Designing a city to be hostile to cars takes more vehicles off the road than trying to push people into electrics. Less cars (of any type) in the city means less health hazards means billions saved means billions to use on climate change research. Please don’t forget that tires are the major polluting factor right now, not exhaust gasses. I strongly believe this is more effective than trying to slowly push people into electrics which will still pollute the air with microplastics and make a ton of noise when they race through the city. Lithium is also not particularly clean to mine, so I’d prefer it was used to make batteries for bikes and other similarly sized vehicles. The world does not have the mining and processing capacity to support converting everyone to an electric car.
I usually visit my closest city for one of two reasons: 1) I have some kind of appointment or 2) I know some who lives there. Right now I’m able to drive there and park on the street. What should my alternative be once the city is “hostile” to cars? Remember, I live 30+ minutes away by car and take a highway to get there.
I think co2 ghgs global warming is by far the biggest environmental catastrophe coming our way. So the most important factor will be how will it impact co2 emissions.
As I said, we should make alternatives to driving in cities as quickly as we can. But that will still take a while. What are you suggesting in the mean time? Not going places?
EVs are much better than gas for minimizing co2 emissions. I think we should encourage them as a transitional solution till we have trains and walkable or bikeable cities.
I think we should encourage them as a transitional solution till we have trains and walkable or bikeable cities.
This is my problem. I don’t think we’ll ever reach that point when we accept half-solutions. It wouldn’t take more than a single decade to uproot our city design if we had any ambition left, but alas.
Our disagreement is that I think the societal cost of cars is more than you think, not that I think electric cars are a bad transitional step. But I also think that we live under an economic model that will kick, fight and scream the whole time we try to uproot such a massive portion of it, being the oil industry. It’s possible we just can’t fix it at this point except by radical change. I don’t have ultimate solutions, I’m just wary of electric cars because lithium mining is just as bad as oil drilling from a different direction and electric cars will kill just as many kids in the street as combustion cars.
By all means make electric vehicles- just please not cars.
So should we not leave our homes for years? I don’t see what you’re proposing.
