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Anyone who's believed that the key to sustainable futures is simply swapping out ICE for electric motors simply is being wishful at best, willfully difficult at

• gameswithgo 8y ago
  Hour+ long commutes are also just terrible. Terrible to live through psychologically, they waste time with you sitting still and not moving so you get fat and weak, and they are dangerous.
  • village-idiot 8y ago
    You are absolutely correct, but there is a really weird addendum to this. There have been a bunch of studies trying to measure the relationship between commuting time and (subjective) quality of life. Most of them find exactly what you'd suspect: longer commutes reduce quality of life. The weird thing is that they found a small uptick at the absolute extreme edges of commuting, like in the 5+ hour a day range. It's still shittier than a 30 minute commute, but it was better than a 4 hour commute. Nobody really seems to know why this is, but it's there. Either way, I walk to work. There are few better ways to commute, IMHO.
    • KozmoNau7 8y ago
      >"Either way, I walk to work. There are few better ways to commute, IMHO." The bicycle is one of those ways. It's faster and significantly more efficient.
      • village-idiot 8y ago
        Bicycling also requires more concentration. I regularly read a book while commuting, which is nice. Personally, my commute would be too short with a bike. I like a good 20-30 minutes between home and work to clear my head and get in/out of the zone. But that's just me.
        • KozmoNau7 8y ago
          I could never read a book while walking, at the very most I'll listen to music, but I also wouldn't do that while biking. Personal limits of multitasking, I guess :-)
  • opencl 8y ago
    I think it depends a lot on the mode of transportation. An hour driving a car is really awful. An hour sitting in transit or a car someone else is driving is ok-ish because you can at least read a book or something. Though a lot of transit is standing room only which is again rather unpleasant. An hour of walking or cycling IMO is not bad if you have a desk job. Much more pleasant way to get exercise than going to a gym all the time, as many car commuters seem to do.
• adrianN 8y ago
  Other forms of electric transport, like scooters and electric bikes should be pushed more. Together with decent mass transit they solve the last mile problem quite nicely imho. But unfortunately the car lobby is extremely strong and doesn't want to lose its market.
  • jbob2000 8y ago
    There's this weird thing that happens in northern climates where all the bikers and scooter riders magically disappear sometime around October and don't reappear until sometime in April. I can't figure out why this happens, we should really aim to understand that before we push bikes and scooters on half the human population. I don't think it's the car lobby that causes this disappearance.
    • xapata 8y ago
      Not all. I just put on my balaklava and some knobby tires. It's not that bad with the right clothes. I wouldn't walk around in Boston winter without my face masks either.
      • csixty4 8y ago
        I'm genuinely curious: do you wear glasses? How do you keep them from getting fogged up/iced over when riding in the winter?
        • village-idiot 8y ago
          Gotta get a face mask with vent holes for your nose/mouth. That lets the moist air escape away from your eyes, reducing fog.
        • xapata 8y ago
          Contacts are essential. Even without my balaklava, my hat bothers my glasses, making them press into my ears. Also, my Asian nose doesn't hold glasses very well. Once while biking in the summer (with sweat dripping) they fell off in traffic. I was basically blind. It was terrifying. Thus, contacts.
• chrissnell 8y ago
  The ship sailed on low-density suburbs 60 years ago. We're past the point of return on those. Outside of San Francisco, Manhattan, and downtown Chicago, most people live in the 'burbs and that's not changing. We will be living with this housing stock for decades--if not centuries--to come. It's best to engineer around that reality, not to daydream of an Amsterdam-like utopia that will never happen for 99% of this country.
  • village-idiot 8y ago
    You are far too certain. 70 years ago a prognosticator wouldn't be considered insane to say "the ship sailed on cities 50 years ago, Americans live in downtown and that's not changing". These things do change, often quite quickly. Personally, I think the Boomers are in for a big shock when they try to sell their homes for a "fair" price, and discover that Millennials neither want nor can afford large suburban homes. Once that happens the market (and politics probably) are going to do some really freaky things.
    • brightball 8y ago
      > Millennials neither want nor can afford large suburban homes I see this often. Very few people want large homes when they are either single or don't have kids. As soon as you do have kids and they start to grow to an age where they want to play outside, having space to run, play sports, be away from traffic, have their own room, etc gets a lot higher on your priority list. You can also get a suburban home without it being "large" and still get a lot of space to go with it. People used to get "starter homes" and then periodically trade up if/when their incomes increased or they had some equity in the home. It seems like the biggest barrier to this today is that people want to go straight to the HGTV home. I can't tell you how many people I've known who, straight out of school, overextend to the most expensive house they can afford. If you want more house, for your money...that usually means buying farther away from density.
      • village-idiot 8y ago
        You act like Millenials don't already have children, when the oldest members of that cohort are 37.
• brightball 8y ago
  Another way to look at the problem: Locating offices unnecessarily in the middle of high-density cities creates long commutes.
  • liveoneggs 8y ago
    locating them in random suburban office parks is much worse, except for those in that particular 'burb.
    • bluGill 8y ago
      Even if you are in the suburb it is bad. They office park has no houses within walking distance. Sure technically you are in the same small city, but you may as well be 30 miles apart - either way you will drive to work. (it is possible to bike to work, but you are doing it for exercise or because you are some sort of "new age hippie" - it isn't practical)
      • mmirate 8y ago
        I wouldn't want to live in that kind of area, no matter how much I enjoy working in it; the land is far too valuable as office parks. Why are people willing to spend out their butts for just the right housing, when all they really need is a half-decent car?* *and perhaps a two-thirds-decent library of hair-raising music or enlightening podcasts
    • brightball 8y ago
      Is it? Because the traffic in the suburbs is usually nowhere near the level of traffic in the city. The commute time tends to be relative to the traffic density more than the distance. I drive to the same location, 15 miles away every day. Depending on the time of day and the traffic, the drive will take 15 minutes or 45 minutes. The commute problem is forcing all of those cars down those same roads at the same time. Locating offices outside of the middle of cities would largely correct the problem.
      • smileysteve 8y ago
• lr4444lr 8y ago
  There are problems with cars, but returning to the bicycle, an 18th century city technology, is regressive, not the way forward. The car was a great liberator from the congested and dirty density of the city which was once the luxury of only the rich to escape with their estates and private coaches. Make the suburbs more energy efficient, and figuring out an innovative and fairer way of financing roads is the progressive path.
  • btrettel 8y ago
    > returning to the bicycle, an 18th century city technology, is regressive, not the way forward Just because something is old does not mean it is a bad idea. By the way, bicycles were first developed in the 19th century (not 18th) and have been continuously improved since then. And motor vehicles are not much newer, anyway. The Benz Patent Motor Car was sold in the 1880s. For comparison, the most popular type of bike sold today, the "safety bike" became popular in the late 1880s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_bicycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_bicycle I've explained cycling to high-tech types as taking advantage of the literal nanotechnology the human body uses. Bikes make use of the human body much more than cars in my view.
    • lr4444lr 8y ago
      You're mistaking the movement per unit energy efficiency of the car vs. The bicycle as the only reason for preferring one over the other. There are a myriad of emergent benefits to people having affordable climate-controlled engined-vehicles with storage that has improved their lives dramatically.
      • btrettel 8y ago
        Reread my comment, as I don't know what you are referring to. I never said bikes are better in every way, or even more efficient. Actually, I think a well designed motor vehicle could easily beat a bike in efficiency, particularly for common diets, but it would be smaller like a bike. E.g., a motorcycle could be better. My argument was that old technologies aren't necessarily bad and that motor vehicles are nearly as old as bikes, so the age argument also applies to cars. I don't disagree that cars have benefits.
• martythemaniak 8y ago
  Think about this: How long is the new-to-trashed cycle for phones? for cars? for homes? The answers are, approximately: 4 years, 16 years and 100 years. The problem with your top-down utopian "we shall raze and rebuild our cities" rhetoric is that it always crashes against the massive inertia of the existing built-up landscape. No to mention that people genuinely like their houses, but we don't even need to bring that up.
  • village-idiot 8y ago
    Don’t put words in my mouth.
• Reedx 8y ago
  > Anyone who's believed that the key to sustainable futures is simply swapping out ICE for electric motors simply is being wishful at best, willfully difficult at worse. Hopefully people aren't literally thinking that, considering that cars are only one piece of the carbon problem. It's not even the biggest piece.
  • village-idiot 8y ago
    I would recommend you take a visit to the tesla motors subreddit.
• apathymannequin 8y ago
  Well, can I at least have an EV on my bicycle for commuting? To me the biggest challenge once cities get cars off the road is to deal with motorcycle traffic (assuming they're not in a city where cars were always secondary to motorcycles). That allows a wider range (distance from transit) of commuters to avoid fully-powered vehicles. Ideally I'd love to see more of these bicycle silos, both attached to transit hubs and in office environments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X4YPRAqXnc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X4YPRAqXnc They help solve the safety issues with leaving your bicycle somewhere. More traditional parking is great where space and trust allows, too (say, in a private office or behind a monitored door).
  • village-idiot 8y ago
    Oh yeah. EV bikes are awesome. Far more space efficient than cars (although less than buses), and producing very little extra road wear compared to regular bikes. I think there’s a quiet bike revolution going on right now, EV bikes went from exotic and home made to common practically overnight. I’m excited to see how this will change our society.