- cross-posted to:
- electricvehicles@gearhead.town
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- electricvehicles@gearhead.town
- technology@lemmit.online
YouTube’s Loaded With EV Disinformation::When it comes to articles on a website like CleanTechnica, there are two kinds of articles. First, there are the … [continued]
To be fair EVs only solve the tail pipe emission problem of cars and not like the 50 others. It’s would be much better to focus on public transit and pedestrian and bike infrastructure, that solves more issues and is accessible to everyone.
Gotta start somewhere. At least I can say that I’m part of the solution and that I am not one of the negative nellies who don’t do squat because they cannot find the ONE solution that solves everything.
The transition from EVs to public transit, biking, etc has to come eventually, too. We can however already do that and places have successfully done so. Look at the Netherlands for example. EVs are in the way of transitioning to better public infrastructure and will only delay it.
Then start with vastly increasing the amount of bicycle Infrastructure so that people can safely use their bike to go to schools, work, home, buy groceries. Give subsidies to buy bikes for even less money than they cost anyway, increase taxes on shit cars like pick tricks that nobody needs in a city setting
Invest heavily in public transportation. Make busses actually useful, start making an actual rail infrastructure in the US instead of… Whatever that turtle crap is you have now.
Same for walking, which would require overhauling urbanisation laws, granted, but still, that would also make your cities actually nice to live in.
If you think that all is an impossibly expensive job then please be reminded that gasoline is heavily subsidized and bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure costs pennies on the dollar compared to car infrastructure.
Biggest issue is stopping the oil and car manufacturer lobbyists who will all stop all of this. Why have nice cities that make big money and recover your environment if thateans that a couple of rich guys will get less rich?
They also introduce their own share of issues like increased road wear due to weight and environmental costs from the mining of rare metals like cobalt and lithium.
With the fact that vehicle size is generally trending towards larger, at least stateside; we’re looking at a situation where those shiny electric pick up trucks that need a battery that’s four to eight times larger than a compacts or sedans battery are going to require further scaling of rare metal mining and are going to result in vehicles that blow way past the weight of anything our roads were designed to handle. Public transit is just far more sustainable. Trains can be hooked directly to a grid so no ridiculously heavy battery, buses carry the same number of people on a road that it would take… Let’s be generous… 30 cars, so even if they were using a cell larger than a pick up truck, their wear would be far lower than the 30 or so cars they could replace.
Of course the issue with America is we’ve got bigger fish to fry like boys who kiss boys and people who want to fuck without having kids.
The damage to roads from added weight is absolutely tiny, practically negligible. Even pickup trucks barely cause any damage. Semis do exponentially more damage.
Or both…?
infrastructure and public transit solve the same issue but infinitely better while EVs are accessible only for people with enough disposable income and are comparably very bad at helping with climate change so I’d rather focus on a more accessible solution that helps more.
In my country people buy used cars pretty much always because of cost and used EVs aren’t really a thing I have seen. There also aren’t many charging stations and local power is mostly produced from oil shale so EVs do squat to help with anything. Public transit on the other hand is easy to advocate for because it’s widely used and most people prefer the tram over car in my city already which is like the best form of transportation over short distances.
While public transit is great. It’s a lot more expensive to setup, and even more expensive to make convenient if the city wasn’t built with public transit in mind.
It’s just not a medium term solution for most north american cities, I do desperately hope that cities will start investing more in public transit, and encourage more dense housing, but realistically that is a 30-80 year timeframe. And that’s assuming 100s of municipal governments all get on board. The political lift here is also very large.
The reality right now in North America is, if you’re heavily advocating against electric vehicles, all you’re really doing is adding support to the oil and gas industry trying to stop the outright ban of ICE cars.
We need to do more public transit, and we need to stop using ICE vehicles.
Actually maintaining car infrastructure is quite a lot more expensive than setting up public transit. The issue is that the effects of climate change are here and will get worse faster and faster while EVs are a drop in the ocean as far as solutions are.
Sure, advocate for EVs if you want but don’t pretend they will have a meaningful effect with the environment unless you can replace every ICE vehicle globally and even then public transit would have a massively higher impact while easier and cheaper to implement.
The highest impact for climate change would be to force the 10 or so companies that produce like 70% of CO2 to not do that or just bomb their factories or something.
Which car infrastructure are you talking about in this case?
Roads and parking mostly
Roads don’t really go away with public transit, they might need less maintenance overall, but they still need to exist in some form, and roads lasting 10% longer doesn’t seem like a huge savings
Parking is mostly privately owned, so saving money on parking doesn’t really make more money available to invest in public transit.
Tram tracks last forever and don’t need roads. Also cars and trucks are responsible for like 90% of road damage, for example pedestrian roads last decades with zero maintenance. If cars and trucks got Thanos snapped the budget for road maintenance would be miniscule.
I get that. But I think it’s extremely important to not mix climate policies with ideology. You risk alienating a very large chunk of the population, especially in the US, who are ideologically against public transportation.
We need everyone to get onboard with the green transition. Also conservatives.
I’m not in the US so I’m not advocating for anything there as I have no power to do that. Here advocating for public transit over cars is pretty simple and accessible, also not alienating to any group I’m aware of. I’m just saying EVs are not very helpful in comparison to public transit.