Cars should be more expensive to cover their externalities but considering that cars spend 95% of the day parked and most people are not driving hundreds of miles per day, it seems likely that the combination of charging points at parking garages and similar structures, homes, streetlights, etc. is going to reach a level where most people can charge more than they need to. In fact, since solar has such massive daylight spikes we probably should be thinking about what we can do to get people to charge their cars at work instead of overnight.

If someone actually believes in democracy, they should try to get politicians to agree with the statement "cars should be more expensive to cover their externalities" on the record. In the US, almost every single one would dodge the question or outright disagree. Even the ones not running for re-election don't want to ruin their and their party's reputation.

Someone already pays for the externalities. It's just not (exclusively) those who benefit from causing them.

Believing in democracy as the least-worst way to set public policy has nothing to do with your own priorities.

I personally think urban development should be more expensive to cover its externalities (i.e. forcing people to buy cars because of landowner-enriching sprawl).

Get your politicians to call my politicians.

Given that practically every family has at least one car, I don't see how this is useful.

Many (surely the majority of) Americans like and/or are dependent on cars. They are happy to be able to vote to shrug that externality off to the overall population.

When the majority of Americans dislike and/or are unhappy with 100° Thanksgiving, beepocalypse, aging out of being able to drive, or whatever else “cars” wreck, then they will start voting to push the externalities off to heavier users.

Eventually, the resulting ghost sprawl of empty suburban neighborhoods will provide enough recyclable building materials to rehome us all nicely in subterranean hive cities. Our eyes will evolve larger to gather the dim light. Our ears will shrink to muffle the incessant hum. Our useless teeth will disappear after a few centuries of microbial food paste consumption. Clothing will become an affectation.

There’s an entire urbanism movement trying to shift things here, but the focus tends to be on removing the hidden subsidies[1] so costs are more visible and making alternatives better. The entire state of California just made density easier to build, which is really important.

Alternatives are important here since while most Americans drive that doesn’t mean that they love everything about it and won’t consider alternatives. There are a ton of people who would love not to pay thousands of dollars to sit in traffic and make their health worse, but they don’t see a good alternative. The activists getting bike infrastructure, improved buses, and density are giving them that option and climate change is causing a lot of younger people to realize that the timing has to be stepped a lot since even EVs produce more CO2 than any other form of ground transportation.

There’s big generational component here, too. Most drivers aren’t old enough to think of roads without traffic as normal, and economic trends mean that a lot of younger people are faced with even longer commutes in cars, not to mention that transit is more appealing when you have smartphones.

1. In addition ti the obvious one of pollution, housing & retail prices are high due to requirements to provide subsidized parking to drivers. Removing that allows owners to make different decisions.

I don't totally agree with the magnitude of how much more work needs to be done- we don't have one gas pump per ICE car, and electric cars don't need to be charged every day.

It's fair to say that people hogging chargers even when they're done charging is a problem, there's a public charger on my street that is near 100% utilization. However this seems pretty solvable- companies can just charge per minute as long as the spot is occupied and let the free market sort it out.

Adding public chargers is also a great way for places like malls, grocery stores, offices, etc to stay relevant, since my weekly shopping trips would probably be enough to keep a car topped off

>It's fair to say that people hogging chargers even when they're done charging is a problem, there's a public charger on my street that is near 100% utilization.

Makes sense to charge a penalty every minute a charger is connected but not drawing power (full battery).

If you put them in convenient places then ICE cars will also park there and not be connected.

ICE cars get parking tickets for taking up those spaces I assume.

Does the street already have street lights? If so, then presumably there already is an electrical distribution network running alongside the street. If it was designed with sodium vapor lamps in mind, but has been upgraded to LEDs, then EV charging infrastructure is withing its capabilities.

Yes, the line was designed for 250W sodium vapour lamps, you replace them with 60W led lamps AND you use some 20% original overprovision and you can have 250x1.2-60=240W per post.

In a city you’re not likely to be farther than a mile away from a high speed charger. It’s perfectly reasonable for a small city car to “fill up” occasionally to cover the short mileage they’re likely to see between charges anyways.

I don’t have an EV or a car at all, but if I did my charging regimen would be “plug it in at the fast charger at the grocery store and charge it while I shop”. It’s just not a big deal.

We certainly don’t need to make our residential streets more ugly than having a bunch of cars parked on it already does by stringing up charging infrastructure all over it.

In Finland we have 220v outlets at every parking spot, since the batteries of ICEs just die during the -20C winter nights without being hooked up.

We all charge our EVs on those same outlets, and I never heard of anybody not having a full charge the next morning.

The main reason why we have so many EVs here -> they are more reliable in the cold. People stopped freezing to death in their Diesels that got stranded on the roadside.