Some people got convinced that banning thermal personal vehicles was incompatible with the bigger picture goals. You can develop a 15min city and a public transport system while also banning thermal personal vehicles.
I don’t know what’s driving this misinformation campaign about electric vehicles “polluting more” or “polluting just as much” when it takes 5 minutes of googling to find 6 reputable sources disputing both these claims
Banning the sale of new thermal cars, motorcycles, vespas does help with climate change in the long run
Some people have taken it upon themselves to refuse some incremental improvements and it’s only leading to doing nothing
I agree with you here. This meme says “address” climate change like “EVs aren’t a perfect solution to climate change” as if that’s some big gotcha. They’re a meaningful, incremental improvement away from ICE vehicles.
Public transit and bikes are better, but electrifying everything is also a good thing.
My comment isn’t an attack on you nor your post. We’re just supplying context to a meme that isn’t entirely helpful to the environmental or fuckcar causes (shocking /s).
This is just an attempt to help people not walk away with the wrong message.
Banning the sale of new thermal cars, motorcycles, vespas does help with climate change in the long run
Friendly reminder that “thermal cars” and fossil-fuel cars aren’t necessarily the same thing. I have a car that runs on 100% biodiesel and is therefore carbon-neutral, for instance. Yes, it’s niche, but it does exist – and if we eliminated the need for the vast majority of cars by fixing our cities, then carbon-neutral ICE fuels might be able to meet a bigger fraction of the remaining need.
In that scenario electric or hydrogen cars would probably be better for global food supplies. Especially in a world of increasing food scarcity due to climate change, having poor people starve while rich people turn food into fuel for their cars doesn’t seem fair. You can put solar panels or wind turbines on barren land and not take up valuable arable land.
It’d be better then releasing more carbon and further exasperating the problems, but I think there are better solutions.
I think their might be a naming issue here. I was going by the wikipedia article for biodiesel which says it’s made directly from crops and it’s
Unlike the vegetable and waste oils used to fuel converted diesel engines
Which seems like what your talking about. It doesn’t seem to point to a name for that though, maybe just biofuel. It does say some biodiesel is made from waste oil but also that:
the available supply is drastically less than the amount of petroleum-based fuel that is burned for transportation and home heating in the world, this local solution could not scale to the current rate of consumption.
And that about half of current U.S production is from virgin oil feedstock. 10% of all grain is already used for biofuel, and that’s just to cover the bit of ethanol used for petrol, if we transitioned even a fraction of cars to full biofuel that number would go up by a lot.
There’s also still an opportunity cost with even the waste oil. If we have the capacity to collect and refine waste oils into fuel, then we can probably also just recycle it and refine it back to food standards.
I should have been more clear: yes, biodiesel can come from things that compete with food crops, but the biodiesel made from waste is the only kind I endorse.
(Fun fact: the kind I use in my car is made from chicken fat, a byproduct of all the chicken processing plants we have here in northern Georgia.)
It’s also possible to make synthetic gasoline, by the way, and I’m only endorsing making it from CO2 produced as a byproduct of something else (and, pointedly, not coal gasification or steam reforming of natural gas).
It does say some biodiesel is made from waste oil but also that…
…this local solution could not scale to the current rate of consumption.
That’s where this part of my comment came in:
if we eliminated the need for the vast majority of cars by fixing our cities, then carbon-neutral ICE fuels might be able to meet a bigger fraction of the remaining need
In Australia we have chip shops along the lonely roads through the desert. Some of them are so isolated there’s no mains electricity. Recently they became electric car accessible by attaching car charge stations to biodiesel generators. The waste oil from frying the chips powers the electric cars.
From what I’ve seen: EVs normally produce about half the carbon of regular cars, mostly from making the batteries. Switching fully to EVs would therefore reduce worldwide emissions by about 8%, compared to 16% by just getting rid of cars completely. EVs also don’t fix the societal problems of cars including sprawl and all of its related problems.
An ideal future would have no internal combustion engines and only EVs. But there would be a lot fewer of them, and preferably in a much smaller form factor.
As an unrelated side note, when I read ‘ICE’, the first thing that came to mind was the train. I’ve never even been to Germany…
Your statement then should be: EVs are better than combustion engine cars. Period. Your first statement is clearly wrong, as EVs are not good for the environment. Just better then combustion engines. Far from good, further away from perfect.
Don’t think you do something good when you buy an EV instead of a bike - if you have the choice.
Making this choice possible should be our main concern, not EVs vs. combustion cars. They make us as lazy as your statement is.
Edit: to the Downvoters: where is my statement wrong?
I already told you why your 80/20 rule doesn’t make sense to me in this case. If you just repeat yourself without further explaining it just sounds braindead to me.
Imagine two lines, the good line leading to a positive future and the bad line. EVs are on the bad line, but branch off from ICEs into a line that goes into the direction of the good line - but just can’t reach it. That’s my view on EVs and that’s why your statement doesn’t make sense to me. Now it’s your turn to repeat your one-liner again.
Bikes are made from metal that is mined from the ground and the tires are rubber that is produced from potrolium. All of that is bad for the environment. Almost all shoes are also made from rubber, and leather that comes from cows that produce methane thats bad for the environment, so you better be walking everywhere either barefoot or in handmade wooden clogs.
If you really wanna play by those rules you are JUST as bad as the guy you replied to
I am fully aware of the end of this line of thoughts, and it is not a good end. And I decided for myself that you have to artificially draw the line at some point.
My line is between the difference of a two tonne car with a huge fucking battery and a bicycle. Where is yours?
There need be no lines, dumbass. Just be accurate in your comparisons, rather than saying everything on THIS side of the line is bad and everything on THAT side of the line is good
Mainly to point out how dumb your thought process is. I have little hope that you will actually listen, but I do hope that any 3rd parties observing will see the logical inconsistencies and see why viewing things as a spectrum of bad to good is a much better way than viewing things as exclusively bad or good.
The carbon footprint of building an EV is larger than an ICE, no one is disputing this. But once in operation the EV catches up and through its life is a better alternative over all. So why not take that win? Why be so vehemently against a solution that reduces carbon footprint and air pollution? Because fuck cars right?
Because the real problem is our car centric society and we won’t fix that by switching every ICE with a EV and tell the people they have to drive a lot so the advantage of an EV comes to light.
EVs have their place, but we could do so so so much better with all the energy we put in them.
So yeah, ‘fuck cars’, if that is the level you prefer and understand.
Because images like this are still relevant no matter how the cars are powered.
Running an electric car is obviously greener than running an ICE car, but producing one is most definitely not environmentally friendly. If we can reduce the number of vehicles on the road, including electric cars, that would go a long way to reducing carbon emissions.
There’s also the case to be made around the environmental impact of (sub)urban sprawl, which generally comes about as a direct result of car dependency.
even then it matters how I generate the electricity. If I have a trillion cows walking hamster wheels and shitting methane into the atmosphere and generate power that goes in your car, that’s probably way worse than ICEs.
Because even if cars ran on pixie dust and emitted nothing but unicorn farts, they would still be catastrophic because of the way we have to ruin our cities to make space for them. Not only is car-dependent, low-density zoning the root cause of all sorts of problems, from the housing crisis, to obesity, to microplastics (most of which come from car tires), to declining social capital due to lack of “third places”, the consequences of car-dependency include huge carbon emissions beyond just the cars themselves:
Producing the concrete to build all those parking lots and widen all those roads is itself a huge and unnecessary source of emissions.
The energy needed to heat and cool single-family homes is hugely greater than that needed for dense housing, since all six sides are exposed to the environment instead of the also-conditioned spaces of neighboring units.
All the extra paved surface in car-dependent areas contributes to the urban heat island effect, exacerbating the problem mentioned in the previous point.
Let’s assume in this perfect future, the number of cars is not increased and they have all been converted to cars that perform identical to this Model S data. Let’s also assume each of these cars are required for daily work commuting, and assuming each Angelino commute the average I found of 41 miles which is about 9.6 kWh per day per car commuting or 24 million kWh total per day just commuting.
However, if we replace all of these car commuters with a train, which we can say requires 0.05 kWh/km, that comes to 8.75 million kWh for the daily commute, or 36% of the power requirement using cars only. That doesn’t even factor in the amount of infrastructure for supporting cars (roads vs rails, parking, public charge stations, mechanics, less power sources, etc).
Replacing every gas powered car with an electric powered one would reduce emissions. However, replacing car transportation with more efficient forms of transportation reduces carbon emissions even further. Again, these are spherical vehicles in a vacuum making a lot of assumptions, but I think my point stands.
That’s a stupid idea. You’d need extremely long cables that would keep getting tangled up around the city. They would have to be disconnected and the bus would have to connect to closest socket to continue on the route. They would also need to have huge spools of cable, and soon the city would be drowning in cables. You’d have to keep rebuilding all the buildings on top of cables. Again and again. Then at some point, the city would be so high there wouldn’t be enough air for people to breathe. Do this everywhere, and you may even considerably slow down Earth’s rotation.
Seriously though, those poles come off weekly and the bus driver has to get out and fiddle with them to reattach. It wastes 5 minutes and slows down the bus behind it.
That’s what no one mentions: with these poles one bus can’t pass another bus.
My city has been stuck trying to expand its tram system for decades at this point, but whenever I mention that we could introduc trolley buses instead people look at me like I’m crazy!
They just make so much sense for our use case. We’re a hilly city, so the rubber tyres are more suitable than steel on steel, the routes they want to build on don’t really have the space for separated infrastructure, so having buses that can run on the roads will be less disruptive, and by not having to install rails they’re a lot cheaper too.
keep organizing around it! Strong Towns could be a big ally in this fight. Get some people to join you and take turns using your speaking times in city council meetings to explain why electric trolleys would be better suited for the needs of the city
and by not having to install rails they’re a lot cheaper too.
The main reason I dislike buses compared to rail is that the very things the engineers and operators consider to be advantages – the less need for permanently-installed infrastructure and therefore greater flexibility for changing routes – I consider to be disadvantages because it means the routes can’t be relied upon to stay put. With rail, once that line is in, it’s in, and it’s safe for the people along it to plan their lifestyles accordingly. Transit-oriented development, for example, isn’t likely to happen along a bus route the way it is along a rail line. Residents are a lot more hesitant to go car-free when the risk exists that the bus route they rely on could be cancelled or changed one day. The visible infrastructure of a rail line signals long-term investment in the community (thus making it more attractive for development) in a way that mere bus stops do not.
I realize that you’re talking about trolley-buses, not regular ones, so the existence of the catenary wires might help mitigate these issues. Still, I don’t think it would be a strong enough signal to achieve the desired effect (especially since the wires are the ugly part of an electrified transit system, and the community getting only the ugly part is kind of a signal of its own, LOL).
They barely improve noise pollution, the loudest factor on a moving car are the tires. If you use electricity out of a coal powered power plant you just outsource the air pollution. And I can’t imagine that it is healthy to live around a the mines that are needed to get all the ressources to build the battery and the car itself.
This is worse then ‘nothing is perfect’, this is lying to yourself to continue to fuck up the planet and fuck up people who are not you. Congratulations on your “cleaner city”.
Edit: maybe tell me where I am wrong instead of just downvoting. I think I have a valid point to diskuss.
Clearly you don’t live near a road where V8s and muffler less cars fly by. And Coal Powered plants are going extinct everywhere except China. Even in my Oil and Gas State, the local power company is building out a solar farm.
So your point is the world will be fine as soon as every person on earth drives an EV? We have a systematic problem and people get hung on the point of EVs vs. combustion engine cars. This should not be the question, they both suck in their own way.
Your footprint is massive if you get rid of your combustion engine car and buy an EV just for the sake of driving an EV. Better would be: get rid of your car entirely (if poasible) and buy a good bike.
And I belive it is already possible for many people and pure convenience is holding them back, while the world burns. And they buy EVs and pat themselfes on the shoulder, as ‘I am not the problem, the dirty combustion engines destroy the world’. Wrong direction of thinking, if you want to better the environment and life quality.
Yeah yeah, the topic makes ma irrational because it feels like a lost cause. Steering hard in the direction of a climate collapse just isn’t a nice future to look forward to.
But that would be reason enough for you to take away another peoples right to express an opinion for a year? That is a bit extreme as well. How did you get there?
It’s an indicator that a person uses a particular type of rhetoric - or worse, actually thinks in a way - that is incredibly harmful to any sort of rational discourse. You know it’s false, the person you’re pretending to quote knows it’s false, it’s exclusively said in bad faith, there’s no reason for anyone to ever say something like that. It doesn’t help you win an argument or convince anyone. It’s exhausting and childish and a waste of time.
Just make an honest argument, of which there are many. Don’t waste anyone’s time with that crap.
At leasts insults are amusing. The type of hyperbole you used isn’t.
Think of it this way: you know I’m willing to support insulting and trolling people and even I found what you said to be so bad I wish I could ban it. That should showcase exactly how bad it is, right?
A person saying insults are amusing just screams ‘ignore me’. I hope you will look back at your statement soon and feel at least some kind of embarrassment. Good luck to you.
I live near a road with a 100 km/h speed limit, all I hear is the tires on the road, no engine. I guess an electric car could be even louder, as they are heavier. The loudest vehicles here are the trucks, but again, can’t hear the engine, just the sound of the tires. Especially when it rains and the road is wet.
I don’t know what ‘breaking down the hill’ means, but of course there are scenarios where combustion engines are louder. When they wait on a red light e.g. My point is: EVs suck as much as combution engine cars, they are both loud.
Why not opt for the option of more public transport, bikes and cars only where they are absolutly neccessary - for all I care EVs.
I live 100 yards away from an interstate highway in the US. Looking at it right now. Yeah the tire noise is real too. But I got use to it, it’s soft and consistent.
Engine breaking is when a truck uses its engine in lower gear to slow down the truck. It’s really loud and sounds like a machine gun.
My favorite solution for cargo transport is loud as well, trains aren’t exactly known for their silent behaviour. Difficult to find the best solution there.
Regarding the topic: I don’t seem to be that off with my feeling, according to this site 50 % of the noise of a car comes from tires. And it gets worse at higher speeds and with more mass. I think EVs are more silent than ICEs but still far from good if they can be avoided by better solutions like bikes, public transport and city planning.
Of course I wouldn’t want to take away your sleeping aid, a nice constant white noise of tires can be nice. But maybe a white noise recording would be better for the environment.
To be fair, they said “moving car”. They’re correct; cars moving at high speed produce significantly more tyre noise than engine noise. Larger vehicles have much more engine noise, so the speed at which tyre noise dominates is also higher.
Like I said, you never had a truck engine break in front of your house. It is significantly louder than any tire noise. It almost sounds like a machine gun.
No I haven’t, because where I live we’ve outlawed using jake brakes within cities due to the noise - except when adequate muffling is installed. Again we’re talking about cars, not trucks, so jake brakes aren’t relevant anyway.
This is a fantastically ignorant response in damn near every aspect. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong, fuck you, I suspect you’re a shell or exxon employee.
Your comment raises some valid points about the environmental impact of electric vehicles (EVs), but there are a few misconceptions that need to be addressed.
Firstly, regarding noise pollution, while it’s true that tire noise can be a significant source of noise from a moving car, especially at higher speeds, it’s not accurate to say that EVs barely improve noise pollution. EVs are generally quieter than conventional vehicles, especially at lower speeds. This can significantly reduce noise pollution in urban areas, where speeds are often low.
Secondly, the point about electricity from coal-powered plants is a common argument, but it oversimplifies the issue. Yes, if an EV is charged using electricity from a coal-powered plant, it’s effectively outsourcing some of its emissions. However, the overall emissions are still typically lower than those from conventional vehicles. Furthermore, the electricity grid is getting cleaner over time as we shift towards renewable sources, which will further reduce the emissions from EVs.
As for the environmental impact of mining for resources to build batteries and cars, this is indeed a concern. However, it’s important to note that conventional vehicles also require resource extraction for their production, and the extraction and refining of oil for fuel is a major source of environmental damage. Moreover, the battery production process is becoming more efficient, and there are ongoing efforts to improve the recycling of batteries.
Lastly, the assertion that advocating for EVs is “lying to yourself to continue to fuck up the planet and fuck up people who are not you” is a rather harsh judgement. While it’s true that EVs are not a perfect solution and have their own environmental impact, they are generally considered a step in the right direction towards reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and mitigating climate change.
Thank you for your answer! My points are a result of my thoughts without looking anything up. You are much more thorough.
So EVs are loud, but ICEs are louder. The production of EVs is dirty, but producing and running ICEs is dirtier. Running ICEs now could damage the nature, because a lot of power is still produced with coal, but the future will fix it.
EVs are better than ICEs. But saying that EVs are a step in the right direction feels very wrong. We have one big problem - ‘car infrastructure’. And giving the avarage Joe/Jane the idea, that they can better the world by using EVs is a waste of time and energy that could be used to go in a much better direction: public transport, bikes, well planned cities. I don’t think Joe wants to sell his new EV, even if he had alternatives, and he will continue to vote for more roads and parking spaces.
But compromises are important: I would recommend everyone, who HAS to use a car with no alternatives and whose car is not up to good environment standards anymore, to buy an EV instead of an ICE.
in a perfect world cars would disappear all together I agree. But for the short term we need to not let perfect be the enemy of good. People aren’t giving up their cars anytime soon, but maybe we can shepherd them into a slightly less shitty version for the time being. Plus having EVs and more solar on roofs will speed up our ability to reduce our coal addiction, which right now is the biggest threat to humanity.
Hopefully we’ll see the transition largely away from cars in time with better public infrastructure. it’s a complex problem.
Where I live I feel like I’m encountering more and more cars that have been modded to be VERY loud by replacing their exhaust pipes, adding exhaust tips, etc. Just about every time I’m driving on a highway I seem to spot cars like this…
Battery powered EVs also have a greater environmental impact to manufacture than equivalent ICE vehicles, but the greater efficiency in energy conversion and the lack of emissions offsets this in less than five years of use on average. Ideally, it will continue to improve as battery technology advances as well.
Idealy we don’t need as many cars in the future. The thought of all those batteries and tires on a garbage dump in Africa and plastic parts floating in the Atlantic make me sick.
While they don’t address it directly, they do provide a route to address it. The issue is a lot of governments are pushing electric cars, and washing their hands of the rest.
There are 3 issues with electric cars.
They are cars - Obvious to most here, but better public transport can vastly improve the situation, regardless of how the car is powered.
Batteries - Electric car batteries are far from perfect. Their range is reduced and they are heavier. There is also the issue of lithium, and/or other chemicals used in the batteries.
Power source - An electric car is only as clean as its energy supply. Powering it from a coal power station is far worse than using renewables.
Counter to these however.
Cars will still be needed, to some extent. Electric are the least worst option we have NOW. We no longer have time to wait for a better option, or find a perfect solution.
Lithium can be recycled; we currently don’t, due to the small amounts, but this will change as economics adjust . Also, we are not actually that short of it, it’s just not be economically valuable enough to mine on a larger scale. Range can be adjusted as tech improves. We can also change how we operate. E.g. Combining out of town parking and charging with public transport options is an excellent way to get people using public transport on a large scale again, in an organic manner.
Power wise, it’s easy to shift an electric car from fossil fuel to renewables. It’s very difficult to shift an ICE car. This is also something we should be doing far more anyhow (but no-one seems to be interested in improving the grid!). On a side note, even accounting for various losses. The sheer efficiency factor of a power station means it’s still better to burn oil to run an electric car, than to run the car directly on the oil.
Don’t get me wrong, the fixation on electric cars is dangerous, but they are still required as part of the solution. We just need to actually work on that solution. While the right, in politics, has a tendency to “circle the wagons” which causes a significant number of problems. The left has a tendency towards “circular firing squads”. We should all be careful not to help kill ideas and projects that pull in vaguely the right direction, even if it’s not exactly what we want.
My main problems with EVs is that they don’t reduce car dependency and the upfront manufacturing environmental cost of making them do not make them more eco friendly across their lifespan (especially with the trend of bigger and heavier cars). Car manufacturers are just jumping on the bandwagon to keep cars relevant in the mind of the consumer and clean their image of more obvious pollutants such as gas and oil.
Electric cars will just perpetuate all the other problems with cars, while tricking consumer into thinking they’re making an environmentally sound choice and clean their conscience. There was still a giant environmental cost to making them, children still mined lithium for them, tyre rubber will still fill the lungs of people, etc etc.
It’s not even just that! Bringing a thing that takes a 10’x20’ space to store with you everywhere is unsustainable.
Even a 2000lb Mazda Miata takes up the same number of parking spaces – one – as a Ford Excursion, which means it contributes just as much to parking lots destroying walkability as the big SUV does. It also contributes just as much to the “need” to widen roads, since you can only have one car per lane and the longitudinal space is dominated by safe following distance, not the length of the vehicle itself.
The bottom line is that all cars ruin cities, even the small ones. (And before somebody chimes in with “but whatabout Kei cars/compact parking spaces,” I’ll note that Japan doesn’t even let you buy any car – including a Kei car – without proof that you have an off-street parking space to store it in, and such spaces are far and few in between in cities since Japan’s zoning code is relatively sane. In other words, the total number of cars is substantially limited and that’s the saving grace, not the Kei cars themelves.)
EVs start their life with a higher environmental burden than ICE vehicles, but the math comes out so that the burden becomes lower after between 15k-20k miles.
By the end of life of an EV, they are more eco friendly than an ICE vehicle of similar build.
Which, over the lifetime of the car, is still a win environmentally. Modern cars are estimated to last for 200k miles, and electric vehicles are believed capable of enduring for 300k miles (although most models are too new to really prove that with data).
I found this article by the European Environment Agency. There’s also the Green NCAP website where you can check the environmental impact of different vehicles over their entire lifetime.
Also, “Environmental burden” and “eco friendly” are generic buzzwords used to lump other environmental issues like micro plastics or habitat destruction in with the reduction of green house gases.
I wonder how the math would work out when it is strictly about reduction of greenhouse gases and factors unrelated to our dependency on fossil fuels are not skewing the results.
Lithium isn’t mined it is gathered by pumping water into salt flats so the lithium rises to the surface and it isn’t done by children. You’re repeating misinformation.
There is an environmental cost for absolutely anything we make. Do you suggest we stop making anything and everything?
Electric cars are the more environmentally sound choice. They are a required first step to ending our dependence on fossil fuels. Without them we cannot end our dependency.
And they’re needed in the construction of Lithium-Ion batteries, which the vast majority of EVs use, you’re clearly arguing in bad faith over semantics. My bad, since children are dying mining for some other mineral it’s okay, my mistake.
Again, cobalt isn’t needed to make batteries and there are many other battery chemistries that can be used in EVs. If that is really a concern of yours then you would be arguing for EV manufacturers to use a different battery chemistry. Which they are already transitioning to.
But you aren’t arguing for manufacturers to change battery chemistry. You’re cherry picking information to argue that EVs are the same as ICEs vehicles. Which makes your intentions obvious.
You argue against EVs then claim to want to end car dependency. So you want everyone riding busses and trains run on diesel?
Climate change is real and we need to end our dependency on fossil fuels to prevent the extinction of our species and EVs are a required step in doing that.
Not weird at all. They are mining an ore called spodumene then using a new method to refine it into lithium. They aren’t harvesting raw lithium like it is done everywhere else in the world.
You didn’t prove anything false. You proved that spodumene is mined and spodumene isn’t lithium. Just like iron mined isn’t steel.
Also you’re trying to ignore the context, which is that ‘EVs bad cause children are forced to mine lithium’. Which proves you’re not arguing in good faith.
Pretty disingenuous, that’s like me saying “gas doesn’t come from underground because it’s actually refined from petrol and the petrol isn’t underground anymore when it’s refined”
More like saying “EVs are bad because lithium is mined by children”.
Then when it is proven that it is not mined, let alone by children, you linking to an article of some rare method of mining spodumene that isn’t done by children and you pretending that is what the discussion is about.
I was answering your message, I’m not the person that talked about children in the first place, you’re message was “it’s not mined AND its not done by children”, that’s two separate affirmations, I only replied to the first one yet you keep bringing up the second one.
Mining is one way Lithium is produced, therefore you were wrong. Doesn’t matter that it’s rare, your first point was that it doesn’t happen at all, which is false.
You inserted yourself into a conversation about how “EVs are bad because children have to mine lithium to make them”.
You’re trying to change the subject to ‘look I found this rare method of mining something that is not lithium, it doesn’t matter that it is rare in the context of the manufacturing of all EVs’.
That is like saying ‘I don’t need to work for a living because look at this rare example of someone winning the lottery’.
Context matters.
Spodumene is not lithium.
Your rare example of mining some thing that is not lithium isn’t relevant in a discussion about children mining lithium for EVs.
As far as I was aware, the environmental impact is still considerably less than a ICE car, even if powered from dirty power. The impacts are different, making a simple comparison difficult, but generally EV win out.
I’m not saying electric cars are perfect, far from it. However, the change is pushing in the right direction. Think of it as a 2 front battle. Public transport Vs car, and EV vs ICE cars. Your arguments have very little bearing on the public Vs private transport argument, but heavily affect the EV Vs ICE argument.
I’d strongly prefer cities with public transport so good that there is little need for cars etc. However, I would also rather have a city with EV cars over ICE cars. The change over from ICE to EV will also help change habits. That is a perfect time to push public transport into the mix.
Picking a fight with EV is just going to leave both groups bloody. Big oil etc will egg it on, while laughing all the way to the bank.
I mean it makes sense at a first principles level.
An ice car connected to a transmission has a lot of losses, additionally, the engine is constantly in and out of various power and efficiency ranges.
Even if you are just hooked up to a generator somewhere else, the generator can run at peak efficiency consistently to charge the battery instead of constantly varying.
You could translate it to any power source. A large wind turbine is going to do better than a small one on top of the car.
do not make them more eco friendly across their lifespan
I upvoted you despite this inaccuracy.
The problem with electric cars is that they’re only a marginal improvement over fossil-fuel cars (note: not the same as “ICE”)*, when, as you said, what we need are the transformative gains from ending car-dependency. (I.e., changing the zoning code to encourage walkable density instead of prohibiting it and ending subsidies on car infrastructure.)
(* IMO internal combustion is not the right distinction to make, since things like biodiesel and gasoline synthesized from CO2+H20+electricity could be carbon-neutral too.)
They are cars - Obvious to most here, but better public transport can vastly improve the situation, regardless of how the car is powered.
Zoning for walkability is vastly more important even than better public transport, as is infrastructure for biking. The “EVs” we should really be talking about are e-bikes.
The big thing is that you need to plan for end to end integration.
Walking > Bikes > E bikes > Trains > Busses > EV vehicles > ICE vehicles.
Most will likely be needed (e.g. someone needs to stock the inner city supermarkets, and you can’t do that by bus), but we should be optimising for that whole chain.
You will still need shops, and they will still need stocking up. That means delivery access. Larger delivery vehicles are a lot more efficient, and so less are needed. You likely will always want a controlled way to get transit sized vans in and out. I would rather that was planned in, in a controlled manner, rather than left to big business, or bodge jobs. E.g. by back delivery roads. Underground would be perfect, but generally isn’t viable.
You also need access for construction and maintenance.
Unfortunately, these requirements also make a vehicle centric model easy for cities, and so, by extension, car centric. Many places default to this. Finding a viable solution requires getting a balance (enough road access to keep places supplied, but good enough support and incentives to keep unnecessary cars out).
The idea that pedestrianized streets are always blocked off to literally everything (including emergency vehicles, construction vehicles, overnight deliveries, etc.) is a common misconception – or strawman argument – but it just isn’t true. Lowering or removing a bollard for access by vehicles with a good reason to be there is an obvious no-brainer.
Yeah, and importantly, a lot of these deliveries can be done at night, when there are far fewer pedestrians around. And long-term, I bet things like local freight rail or cargo trams could be used to deliver to larger, higher throughput stores:
No matter what we do or suggest, troglodytes are going to look at the step up or downstream from that and claim that nothing matters because nothing is "as good" so why bother.
Yeah, instead of flooring it to the cliff of climate change, we shift gear to a leisurely cruise to the climate change cliff.
Sure, it’s better. But EVs aren’t being pushed because they’re better, they’re being pushed because if they didn’t, then they wouldn’t be able to sell cars at all.
To be fair, getting rid of capitalism and stopping climate change, as powerful of a 1-2 punch it would be, is probably the most difficult challenge of our life. Incremental change might work. We already have a reactionary half of the country that wants to shoot the other because they think the other wants to make them stop eating red meat and take away their gas stoves.
So, what’s the solution that fixes this for EVERYONE? It’s not about inconviencing people it’s about getting people on board with the solution. And the people who need to be on board with the solution think the problem is a hoax.
It’s wild but it actually is. BEVs produce around 30% fewer emissions per km than ICEs if you include every emmission on both sides.
With better manufactoring and better energy mix, you could expect maybe 40% fewer emissions compared to ICEs in a couple decades in the EU (likely much worse in the U.S. and other less democratic places).
That’s not nothing and an amazing feat of engineering for sure but still nowhere near sustainable because the baseline (ICE) is just incredibly bad. 30-40% less than “incredibly bad” is simply not “good” when we actually need to be as close to 100% as possible.
If we shifted all current ICE transport to BEVs, that’d at best be a very small step in the right direction, not a solution in any shape or form.
We actually cannot put every single person on the planet into ther own 1-3t metal box to move them around, no matter the engine type of that box.
BS. You’re assuming current (or is that past) levels of renewable energy and no recycling. Sure mining and processing done rare earths is polluting and energy intensive, but it gets cleaner every year based simply on increased renewable energy. Also, most of these metals are infinitely reusable, and just aren’t yet because it’s not worth it until they’re widely used
You’re assuming current (or is that past) levels of renewable energy and no recycling.
See the 40% figure. It assumes realistically achievable goals in the EU for the next decade or two.
most of these metals are infinitely reusable, and just aren’t yet because it’s not worth it until they’re widely used
That’s not the problem. The problem is that it’s not economical to recycle them. You technically could recycle them in the present day but mining new resources and throwing the old stuff into a landfill is just cheaper and I don’t see that changing any time soon, especially not in undemocratic neo-“liberal” places such as the U.S.
This argument also misses that the current demand for transport is much smaller than the future demand will likely be. We aren’t even close to putting every human on earth into their own metal box yet; that insanity is still in front of us if we continue like we have been the past century.
You really ought to step back and compare the amount of lithium needed to be mined vs the current fossil fuel production. There a vast difference. Then adjust it for the Lithium being infinitely reusable, vs fossil fuels not at all.
Bikes don’t work well in places like where I live when you can easily get 1-2 feet of snow in the winter. Or very icy roads. They definitely should be used more, but they aren’t a panacea.
Some nations that experience harsh winters have well maintained bicycle infrastructure year round. Access to effecient, maintained, and safe bicycle infrastructure is the biggest factor preventing or enabling cycling.
Biking in sub-zero temperatures when it isn’t even safe to be exposed outside for more than a few minutes (also happens here in the winter) is not a good idea either.
Again, I am all about bikes. I think bikes should be widely adopted. I would also never ride one in winter conditions here no matter how well the infrastructure is maintained. Have you ever seen a road plowed after there’s been a huge snowfall? Keeping a bike lane clear is not especially reasonable an expectation for a snowplow.
Most bike lanes get a differnet treatment creating a tightly packed snow surface to pedal on.
Safe bicycle infrastructure does not equal bicycle gutters. Bicycle gutters are unsafe on most roads even in the summer and were designed without winter maintaince as a consideration.
Skipping through the video, those look like roads dedicated to bicycles. Unless you repurpose an entire city to be bicycle only, which is a very unlikely scenario in most places in this world with harsh winters, that really doesn’t apply to the way snowplows usually work.
What do you think good, safe and dedicated bicycle infrastructure looks like? Cars and bicycles has vastly different needs and therefore should have differently built roadways.
When your city repaves its 4-6 lane roads, it has the choice to change some of those car lanes to bicycle/pedestrian/multiuse paths.
How do you think you build a good, safe and dedicated bicycle infrastructure in a city which has not been designed for it? There are roads here, like the one where my office is, that only have one access route. How do even get the delivery trucks in if you make that only road bike-only? And if you say “just build another road,” who is going to pay for that?
Also, almost every road here has two lanes, one in each direction.
No bike friendly city, and very few advocates for them, are suggesting to ban motor vehicles entirely. Rather, we can structure infrastrucrue to serve both, instead of just cars.
A 4 lane stroad can be turned into a two lane, limited access road with protected, separated bike lane and a median. This actually improves auto throughput, travel times, and emissions.
A 2 lane residential street can have restricted parking, narrower right of way, and wide rsidewalks. This naturally slows cars, making shared right of way safer for all.
A pedestrian zone can have moveable bollards, so that deliveries and mobility services can still access, whil keeping the street safe for people.
In all these cases, its not about bulldozing buildings, its about changing the way we use existing land.
How do you think you build a good, safe and dedicated bicycle infrastructure in a city which has not been designed for it?
The Netherlands did it. Just change construction requirements/guidelines, zoning, etc, get some biking activists, and wait 50 years. All of these problems have already been solved.
And to answer your specific question, I think they normally close off roads to regular cars but let delivery vehicles go through. In the short amount of time the vehicle is there, people just bike/walk around it. And they also make smaller delivery vehicles, including branded cargo bikes for when the situation fits.
No. Because infrastructure needs to be replaced every so often and after 50 years you’ll have gone through most of it. 50 years ago is around when the Netherlands switched from building car infrastructure to also building bike infrastructure.
Such a bike-only city just have to build heated underground tunnels for biking. If a New York subway style bike highway isn’t good enough., since wind chill and all that, instead build a city-wide roof over the first floor of all the buildings in the city to basically make that first floor a basement.
This is obviously an extreme answer, but if a city wanted to be bike-only, the only barrier is cost.
no city wants to do that, but they could. Stick Solar panels on the first floor roof and do the solar freaking roadways idea to heat up the tiles and avoid plowing (without needing to make them car-proof.)
I got myself all excited, I wish this was more than a modern fantasy.
Bike lanes cost less than car lanes. Bike-path-sized snowplows probably cost less than car-lane-sized ones, too.
Bike infrastructure only seems unaffordable for those who dishonestly see it as an add-on on top of car infrastructure, rather than correctly as a replacement for (some of) it.
Bike infrastructure only seems unaffordable for those who dishonestly see it as an add-on on top of car infrastructure, rather than correctly as a replacement for (some of) it.
Well sure, bike infrastructure is cheap if you take a road for cars, ban all cars, and declare it bike only.
But that’s so ridiculous it’s not worth mentioning.
Again, these problems have already been solved. Compress the snow on bike paths, and make a reliable public transport system for when its really too cold.
Biking in sub-zero temperatures when it isn’t even safe to be exposed outside for more than a few minutes (also happens here in the winter) is not a good idea either.
It’s funny how many of the same people making this sort of argument would happily go skiing in the exact same weather.
My family lives in a rural town of 1600, my wife works 800m from home and I commute 50km to the nearest city for work. Most days she walks to work for 7:30 or takes the ebike. I take our EV to arrive at 9am. My daughter takes the school bus , which arrives at my home at 8:17am.
There is a bus that comes to my town and goes to the city each day at 7AM and 8AM. Unfortunately, I cannot take the bus, or I would have to leave my daughter unattended. I don’t think I need to explain why taking my bike 120km a day round trip by the bike path won’t work.
By taking the EV, I make my life work and I save a good amount of CO2 in the process. My old hatchback would have burned 7.7l fuel to make the commute , or 7.7 * 19.6 lbs CO2 = 150lb CO2 per day. My EV gets 16kwh/100km generating between 3/4 lb and 5lb CO2 for the trip, based on local energy mix.
I think a mixture is the real solution. Public transport and human-powered transport such as bicycles should be encouraged as much as possible, but they cannot apply to every scenario. I have to drive about 10 miles down a 4-lane highway to an industrial park whose only access is that highway. Both my home and that industrial park are outside city limits. The nearest bus to me is 2 miles away and goes the opposite direction. Even with robust public transport in this area, it wouldn’t be economically justifiable to get a bus to go from anywhere near my semi-rural subdivision to that industrial park. Not enough people would ride that bus and it wouldn’t be safe to ride a bicycle there.
So I’m a case where I have to drive a car. I don’t like it. I wish I had another option. I would never drive again if I could, but right now I drive a car and the most eco-friendly car I could afford, which was a used Prius.
So people in this community can berate me if they want, but I’m pretty much out of options unless I do something drastic like quit my job and move. And “quit your job and move so you don’t need a car anymore” is not advice anyone should take. Maybe one day, I will be able to do that. I rode public transport all the time when I lived by the train in L.A. and I loved it. But I don’t live in L.A. anymore, I live in a small city in Indiana where public transport throughout the county, which is mostly farms outside city limits, is just not viable.
Your situation doesn’t reflect the majority’s situation, that’s what people need to understand, with better public transport it’s a very small minority that needs a car.
The meme makes a blanket statement forgetting about a big swath of rural people, falsely claiming that EVs don’t address climate change when the cold fact is that EVs do represent a way for people like me to contribute to the solution. A meme like this deserves a reminder like mine.
Or, I could make a small post so that one of our rural neighbours, driving an SUV, doesn’t read “EVs don’t solve climate change” and think to themselves “Hey, that’s true, may as well continue on with my SUV”.
In a way it does, if cars didn’t exist you would have found work closer to home and your environmental impact would be lower. Your situation exist because cars allow it to.
That’s a bad way to phrase it because it frames cars as technological innovation providing a benefit.
The reality, and the best way to phrase it, is different: his situation exists because massive government subsidies for car infrastructure allows it to. He’s not an enjoyer of modern convenience; he’s a welfare queen.
Thank god it’s not like that because I have a great job and a great life that was enabled by the freedom that my cars have given me. Y’all can get rid of your cars but I will always have one regardless of the law or society’s opinion. I’d build my own fucking car if you couldn’t buy one even.
Your situation doesn’t reflect the majority’s situation
In America this is an extremely common situation. Public transit is abysmal here. We need to build that up before we start removing car infrastructure.
Sure, you google me a snow clearing device that will clear plowed snow after a 2-foot snowfall away from a bike lane that abuts a bunch of parked cars on a narrow street and also doesn’t create a traffic hazard. Because that’s what we deal with in my town.
Yeah, you do see that bike lane is separated from the rest of the road by a concrete line so that plow can plow that area separately from the rest of the road, right?
Do you think maybe, just maybe, it’s possible that there isn’t a single solution for every city and town in the world and there are unique problems they can face which make things other cities can do untenable? Is that even a remote possibility? Or does it not apply to plowing snow?
First of all, cars have a much greater grip on the road in icy conditions. So they can handle things like black ice when riding a bicycle on it would be extremely dangerous.
But sure, every small city and town with harsh winters are beyond relevance.
Small cities and towns have a big problem solving things like black ice for cars. Hence the many accidents on days like that when people drive in those conditions. I know because I used to work for the local news station.
I thought I meant beyond relevance for urbanism, and by the way I mostly meant for this discussion about snow on bike lanes.
Guy who said “don’t put words in my mouth” literally 10 minutes ago
Small towns going bankrupt is a result of newer means of transportation concentrating centers of activity within a region.
If you can’t clean the ice for cars, cleaning it for bikes is cheaper. If you can’t do any, then don’t do any - you’ve got worse problems. Thus, irrelevant for this discussion.
You literally didn’t. You cut it off mid sentence.
It’s insane how you’ve moved the goalpost from “It’s impossible to clean snow off bike lanes” to “it’s impossible to clean snow off some bike lanes when the conditions of the bike lanes are very specific” to “it’s impossible to clean off bikelanes when the city is tiny and too broke to clean it off roads in the first place”
Guess what? Then don’t clean them. Discussion has been moved to a segment of the problem that is so small and uninteresting that and if you had been clear about your message in the first place, nobody would’ve needed to answer you
That’s another thing I never said. I never said impossible. And I have always been talking about where I live, not anywhere else. I made that very clear.
Neither do cars work well in those conditions.
If you clear and salt the bike paths in a timely manner, like we also expect for other roads, then bikes are a perfectly viable option even in winter.
EVs can also act as a battery for the home and a back up generator. A lot more useful than just a car. Now I know this sublulemmy is urbanist, but the sorts of people to buy a car don’t live in a city.
If you live in an area where bikes are viabl3/safe they are - provided you dont need to haul tools / groceries / other people and you’re not mobility impared. It sucks that so much of the worlds infrastructure was built to be as hostile as possible to any other form of transit.
Large tools, not tools in general. You can haul a tool belt, a battery skil saw, and a drill just fine on a bike, which is all you need for a lot of construction work. You could even haul a compressor and it’s accessories like that. I wouldn’t expect a 12ft ladder, or a diesel generator, but those are very large and very heavy, respectively, and also not generally needed.
groceries
Even if you do weekly shopping for a family of 6, you can do that by bike just fine. Cargo bikes and trailers are a thing. But we shouldn’t need to do weekly shopping trips, because the store should be a 5 minute walk away that you can just stop at anytime.
other people
Trailer is a thing. As are various passenger bikes
Cars itself are actually only a small part of climate change. The major part of it is form construction, planes, and electricity. We can fix electricity with sustainable energy, fixing planes is a lot harder as of now. Fixing construction seems impossible for now.
We’ll run out of time before we we hit zero. We are already too fast to break before the cliff. All we can hope for is a soft landing, and we need everything for that. Even nuclear energy (go 100% on nuclear!)
The largest sources of transportation greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 were light-duty trucks, which include sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks, and minivans (37%); medium- and heavy-duty trucks (23%); passenger cars (21%); commercial aircraft (7%); other aircraft (2%); pipelines (4%); ships and boats (3%); and rail (2%).
Driving accounts for a larger percentage of emissions than you’d think - something like 14% of emissions are gasoline alone.
Electric cars have about half the lifecycle emissions of gas cars, so that’s equivalent to a ~7% reduction in emissions - more if the grid goes solar.
That said, replacing suburban sprawl with traditional denser streetcar suburbs like you see in the Netherlands would be a much bigger reduction in emissions.
They have a lower emissions after a few years even with higher initial manufacturing emissions even in areas with coal as the source of power, just takes longer to recoup. youtu.be/6RhtiPefVzM?si=ythLgdv93D6zC3WM
They allow for government to control the means of electricity production that powers these vehicles
While not perfect it is a decent step to remove the individual citizen’s direct pollution and leave control In the hands of government. This is where the change needs to happen for manufacturing and other large scale polluters.
On the second part: That’s just because for some reason most governments don’t care that it would be much more profitable to everyone if state corporations took care of petrol exploitation instead of private companies that profit few investors…
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