I think that's kind of the point.

* CA talks a lot about replacing cars, and accomplishes nothing.

* FL makes no pretense about being primarily a based car-culture, but successfully implements mass transit where it makes sense

CA has moved on and is just going to electrify all of the cars

Electric cars solve almost none of the problems associated with cars.

Adding fossil carbon to the atmosphere seems like a pretty important one though.

The pandemic proved that pollution is primarily caused by trucks and not cars. Most of the highest polluted cities in the world that were clear during the global lockdown regained their pollution once trucks went back on the road.

Genuine question: How do you know this? (Maybe a source or something)?

I know the supply chain got messed up, but given that trucks are so crucial to transporting goods (at least here in the US) I would think that trucks remained on the road during the pandemic while individuals driving cars all stayed home during quarantine.

I'm really curious how this conclusion ('trucks are the primary cause of pollution') was reached

Probably something like this:

> In the most recent year for which data are available, combination trucks made up only 1% of the vehicle population but were responsible for 6% of all vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and 17% of vehicle fuel use.

Given that diesel is often considered "more polluting" you can probably make it work out given a bunch of assumptions that may or may not apply. Trucks are the primary cause of road wear, for example.

Trucks also produce the lions' share of the noise pollution. Don't laugh, noise pollution is very serious; it causes cognitive damage to people who live near busy roads which in turn has innumerable deleterious social effects.

There’s a number of climate fights that I think would be better argued with noise pollution reduction instead of carbon reduction, and vehicles especially trucks is one of them.

> Given that diesel is often considered "more polluting"

Modern diesel engines are less polluting than unleaded cars, thanks to diesel particle filters:

"gasoline cars emitted on average 10 times more carbonaceous PM at 22°C and 62 times more at -7°C compared to diesel cars"

[1] https://phys.org/news/2017-07-diesel-gas.html

I don't actually have a problem with that, but if so they should have spent the $128 billion HRS buying every tenth person in CA a Model 3 instead.

Or spent it to keep their nuclear points operating and generating clean energy.

>* FL makes no pretense about being primarily a based car-culture, but successfully implements mass transit where it makes sense

Effectively no FL city has mass transit, unless you want to count South Florida which has a commuter train (Trirail) and the Metro, which are both essentially north-south only. It makes sense to do everywhere, but has been done nowhere.

The Disney World monorail[1] has higher daily ridership than BART[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_World_Monorail_Sys... [2] https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2020/news20200225

Amusing stat, but doesn't really speak to FL builds.

Why not? It's in Florida, and one way or another, Florida policymaking enabled mass transit where it made sense.

You probably don't like that it's a private company on private land, but that's irrelevant to the question of decarbonation.

You know there's a Disney park in California too, that has a monorail and shuttle services too?

So why not compare Disney to Disney and the metros to... well...

Was it a FL public project? That Disney, famously in "battle" with the FL government right now, did something commendable says little about what FL would do.

It say that Florida had regulations and land-use policies that allowed private enterprises to set up effective mass transit! That's a good thing that most states didn't do!

Not really. Florida effectively gave a large chunk of land to Disney. This has famously been covered in recent litigation and they tried to claw it back. Such that, no, I don't think you can take Disney's situation as at all indicative of something from the Florida land-use policies. Would be akin to financial advice from a lottery winner.

Unless you are saying maybe we should pursue more local governments run by a corporation? That also feels wrong, all told. Though, I would grant I don't have enough perspective there to know.

FL didn't give land to Disney. Disney bought all of its own land via W.E.D. Enterprises and other dummy companies they used to discretely make the purchases in 1964 [2]. Later, after Walt's death in 1965, in 1967, Roy O. Disney made the case for the Reedy Creek Improvement Act [1], which gave Disney an exclusive zone in the state independent of county/city/state zoning laws, building codes, school districts, etc.

Part of the pitch to getting the Reedy Creek Act passed, was the plans for E.P.C.O.T. (Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow) and the plan to build a new urban development. Those plans were complicated after Walt's death and permanently shelved after his brother Roy's retirement in 1968, but Disney retained its exemptions in spite of never truly undertaking the original plan and simply operated a tax-reduced, virtually regulation-free amusement park, until this year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Act [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140903204555/http://articles.o...

Right. "Give land" was used in a way that is a clearly meant more colloquially than any specific form. To the point of this thread, I am asserting that Disney acted far more independently in all things that they did than not. Such that counting it as a thing that the Florida government did well feels like a stretch.

At the least, it is far more complicated than makes sense, and can't really be used as evidence one way or the other for Florida making good choices.

How many people daily take the ferry that runs between the entrance of Small World and the exit? By expanding the definition of "mass transit" into meaninglessness, we might find that Florida really is a leader!

How many tourists take the subway from Chinatown to Fisherman's Wharf? None, because it doesn't exist.

There's only one definition of "mass transit" that matters and it's the one you know CA can't deliver on.

The sad thing is, I think if Walt Disney hadn't died when he did, the monorail system would have expanded throughout the city of Orlando and probably to other parts of the state.

His plans for EPCOT were originally to build an actual planned city using these technologies to manage traffic flow: https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/overview/the-...

The Disney world ridership numbers are from 2012, back then the daily ridership numbers for BART was well over 300,000 or more than twice that of Disney’s Monorail.

Your BART number is also in the middle of the Pandemic, back then the daily ridership of the Disney’s monorail was 0, as the park was closed.

Most resent number for BART is (Q4 2022) 146,500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit

I’m having difficulty finding ridership numbers for Disney’s monorail. The best I can give is 150,000 per day. https://www.tampabay.com/life-culture/2023/05/04/disney-desa... which is something some legislator says while playing politics.

Well, but cars don't work very well as soon as you concentrate parts of your population in urban centres. Both are needed and both are optional depending on where you live. At least individual ownership, because you will always need trucks, but you will also always need goods trains.