It is easier and cheaper to make one larger electric vehicle than 68 smaller ones, and they would damage the road less too. Of course this kind of comparison between two different things is inherently very difficult to do fairly
Ik that ttolleybuses are better than electric cars in carbon footprint, traffic, etc. I’m just proposing that we compare things with the same power source together. It makes more impact to say that an electric trolley is x% better on y metric compared to electric cars, than to say they are x% better than gas cars.
Imagine a situation where you say electric trolleybuses are superior to gas cars for reasons x, y, and z on xcretion or speddit. Then some elon musk bootlicker or big oil bootlicker replies to you saying “what about electric cars” or “what about gas buses”? You craft a meticulous reply about why gas buses are better than electric cars. But it’s too late. Thousands of lurkers saw the bootlicker’s reply to you but will never see your rebuttal. Many of them are now more against public transportation.
Nope, a car electric or not creates multiple issues like urbanism, pollution (i.e: noise, visual, microplastics), hotspots, hostiles environment like parking lots, increase deaths rates, consequences on flooding, etc.
A lot of them can be solved with public transportation.
How are buses still not better? The ratio of individual people being moved to total mass being moved is better. The maintenance and insurance fees are collective. The driver of the bus is a trained professional vs some rando commuter.
Or maybe tell bosses that if your job can be done remotely it should be done remotely. Then there's more room on the bus for people who need to be in meatspace to do their jobs.
As much as I enjoy wanton violence for the ruling elite, a good start would be threatening the politicians with this unless they implement laws that make it unprofitable to force people into offices.
It should be codified that if a job can be performed remotely, it ought be, with the voluntary option to have people go to offices and such.
I wish I didn’t need hands for my job, 90% of it is brain work with a tinker here and there. I see so many videos of robotic hands being used for things and can’t wait for the day I can just send one of these out to a site equipped with some tools and just remotely tap into the video stream. It’s coming and I don’t think it will be too long. Hell, I’m just a layman and if you gave me a dedicated year and some funding I could get something viable up to par so I’m sure it’s possible, guess it just won’t profit anyone enough to sell it yet.
We used to have trolleybuses when I was a kid in the 70’s, they were so insanely much more nice to ride than a diesel. No bad smell, and they were smooth and quiet.
I guess we will get back to something similar soon, but with batteries.
Yes in some aspects, it’s like we are moving backwards. Funny since the talk about environment is more serious now than back then, still we often use unnecessarily polluting solutions, where the older “too expensive” solutions were viable when we had way less money as a country than we have now?
One would have thought the oil crisis had made us keep the trolley busses?
Until in 5-10 years when the batteries are fucked.
That’s the beautiful thing about trolley buses - they do not need a (substantial) battery. They are basically trains on wheels.
There are some places where battery powered buses make sense - for example, where I live, lucerne Switzerland, there is one bus line that just goes up and down a rather steep hill. By using recuperative braking, the battery powered bus is super efficient. For other, normal ‘high traffic’ lines, trolley makes so much more sense
Trolleys don’t really make any sense. I come from Riga, it has a lot of trolleys and the city is designed around trolleys and trams. And yet modern trolleys have bloody diesel engines, because being permanently hooked to the wire makes no sense at all. It’s much better to have electric buses with a few overhead wires here and there to fast charge on the go.
Lucerne has a few trolley lines. They are ONLY trolley buses. The long, 3 Segment ones. Then, some 1 Segment hybrid buses that have pantagraphs. At the end of those lines, there is a longer stop where the trolley lines end, the pantagraph gets pulled down and the bus trucks along the last few stations with diesel.
Then theres just normal hybrid buses for more rural lines, and a battery operated bus that goes up and down a hill.
There’s a solution for every line - you just need the proper infrastructure. The reason that we have this great pantagraph-compatible infrastructure is that, while there are a lot of trains in Switzerland, there is no metro. So in lucerne, the trolley buses work almost as a metro, with the main lines having buses every 7 minutes.
In civilized places, buses take about as long as a car, as they’re prioritized in infrastructure. The added benefit is that you don’t even need to own a 2 ton death machine.
Fair, but it is the reality a lot of people live with. I would love for us to have a Netherlands approach to biking, but we don’t. And we have brutally cold winters, where waiting for a bus is made even more undesirable, and biking less of an option because of how treacherous the snow makes everything (including driving).
To me it seems more like a pleasant fantasy than a realistic expectation. For other places I’m sure it is an attainable reality.
I don’t think you’ll meet a transit/urbanism advocate who will tell you to ride transit that doesn’t exist where you are or that is wildly impractical for you. I certainly won’t. For me, it’s more about doing what makes the most sense for you, while also pushing to change the infrastructure where you are to make transit and urbanism better and more feasible for more people.
I have written my council pushing for changes to existing biking laws to make it safer in my city. So you’re rightz we have to push for what we need. Nothing changes if we don’t voice our concerns.
Local climate really isn’t a reason to avoid public transportation infrastructure, as you have VERY hot and humid places (São Paulo, Brazil during summer) and very cold places (Netherlands during winter) with perfectly functional services. It’s all about HOW said infrastructure is deployed and cared for.
Netherlands is quite warm from my perspective and a poor comparison to the extremely harsh winters we experience.
Thier average winter temperature is our late fall and early spring temp (November and March). The months of December, January and March are more comparable to Siberia.
Almost 20 years ago Clear Channel radio came under fire because a pair of their syndicated talk show hosts encouraged their listeners to go out and take a baseball bat to a bicyclist. I’m an avid cyclist and I’ve dealt with a fortunately small number of assholes that are susceptible to this kind of suggestion. One guy yelled “fuck Joe Biden”; another guy yelled “you’re gonna get somebody killed!” after another driver went slightly into the opposite lane to pass me.
I think it’s a tossup as to whether I’ll eventually be killed by one of these bike-hostile morons or by somebody looking at their phone while driving.
All you car haters, I’d like to see you sitting outside, having a coffee, in Arizona during the summer where it is 56°C during most hours on a daily basis.
What if you link a whole bunch of them together, and then instead of having each cart be self propelled, you could have one car that pushes all of the linked cars at once? Sounds way more efficient to me. If only there was a name for a long chain of linked cars…
As much as I hate SUVs, an electric SUV will probably have a lower carbon footprint than a small petrol car. Obviously the SUV is garbage for many other reasons, but generally speaking, ICE has a much lower energy conversion efficiency, and the oil supply chain is much dirtier than; even though per unit mass, lithium is worse, the sheer amount of petrol the ICE vehicle will consume over its lifetime will outweigh the production of the EV several times over.
The actual calculation depends on how dirty the power grid is in your area, or if you have solar panels.
Either way, I 100% agree that neither of these are good solutions and we should be pushing for public transit and bikes.
Great video! I use Warsaw’s transit system every day and can confirm all that you said.
However there is imo a big issue with this system - the tickets are quite expensive and because of that there is a lot of fare dodging. People figure out that it is cheaper to pay the fine if they get caught. I believe public transport should be free, and it is in many cities in poland already, so why not Warsaw?
And when they get that driver he will of course be a completely normal guy just fighting the good fight against the repression from all those idiologically damaged cyclists...
I'm on your side and even I think this is a bit victim-y. I can confidently say nobody will be coming on the news to say this guy was just fighting the good fight against ideologically damaged cyclists.
That's probably just a matter of perspective not being from the US.
You are probably used to other topics being the center piece of that stupid culture war always initiated by retarded conservatives, while I am used to every bike lane, single bike, tempo limit for cars or even electric car becoming the next big topic in a discussion about how evil idiologists are trying to destroy our culture, industry and wealth by banning our holy cars and private jets (or some similiar delusion...).
Different propaganda, different kinds of brain-washed morons to expect...
It seems The Onion’s article headline everytime there is a school shooting applies here, ‘“There’s no way to prevent this!” says only country where this happens.’
Hell, they could probably get away with re-marketing trains rail trucks by talking about how much horsepower they have, how big they are, and how they can even pull other cars in a single line.
The us has a large scale train system (for freight.) the key will be to convince people who currently drive trucks (vehicles used to move freight) that trains are bigger and more phallic and thus a better method of compensation.
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