I rent them a few times and year which basically comes down to sharing a handful of cars between a few hundred neighbours. Every single person having one or multiple cars is insanity, especially when you consider traffic conditions.
Part of the issue here is that if you own a car, it’s often cheaper to take the car than public transport, because most of the car expenses are paid independent of the immediate usage.
Car value deprecation, taxes, maintainance, all of that cost you money no matter whether you drive into town today or use some other means of transport.
I think it would be much better to put all taxes onto the fuel price. If you pay €5 for a litre of fuel, instead of the ~€1.5/l that we are currently paying, it would make more sense to take public transport some times.
I think this is the huge balancing point at which cars rely on. You saw a lot more small cars and less of these huge monster trucks roaming around North America back when gas had hit $5/gallon. Now gas is $3 but accounting for inflation, it’s probably at one of the cheapest points it’s ever been.
Even though I argue many times for cars in these posts, I long for a day when gas is $10/gallon so that these 3-5 ton behemoths aren’t on the road carrying a single person. I’m fine with this causing an artificial limitation on people to pick and choose when they use their personal transportation. Granted, we’ve also seen that this results in the economy slowing down overall as people choose to go fewer places and thus spend less money overall.
i feel like you probably didn’t realize what community you are posting in. this is the anti-car community. not the better car community, the anti-car community.
No I realized damn well what community I was posting in. That’s the great thing about intellectual discourse, is the ability to argue a cause based on its merits in order to refine an opinion or idea to its ultimate ends. Without dissenting opinions being allowed, all you do is isolate yourself into an echo chamber where your opinions are never challenged and get ever-more extreme to the point of comedic proportions. You need your ideas challenged so that you can make an educated and refined argument. Additionally, my arguments allow me to be open to correction and I can update my own opinions based on arguments made against my statements as well. I know the internet has taught many people that argument = bad, but true discourse invites other opinions that may not necessarily agree. I, in my propensity to wish for the best in humanity, am of the hopes that I can achieve that here on a platform where I assume that people are slightly more intelligent because they had the foresight to leave the previous platform which has been overrun with anti-intellectualism.
But this argument basically implies that we should gut the majority of people’s benefit because of a minority’s inconvenience. Certainly we should accommodate the minority who can’t, especially if it means living a fulfilling life, but not at the expense of everyone else.
Making life easier for those who can’t or doesn’t want to drive detracts nothing from those who can. In fact it is beneficial for those who want to drive to have denser cities, and better public transport. It means safer streets, less traffic and lower insurance premiums. Yours is a false dichotomy.
You lack reading comprehension. I did not give you a false dichotomy, because a false dichotomy requires that I present to you two options, with the stipulation that you can only choose one or the other. Nowhere in my previous post did I do any such thing.
I merely reiterated what I understood your stance to be, and offered an alternative; which would be not unduly hampering other people’s experience because of a minority.
You’re so focused on being “right”, that you’ve lost sight of the actual discussion in an effort to portray my argument as some sort of argumentative fallacy. Which ironically enough, is in itself, another fallacy – called the fallacy fallacy.
You’re not arguing with the original poster. Someone definitely lacks reading comprehension skills and is irrationally fixated on proving themselves right at all times, but it ain’t me. You created a straw men and presented it at “either this or that”, false dichotomy. Again, supporting those who don’t want or can’t drive doesn’t infringe upon the rights of car owners and those who do want to drive. This is not an oppressor-oprressed dynamic. That’s classic victimization. We can help and accommodate to the needs of minorities without having to disregard the needs of the majority. At least learn your moral arguments right.
I find the language you use interesting. Those who take their living room with them to save a few minutes “benefit”, whereas those who have to breathe in the fumes and be victims of traffic violence are “inconvenienced”.
The thing is that the 1 container ship transports a hell of lot more actual cargo from one place to the other than personal cars, which are mostly used for commuting lazy buttchecks back to where they came from in the morning.
I always have felt like blaming cars, of all things, misses the bigger picture.
On the contrary, doing anything other than blaming cars misses the bigger picture that car-dependent development is what drives, directly or indirectly, almost all the pollution except for industry and agriculture:
The emissions of the cars themselves, of course.
The emissions associated with producing all the extra concrete you need to build places to store the cars, as well as wider roads to fit all the traffic. (EDIT: and longer roads, for that matter, because inserting all the space for car storage forces your destinations to be further apart!)
The emissions associated with restrictive low-density zoning codes forcing 90% of the population to live in single-family homes exposed to the environment on all six sides, instead of giving them the freedom to choose to live in denser housing where shared walls increase thermal efficiency.
When you talk about “pollution” (compared to a shipping vessel) you are only talking about greenhouse gas emissions. This is the exact fallacy that the comic is addressing.
Localised particulate matter pollution will have a much more severe and direct impact on human health. Whether widespread individual car ownership is worth the cancer and microplastic pollution in our bodies is certainly still open for debate. However, this “environmentally friendly car” that you are imagining is a pipe dream.
Humans living fulfilling, individualised lives has been happening for more than just the last century.
Cargo ships also emit a shit ton of particulate, NOx, and SO2 since they aren’t required to have the same emissions controls as on road vehicles. It’s a serious problem for both climate change and immediate health impacts.
But those cargo ships exist whether we’re also driving a bunch of cars or not. It’s just totally orthogonal.
If anything, switching to heavy EVs will increase the amount of pollution caused by cargo ships. Bringing up cargo ships makes no sense as a defense of EVs
Plus, short of putting nuclear reactors on every ship, they can only really function on oil based fuels. Nothing compares in terms of energy density. If you somehow managed to put god knows how many battery packs on a ship without it sinking, it would probably take months to charge and suck tens of megawatts from the grid whilst doing it.
The greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), expressed in CO2e — of total shipping (international, domestic and fishing) have increased from 977 million tonnes in 2012 to 1,076 million tonnes in 2018 (9.6% increase).
Whereas in a pdf from the EPA at the bottom of this page says passenger cars and light-duty trucks produced 1,046 million metric tons of CO2 in 2021.
So to recap, all maritime shipping in the world produced only slightly more CO2 than the passenger cars and light trucks only in the United States.
Damn, thanks for the rebuttal – Do you have any other sources that are closer to 2022? Covid REALLY did a fucking number on everything from shipping to travel, both reducing travel and increasing shipping - so I’m concerned that those numbers may be a little different in a post-covid world. Still, very enlightening facts!
I do not. The previous study of its kind from the IMO was from 2014 and looked at the years 2007-2012, so it seems to take a few years for them to be able to put all the information together.
Cars are one of the things that actually empowers individuals to live their individualized lives.
So if I’m forced to live in my car or forced to use it because I would otherwise most likely be run over if I was riding a bike or the distance is too far for walking and I can’t catch public transit to my destination, am I empowered? Having a choice of how I want to get to places is empowering, not “oh I’ll guess I’ll go in my car”. I can see the argument for living in a car, but I also know that people sometimes make that choice because it is literally cheaper to buy and re-do a car so they can live in it rather than renting in some areas.
Cars are, and honestly should be treated as, a luxury good. It’s fun to drive around some routes form time-to-time, but I’d much rather bike or ride public transit to places rather than drive.
If a significant amount of people live in their cars, it means that the housing market and the wages are seriously out of whack, and the government has not been doing their job for the last decades.
This is one of the main cores behind the anti car and fifteen minutes city concepts. I’m currently facing the choice. Should I buy a car? Because, though I currently move and live without, using a car for commute would be a net personal gain. Biking is not an option, there is no infrastructure nor protections for moving on a bicycle in my city. I have to commute 50km each way, my job is not possible to be done from home, moving closer to work is financially prohibitive. Any new job would be near the same exact geographic area. A car would reclaim almost 3 hours of my day and multiply my options for leisure 10 fold for relatively cheaper. I hate to have to face that dilemma.
I wouldn’t doubt people driving EVs may even have less sustainable lifestyles in general because of their absolved guilt from driving the EV. Not that the average driver matters much when considering cargo and air traffic.
Regenerative braking is basically turning the motors into a generator to recharge the battery. If you brake regeneratively, you’re not using your brake pads at all.
Many EVs can have their settings adjusted to where 90+% of braking can be just regenerative.
Although lightweight EVs emit an estimated 11-13% less PM2.5 than ICEV equivalents, heavier weight EVs emit an estimated 3-8% more PM2.5 than ICEVs. In the absence of targeted policies to reduce non-exhaust emissions, consumer preferences for greater autonomy and larger vehicle size could therefore drive an increase in PM2.5 emissions in future years with the uptake of heavier EVs.
lol - I love when this gets (re-) posted periodically. The first time I read it I was thinking “out in the desert” when it said it was outside Phoenix. It’s not. It’s a single block (1 street x 1 ave) of space *in the middle of Tempe Arizona * with a 4 lane highway on one side. This is not a “no car utopia,” it’s a more-profit apartment complex that is using the “walkable city” greenwashing to cover the entire parcel with dense apartments (and limited, doomed retail) and not have to set aside mandatory parking to cut into profits. Last I looked, a 3BR rental was something like $35k-40k a year in rent.
Don’t get me wrong - the concept is nice, with good massing around the alleys and public spaces. This took planning. And it’s ~1/2 or 3/4 mile walk to a pretty major shopping area (across said 4 lane highway and a massive parking area at the mall). And that last part is good because there aren’t enough units in this development to support more than 1-2 restaurants and a bodega…it’s only about 1/4 to 1/3 the population needed to support a standard grocery store. And - as advertised- there’s no parking and Tempe isn’t walkable so you’re not getting any substantial outside customer traffic.
This is also in my city which during summer feels like an actual hellscape. It's a great idea overall but damn if it's the last city I'd pick for walking about 40% of the time.
The development’s buildings… are clustered together intimately to create inviting courtyards for social gatherings and paved – not asphalt – “paseos”, a word used in Spanish-speaking parts of the US south-west to denote plazas or walkways for strolling.
Importantly, such an arrangement provides relieving shade from the scorching sun – temperatures in these walkways have been measured at 90F (32C) on days when the pavement outside Culdesac is 120F (48C)
Living in a city with many bicycle lanes along major streets, the toxicity of exhaust gases worries me and doesn’t come as a surprise. Sucks that most people don’t know or care about that
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