Public transit would be great if you didn’t have to ride with other people. That’s my real problem with it in America at least; there are always loud and gross people aboard. My town has phenomenal bud infrastructure, but people drive because it’s faster, and because you don’t have to be around undesirable people.
Maybe public transportation where each person or group could ride in their own automated pod, which would be publicly owned. That way you could still go skiing/hiking/etc, since mass transportation to those places is very difficult due to low volume.
or you could bring in headphones to public transport like the rest of us
also lmao “public transportation where each person or group could ride in their own automated pod”, you’re either advocating for taxis or straight up segregation
It’s also (western) safety standards. Even small cars are larger; compare an 80s Corolla to a 90s to a 2010s. Compare bmw 3-series across the same time span. To make cars safer for occupants, you need more metal and more space. So they got larger.
There are stil legitimate reasons for those size vehicles to be on the road so I think it’s still good to have safety for all sizes, but I see what you mean about spiraling out of control easily.
Another interesting contributing factor are safety regulations and their knock-on effects, which weren’t immediately obvious when they were implemented.
For instance, in an effort to reduce pedestrian fatalities from frontal collisions, vehicles in the US were mandated to have at least three inches of crumple space between the hood of the car and the engine block. The thinking being that more crumple depth would help prevent fatalities and serious injuries that occurred when a pedestrian hit the hood of the vehicle, which would deflect, allowing those soft human bits to continue right into the (not soft at all) engine block.
Well increasing the height of the hood of the vehicle meant that they had to raise the A-pillar, which raised the height of the window opening on the doors, since the bottom of the side windows generally lines up with the hood on passenger vehicles. This meant that the side body panels of the vehicle just generally increased in size, and in an effort to maintain a proportional look, the wheels also had to increase in size otherwise they would look weirdly small. And to maintain a comparable amount of visibility out the windshield and side windows, the roof of the vehicle had to be raised to compensate for the new position of the window sill in the doors.
So something that was intended to just add an inch or two of height to the hoods of existing passenger vehicles to satisfy a safety need, ended scaling up the entire vehicle.
I live in Vancouver and our transit agency is seriously considering ripping the trolleybus lines out. Just like how they ripped the streetcars out before the trolleybuses came and then shamelessly told us that it’s too expensive to reinstall the tracks so we’re just never getting it back. In both cases it was because “it’s getting too expensive to maintain” after they deferred maintenance for ages so everything is falling apart and the small problems got compounded into showstoppers from neglect.
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.
I live in Scandinavia, in one of these walkable cities. Everyone has a car. Why? Because relying on public transport or walking/biking everywhere is not practical. It’s just reality.
That’s fair enough. I also own a car, but I try to use alternative means of transport (bus, bike, walk, skateboard) whenever possible. It’s the prioritisation of cars over all other modes of transport where I have the issue. My city is riddled with car filled streets criss-crossing all over. There’s a plan to take one of the most shop focused streets and make it walkable. It would mean that I would be able to get to work almost the whole way on it. I hope it goes through
I’m not disagreeing with you or most people here for being annoyed by everything being build around car usage. I just don’t see it realistically change. You’d have to rebuild most cities from the ground up and invest ungodly amounts of money into several modes of public transport in every city. It just won’t happen.
I’ve had to use public transport to get to a job I loved in a neighbouring city, due to not having a car at that point. Where a drive with the car would have taken me about 20 minutes one way, the bus+train combo I was forced to use was 1,5 hours including waiting times. It was so draining that I quit that job after 6 months.
If this is the choice you need to make, people will take that car every time because you can’t rely on jobs being available within 20 minutes of walking or public transport, most cities aren’t build to offer jobs+housing+shopping within a small radius for all the people living there.
The part about going to your job is totally valid. Some jobs can be worked remotely or partly remotely now, but that doesn’t apply to all professions, so that is something to keep in mind.
In terms of not being able to realistically change the current cities, many of the best walkable cities prioritized cars first and then changed. It took decades, but they eventually achieved it.
There’s this presentation I found after doing some research on the 15-minute cities conspiracy theory, and it was a really interesting talk about how towns and cities can be changed into slower, more accessible ones. It’s an hour long but there’s a 5 minute segment where it discusses cases where cities have changed from car-based to a more walkable one, in this case Amsterdam and Pontevedra (in Spain).
I recommend checking it out. Here’s a link with the timestamp of the start of the section about those cities:
In the section before this one, he discusses the cost of other transport modes versus cars. Building and maintaining infrastructure for cars is waaaaay more expensive than for other methods, so cost isn’t an issue. I’ve included the slide below.
I don’t think they’re even a solution. They’re just another scam like hydrogen fuel cells were. They exist to keep people from pushing for the real change we actually need… Just like the decade we lost because people bought the hydrogen fuel cell grift last time.
I live in GA outside of Atlanta and rent is already tough. I’ve been to cities with not exactly amazing but serviceable public transportation (various parts of greater NYC and Chicago) and loved them. I’ve tried to use busses elsewhere, though it often meant 3 hours wasted to go to work, with similar time wasted after (hourly buss schedules and multiple transfers).
I have an electric car now, work from home, and try to avoid having to drive much, but there isn’t much more I can afford to do atm. An bike would be nice but even that’ll take money I’m still recovering, and some places I go to even just a couple times a month has no public transportation. I’d love if it did, but I have to use EV for now.
When we lived in L.A., we were near a train station. My wife sometimes took the train to work and sometimes drove. Even in L.A. traffic, it took her half the time to get to work by car because of how far away we lived from where she worked. It really sucked, but that was the reality. She had to get up at 4:30 am to take the train and 6 am to drive. She did carpool, which is better than driving alone, but it’s hard to convince people to get away from cars if you have to make sacrifices to your day like that.
I think when most people decry EVs, we’re not talking about individual EV owners but the system which forces basically everyone to move around by personal vehicle. Sure, they’ll be the occasional person who says, “I bike 28km to and from work at a very physical job where I often work overtime. I have to share the road with traffic. I don’t know why everyone can’t commute by bike,” (this was the gist of a comment I read on reddit years ago). However, most people understand that changes can’t just be personal responsibility.
With the information we have about your life, it sounds like you made a reasonable decision. If you can continue to be mindful about the decisions you make and advocate for a better world when you can, I think you’re doing a great job!
Not really. At all. Like they’re barely even a bandaid.
The issue is a car weighs a couple of tons and it’s being used to move a person who weighs around 100kg.
It’s massively inefficient use of energy.
Even in some fantasy world where the energy used to charge the batteries is all renewable - not even close to reality but let’s pretend - all that lithium and other precious earths are still an environmental disaster.
The answer is mass transit and lower mass vehicles. A lifestyle change is actually required and the thing is it wouldn’t even make people less happy, just that change is so fucking scary for some reason.
Walkable cities are a dream lifestyle and an electric scooter in a walkable city is outstanding. Fuck urban sprawl.
People who give this message like everyone is just choosing to screw the environment for fun make a crapton of assumptions about the forces people face in finding a place to live.
EVs are not limited to personal vehicles though. I absolutely agree on developing mass transit, be it rail or other, and preventing urban sprawl.
But cars (personal vehicles) and other vehicles will always exist (at least for the foreseeable future) and people will still need to haul stuff (garbage collection, artisans, deliveries, movers etc…).
I’d take an electric garbage collection truck over a ICE one for instance. It’s anecdotal but there are roadworks in my neighborhood, and most of the machinery is electric which is very nice. Electric mopeds/motorcycles are also much quieter than ICE ones. You could also electrify buses, airport equipment, port equipment, trains (the diesel ones), mining equipment, etc.
So no, EVs are not the solution but a solution, and their development is a good thing if we want to move away from fossil fuels.
Investing trillions of dollars into dead ends is, however, the enemy of progress. The ressources we’re throwing at replacing existing cars with EV cars would be enough to implement better solutions.
No technology is a dead end, you can’t run trains 30 miles out of town for 6 families already over 500 acres. Just because a technology doesn’t benefit urbanization doesn’t make it worthless.
I’m not opposing the research, I’m opposing the implementation. Spending trillions of dollars because >1% of the population would be inconvenienced as you showed by having to use less developed or more expensive alternative is stupid.
I’d call them less a solution, more an attempt at harm reduction.
And the only things they’ll properly resolve are tailpipe emissions and idling noise. At least one of which is of no concern when dealing with the externalities of car traffic.
If you really want to solve the environmental impact of transportation, you minimise the need for transportation. Put homes and workplaces close together, offer mass alternatives for the pairs where you really do need motorised mobility solutions, and minimise the number of situations where it’s more convenient to take a car. Ban on-street parking and heavily tax off-street parking. Need to park your car in the city? Hope you can afford to pay an arm and a leg. Oh, you can’t? Looks the Park & Ride at the train station two towns over is the nearest alternative. Don’t worry though, the trains go six times an hour and a day ticket is, like, four quid max.
Look mate, if you’re going to shove the “tHe stATeS arE ToO bIG, thus wE cANNot SOlvE The transIt ProbleM” rhetoric on us, please find another place to wallow in your lack of trains while assuming car industry rhetoric as undeniable fact.
Also, your claim has been debunked and reclarified so often that I’m not going to begin to explain just how wrong you are.
You guys are all idiots. A bunch of Europeans lucked into an infrastructure that works with twice the people in half the space, and you act like it was an intentional and smarter design decision in anticipation of a climate crisis. You shipped your most insane people off your continent to become Americans, and their shitty Calvinism has made everything that has always been terrible about Northern Europe even worse.
Now you want to act like anyone who thinks what you propose isn’t exactly easy (or democratic) is some kind of corporate fascist. Fuck off, the lot of you.
Well, that’s not a very productive stance, is it? I thought you thought yourself an ally, yet you just criticise everything here as impossible without producing any plans yourself.
So enlighten us, how do you act on your „desire to fight global warming“?
What I also really want to know is, you posted a video from the Google Photos account of Harry Teasley, claiming it shows your dogs. Are you Harry Teasley, or related to him? Or did you just find this video and thought it was fun to impose as him?
Hello, I’m Albertan. Stop saying this. Our governments maintain roads in between these cities every year, there is no reason they couldn’t have been train lines instead. Roads are far more expensive than many realize.
Once upon a time, all cities were connected by train, and we ripped it all up to build roads instead. Sure, it’s going to cost money to build these up again – that’s what happens when we make a mistake, we have to pay for it in one way or another. But connecting smaller towns and cities is not the herculean impossible task that people seem to want to pretend it is.
There ARE major urban areas in North America. People are not evenly spread out across the landmass equally. Connecting these first is obviously the goal, because that will take care of 70% of the problem already. And always remember not to make perfect the enemy of good - even if we stopped there we’d be in infinitely better shape than we were before.
We’ve done a ton of that. The Acela is great, I’ve ridden it a bunch. But that kind of thing doesn’t scale as efficiently as you would hope. It can serve corridors of people, but not huge continents of hundreds of millions all that well. There are to many places to be.
They’ve done this to our city center. Last time I visited (half a year ago) most of the shops and restaurants had gone out of business and they’re contemplating turning the café/mall area into apartments.
Meanwhile, during the same period of time, a huge car mall has started sprawling on the city edge. It’s a huge shame really. Used to be a very pleasant area to visit and walk around.
Nowadays it’s either take the bus (30+ minutes once every half hour), the bike (30 minutes if the weather is ok and you work up a sweat) or hope there’s parking and pay exorbitant rates (10 minutes).
I used to commute to work via public transit, until they put fees on the commuter parking by the train station as well. Slightly more expensive to drive all the way, but way faster (1/2 the time).
So… yeah. The “fuck cars” attitude of my municipality turned me from someone who travels by foot, bike, bus, train and car into someone who travels almost exclusively by car. I need a car, the rest is optional.
…yeah, i tried the public transit thing for awhile and not only spent at least as much money but also increased my commute by four to six times: totally unsustainable, mostly due to anti-infrastructure politics…
…wherever urban real estate is driven by speculative capitalism, walkable neighborhoods are a luxury reserved for the upper class…
[…] Put homes and work locations close together […]
The best hope for that to have marginal improvement is a move towards remote work, mostly feaseable for white collar activities.
Anything else is constantly pushed outside and away from residential areas.
I know a few stupid examples of very well planned and thought out industrial parks and long time industrial sites forced to vacate because residential were built 2 or 3km away and residents did not enjoy the movement going back and forward (not through the residential areas, mind that) of trucks and other machines or the sounds coming from a factory when the conditions were just right to carry it over the distance. Needless to say companies simply moved away or closed down activity and the previously complaining residential areas became high unemployment areas.
It’s the same absurd reasoning behind people building houses in the middle of nowhere and then demanding power, water and communications connections.
Solution to what though? Emissions are reduced but not eliminated: when accounting for greenhouse gases emitted during production, EVs start outperforming traditional cars only after 5+ years of use (depending on the type of car). And other factors like tyre dust and road maintenance (due to EVs’ higher weight) or resources needed to replace/recycle old batteries are not even included in that balance.
EVs might still be a net positive when compared with traditional cars, but both pale in comparison to public transport and infrastructure oriented towards bikes and pedestrians.
That’s really only because most of our electricity is still produced through fossil fuels. As we move to renewables, that equation will shift rapidly toward net positive much before 5 years. And that’s not accounting for any technological advances (like sodium ion batteries) that happen in that time.
The 5 year figure is from a German study and is based on the German energy mix (which is indeed quite dirty). So yeah, that number will hopefully decrease. But even with that, the “up-front” emissions in EV production are a major issue that is tough to solve and rarely made transparent by EV manufacturers.
The main source is battery production and related to the mining and refinement of their raw materials (source, source). The exact emissions are hard to quantify. That being said, the lifetime emissions of battery EVs are still significantly lower, so it’s still a net benefit. For a bigger picture, you can check the references here and here.
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.
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