Unfortunately, EVs do not solve the problem of air pollution from motor vehicles: tires produce a LOT of particulates.
https://theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyres-pr...
100 gallons of gasoline produce ~1 ton of CO2, and it costs ~600$/ton to perform CO2 air capture.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/tire-pollution-toxic-chemical...
It’s also extremely inconvenient with three kids, especially if you’re trying to bring a stroller onto the train during rush hour. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that every city with excellent public transit is also dying because people aren’t having kids.
My kids hated the bjorn and so did my (very third world communist country) foreign wife. I liked it.
The stroller also has storage space for, for example, the medicine bag that keeps my last kid alive in case he swallows <insert long list of allergens>. The stroller has everything ready to go except the baby and we don't have to don our various accessories.
Finally, as Europeans, we find those Americans and their various polyester bags (back, front, bjorn, fanny, etc) look ridiculous. One looks like a marine about to assault Fallujah. The stroller has a dignity to it that all those bags lack.
In fact, despite the smell of urine, I used to love Atlantas MARTA for its brilliant airport exit.
There's nothing inherently undignified of public transportation system. America's indignity comes from our inability to clean.
They wouldn't be if everyone was in a car.
Average commute time in greater Tokyo is double that: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu...
Have you ever flown over Texas?
I don’t know about Singapore or Hong Kong. But I suspect rich people there drive rather than taking public transit.
Source:
>>> Differences between cities [public transportation vs car transportation times] mainly concern the magnitude of the ratio, where the car is remarkably faster than public transit in Los Angeles but _not that much in Tokyo and Seoul._ (Emphasis mine)
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PT travel time (minutes) Min: 9 Max: 121 Mean: 52.8
Car travel time (minutes) Min: 11 Max: 123 Mean: 41.8
PT travel cost (¥). Min: 110 Max: 1290 Mean: 430.8
Car travel cost (¥) Min: 149 Max: 6138 Mean:2102.6
```
Source: Altieri, M., Silva, C., & Terabe, S. (2021). Keep pushing! Analysing public transit and car competitiveness in Tokyo. Case Studies on Transport Policy, 9(2), 457–465. doi:10.1016/j.cstp.2021.02
Fwiw, my experience is same as OP. In Shanghai, it is far faster to take a Didi than public transit. It's typically a 20 minute door to door vs 40.
Minor note that 2/3 of Atlanta was destroyed in 1864.
So in contrast to other major American cities, it had the benefit of being mostly planned in an automotive era.
Add in the fact that the surrounding geography doesn't preclude expansion in any direction, and it's essentially a "best-case" city for cars.
Even LA became an automobile city, and it has much more substantial barriers to expansion. Now that it's built out, LA is developing a pretty expansive metro system, but it will take decades to truly cover the region. It would have been nice to at least lay the main lines of the metro when land was cheap. One thing China got right is learning from these mistakes and building out their metros ahead of their city growth.
I think mass transit can be great in the right contexts. For ATL, I think it makes the most sense in the few sq miles of city proper, not 20+ mi out.
what in the absolute f** are you talking about? have you ever experienced the sudden death of a loved one? what about the network impact of someone dying? even if you want to look at it through a capitalistic lens, think of the reduction in capability people going through that trauma. the amount of resources it takes in the health care, and public service sectors. you're off loading the immense costs of a person dying onto folks at random like an inverse and more likely lottery.
since you're so confidently in having the empirical measures of what outweighs what, at what point would a public transit system start to be a "good cost tradeoff" in your framework? cause there's a logical end goal you could get to: individualized transport with an experienced driver; and then work backwards from there until you balance the cost of implementation with those tens of thousands of death. would it be $1,000/day/person? $500/day/person?
though more than likely you're speaking like this because you've lived your entire life transported by car, benefiting off of the externalized costs passed off to the less fortunate, and you fear having your subsidized conveniences justifiably going away.
That you see this tragedy as a benefit reveals the grotesquerie of you world view. You also do not address the downstream effects of that lost life in terms of grief, material loss, and reduced capacity. (You’re not even a good capitalist.)
May you never experience the losing end of a “more comfortable and convenient life”.
1. deaths directly by car are not the only deaths to account for. look at the history of lead poisoning from gasoline and the ramifications we're still reckoning with today from that. think of the rubber, heavy metal pollution we are just finding out today is driving critical ecosystems rapidly to extinction (in my neck of the woods: salmon). the death from the resource gathering required only for cars. there are so, so many externalized costs you don't consider even tho i'd argue that due to no experience with it yourself that the violence associated with a death by car is no easily written off as a statistic.
2. the environment built for cars is the only environment that can be. you've been duped by automobile manufactures, oil barons, and the affluent class that needs their chose mode of transportation adopted and subsidized by the masses. i see many more countries with better public transit and less folks living with cars all with better measures of comfort and convenience. you have exact measures to compare number of deaths, population, and road miles, but there's no way to measure whether those miles were worth it for anyone because of the baked in assumptions of no other choice. but what is always measurable is that deaths are directly caused by the existence of cars, and that death impacts people greatly.
rethink your assumptions and misanthropy.
There’s no country that can afford to be car dependent where most people don’t drive. Even in Sweden and Japan, which have amazing public transit systems, 80% of households own a car.
You make a decision to get into the car with eyes open and most people are okay with the deal & the odds.
I have a feeling your response is because you’ve lost someone, so sorry about that. Life ends up more or less as a shit lottery and sometimes you get lucky (unlucky)
And props for being a responder and seeing it with your own eyes. I actually think it should be more widely spread, showing it on the nightly news, etc. it’s an effective strategy to make more careful drivers.
"nicer" and "cleaner" mean the same thing, and I'll give those to you. When you create a transit system that poor people can't afford to use... you don't see poor people anymore. But they didn't disappear, and you didn't solve a problem.
My larger point is that public policy is a meta-market. We subsidize the suburbs because the majority of people like the suburbs. The net migration patterns in this country are to places like Dallas and Atlanta because that's where more people want to live.
I would love to see an experiment where we make a 1200 sq-ft apartment in a dense, walkable neighborhood, the same price as a 3000 sq-ft McMansion outside Dallas, by actually building the former. I predict… unexpected migration, but who knows. That’s a hard experiment to run.
Trains are not the solution. Even the best train systems are much slower than point to point car transportation. When I go to Tokyo on business, I take Ubers, not the (excellent) train system, because cars are faster and more convenient. In Japan, 80% of households have a car. In Tokyo prefecture, there are about 40 cars per 100 households. In Osaka it’s 65 per 100.