9 ms·

1. individual cars are a dumb way to "fix" the environment, they're hyper resource intensive and have so many problems 2. the good way is to build mass transit

by 0x262d 8y ago

1. individual cars are a dumb way to "fix" the environment, they're hyper resource intensive and have so many problems 2. the good way is to build mass transit and radically change society, which is a political issue. tesla comes in a long tradition of sucking public funding into a private entity which cuts across that 3. additionally tesla propagandizes against the above 4. elon musk is a colossal dipshit so that is mostly why I criticize them.

ancorevard 8y ago
"2. the good way is to build mass transit and radically change society". Study transportation needs of people and you will discover that mass transit only fulfill some parts of people's mobility needs. Study: https://micromobility.io https://micromobility.io
- mhermher 8y ago
  And it's falling short of that even! The issue isn't what the optimal state is, it's the delta between here and there.
fucking_tragedy 8y ago
> 1. individual cars are a dumb way to "fix" the environment, they're hyper resource intensive and have so many problems This may have been a poor way to say it, but it is the truth. We will not buy or consume our way out of climate change or negative externalities that affect the environment. > 2. the good way is to build mass transit and radically change society, which is a political issue. tesla comes in a long tradition of sucking public funding into a private entity which cuts across that Again, a poor choice of words for an otherwise good point: if we want to see a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, we need to move away from the idea of ubiquitous transportation via personal vehicles.
- jppope 8y ago
  > "if we want to see a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, we need to move away from the idea of ubiquitous transportation via personal vehicles." Unfortunately, this is extremely difficult in the United States... we've spent 70+ years building our entire country around the personal vehicle. Save Boston, NYC, Philly, Baltimore, DC, Chicago, and perhaps SF, ALL of our cities require owning a car. Strategically Musk might actually be going the right way... by starting to get people to think about transit in a different way.
  - dereke 8y ago
    Maybe the infrastructure that is in place to support cars could pivot to public transport? We could replace some/all lanes on motorways/interstates with train tracks. Reduce roads in cities to one way and install trams in the other lanes.
    - eMSF 8y ago
      Railway fetishism is truly something I guess I'll never really understand. Trams are LOUD and annoying.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      Replacing interstates with rail doesn't work. For one thing, there is already rail running parallel to most of them, so there is no need for it. Moreover, the usage is different. A person lives in the suburbs, they drive five miles through their suburb, then get on the interstate for 10 miles, then drive to an office park 5 miles off the interstate. If you get rid of the interstate, what are they supposed to do? Drive 5 miles to the train, take the train 10 miles and then walk 5 miles? Buy a second car to use for the other leg of the commute? What you need is to relax the zoning/density restrictions in the city so that more people and businesses can afford to be there instead of in the suburbs. Then they can use the existing mass transit within the city, which unclogs the interstate for the people who can't, e.g. because one of their endpoints is outside the city for legitimate reasons or because they have to transport bulk material in addition to humans.
      - 8y ago
- LMYahooTFY 8y ago
  >We will not buy or consume our way out of climate change or negative externalities that affect the environment. I disagree. While our consumption habits merit a lot of discussion, we literally have to buy and consume our way out of climate change. We're not going to _stop_ buying and consuming, and we're not going to manage to reduce it enough to stop climate change without massive economic recession (read: massive human suffering). You can argue such suffering is overall less than what we will suffer due to catastrophic climate change, but that is not at all obvious.
  - fucking_tragedy 8y ago
    > we literally have to buy and consume our way out of climate change. This is like hoping that we can dig ourselves out of a hole that we already dug ourselves into. > We're not going to _stop_ buying and consuming, and we're not going to manage to reduce it enough to stop climate change without massive economic recession If we aren't going to forgo consumption, personal transportation as the only mode of transportation and a market that refuses to properly account for negative externalities, I feel that we should at least be honest about the situation instead of pretending that continuing the status quo will fix climate change and environmental destruction. Let's just be honest and say that we don't intend to change things, and embrace the fact that climate change might usher in destruction and human suffering on a large scale. That way we can at least address problems as they arise instead of believing in a fantasy where a solution will fall into our laps if we just buy the right cars.
    - maxsilver 8y ago
      > This is like hoping that we can dig ourselves out of a hole that we already dug ourselves into. Which is a good example, because that's literally how you get people out of a hole. You dig your self out -- you stop digging down, and start digging at a 45 degree angle upwards, so you and everyone behind you can safely walk out of that hole. That's what we need people to be doing -- continue consuming, but sideways instead of downwards, so their consumption helps fix the problem. > a market that refuses to properly account for negative externalities Then you should be thrilled with what Tesla (and all EVs) are doing. They are eliminating some major externalities. Other public transportation forms (like Buses and Trains) also have negative externalities that never accounted for. We don't shut them down, even though they have problems. We strive to improve them, just as we are doing for EVs. For example, the buses in my hometown today get 5 miles per gallon on gasoline. I drive a Volt, it gets around 100 miles per gallon. (Since it's mostly powered by wind energy, not gasoline). Ignoring construction costs, there needs to be at least 20 people on any given bus, before that bus is more energy efficient than a modern PHEV / pure EV vehicle in terms of fuel spent. In NYC, with the density they have, that's probably easily possible. In Michigan, we're nowhere near that density today, and none of us has the $200k-per-person cash necessary today to change that. But many people do have the $10k-per-person cash to replace gasoline cars with electric ones. That's a real impact people can actually make today.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > We will not buy or consume our way out of climate change or negative externalities that affect the environment. That is silly. You have something that causes climate change (coal, oil). It can be replaced by something that doesn't (electric cars, solar panels, nuclear power). Unless your plan is to stop having transportation and electricity, that means the solution requires us to buy things like electric vehicles, solar panels, nuclear reactors, etc. > if we want to see a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, we need to move away from the idea of ubiquitous transportation via personal vehicles. Mass transit requires density. You can't reduce emissions by running huge empty buses through low density areas. The transit problem is a real estate problem. You don't need more trains and buses, you need higher density near the existing trains and buses. That allows you to run one every 15 minutes instead of every hour and still have it full, which is what it takes to make it a viable replacement for a private car, and that is what makes it cost effective and affordable. But even that, which would reduce the number of private cars significantly, would never eliminate the need for them entirely. There are things (large farms, industrial facilities) that must or should be away from higher density areas, and the people who work there need some way to get there and back. And mass transit still doesn't work in those kinds of low density areas.
- abalone 8y ago
  I don’t think it’s productive to prosecute the electric cars vs mass transit issue like this. We need to get to carbon neutral within 12 years. If your plan requires radically changing society, including moving everyone who lives in vast swaths of the country into urban areas, then your plan will not meet that deadline, even with total commitment. To avoid climate catastrophe we need to embrace a multitude of solutions. I understand the frustration at hearing Musk criticize public transit. It’s triggering. But we are going to need sustainable personal vehicles for a number of use cases, even if we move as many people as we can to mass transit in a decade.
  - 0x262d 8y ago
    this is such a silly line of reasoning. you're saying we can only make the incredible deadline by changing things in a very moderate fashion, rather than a radical one? just like we've been doing to get to this point lol?
    - abalone 8y ago
      Okay, "not silly" person who's good at reasoning. Tell us how we move 221 million[1] people into mass transit serviceable urban areas in 12 years. I'll wait. [1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-ec...
nabnob 8y ago
Agreed. Consumerism is part of the problem. People don't want to think about the fact that we might have to accept a different standard of living in order to fight climate change.
- sridca 8y ago
  Yup. It is far easier to fight against meat eaters than give up your fancy car.
Symmetry 8y ago
I don't want say anything bad about mass transit for large cities where it makes sense. But you have to reach a certain economy of scale before trains become more efficient than cars. A train with just a couple of people uses far more power than a car does. We can do a lot to encourage people to live closer together by ending subsidies, removing zoning laws, etc. But in the end we still need farmers and other professions living spread out across the country. We can't achieve perfect urbanization. And given that electric cars are going to be a necessary part of getting to zero emissions.
tengbretson 8y ago
> the good way is to build mass transit and radically change society, which is a political issue. tesla comes in a long tradition of sucking public funding into a private entity which cuts across that I don't understand how people can simultaneously hold this belief and then act surprised when others criticize the "green movement" as just an excuse to control people. Modern personal transportation is one of the ultimate expressions of individual freedom. We're making it cleaner, we're reducing externalities, and still environmentalists want to herd people onto busses and trains. How about no?
- com2kid 8y ago
  > I don't understand how people can simultaneously hold this belief and then act surprised when others criticize the "green movement" as just an excuse to control people. Massive subsidies to the entire car industry, from cheap roads to cheap gas, are a form of nudging society towards certain behaviors. Building reliable mass transit, proper safe isolated bike lanes, and removing subsidies that are in place, are another form of societal nudging. As an example, wide city streets are a form of subsidy, the city loses money on those streets, a 4 lane road in a downtown region of a major metro is a huge lost opportunity cost! But a combination of political and societal factors came together to cause cities sacrifice buildings for for car lanes. > Modern personal transportation is one of the ultimate expressions of individual freedom. I personally enjoy driving, but when visiting cities with real mass transit (Tokyo, London, etc), I feel a lot more free to travel within the city. No being stuck in traffic, transit times are a lot more reliable than driving, no worrying about finding parking and then walking to my destination, and no worries about not being able to find parking at all! And in cities with "almost there" mass transit, such as Boston, so long as you are on the transit lines, everything is incredibly nice. Honestly I think Bostonians complain about their transit system too much, whenever I visit Boston I am very pleased with MBTA's service! > We're making it cleaner, we're reducing externalities, and still environmentalists want to herd people onto busses and trains. Individual transit has huge external costs. From giant parking lots everywhere, to the fact that it just doesn't scale[1]. Cities cannot grow beyond a certain size/density relying on individual transit. Self driving car's don't solve the density problem, while self driving taxis kind of solve the parking lot problem[2]. For that matter, an underground parking space in a condo in a metro area costs around $30k to build! Want two spaces for a family? That is $60k added to the purchase price. Housing that isn't incredibly expensive? Not going to happen if there is a $60k tax added to the price of every new housing unit in a city![3] No one is arguing to build out mass transit in every single small town, but for the majority of the population that lives in metro areas, mass transit makes an enormous amount of sense. [1]https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif [2]Parking lots have lower tax rates, being unimproved land, than land with proper building on them. This reduction in revenue, for land in the most valuable part of the city, has obvious large $ costs. Of course cities can get around this by special taxes for parking lots to discourage them, but without proper mass transit in place, people still need to drive into a cities dense downtown core, and fees just get passed along to citizens. It becomes more efficient to just build mass transit, and put in proper building rather than concrete flatlands! Mass transit is a large up-front cost with rather low on-going maintenance costs compared to road ways (unless you are NYC and manage to defer maintenance for several decades...), but the property taxes from the additional land that is freed up is an ongoing revenue source that will last for centuries. Unfortunately few politicians care about "well the city will be super vibrant for the rest of time". [3]Obviously only applicable once a city grows beyond a certain size and starts building medium and high density housing.

by 0x262d 8y ago

ancorevard 8y ago

"2. the good way is to build mass transit and radically change society". Study transportation needs of people and you will discover that mass transit only fulfill some parts of people's mobility needs. Study: https://micromobility.io https://micromobility.io

mhermher 8y ago
And it's falling short of that even! The issue isn't what the optimal state is, it's the delta between here and there.

fucking_tragedy 8y ago

> 1. individual cars are a dumb way to "fix" the environment, they're hyper resource intensive and have so many problems This may have been a poor way to say it, but it is the truth. We will not buy or consume our way out of climate change or negative externalities that affect the environment. > 2. the good way is to build mass transit and radically change society, which is a political issue. tesla comes in a long tradition of sucking public funding into a private entity which cuts across that Again, a poor choice of words for an otherwise good point: if we want to see a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, we need to move away from the idea of ubiquitous transportation via personal vehicles.

jppope 8y ago
> "if we want to see a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, we need to move away from the idea of ubiquitous transportation via personal vehicles." Unfortunately, this is extremely difficult in the United States... we've spent 70+ years building our entire country around the personal vehicle. Save Boston, NYC, Philly, Baltimore, DC, Chicago, and perhaps SF, ALL of our cities require owning a car. Strategically Musk might actually be going the right way... by starting to get people to think about transit in a different way.
- dereke 8y ago
  Maybe the infrastructure that is in place to support cars could pivot to public transport? We could replace some/all lanes on motorways/interstates with train tracks. Reduce roads in cities to one way and install trams in the other lanes.
  - eMSF 8y ago
    Railway fetishism is truly something I guess I'll never really understand. Trams are LOUD and annoying.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    Replacing interstates with rail doesn't work. For one thing, there is already rail running parallel to most of them, so there is no need for it. Moreover, the usage is different. A person lives in the suburbs, they drive five miles through their suburb, then get on the interstate for 10 miles, then drive to an office park 5 miles off the interstate. If you get rid of the interstate, what are they supposed to do? Drive 5 miles to the train, take the train 10 miles and then walk 5 miles? Buy a second car to use for the other leg of the commute? What you need is to relax the zoning/density restrictions in the city so that more people and businesses can afford to be there instead of in the suburbs. Then they can use the existing mass transit within the city, which unclogs the interstate for the people who can't, e.g. because one of their endpoints is outside the city for legitimate reasons or because they have to transport bulk material in addition to humans.
    - 8y ago
LMYahooTFY 8y ago
>We will not buy or consume our way out of climate change or negative externalities that affect the environment. I disagree. While our consumption habits merit a lot of discussion, we literally have to buy and consume our way out of climate change. We're not going to _stop_ buying and consuming, and we're not going to manage to reduce it enough to stop climate change without massive economic recession (read: massive human suffering). You can argue such suffering is overall less than what we will suffer due to catastrophic climate change, but that is not at all obvious.
- fucking_tragedy 8y ago
  > we literally have to buy and consume our way out of climate change. This is like hoping that we can dig ourselves out of a hole that we already dug ourselves into. > We're not going to _stop_ buying and consuming, and we're not going to manage to reduce it enough to stop climate change without massive economic recession If we aren't going to forgo consumption, personal transportation as the only mode of transportation and a market that refuses to properly account for negative externalities, I feel that we should at least be honest about the situation instead of pretending that continuing the status quo will fix climate change and environmental destruction. Let's just be honest and say that we don't intend to change things, and embrace the fact that climate change might usher in destruction and human suffering on a large scale. That way we can at least address problems as they arise instead of believing in a fantasy where a solution will fall into our laps if we just buy the right cars.
  - maxsilver 8y ago
    > This is like hoping that we can dig ourselves out of a hole that we already dug ourselves into. Which is a good example, because that's literally how you get people out of a hole. You dig your self out -- you stop digging down, and start digging at a 45 degree angle upwards, so you and everyone behind you can safely walk out of that hole. That's what we need people to be doing -- continue consuming, but sideways instead of downwards, so their consumption helps fix the problem. > a market that refuses to properly account for negative externalities Then you should be thrilled with what Tesla (and all EVs) are doing. They are eliminating some major externalities. Other public transportation forms (like Buses and Trains) also have negative externalities that never accounted for. We don't shut them down, even though they have problems. We strive to improve them, just as we are doing for EVs. For example, the buses in my hometown today get 5 miles per gallon on gasoline. I drive a Volt, it gets around 100 miles per gallon. (Since it's mostly powered by wind energy, not gasoline). Ignoring construction costs, there needs to be at least 20 people on any given bus, before that bus is more energy efficient than a modern PHEV / pure EV vehicle in terms of fuel spent. In NYC, with the density they have, that's probably easily possible. In Michigan, we're nowhere near that density today, and none of us has the $200k-per-person cash necessary today to change that. But many people do have the $10k-per-person cash to replace gasoline cars with electric ones. That's a real impact people can actually make today.
AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> We will not buy or consume our way out of climate change or negative externalities that affect the environment. That is silly. You have something that causes climate change (coal, oil). It can be replaced by something that doesn't (electric cars, solar panels, nuclear power). Unless your plan is to stop having transportation and electricity, that means the solution requires us to buy things like electric vehicles, solar panels, nuclear reactors, etc. > if we want to see a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, we need to move away from the idea of ubiquitous transportation via personal vehicles. Mass transit requires density. You can't reduce emissions by running huge empty buses through low density areas. The transit problem is a real estate problem. You don't need more trains and buses, you need higher density near the existing trains and buses. That allows you to run one every 15 minutes instead of every hour and still have it full, which is what it takes to make it a viable replacement for a private car, and that is what makes it cost effective and affordable. But even that, which would reduce the number of private cars significantly, would never eliminate the need for them entirely. There are things (large farms, industrial facilities) that must or should be away from higher density areas, and the people who work there need some way to get there and back. And mass transit still doesn't work in those kinds of low density areas.
abalone 8y ago
I don’t think it’s productive to prosecute the electric cars vs mass transit issue like this. We need to get to carbon neutral within 12 years. If your plan requires radically changing society, including moving everyone who lives in vast swaths of the country into urban areas, then your plan will not meet that deadline, even with total commitment. To avoid climate catastrophe we need to embrace a multitude of solutions. I understand the frustration at hearing Musk criticize public transit. It’s triggering. But we are going to need sustainable personal vehicles for a number of use cases, even if we move as many people as we can to mass transit in a decade.
- 0x262d 8y ago
  this is such a silly line of reasoning. you're saying we can only make the incredible deadline by changing things in a very moderate fashion, rather than a radical one? just like we've been doing to get to this point lol?
  - abalone 8y ago
    Okay, "not silly" person who's good at reasoning. Tell us how we move 221 million[1] people into mass transit serviceable urban areas in 12 years. I'll wait. [1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-ec...

nabnob 8y ago

Agreed. Consumerism is part of the problem. People don't want to think about the fact that we might have to accept a different standard of living in order to fight climate change.

sridca 8y ago
Yup. It is far easier to fight against meat eaters than give up your fancy car.

Symmetry 8y ago

I don't want say anything bad about mass transit for large cities where it makes sense. But you have to reach a certain economy of scale before trains become more efficient than cars. A train with just a couple of people uses far more power than a car does. We can do a lot to encourage people to live closer together by ending subsidies, removing zoning laws, etc. But in the end we still need farmers and other professions living spread out across the country. We can't achieve perfect urbanization. And given that electric cars are going to be a necessary part of getting to zero emissions.

tengbretson 8y ago

> the good way is to build mass transit and radically change society, which is a political issue. tesla comes in a long tradition of sucking public funding into a private entity which cuts across that I don't understand how people can simultaneously hold this belief and then act surprised when others criticize the "green movement" as just an excuse to control people. Modern personal transportation is one of the ultimate expressions of individual freedom. We're making it cleaner, we're reducing externalities, and still environmentalists want to herd people onto busses and trains. How about no?

com2kid 8y ago
> I don't understand how people can simultaneously hold this belief and then act surprised when others criticize the "green movement" as just an excuse to control people. Massive subsidies to the entire car industry, from cheap roads to cheap gas, are a form of nudging society towards certain behaviors. Building reliable mass transit, proper safe isolated bike lanes, and removing subsidies that are in place, are another form of societal nudging. As an example, wide city streets are a form of subsidy, the city loses money on those streets, a 4 lane road in a downtown region of a major metro is a huge lost opportunity cost! But a combination of political and societal factors came together to cause cities sacrifice buildings for for car lanes. > Modern personal transportation is one of the ultimate expressions of individual freedom. I personally enjoy driving, but when visiting cities with real mass transit (Tokyo, London, etc), I feel a lot more free to travel within the city. No being stuck in traffic, transit times are a lot more reliable than driving, no worrying about finding parking and then walking to my destination, and no worries about not being able to find parking at all! And in cities with "almost there" mass transit, such as Boston, so long as you are on the transit lines, everything is incredibly nice. Honestly I think Bostonians complain about their transit system too much, whenever I visit Boston I am very pleased with MBTA's service! > We're making it cleaner, we're reducing externalities, and still environmentalists want to herd people onto busses and trains. Individual transit has huge external costs. From giant parking lots everywhere, to the fact that it just doesn't scale[1]. Cities cannot grow beyond a certain size/density relying on individual transit. Self driving car's don't solve the density problem, while self driving taxis kind of solve the parking lot problem[2]. For that matter, an underground parking space in a condo in a metro area costs around $30k to build! Want two spaces for a family? That is $60k added to the purchase price. Housing that isn't incredibly expensive? Not going to happen if there is a $60k tax added to the price of every new housing unit in a city![3] No one is arguing to build out mass transit in every single small town, but for the majority of the population that lives in metro areas, mass transit makes an enormous amount of sense. [1]https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif [2]Parking lots have lower tax rates, being unimproved land, than land with proper building on them. This reduction in revenue, for land in the most valuable part of the city, has obvious large $ costs. Of course cities can get around this by special taxes for parking lots to discourage them, but without proper mass transit in place, people still need to drive into a cities dense downtown core, and fees just get passed along to citizens. It becomes more efficient to just build mass transit, and put in proper building rather than concrete flatlands! Mass transit is a large up-front cost with rather low on-going maintenance costs compared to road ways (unless you are NYC and manage to defer maintenance for several decades...), but the property taxes from the additional land that is freed up is an ongoing revenue source that will last for centuries. Unfortunately few politicians care about "well the city will be super vibrant for the rest of time". [3]Obviously only applicable once a city grows beyond a certain size and starts building medium and high density housing.