[0] https://blog.ucsusa.org/jimmy-odea/electric-vs-diesel-vs-nat...
I think that a single train can hold over 1000 people, and requires much less energy, not to mention space, materials, infrastructure and maintenance, than hundreds of individual cars in which these 1000 people sit in 1s or maybe 2s.
Again, it doesn't matter how they are powered; cars suck as an idea; simply because of how horribly they scale. They require tons of resources to build, they require tons of resources to maintain. They eat up tons of space. They kill hundreds of thousands of people per year. They are energy inefficienct compared to trains.
Oh, and railway-based public transport systems would be trivially easy to automate, compared to cars.
If we invested even a sizeable fraction of the resources into public transport that we waste on building ever more lanes and ever bigger parking lot hells right through our cities (aka. our livingspace), barely anyone outside of actual rural areas, would even need a car.
And this isn't a pipe dream. This is how actual people in actual cities live, today. Many european and asian cities are completely accessible by public transport.
> This is how actual people in actual cities live, today. Many european and asian cities are completely accessible by public transport.
And many people hate it too. Look at the popularity of cabs/ubers/limos in those cities.
Scaling up packing as many people as possible into cities is not a desirable goal to significant chunks of people.
No, it really doesn't sound like that.
Trains, and other public transport vehicles, in comparison to the damage that individual traffic does, ARE a contributing solution to global warming.
> Scaling up packing as many people as possible into cities is not a desirable goal to significant chunks of people.
Oh really? Then how did cities come to be in the first place?
But you know what really makes cities a hell to live in? Covering them with multi-lane roads and giant parking lots for those flotillas of pointless metal boxes with rubber wheels.
Because it was and is the only way to escape poverty for many people.
I grew up in a small city and the majority of my classmates had to go to larger city to get a good job.
This effect was very extreme during the early 1900s especially when the Great Depression hit. Either starve on the farm or move to filthy city. Cities being desirable for anyone but the rich is a very recent phenomenon.
Let's get the obvious out of the way first:
Does it matter more than keeping our habitat viable to support the continuous exstence of our species? No. No it does not.
With that out of the way: I don't see why individual freedom to move would be impacted by this. Imagine a world where we invest as much into public transport as we now do into cars. Imagine how spacious, frequent and comfortable the public transport is in that world.
Additionally, focusing on PublicTransport doesn't mean cars need to be abolished completely. Need a car for a day? Where I live I can rent one (and a nice one at that) within minutes on my phone, and get it from a public garage where it is stored.
We will need to have street infrastructure in the future as well anyway: Local delivery, emergency vehicles, construction, etc. That's fine. That can stay. And so can rentable cars for those in-between times when people actually need a car.
That's not because we take what cars can do for granted, it's because individual traffic is a major contributor to the mechanism that is actively killing our habitat. That isn't an opinion, it's a proven, peer reviewed, often-challenged-never-falsified fact.
And no, EVs will not make that better. They are just a different instance of the same problem.
So yes, we do want to "kill off" cars. Not because we take them for granted, but because they suck as an idea, have always sucked as an idea, and will always suck as an idea, no matter how they are powered.