Visited NYC recently and didn’t need to rent a car. Primarily took the bus, ferry, and rail car/trains. In some cases I just walked from my hotel to the destination. Could have rented one of the e-bikes as well. Transportation costs for just 1 week were less than $100 (a quarter of this was because of LIRR usage). Didn’t have to deal with traffic, or some dumbass rear ending me because they weren’t paying attention. I could effectively multitask while traveling by alternative means.
Unpopular opinion: heavy investing in “EV infrastructure” is a waste of time and money.
We already spend an ABSURD amount of money to create and maintain car infrastructure. These roads are not cheap and commonly are not maintained well in part due to costs. That's not getting into externalities not covered by the cost of car ownership/usage. And where does this money come from? Generally the places where there is more density.
It just doesn't make sense for each person to have a several ton hunk of metal and for it to sit there taking up space 95+% of the time. This solution is not scaling well at all. People want to have a big suburban home, but at the expense of many, many others. It's just not right.
So we have shitty apartments in Manhattan where the land is 99% of the cost and countless, cookie cutter suburban hellscapes.
It really doesn't. NYC isn't $ARBITRARY_SUBURB except without obligatory car ownership.
For that matter a person could very much live car free in a minor city like Binghamton or Ithaca NY if they work at a place that is well served by transit.
And I'm not talking about personal differences, like family. Paris isn't a world class city because my mom lives there. I get that individuals have reasons to live places. I'm talking about populations, not people.
Also, interesting phrasing to make it seem like a "small nyc apartment" is a bad thing. I don't pay for expensive repairs, yard maintenance, or big ticket appliances. Most renters don't pay for heat either (at least not directly). Not to mention interest on a mortgage or property taxes. All costs totaled, living in NYC isn't strictly more expensive than living in a suburb.
[0] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2023/08/annual-new-car-ownership-co...
You're not forced to pay the average if saving money is important. My primary driver costs me ~2K a year total.
> All costs totaled, living in NYC isn't strictly more expensive than living in a suburb.
As someone who beat my head against the wall of trying to afford to live in NYC for several years and eventually gave up and moved to the suburbs, I assure you it's far cheaper to live in the suburbs.
(Sure, there are exclusive luxury suburbs that'll cost as much as living in NYC but you wouldn't move to those if affordability matters.)
When people express opinions like this you immediately know they live in the city and think everyone else does too.
There are very few policy decisions that will be universally good for everyone. That doesn't automatically make them bad policies.
it's a lot larger than you think, especially if you're a city dweller.
I'm not arguing we should ignore rural communities, just that we shouldn't rule out ideas that work in cities because they don't work outside cities.
this is not an argument for why we should be ignoring EV's in lieu of transportation, which is what I originally responded to.
Walkable cities sounds nice, but I like having space. At this point of my life, living in a suburban community is desirable.
One wonders how the hay gets baled if most of the population is elderly people.
you don't actually understand what a rural community is.
Unless it's a Hutterite colony, in which case your point is entirely moot because they have 0 private transport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redvers,_Saskatchewan
Population 1,000.
> Eligibility
> Elderly individuals and those with special needs.
which is what I expected when I went looking, calling that public transportation is against the spirit of what we're discussing here.
My further guess is that the majority of the people in this town are elderly (retirement community).
What you're arguing is that there are towns that would pop up around these railways after the fact, and while that's true, they would also pop up around water, gold, and other natural resources.
It turns out there's lots of reasons why communities form, but one thing we know for sure is that railways require demand FIRST, not second.
Railways induce demand, both for work for the railway (moving trains, moving goods between trains, services for passengers), and for the excellent transport connections they provide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_towns_in_the_U...
You still see this in rural Europe. There will be some little village in the middle of nowhere. But the shops and (now I'm picturing the north of England) a pub will all be in a cluster, and there are country lanes that you can actually walk on, and in that village center there's a bus stop, from which you can get to Carlisle or Newcastle and thence to Durham, or wherever.
Some developing countries too actually. You couldn't backpack around these places if they didn't have busses. The "third world" is often a better place to be a pedestrian than America is. Because everybody else is a pedestrian too.
America's problem is that all the private investment in railroads has been displaced by public investment in highways. It's Eisenhower's fault. It makes sense that the US would invest in dual use technologies for mechanized warfare, but it sucks to have to live with.
And now -- I like bike paths, but -- rails-to-trails efforts are just an admission of defeat. But they're what we're getting instead now.
they used horses...
I think it's hilarious how people are trying to argue that a single train stop in a town is somehow public transportation for the citizens of that town to get around said town.
It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
It's interesting how quickly we forget about how things used to be. My grandparents were subsistence farmers in my lifetime, and they did not use horses to get around town. I don't think they ever owned a horse.
For regular everyday travel, they walked.
They'd sometimes need to go work out in a field. On those days, they'd hitch up the cows to the wagon and spend the day working there. This is a slow process, so they'd need to have enough work to spend the whole day there.
Horses were never a transportation method, except for the extremely rich. They were agricultural tools. Looking at France, because data is easy to get there, the population of France was about 40 million in 1900[2]. Around that time, France also had about 3 million horses, or about a horse for every 13 people. Of these 3 million horses, 2.5 million were "draft horses" used for pulling plows.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-the-horse-p... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France#Histori...
before they had cars people used horses.
This is true from both an economic and an environmental standpoint: not only is it expensive to run public transit when fewer people use it, it’s also less environmentally friendly because you have big heavy buses and trains spending a lot of time driving around with few people riding them.
That said, I would certainly like to see better public transportation in many areas, but it’s not a silver bullet. The idea that EV infrastructure is a waste of money because we just need more public transportation is pretty preposterous, IMO.
That's a significant demographic of the car owning population, especially here in Europe. Having your own house with a charger is an extreme rarity.
I'd guess that this usually works pretty well, but with winter and a higher than normal number of broken chargers, those became more congested than normal, and this usage pattern will lead to it getting steadily worse throughout the day.
IIRC on a Tesla the car screen displays that it's warming the battery, but the app on the phone doesn't. The phone screen just says that it's charging with 0 amps.
TBH, it sounds like a lot of things going wrong (or even just weird) at once. In every report that I saw, there were at least some cars sitting unplugged in front of stalls with noone in them. Even if those were broken, when they get fixed they might need to tow cars to make them usable again!
You are definitely right though. Someone with a cold soaked battery could easily think the charger isn't supplying current, when it is really just running the battery heater for 30+ minutes first.
This isn't quite accurate. The Tesla app on iOS at least shows the battery preconditioning.
They just don't have one at home. That's going to become even more common as not every single parking spot can be turned into a charging space.
Long story short: a 15A outlet really isn't going to get the job done for charging a car. Also you cannot just charge off a 15A outlet, you're going to need to run an extension cord within 15ft of the car give or take and plug in your charger there (you can't just plug a NEMA 5-15 plug into an EV).
That charger >> extension cord connection is going to need to be weatherproofed somehow. And oh, by the way, if you're in a big city good luck not getting your $500 charger stolen since there's probably no good way to secure it.
So yes, they are going to need an EV charger.
[1] https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/average-miles-driven-per-year...
I have multiple EVs in my household, I'm completely onboard. People acting like they're for everyone today are delusional with the current state of charging infrastructure in the US.
We've had the unfortunate need to use public charging a handful of times and almost every single time it has been an absolute nightmare. From non-working chargers to long lines (because of all the aforementioned people who only have access to public chargers). The only time it has been relatively painless was road trips when it's the middle of nowhere middle america because most folks that live there don't have EVs.
If you live in an apartment without an electrified garage then of course the BEV use case is less likely to work for you. And I totally agree on public chargers. Non-Tesla is a complete crapshoot and probably will be for several more years until the adoption curve forces the infrastructure to improve.
People also like to think that their car can get them out of any personal jam, eg, if they need to take a family membership to the hospital, they will simply assume that their car is going to be the mode of transporter, and anything that makes them think that an EV might not be able to cut it in that hypothetical is going to be damaging for the EV transition.
The 15A charger that came with my car is weatherproofed and locks into place when connected to my car outside my apartment building. The rent I pay also pays for that overnight trickle charge, so a replacement charger would still cost less than I was previously spending in fueling up my Ford Fusion each year.
This is frankly silly though. In reality the EV sales will ramp over time and then ICEs age out of the fleet over multiple decades. And that's the timeline that is being attacked as insanely rushed.