You're correct in the sense that trains and bicycles are, true, more energy efficient. I'm not even looking for numbers here, because it's irrelevant.
What you're missing is that real humans occasionally need to move a mattress. Or just bring home groceries once a week. Or have kids. Or that a full quarter of the population are seniors. Or that quite a few people live in places with hard winters. You think it's a coincidence that Netherlands is the country of bicycle riders? Gulfstream :) They hardly have any snow or ice - just walk around in the street there, and it'll hit you that most buildings have windows that take up half the wall. Cold is just not a concern there, the way it would be in a lot of other places.
If you compare an EV with a train on an energy efficiency PoV, yes, the train may be twice as efficient (or less?). But an EV covers 80% of energy requirements (it's CLEAN, cheaper than gas, less carbon generating, less likely to subsidize oil-based dictatorships), while also not having you haul a toddler, an infant and 3 bags of groceries through snow from the train station half a mile away.
But in relation to the point you made about bad or cold weather being a factor for bikes being an impractical mode of transport. Please take a few minutes to consider the points and examples provided in this video (1).
TLDW: There is a town in Finland (Oulu) where cycling is a primary mode of transport (over a fifth of of all trips are by bike and 77% of people cycle occasionally) even in winter when it gets down to -20 Celsius.
Weather is always spouted as a reason for not investing in bike infrastructure which is really annoying because that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. It's the lack of safe and adequate bike infrastructure that stops people from cycling. Anyway, I thought it was worth adding that point of nuance to the discussion.
This is not an argument that (EV) cars can be replaced by trains+bikes. This is a solid argument, with which I agree, that bikes have a place in a transportation ecosystem and they should be encouraged. I was never disputing this - I own several bikes, and I actually prefer to rent uber electric scooters over uber cars.
I just wanted to clarify a bugbear with me which is the "people don't use bikes because the weather is crappy". I know nuance is lost in such a few amount of words and that's probably not what you are saying in totality but i just wanted to highlight this point.
As an aside, I lived in a large city where amenities such as supermarkets were relatively far away. For a couple of years I got away with not owning a car and using a bike for all shopping needs. There are some examples of where a car would have been way more convenient but the fact of the matter is I made do without it. There are a large number of trips that I made with the bike that I wouldn't have done if I did have a car. Humans are creatures of convenience. There are some trips where a car (or something similar) is absolutely essential but for the vast majority it is not. In situations of necessity it is amazing what can be achieved. We are not living in an age of necessity with regards to means of transport but we really should be if the climate science is to be believed.
Yup, private carriages are the only option for your occasional weekly or monthly tasks.
I guess its also just outright impossible to just allow for mixed zoning that'd allow for daily grocery shopping as well.
And I'm saying this while owning... let me count... 4 bikes, one of which is electric. And I absolutely love Uber electric scooters.
But no matter how I try to get creative, I just can't think of a way where you can have bike infrastructure covering everything. Too many pieces missing. Where would you park all those cargo bikes near train stations? And again, what do you do in winter with two kids?
Small city EVs on the other hand require no new infrastructure, zero major investments, are a fraction of the cost of a car, are non-polluting, and do 90% of what a normal car does. And when going on holiday - yes, you can take the train, which is what I'm actually doing btw.
All they need is a very small regulatory change. Allow no-highway cars with speed limits and none of the safety features of modern cars. Just do that.
People have pointed out that most people can use bikes for pretty much everything, but obviously there will be a need for the occasional car. Some people will need to use cars more, other less. But if you make the simple mindset change of first planning to bike there and then falling back to the car if you deem it infeasible, we’re already most of the way.
Most of the safety concerns for bikes disappear as soon as a certain amount of bikers are in the streets and the infrastructure isn’t actively hostile to them.
Even in the Netherlands, bicycles was the most dangerous mode of transportation in 2021, with 207 fatalities. Cars came in second with 175 deaths.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/523310/netherlands-numbe...
When a car kills a cyclist it's not the bicycle being dangerous, and you can't compare numbers directly without normalizing by some metric (hours, km, trips). Although in the latter fallacy I believe correcting it will make bikes look worse.
Also keep in mind people of all ages are allowed to ride bikes, which is luckily not the case for cars. This source does say elderly and children are more likely to be part of cycling accidents (not necessarily fatal) https://www.veiligheid.nl/kennisaanbod/infographic/infograph...
Also driving under influence is (hopefully) much more prevalent in case of cyclists.
Hence, car drivers switching their transportation mode to bikes don't have the same risks as the entire cycling population.
I get what you are advocating for. I have had several periods in my life where I used a bike as my primary form of transportation. But it only works well in a pretty narrow set of circumstances.
Small EVs are the type of cars that are needed the least. They are a car for those cases where you essentially did not need a car.
People prefer living in places they can dress in t-shirts and shorts. But trying to dress in a t-shirt in the snow won't make you happy.
It's true that all else being equal, a walkable city is the best. But we don't have that, and we're not likely to have it soon. All we can do is work on a solution for today and tomorrow. And I really don't see OP's original point of trying to skip EVs.
Tesla alone has received enough in subsidies from california to build a decent transit system for about a quarter of its population.
Internal combustion engines are sized at a point where they are profitable and efficient.
Electric motors allow us to make terribly small cars, and their small batteries will mean even more efficiency improvements. Combined with self driving abilities and we no longer need to own our own car…just hop on the city infrastructure and get driven to your destination.
In fact if we make it small and light enough you could suspend the car from a metal rail and now have an extra lane up in the roadway above the regular traffic. And then you can add another metal rail layer…and another. And you no longer need intersections because the rails can dip down or up to cross each other. So the biggest source of traffic latency (stoplights) and bandwidth limitations (not enough road surface area) will be eliminated.
Eventually we may build entire city blocks pre-fabricated with vertical and horizontal elevators inside, so you no longer need your own vehicle to navigate. Heating costs will be proportional to the external surface area and not to the volume enclosed by the building.
I live in a small/midsize city with relatively ok public transit for its size and the only places I ever take it is to downtown or the airport - places where parking logistics are terrible and it's easy to get to on public transport. Anywhere else (like going to the store or work) and getting there takes hours without a car. Living in areas that have better connections or better walkability triples my housing cost, so I own a car and drive. Cities need to be significantly more dense for more trains to make sense, but that density means clearing out all of the less dense buildings and building new. That's extremely costly and doesn't actually help the environment because of the massive amount of carbon needed to fix that everywhere.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/314719/average-car-and-v...
People without cars also have to do that. Groceries can be walked home (i know because i do it) and they also fit on busses. Mattresses are a rare thing and you can rent a taxi.
Cars carry 5 people and can cost between $5k and $10k.
So cargo bikes are really no match.
You're making the assumption that the cargo bike seats only one person, when a parent could easily seat two children on a cargo bike.
You're making the assumption that everyone would be using the cargo bike as their primary day-to-day transportation, when the cargo bike is mostly useful for either transporting young children, or when transporting cargo. At other times a more reasonable choice would be to use a regular bicycle.
You're making the assumption that cargo bikes take up as much space as cars which is just downright false.
Also, there is close to no second hand cargo bike volume so it is absolutely a fair comparison.
If I want to buy a vehicle I don't care if second hand cargo bikes are available or not. I know that second hand cars so exist though.
Most people don't pay $40k up front, instead they pay $4k to $10k per year for a new car.
$5k for a _very nice_ cargo bike capable of transporting 1-2 kids too young to cycle on their own.
$4k for _nice_ bikes for each adult. ($2k x 2)
$3k for _good_ bikes for each kid as they grow out of the cargo bike. ($1k x 3)
$1k a year on maintenance for the bikes if you don't want to do it yourself.
$1k for locks and a crash course on how to lock your bicycles to stuff making it too much of a pain to steal.
That's $15k, or the cost of your lower end for a car for 3 years.
So between year 3 and 4 you can start either just replacing the bicycles with new nice ones because you like brand new, get yourself even more expensive electrified bikes, or spend it on other stuff.
And all the while here you could also settle for just "decent" bicycles which cost way less.
That car will last you 10 years something you can hardly say about the cargo bikes.
You don't need a new car every year.
The equivalent cargo bike to a $5k car is below $500 and kids bicycles are below $100.
Edit: As for why I calculated like that? It is quite normal for a car to cost $5k per year. You have insurance, maintenance, repairs, taxes, financing, depreciation and fuel to pay for.
If you _only_ spend $5k on a car you're either going to skimp on a lot of those costs or pay it in maintenance, repair, and fuel... or you should compare it to the same tier of bicycles. Used bicycles you fix up yourself.
They really don't.
I'm not sure why you need 5 people for the things listed above, like carrying groceries?
> can cost between $5k and $10k.
And how much per year in insurance/tax/maintenance?
A family probably only needs one cargo bike. An brand new _expensive_ cargo bike costs around the same as the yearly cost of a car.
If you think your car costs less, calculate your TCO.
Electric cars? They're not really any of these things. They're just not quite as bad as gas vehicles.
I practical terms, when using words to actually mean something as opposed to bash opponents over the head with them, EVs take away something which is burning gas exactly in the places with the most population density and replaces them with something which is not burning oil in the places with the most population density. What's left in terms of local pollution? Break pads? Still less than gas vehicles, due to regenerative breaking. Microparticles from tires? Yeah, that's about it.
If you also want to count pollution from manufacture and energy generation, then you kinda have to also count pretty much every activity humans engage in, including hiking in the woods because your backpack is manufactured somewhere, using energy.
The effects of car pollution for human health are 99% burning fuel. EVs take this away. I think it's fair to call them non-polluting, and not play word games with this.
Producing an EV and building and maintaining car infrastructure uses massive amounts of fossil fuels and entails horrifically destructive mining of large quantities of rare elements such as cobalt and niobium.
All for the end result of wasting vast amounts of time, space, and tax money in any urban area to force a suburban lifestyle that is even more destructive, economically unsustainable, and wasteful.
If you want to disincentivise congestion, or car accidents, or road wear, or suburban sprawl fine.
But don't just spout climate change denier talking points about EVs.
EV busses are a hot trend right now, they make public transport cheaper, safer and greener.
Do you really want people to believe that they are environmentally worse than the ICE vehicles they are replacing? What about urban delivery trucks going EV? How does spreading that fiction help?
Their only upside is nimbys might let you have a transit system if you suggest them.
https://www.transportenvironment.org/wp-content/uploads/2021...
How do you account for dangers of battery production and disposal? Are injured EMTs and mechanics, due to high voltages, also considered? How do you account for pollution of installing upgraded transformers and lines to the bus depot for charging batteries?
Have they all missed these deaths that you've uncovered? Enough death and destruction to overwhelm the well studied impacts of air pollution?
Prior to that I was relying on public transportation, renting something for vacation, and coordinating with others.
In the US that was not sustainable.
It’s just that there is trains between them. Or buses that are not greyhound. By « we » I mean Europe. It’s small, but large enough.
And yeah, density, yadada …
It’s fine. Différents place, different organizations. You guys also have a massive army so you will end up being right.
If your neighborhood is well planned, with good access to public transportation, groceries, daycare, etc. then renting a car becomes viable for the cases bikes don't cover.
Trains, trams, buses and bicycles don't need to cover every case.
And real humans can occasionally rent a car. Maybe it is not worth holding thousands of dollars' worth of rusting metal for that occasional odd job.
As for snow and ice, Oulu, Finland is an example of how infrastructure defines the way people live:
And quite a few of them have will have unplanned trips to do from very sparsely distributed locations (also known as "houses in the countryside") to other very sparsely distributed locations (aka "their doctor" or "their family").
Also, car loan is perfectly suitable for planned, long distance trips with lots of cargo, which unfortunately happen at the same time for everyone (they're also known as "vacations"). I would not want to be Hertz on the 15th of August in a world without personal cars - unless you ban people from traveling cross country to see their family twice a year, which might be required.
I used to bet on "small scale on demand public transportation", but it requires either "communities paying drivers" or "engineers solving self-driving in rural roads", none of which is happening anytime soon.
In the meantime, though, we have to invest in trains, bike lanes, and downsize cars at the same time as electrifying them.
But yes, of course children need a different kind of transportation.
Though, arguably, it's easier to pedal with your toddler on your back than with your grandma !
What's the typical age limit ?
Moreover, it’s also just convenient to be able to get across town in half the time that you can by public transit.
That's a kind of 'frictionless cow' blind spot as well. If personal ICE and electric cars disappeared from existence tomorrow, we'd adapt.
You're also conveniently leaving out cost. Transportation costs in walkable cities with good public transportation is considerably cheaper. Cars, gas, insurance, maintenance, parking, etc. is extremely expensive. My current transportation costs are roughly $80 a month. When I had a car, they were roughly $800 a month (with averaged maintenance costs included).
(Most) Folks aren't saying that cars shouldn't exist, just that in cities, they should not be what we design for, because their convenience for some people results in the inconvenience of most people.
EVs should replace ICE cars, but we should restrict how cars can be brought in the city, and we should limit where and how they park (especially by eliminating free parking). The costs related to this should be progressive, based on income.
It's funny you mention the Netherlands as your proof for your little list of gotchas. The Netherlands handles all your little gotchas fine, and so do more northern countries like Sweden.
The problem is the convenience of a car makes it not worth just putting on a layer of clothing for the weather. Use a car if you're going to travel 100km, but don't be like the rest of the people in my Montana town and use a car to go pick up the groceries 3 miles away just because it's 42 degrees and you're cold.
See by saying you need a car for these extremes you are actually just making excuses to use a car all the time.
Most people in the Netherlands who can afford it still have a car though. Yes i do a lot by bicycle but a car is far superior for many errands and trips.
Road trips? Why are you taking them in a personal vehicle? Because there isn't competent public transportation.
I'm against car ownership. Oh you can't get anywhere without a car? Maybe build another lane to a place where I care.
I have the short end of that equation, so I'm commuting 20 minutes by car (vs. nearly 2 hours by bike or by bus). It just doesn't make sense to have transit go regularly enough or direct enough to where I'm commuting to (one rider buses are worse than cars!!).
It's hard to change you life to avoid such a convenience, but it's possible if you try.
Assuming I'm an average driver, and across a 30-year career, that commute is increasing my changes of dying something like 0.3%, given the number of miles I'm driving (that's a whole lot higher than I expected!) by car vs. 0.03% by bus. But...by bus, I've spent an additional 3% of my entire life (assuming I live 100 years = 876,000 hours) commuting, so the balance of that equation shifts pretty far in favor of car commuting (and I'll switch to electric at some point soon once EVs are purchasable without a 6-12 month wait...).
I will grant you that riding a bike 4 hours per day would probably improve my lifespan more than that 4 hours (due to improved fitness), though will likely also cost me my relationship because all I'll be doing is working and commuting to work. But this would enable me to move closer to work! Win/win!
Yes. You're replying to the meme comment: "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas." and you're literally saying you're out of ideas.
>by doing what, exactly?
You've already mentioned you have a 30 minute commute. What could you do to reduce that? Maybe your SO has better options for public transportation to their work than you do and you could move to take advantage of that while giving you a commute close enough to bike. You could car pool. You could work with your local government to increase public transit options. Get an E-bike and take that to the faster public transportation routes instead of waiting 2 hours on the bus. You could just take the bus.
My bus option is a single transfer. But it still takes 2 hours. Bike to the transfer takes the same amount of time as taking the bus. E-bike 20 miles is a possibility, though we're probably talking higher chances of death that way than a car. Biking by human power would probably be lower chance of death (due to lower speed and better cardiovascular health).
Working with the local government generally doesn't work...especially for something like this where it's adding a bus route for one (which is worse than a single occupant vehicle). I'm like the definition of a case where single occupant EVs make sense...
If we were to discussion energy in transportation the context is much richer and complex. The easiest way to see this is in weight. A EV car in general is much heavier than ICE cars, sometimes by a factor of 3x, which happens to cancel out the energy efficiency of the EV. We also have to consider reduce, reuse, repair and recycle aspect. EV car is generally more electronica complex and (according to what I have read), have worse reuse and repair aspect than ICE cars. EV might win on the recycle aspect, and train/bicycles obvious win on the reduce aspect.
We also have to consider drive distance. The average trip for a car (using statistics form my country) is 5km, which most of those being commute to and from work, with a majority within biking distance. Of course, if people need a car to transport kids, participate in hobbies, regularly transporting large items, then they might simply use that same tool to travel to and from work as a convenience. Owning a car enables unnecessary travel with car as well as enabling the necessary travel.
And finally we need to consider how stations for stores, buses and trains are designed. Train stations are not designed for a person to haul a toddler, an infant and 3 bags of groceries. Subways however are rather much designed to make transporting a toddler and a single bag of groceries a fairly acceptable experience, and since subway stations generally has good coverage, people don't need to have 3 bags of groceries. Supermarkets that focus on subway users tend to be located in the subway stations, while supermarkets that focus on car users that travel a few miles from the store tend to have large parking lots and be located at the outer edges of cities near big highways.
This isn't true.
The law in my country has a combined maximum weight limit (car + trailer) as part of their driving license, which has cause a bit of a problem with EVs. The extra weight from battery mean that there isn't much room to drive the car with a trailer, a problem which political is starting to gain some traction. The argument being put forth is that people are forced to use ICE car to pull things like boat trailer just because the law was designed for more lighter ICE cars.
If there is no additional weight with EVs then the law doesn't need to change. Are you saying that the people arguing that EV is being hindered are wrong?
Just as a small hint about that. EU has recently change their rules. The previous allowed max was 3.5 tons, but electric and gas powered cars has been given an exception to increase the max to 4.25 tons in acknowledgement that those cars tend to be heavier, and that the previous limit restricted the use of lower emission transportation. Source: Revision of the Directive on Driving Licences.
Of course politicians could be wrong and there is nothing to make it physical impossible to build a light weight EV. Restricting weight reduces road maintenance and decreases the breaking distance and if there is no need for increasing the maximum then everyone is better off with the old maximum.
The corollary is that real human civilizations have to move goods over roads with ICE trucks for the foreseeable future unless batteries approach the energy density of diesel.
It not going to happen overnight, and currently bans on new sales only are scheduled for like 2040, but they're likely to be brought forward as people get more confortable with the idea.
Starting with last mile delivery in urban areas, trucks are going electric today. And it's not initially about energy density, it's about the poisons and pollution they emit.
So far it's not, the state of the art prototypes can not do the required job.
Maybe it will be something like fuel cells instead, who knows.
https://www.volvotrucks.com/en-en/news-stories/press-release...
Green Hydrogen will be part of the answer in the next 5 years or so, but it's not a blocker right now. There's plenty of semi trucks that have tasks that are within the current battery limits.
Blue Hydrogen and small Fuel Cell hybrids got pushed harder than they should have been by some oil and gas people, which left a bad taste in many people's mouths but, as long as it's not being used for something that you could do with mains electricity or batteries instead, Green Hydrogen is part of the solution. We need it for making chemicals and fertilizer and as an analog to pumped hydro storage.
A view on this from a anti-oil and gas angle is here:
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/09/01/cleantech-talk-chemical...
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/09/03/cleantech-talk-chemical...
Hydrogen cars, no. Hydrogen shipping, maybe. Hydrogen for chemical feedstocks, yes.
When that equation changes (which it will do eventually), clean hydrogen production will win out and at that time, we'll need infrastructure to support it. The question is just: when will it happen?
> The cheapest cost of production for grey hydrogen in the world today comes in at a monthly average price of $1.71/kg in the US Midwest, according to Platts, with green hydrogen in the US Northwest coming in at $3.73/kg. Subtract the $3/kg via the tax credit, and that renewable H2 would cost a developer $0.73/kg to produce.
On the contrary, it's highly relevant in a world where we have a very pressing energy issue.
>What you're missing is that real humans occasionally need to move a mattress.
Cargo-bikes can cover many of the transportation use-cases the average person has, and the rest can be covered by utilizing shared transportation vehicles. No private vehicle ownership is necessary here, and private vehicle ownership and its use as the primary mode of transportation is >80% of the problem.
>Or just bring home groceries once a week.
Cargo-bikes, closer shops, public transportation, grocery delivery and/or higher frequency of shopping solves this
>Or have kids.
Cargo-bikes, public transportation solves this
>Or that a full quarter of the population are seniors.
Bicycles, public transportation solves this isse. Additionally, car infrastructure is more exclusionary to seniors than the alternatives - same with children, who are not allowed to operate a car. Not to mention people with disabilities. All more discriminated against by car infrastructure than the alternatives.
>Or that quite a few people live in places with hard winters. You think it's a coincidence that Netherlands is the country of bicycle riders? Gulfstream :) They hardly have any snow or ice - just walk around in the street there, and it'll hit you that most buildings have windows that take up half the wall. Cold is just not a concern there, the way it would be in a lot of other places.
Bicycle rates are not statistically correlated with neither local climate, nor topology for that matter. Infrastructure is more or less the sole deciding factor.
>If you compare an EV with a train on an energy efficiency PoV, yes, the train may be twice as efficient (or less?). But an EV covers 80% of energy requirements (it's CLEAN, cheaper than gas, less carbon generating, less likely to subsidize oil-based dictatorships), while also not having you haul a toddler, an infant and 3 bags of groceries through snow from the train station half a mile away.
Essentially all of these problems can be solved satisfactorily with alternatives. Note that clean is also relative - the alternatives are very significantly cleaner than car-oriented transportation.
And we have barely even touched the subjects of transportation mode lethality nor economic discrimination, which are hugely significant - cars kill more than any other mode of transportation, and is more expensive both on the individual and societal level, making them a huge burden for poor people.
Can you use a cargo bike to do groceries? Sure. Can you rent a car to carry a mattress? yes. Can you carry two children on a bicycle? Ehh, ok, let's pretend you can, or you just take the bus.
But this is ignoring the fact that in the past hundred years, people have repeatedly chosen to own a car. Yes, including in places with good public transport. And surprising enough, even when the cost of a car + maintenance + repairs + financing + gas is a lot higher than just taking the bus, not to mention the comparatively trivial price of a bike. The very fact that you just don't see that many cargo bikes anywhere, but see cars everywhere is a pretty strong hint. That's the default hypothesis - that cars actually do bring value in people's lives. All you're offering to counter this is a list of "in specific contexts, bike may solve the same problem in shittier ways". I'm sorry, but I just don't see how freezing your ass off in winter on a bike is even remotely acceptable.
In my youth I actually tried this. Spent a winter with a motorcycle, and another winter with a bike. Both were complete and utter failures. I actually burned a set of gloves when I left them on the engine to get warm. And biking on the snow and ice... ugh. The bruises.
Plus small practical things. A cargo bike or a bike with a trailer basically take just as much parking space as a small car. And are a hellof a lot easier to steal.
Cars may kill more people than bikes, but you can't snap your fingers Thanos-style and have all cars replaced with bikes. Dramatically increasing the number of bikes in the street means mixing bikes with cars, which means a lot more dead people. I know it's the car's fault, but such is life, the universe is not fair. Still means more dead people.
> Bicycle rates are not statistically correlated with neither local climate, nor topology for that matter. Infrastructure is more or less the sole deciding factor.
I call bullshit. Smelly, stinky bullshit. In the same city, with the same infrastructure, I see with my own eyes bikes and electric scooters disappearing in winter and reappearing in spring. That'd be just impossible if climate had no bearing and only infrastructure mattered.
They aren't saying weather doesn't matter. Just that people use weather as an excuse for bad infrastructure which matters much more, and is easier to change.
Also, people may not be aware that e-bike cargo van deliveries are already a thing in urban areas. Being enclosed from the rain is not a unique advantage of cars and removing cars from urban areas as much as possible is a necessary first step.
You might say, well that's just a small electric car and technically you'd be correct. A small, light, electric "car" that can intermix with pedestrians and cycles and wheelchairs and mobility scooters.
I'm sorry for appearing confrontational, but the original comment was pretty much "we should ignore EVs and just skip to trains+bikes because they're better". I'm not disputing that bikes are ok, and as it happens I own several and love riding scooters. But taking "bikes are ok" and using it as a stick with which to hit EVs has just one result: later adoption of EVs, more people dying early because pollution, more carbon in the air.
I didn't say that we need to chose just one solution. OP did, quite clearly. And then followed up with arguments which are rather weak, to which I'm responding a bit less politely than I otherwise would.
That being said, cities don't have to look like the US dystopian suburb. Germany, for instance, is full of towns and cities that are walkable, bikable, and impose no artificial restrictions on car ownership and usage. It's the big cities that have problems with cars due to space constraints. But that's not an inherent property of cars. They start to see similar issues with cargo bikes and will arguably face problems with kitchen ownership at some point.
This is purely a function of contemporary car-oriented infrastructure, nothing more. People do indeed select the choice that is most convenient, and the built environment as is today does favor the use of cars.
Though, for all the reasons mentioned in this thread, and more, this is a grim mistake.
>That being said, cities don't have to look like the US dystopian suburb. Germany, for instance, is full of towns and cities that are walkable, bikable, and impose no artificial restrictions on car ownership and usage. It's the big cities that have problems with cars due to space constraints. But that's not an inherent property of cars. They start to see similar issues with cargo bikes and will arguably face problems with kitchen ownership at some point.
Cargo bikes scale far better than cars. Germany, while better than the U.S, is still not peak built environment. As a nation they lean quite a bit on cars.
That's a huge misunderstanding. They scale in exactly the same way: they have space usage that grows linearly with the number of owners. They are of course smaller, but also carry only one adult. A city that has a problem with x million cars will have the very same problem with 3x million cargo bikes. That's a serious problem, because cities tend to grow ever more dense. The constant factor simply doesn't change the equation. The only thing that scales better is a shared mode of transportation, but that doesn't offer the same level of freedom as individual transportation and is often not as efficient as one would like (e.g., subways getting overcrowded during rush hour).
Trains only go where there are tracks. Tracks are much more expensive to build and maintain than roads. Trains to do not run on demand.
Bicycles do not protect riders from the elements. Bicycles are not suitable for hauling large or heavy objects, or many objects.
This whole anti-car thing is getting tiresome. Yes, the US needs to dial back its car culture. But cars do have a place, and fill a niche that other transportation methods cannot fill.
This simply is pre-WWII urban planning. We used to have sustainable cities and comprehensive passenger rail systems before we teared them down for cars and suburbia.
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/1031678/gdp-and-real-gdp...
With a quick google i found this graph https://www.cbpp.org/wealth-concentration-has-been-rising-to... which suggests that the present is much more unequal than the 1970s, but still hasn't risen to the level of inequality from the pre WW2 era.
The fact that conservatives broadly have taken the position supporting of cars and car-oriented development is one of the most absurd things imaginable. Socialized inefficient infrastructure that was not even a thing a hundred years ago being considered a conservative policy, a real hoot.
I'm a conservative, and I would love to have more walkable/bikeable cities and to not need a car.
I'll admit to this not being an opinion I hold based on any kind of scientific observation, this does seem to be an opinion I have anecdotally observed among rural- and suburban-populations, which tend to lean more towards the conservative political spectrum than their urban counterparts.
>I'm a conservative, and I would love to have more walkable/bikeable cities and to not need a car.
Kudos.
In the US, trains would require an expenditure of trillions of dollars with a multi-decade long fiscal commitment for an idea that's deeply unpopular with the citizenry. Ain't gonna happen here in our lifetime. Maybe in other countries, but not the USA.
You can buy an electric car today.
If heavier were better, we’d see all Tour de France riders use cast iron wheels and frames ;)
However I agree, wherever possible, less cars would be good. Public transit and bicycles work well in those regions, which have the proper infrastructure. Some European cities are quite good in this respect, others are following.
Fun fact though: between an efficient electric car (like the Tesla Model 3) and an electric train or even a Diesel bus, there is little efficiency difference, in a lot of cases the electric car wins. But trains win on not contributing to congested streets etc.
Writing this from one right now, going 200 km/h while having breakfast.
Decarbonising Transport: A Better, Greener Britain
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... .pdf
> But we cannot, of course, simply rely on the electrification of road transport, or believe that zero emission cars and lorries will solve all our problems, particularly for meeting our medium-term carbon reduction targets to 2035. Road traffic, even on pre-pandemic trends, was predicted to grow by 22 percent from 2015 to 2035 much of it in cities, where new roadbuilding is physically difficult and disadvantages communities.
> We cannot pile ever more cars, delivery vans and taxis on to the same congested urban roads. That would be difficult for the roads, let alone the planet, to tolerate. As we build back better from the pandemic, it will be essential to avoid a car-led recovery. As I said in “Decarbonising Transport: Setting the Challenge” in March last year, we must make public transport, cycling and walking the natural first choice for all who can take it. Many journeys are short, could be done differently – and were done differently, in the very recent past. Even ten years ago, for instance, more children walked to school. We want to reduce urban road traffic overall. Improvements to public transport, walking and cycling, promoting ridesharing and higher car occupancy, and the changes in commuting, shopping and business travel accelerated by the pandemic, also offer the opportunity for a reduction or at least a stabilisation, in traffic more widely. That will benefit everyone, drivers included.
So to me it feels like those who use this as an opportunity to undermine EVs, aren't really helping.
My position is a general anti-car position, with a particular disdain for ICEs. See my other comments in the thread for my thinking on the way forward.
The extra leverage that urban traffic has to prioritise zero local emissions, lightweighting for pedestrian safety, vehicle redesign for visibility, silent operation, small vehicles for avoiding congestion (e.g. cycle couriers) is a lever to get general road transport and rural trucks to low emissions faster. It also lets more people into the cities (which is happening anyway but ICE vehicles are slowing it down)
That said, I just can't see America reorganizing already built-up areas around trains, if only because it would require the government to purchase too much land just to lay the tracks.
I absolutely think that all new development should be done in a transportation-first level of density. But the existing burbs are a lost cause. And so we end up with electric cars.
Those forms of transportation are slower than cars.
Agreed. So much time gets killed by the mathematically unscalable car infrastructure, where many many hours get killed when people are stuck in traffic. These hours are essentially impossible to make more productive as well, as drivers are unable to perform other tasks while at the wheel. Public transportation does not suffer from this shortcoming, and bicycle infrastructure is inherently more scalable and hence traffic congestion is not a thing when it comes to bicycle infrastructure. Time spent bicycling also doubles as exercise, further enhancing the time-efficiency of this mode of transport.
>Those forms of transportation are slower than cars.
Not inherently. This is a mere matter of infrastructure, nothing else. Dense urban environment and rapid transit is clearly less time-wasting than the suburban car-oriented development, in essentially every aspect imaginable.
Road to hell is paved with good intentions or something.
Good old genocide is the ultimate conclusion to that and undeniably the most effective option.
I don’t get it. The idea is not not force people to need cars by building poor infrastructure and poorly planned cities. I’d love to not need to own a car (and I’m not American).
Not sure why you keep talking about genocide and to be honest it’s not quite coherent.
A personal car gives incredible freedom, especially to the poor. Suddenly they can live affordably far from work, choose better work places, do work on the side, transport luggage on the cheap.
Inevitably, the only way to stop people from getting cars is to make the licensing and their cost prohibitively expensive.
So they will take overcrowded trains that may not be on time, and/or live in closets or be lucky not to get into a serious accident on a bike/moped in a city not made for them.
Solving battery energy density and EVs are a good compromise.
But yes, you're right, cities should not be planned around cars. Imo, there should be more of them actually, but alas it seems that's a lost art and everyone's gathering in whatever big cities were made in the past couple of centuries or earlier.
Genocide is a dumb example stemming from my belief that death is better than life in squalor heh. Obviously most people don't think that.
Does this mean we should throw our hands up and not make an EVs? No, that would be a bad strategy, a complete non-option. We must halt the climate crisis, this is quite frankly mandatory.
So, how do we tackle this issue? If we want to deal with the problem in a timely manner, we have to work within the framework we already have today. This means some degree of replacing ICEs with EVs. Crucially though, we need to realize that the framework itself is bad, and requires replacement in the future. This means halting investments in non-sustainable built environments, building energy-efficient transportation infrastructure to connect existing places where it makes sense, and only building new places with appropriate transportation infrastructure.
Defeatism is not on the roadmap.
> single family homes are way worse with regards to energy efficiency,
We’re definitely not going to get everyone into small urban apartments in the next 50 years. We couldn’t build the necessary apartments fast enough, and the costs would be enormous for a relatively small reduction in emissions. The better value for money is building out our clean energy capacity as quickly as possible and disincentivizing waste via carbon pricing.
> Defeatism is not on the roadmap.
Cool, then let’s just terraform Mars and call it a day. Of course, we have to be realistic which means no terraforming Mars or building hundreds of millions of apartment units and equivalent rail infrastructure.
There is some potential in reduction by moving jobs to WFH when possible, but this is not mutually exclusive with migrating to energy efficient means of transportation and urban development. Hence, I don't think it's relevant in the discussion.
I also have a theory that widespread WFH makes dense cities obsolete. Dense cities seem to originate from big money appearing somewhere and everyone building around it, eventually reaching the typical situation where the highest-paid can afford to live there and everyone else commutes in and out. If the housing, roads, or public transit are expanded, more people come and saturate them again, because the commute is worth the pay. (If it's just roads, such commutes are super polluting.) But when the execs and higher-paid workers don't need to be there in person, it dominoes. There's no extra money to be made providing physical goods/services in that area, and no incentive for such a forced commute or crammed living quarters. Physical laborers end up working locally, and more isolated, less dense, lower-income but lower-cost-of-living cities form. I used to work in SF and observe these things closely, and now I'm watching what happens as many of the techies leave.
Local example: There were plans in the 1950 to have a highway cross through Berlin Kreuzberg (The A106, today Oranienstraße for the locals). Part of those plans were put in motion, the buildings around Kottbusser Tor date back to those ideas. Massive local protests put a stop to that. More recent example from Berlin: the current extension of the A100.
You can find enough examples of highways cutting through existing neighborhoods in the US if you look around a little. To cite [1]
“ Planners of the interstate highway system, which began to take shape after the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, routed some highways directly, and sometimes purposefully, through Black and brown communities. In some instances, the government took homes by eminent domain.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/14/utrecht-restor...
Highway construction demolished a lot of neighbourhoods in cities. In the U.S, the demolished neighborhoods were also disproportionately low-income and majority non-white neighborhoods.
>I also have a theory that widespread WFH makes dense cities obsolete. Dense cities seem to originate from big money appearing somewhere and everyone building around it, eventually reaching the typical situation where the highest-paid can afford to live there and everyone else commutes in and out. If the housing, roads, or public transit are expanded, more people come and saturate them again, because the commute is worth the pay. (If it's just roads, such commutes are super polluting.) But when the execs and higher-paid workers don't need to be there in person, it dominoes. There's no extra money to be made providing physical goods/services in that area, and no incentive for such a forced commute or crammed living quarters. Physical laborers end up working locally, and more isolated, less dense, lower-income but lower-cost-of-living cities form.
This is only really true if work is the only reason someone would live in a dense city, and it's not. Cities are a thing because they allow for economies of scale in all things, be that culture, dating, transportation or otherwise.
This efficiency is somewhat obscured by a plethora of reasons right now - car-oriented infrastructure subsidised by people not utilizing that infrastructure is one of the higher ones on the list.
The space a highway or other road takes up is nowhere close to the space it allows to inhabited, though. LA County is the perfect example of an area that has grown via roads to become non-viable for trains. It's just too spread out. Without the roads, tons of households would be cut off from jobs they commute to, again the low-income ones. I'm not justifying the original construction of the highways, just saying what would happen if we went back.
> This is only really true if work is the only reason someone would live in a dense city, and it's not. Cities are a thing because they allow for economies of scale in all things, be that culture, dating, transportation or otherwise.
Regular cities make sense for that. You get two of each kind of business in proximity, and most people are good with that. Dense cities go beyond that point and get to where less scalable resources become strained, like housing. It's a clear sign when people are commuting from outside that something is wrong. Yes, some people still prefer the excitement, but usually just the young and single. SF pre and post tech boom, and during/after 2020, gives you an idea of how many people are just there for the work.
See: the cross Bronx expressway
On a personal note: in the 1970s an entire city block of very old homes in my city was taken via eminent domain to make room for a parking garage.
Does it take into account the farming and supply chain costs of that food it's about 15% efficiency by calorie, compared with gasoline which is close to 90% efficient IIRC. Or is it just food/fuel energy -> work?
Common gasoline engines have an efficiency around 30-40%, assuming modern high-efficiency designs. For older designs this is closer to 20%.
The lifecycle emissions of an EV depend on how the electricity was generated, and the total emissions of cycling depends on the diet of the cyclist - even though the energy per distance is the same regardless.
It doesn't count the manufacturing of each. It's still a valid comparison without it, cause most Americans who have a bike probably also have a car that they need for trips that aren't bike-able, and also cause it helps to separate fixed and marginal costs anyway.
They also picked a car that is twice as efficient as the average car for comparison and the most meat-heavy fiery possible (essentially meat only). That’s interesting as a though experiment, but not as a basis for policy- which is exactly what they state in their preface.
Also, you'll still need the roads for logistics.
My point about maintenance also still stands.
Yes, that might be true, but it's the "coal" that's the issue, not the recycling. It says so little useful about recycling that it's basically a lie. But it does suggest we should phase out coal, not just to make recycling cleaner, but for everyone that uses electricity.
Similarly, I assume this study looked at red-meat reared in a GHG callous manner. Which says basically nothing about bicycles, but does tell us that we should take the obvious steps we're already aware of to decarbonize food. Not because it helps cyclists be more efficient, but because it's a smart thing to do for everyone who eats.
> Indeed, the use of fertilizers, methane gas released from livestock like cattle and massive food waste all contribute to the vast carbon footprint of food production. Since land is both a source and a sink of CO2, land-clearing for new agricultural terrain in tandem with deforestation drives harmful emissions, equating to approximately 26% of the global total.
Hyperloop being near vacuum to remove/reduce friction from the area, while vehicle likely on floating MagLev skate, accelerating up to 1,223 kmph should certainly beat all current technology?
Cool as hell, though. When going to visit one of my grandparents, I usually pass by a decommissioned railroad that now does bicycle draisines for tourism-purposes. I really should go ahead and ride that some day, it seems like a lot of fun.
While phasing out ICEs entirely is clearly an urgent necessity, it would be wise to invest in a world where we move more towards these superior modes of transportation, instead of going for EVs, which are a slight improvement, but not at all as big of an improvement as we could realize with trains and bicycles.