As a city-dweller, I'll be glad when the decline of ICE cars removes the loud sound of accelerating engines, and the reduction of PM2.5 particulates improves my health.

Sure, it's not a cure-all, and more pedestrian areas, better bicycle infrastructure, more medium-density housing with walkable neighborhoods, and heat-pumps instead of burning oil or gas are still important issues. But just switching from ICE to electric engines is a cheap win that I'm glad to get as well.

As a city dweller I won't be so sure. Most of the noise I hear on the cement road is from the tires, and those big fugly tesla suv-sedan things are loud when they roll up with their 5000lb of weight. Most of the PM2.5 we are left with today is from tires anyhow thanks to the catalytic converter and unleaded fuel. That part isn't going away. To be honest I wish the climate crisis would promote people into lighter vehicles and mass transit versus just more of the same unsustainable patterns, but here we are. The green thing to do now is to replace your working car that is already built and delivered to your door with one 2000lbs heavier. Seems like green washing more than actual action to me. You would think bike lanes everywhere would be an easy win given how cheap they are, but its like no one really cares about doing anything but taking the car everywhere.

A 2022 Model 3 weighs about 3700 pounds. A 2022 ICE Ford Mustang (the coupe, not the SUV) weighs 3850 lbs.

A 2022 Model Y (SUV) weighs 4400 pounds. A 2022 ICE Ford Explorer weighs 6100 pounds.

Maybe this is because Ford sucks at making reasonable-weight vehicles, right?

Well, a 2022 Ford Mustang Mach-E weighs 4700 pounds, which is a bit overweight vs. the Model Y, but still way lighter than their old flagship SUV.

I'm not sure how, but in the US, EVs are somehow lighter than comparable gas vehicles.

> I'm not sure how, but in the US, EVs are somehow lighter than comparable gas vehicles.

You are just using the wrong comparators. A Tesla Model Y is more comparable (for instance, it's a lot closer in dimensions) to the 3,700 lb Ford Escape SUV than the 4,400 Ford Explorer.

It's better than nothing but I don't intend to be happy about it alone. I don't even think it'll be cheap in the end. Road maintenance is already expensive and neglected in cities. Making cars heavier is not going to help at all, it's just shifting the pain around.

Imagine wanting to live in the same square mile as millions of other people and then getting upset that you have to deal with millions of other people trying to live their life.

If you require everyone around you to to have the same priorities as you, then you may be happier in a smaller town.

Are you suggesting car drivers move to smaller towns where it's actually economically efficient to use them? You wouldn't want car drivers imposing their noise, pollution, financial cost, infrastructure cost, and displacement on the millions of other people trying to live their life. It's very insightful of you to imply that cities should be designed for people, and not cars, so those millions can actually use the density to their advantage.

How about this? Let's move the population of Dallas Fort Worth to San Francisco, and vice versa, and see how quickly people's opinions about vehicle ownership change.

The main issue with having cars (or not) is that infrastructure that costs many orders of magnitude more than the cars has to be rebuilt if you want to switch between car-dependent and walk/bike-everywhere.

Yes absolutely, the only way for many people to live in one place is for them all to drive cars for all trips within that place. There are no other possible configurations.