this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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Public transport would be a much more effective and cheaper solution, but we're all looking at EVs because it means not having to change anything about the status quo.
The problem is that to effectively fight climate change you need to cut emissions in five to ten years, and not fifty to a hundred, and in a nation where even a solidly blue locality openly dedicated to fighting climate change can take ten years and hundreds of millions of dollars to open a bus lane, it should not come as a surprise that many people with the resources to do so are choosing an imperfect solution now rather than running for office so they can get a bus line to their neighborhood in a few decades.
This is before we get to the fact that even nations which world leading public transport systems known for connecting to every small village and house still have plenty of cars and highways, people just don’t try and use them to for every trip in a dense city and plenty of people can get by without owning a car at all. We need to eliminate all emissions, not just city emissions, and we needed to do so ten years ago.
Yes north america needs more common, frequent, and reliable mass transit and the fact that the richest country in the world’s mass transit is in such a state is a national disgrace, but that is not opposed to the quick elimination of oil burning cars but rather should be done in parallel to them.
Thanks for such a well reasoned response 😁 My knee jerk "public transport good" response did miss a lot of the subtlety you've captured here!
Which automatically excludes "The Great eCar Transition" as that takes generations.
Generations? The average American passenger vehicle is 14 years old, so if tomorrow all new cars were electric, you would have haved car transport emissions within 15 years, and be at a 75 percent reduction within the first generation. Cut out fossil fuel subsidies so people are paying the 8 or so dollars per gallon it actually costs for gas and incentivize US manufacturers to actually build affordable cars and you’ll see much quicker adoption that what normal wear and tear causes.
Of course that isn’t going to happen tomorrow in the US, but you are also going to have a lot of vehicles already sold in the decades prior and which tend to stay on the road longer.
Compared to the fifteen or so years it takes to build a single light rail line, much less intercity high speed rail, and you are not going to be able to replace half of all car traffic in a single build cycle, much less reach 75 percent within thirty years, by which point you’re trying to replace all traffic in the very small towns and unincorporated areas that even nations renowned the world over for their public transit connectivity often struggle to reach.
Does the US need to build more mass transit, yes. Can it do so faster than it already buys new cars, no.
Go look at their models instead of doing napkin math.
Then go look at where the displaced ICE cars go, let me know how many of those are going straight to the junk yard.
Yes. Easy patch.
I mean, public transport is a fucking ton of money to start up, and anywhere outside an urban center it is not just a loss but almost a total loss due to distances.
I remember being in a meeting in grad school to discuss the school bus system as part of the student review of finances. We had a bus route that went to another town a good distance away, and it was nearly always empty or with like 2 people on it, so they basically said once the grant money is gone we will shut down this route. We can't afford to put good money into something expensive and isn't getting used.
I realize there is a lot about car culture feeding that, but it remains a massive obstacle. Switching from existing structures like parking etc to public transport? How? How fast? What do we do with that space? Who pays for it? I'm frustrated by the system but we can't just start from a blank slate, we have to work with it.
Are you serious? I was in the US just once, and within 3 days, I felt depressed. I had originally planned to travel through the US and CA for two weeks but following a one-week work thing and decided to just return after following obligatory week 1.
At least two thirds of basically any downtown appears to be parking and there's at least a further 15% that's overly wide roads.
You could remove the concrete and build parks which would improve those cities' water household and have made me feel less depressed. You could build housing. You could build stores. You could build third places. You could make downtowns livable.
And it's definitely possible. Because those places all existed before they were bulldozed to better suit cars.
The fact that the remote/rural bus stops aren't being used is not a fault of public transportation itself. But rather, it's the fault of route design/planning.
Isn't route design/planning part of a public transportation system? And even if it weren't, it's still a real and valid issue that would need to be addressed. Even if the plan is just to force everyone into high-density housing against their will, you still have the last mile problem, just like cable and internet companies. Either the bus stops at every building (and is therefore too slow to be useful) or some people have to walk farther than others, which is fine for most of us, but disabled/elderly/injured people shouldn't be further disadvantaged as part of our transportation strategy.
America specifically doesn't want to build sane infrastructure, we've gone too deep on car culture over the last century+. Going out of the way to build self-driving cars rather than running more rail (or even bus, or trolley) is a solution hunting for a problem that shouldn't exist. Especially given how much car prices have sharply increased in the last decade. Nobody will be able to afford personal transport, people will continue to use older cars for longer periods of time, or get into insane mortgage-sized car loans.
...but we want our "independence" and "freedom" dammit! .... /s
Even so, the status quo changes with EVs. You see it with dealerships/shops charging more for simple repairs, manufacturers trying to go to subscription models for basic car features.
So much of the US is car-based:
Don't forget about the massive insurance scheme designed to deal with the aftermath of millions of largely preventable collisions and tens of thousands of deaths each year, the regulatory complex, the adverse health impacts and burden on the healthcare industry, and perhaps biggest of all - the infrastructure (and space) needed for all of this unnecessary driving, all of which come at the expense of all other forms of transportation. The scale of the auto industry is mind boggling, especially considering how useless most of it is.