12 ms·

Yet another reason the real answer to the climate crisis isn't EVs - it's public transit, bicycles, e-bikes, scooters, e-scooters, walking, etc. All these othe

by wffurr 7y ago

Yet another reason the real answer to the climate crisis isn't EVs - it's public transit, bicycles, e-bikes, scooters, e-scooters, walking, etc. All these other modes are much lower impact on the environment than purchasing and operating an EV, much less an ICE.

wffurr 7y ago
Or carbon-neutral liquid fuels for use cases where you absolutely need an ICE-type vehicle with 300+ mile range. e.g. synthetic gasoline or biofuels. Unfortunately, those fuels really need a carbon tax to be competitive with fossil fuels.
ummonk 7y ago
Plenty of travel (both commutes and long distance travel) which is too lengthy for bicycles / scooters, but doesn't have public transit servicing it.
- wffurr 7y ago
  So build the transit. It's cheaper than highways and doubly so when you factor in the private vehicle cost borne by users of those highways.
  - ummonk 7y ago
    Electric rail transit is significantly more expensive than highways, and operational costs are really high if you're trying to offer frequent service on less trafficked routes. Public transit is cost effective for urban cores and commuter rail routes to those urban cores, but everywhere else it's simply not economical.
- ysavir 7y ago
  I think that's GP's point: Instead of investing in EVs, we should be expanding public transport to reduce the dependencies on personal vehicles in the first place.
  - chc 7y ago
    Who is "we"? I don't know about where you are, but where I live, there is tons of public transport, with more being developed all the time, but nobody wants to use it because the design of the area is fundamentally unsuited to mass transit. If we spent 1/10 the time and money making infrastructure for EVs, everyone would be able to have one already, but we don't. We keep trying and failing to make public transit work.
    - ysavir 7y ago
      Okay, fine, we should build out public transport and start designing city and suburban features around public transport. Is that satisfactory?
- notJim 7y ago
  A lot of the reason for those long commutes is that housing in dense, urban areas served by public transit is too expensive. Affordable housing is a climate change issue.
whatshisface 7y ago
You have to add "redesigned cities" to that list. Electric vehicles are almost as much a patch for ICE cities as they are a replacement for internal combustion.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  I don't think most actual cities would need to be wholesale redesigned; plenty of urban planners have proposed plenty of incremental ways to successfully re-tool cities to favor humans over automobiles. And it has successfully happened in the past - see Amsterdam, for example, or (admittedly to a lesser extent) Montréal.
  - dylan604 7y ago
    I would love to see a city in the Western parts of the US accomplish this mainly because of how difficult of a task it would be. The majority of people live >15 miles from downtown areas. Mass transpo can only be generously described as an after thought. I've played SimCity, and if you did not place your subway/train/bus stops efficiently, the citizens did not use them. That plays out in real life as well, except it is much more difficult in real life to just break out the bulldozer to re-engineer the city to make it more mass transpo friendly.
- notJim 7y ago
  "Simple" things like good bike lanes and traffic calming enable cities to redesign gradually, and of course this is largely already happening (perhaps too slowly) in many cities.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- nextos 7y ago
  Some cities in mainland Europe are like this already. They make cars unnecessary. Even bikes, as you can walk everywhere. I'm talking about midsized cities (100-300k inhabitants) that are really compact thanks to 4-8 levels in every apartment block and ubiquitous use of lifts. Lifts are the disruptive technology. They make energetically efficient cities possible and cheap. I also find these cities much more nice to live in. Nice parks, avenues and shopping streets. I guess they are the heirs of the Hellenic tradition of valuing meeting squares a lot. In contrast, as much as I like other aspects of Anglo-Saxon societies, their terraced or detached house model is energetically unsustainable, and yields both liveless suburbs and downtowns.
dtwest 7y ago
That doesn't work in many low density areas (prime example is American suburbia). So your answer for those people is to make them move to a more dense area that can support such solutions. Which isn't a bad idea, but it's a much harder thing to accomplish.
- kennywinker 7y ago
  Ebike/scoot to transit hub, trains to commercial areas. It’s not rocket science.
  - flyingfences 7y ago
    Bikes and scooters are great (provided there are safe riding lanes and trails) until there's any weather. If I have to show up at work looking presentable then biking through a downpour simply isn't an option. If there's any sort of snow or ice on the ground then biking simply isn't an option.
    - dannyking 7y ago
      Yes. You also need to factor in things like having young kids. Before I had them taking an ebike to a train would make perfect sense. Now though, without a car it would be incredibly difficult to get them to daycare and make it to work on time without waking up before Dawn.
      - wffurr 7y ago
        You can't put the kids on the ebike to daycare? Seems like that would be faster and easier than dealing with a car. Just wait until you start in on the total mess that is school drop-off when every parent decides they have to drive their kid to school. Much faster to breeze past the stopped traffic on a bicycle, unstrap the kids and send them on their way, and bike to the train.
        mises 7y ago
gxqoz 7y ago
Interesting article from CityLab on why plugging public transit EVs into a city can be more challenging and expensive than originally planned: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/06/electric-bus-china-grid-ev-charging-infrastructure-battery/591655/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/06/electric-bus-... "That’s what Philadelphia discovered when it decided to expand its existing fleet of e-buses with newer models—ones that featured bigger batteries. The city failed to recognize in the early planning process that it would be prohibitively expensive to acquire land in its busy downtown area for charging stations along the bus routes. So they decided to install all the charging infrastructure in the bus depots."
- wffurr 7y ago
  The MBTA found that CNG buses had the lowest lifecycle cost and cost per greenhouse gas reduction. Diesel-electric hybrids have maintenance issues, and battery electric and hydrogen buses have significant capital costs which makes it difficult to realize the significantly lower operational costs. https://www.abettercity.org/docs/Alternative%20Propulsion%20Systems%20Final.pdf https://www.abettercity.org/docs/Alternative%20Propulsion%20... However, even pure diesel buses are much more efficient at moving people than single-occupancy vehicles. It's also worthwhile to note that a real plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions would necessarily include substantial capital outlays: not just bus charging infrastructure but grade-separated rail, dedicated busways, bus rapid transit, cycle and scooter infrastructure, etc. etc. Not to mention all the other climate adaptions that need to happen at an infrastructure level.
golover721 7y ago
It’s never going to be a one size fits all solution. While all the things you mention work for “some” people, an EV is the best option for “some” people.
- wffurr 7y ago
  Yeah, which is why it's such a huge problem to jam cars everywhere, even places they don't belong like city centers.
- m463 7y ago
  Like old people, or people who don't want to fall down and break a wrist or hip. (and then there's what elon musk says -- all lease return model 3's will be added to the tesla automonous taxi network)
steelframe 7y ago
> Yet another reason the real answer to the climate crisis isn't EVs If our objective is to significantly reduce carbon emissions from people moving from point 'A' to point 'B', fully electric vehicles are a red herring solution. It's more realistic and cheaper to focus on plug-in hybrids. That way you can achieve 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from driving 4-wheeled vehicles without requiring new infrastructure or requiring people to drastically change their habits. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/14/reducing-carbon-emissions-hybrid-vs-plug-in-hybrid-vs-battery-electric/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/14/reducing-carbon-emissio...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
bin0 7y ago
And yet, public transportation is not the same. Americans love their cars because we are a very independent people who appreciate the ability to go where we want, when we want. An EV could at least conceivably be a replacement, though that will be difficult until they can charge in a time comparable to that of a gas station fueling and go as long or longer. I don't want to have to plan around some schedule set by a committee. Issue number two: other people. Public transportation is not as nice as a car because you are not insulated from others. I can run my AC nice and high and listen to a pod cast in peace and quiet in my car, even if I've got to deal with jostling cars on the outside. In a train/bus/etc, you never know what you'll get. Half the time there's some one with music blasting, or cussing loudly. The other half they guy next to me smells awful or takes two seats because he's a land whale. If by some miracle neither of those things is true, all the seats are taken. Public transportation sucks, I like my car, and see no personal reason to switch to a less-comfortable and less-available form of transportation for the sake of some one else's political win.
- m463 7y ago
  Public transportation takes a lot of time. It doesn't necessarily lead to an efficient workforce. The hour of commute time saved by driving could probably be translated into percentage points of GNP for a country.
  - bin0 7y ago
    I'm not sure how any of this contradicts my comment. Or were you agreeing?
    - m463 7y ago
      I was agreeing.
  - esoterica 7y ago
    If you live somewhere with good public transportation, it is much, much faster than driving. Trains don’t have to sit in traffic.
- 7y ago
stevenhubertron 7y ago
Agree. I have an ebike and commute 8 miles each way. It's been fantastic and I arrive home in the afternoon feeling fresh despite it being 95F out.
baron816 7y ago
Hopefully (from a convenience standpoint) driverless will be the solution. Could still be zero emissions. Hard to imagine half the country migrating to denser areas within 30 years.
zimprop 7y ago
I 100% agree, not only are they much lower impact on the environment but from an implementation perspective are far simpler. I find it kind of funny that people talk about the future of travel and transit being automated electric cars that can pick one person up and take them to another predetermined place without the passenger's intervention. I immediately think it kinda sounds like a bus or a train. I think we have gotten into the habit of falling so in love with convoluted high tech solutions that we overlook the most basic and straightforward answers to these deep problems
m463 7y ago
Actually, the switch from incandescent to LED street lights could easily smooth this over. The old incandescent street and traffic lights were frequently hundreds of watts, on long chains over large distances. This can be repurposed to car charging with little in the way of power delivery redesign.
ColanR 7y ago
It's been entertaining to read the discussions (below) about how to make this practical. So far, it looks like the only way to make this work is to a) live in a city, or rebuild your suburbia into a city, and b) construct your entire life around riding that bike - choose a job with a tolerant boss, spend extra hours every day showering and changing clothes after biking, etc. I'd rather drive an air-conditioned car, sit in traffic for that hour or two, and enjoy my private backyard (however small it may be).
- zanny 7y ago
  Instead of constructing your life around a bike you construct it around a car. You can't commute to work any other way, if it breaks down you are bound to mostly Uber as a backup strategy to get anywhere. Except those car-centric environments you live and work in are a more effective gate to keep the poor out than the grandest gated community. Almost no where else on the planet is the idea of a city being a tiny urban core surrounded by hundreds of miles of single family houses in spiraling one lane streets of sprawl the norm. Its a purely American fixation on centering all human activity around cars. And for your benefit, even - the world would be alight in a raging inferno if we ever tried to globally house everyone in quarter acre single family houses with 4 hour single-occupancy car commutes every day.
  - baggy_trough 7y ago
    It's more accurate to say that life has been optimized for convenience and net happiness, and that ain't a bike.
  - ColanR 7y ago
    > construct it around a car I don't, actually - it's that a car is far more useful than a bike. I drive 25 minutes to work; I haul (5 bike-ride-loads of) groceries several miles to my house; I visit friends anywhere from 1-5 hours away; I casually drive into the city and back. Even if I felt like riding 10 miles each way, rain or shine, or using public transit, it takes so much less time to drive my car, and I have to either find multiple clever solutions to each of the other activities I use the car for, or just go without. My car gives me freedom from limitations; bicycle dependency only adds to them. To use a bike instead of a car, I have to fundamentally adjust my life, in every way for the worse.
ip26 7y ago
I bicycle, ride buses & trains, I have an e-bike and I love it. But realistically we have between ten and thirty years to fix all this. That's not enough time to reinvent the entire world from the ground up, so in addition to the technologies you list I am also hopeful for EVs, synthetic fuel, and so forth.

by wffurr 7y ago

wffurr 7y ago

Or carbon-neutral liquid fuels for use cases where you absolutely need an ICE-type vehicle with 300+ mile range. e.g. synthetic gasoline or biofuels. Unfortunately, those fuels really need a carbon tax to be competitive with fossil fuels.

ummonk 7y ago

Plenty of travel (both commutes and long distance travel) which is too lengthy for bicycles / scooters, but doesn't have public transit servicing it.

wffurr 7y ago
So build the transit. It's cheaper than highways and doubly so when you factor in the private vehicle cost borne by users of those highways.
- ummonk 7y ago
  Electric rail transit is significantly more expensive than highways, and operational costs are really high if you're trying to offer frequent service on less trafficked routes. Public transit is cost effective for urban cores and commuter rail routes to those urban cores, but everywhere else it's simply not economical.
ysavir 7y ago
I think that's GP's point: Instead of investing in EVs, we should be expanding public transport to reduce the dependencies on personal vehicles in the first place.
- chc 7y ago
  Who is "we"? I don't know about where you are, but where I live, there is tons of public transport, with more being developed all the time, but nobody wants to use it because the design of the area is fundamentally unsuited to mass transit. If we spent 1/10 the time and money making infrastructure for EVs, everyone would be able to have one already, but we don't. We keep trying and failing to make public transit work.
  - ysavir 7y ago
    Okay, fine, we should build out public transport and start designing city and suburban features around public transport. Is that satisfactory?
notJim 7y ago
A lot of the reason for those long commutes is that housing in dense, urban areas served by public transit is too expensive. Affordable housing is a climate change issue.

whatshisface 7y ago

You have to add "redesigned cities" to that list. Electric vehicles are almost as much a patch for ICE cities as they are a replacement for internal combustion.

mumblemumble 7y ago
I don't think most actual cities would need to be wholesale redesigned; plenty of urban planners have proposed plenty of incremental ways to successfully re-tool cities to favor humans over automobiles. And it has successfully happened in the past - see Amsterdam, for example, or (admittedly to a lesser extent) Montréal.
- dylan604 7y ago
  I would love to see a city in the Western parts of the US accomplish this mainly because of how difficult of a task it would be. The majority of people live >15 miles from downtown areas. Mass transpo can only be generously described as an after thought. I've played SimCity, and if you did not place your subway/train/bus stops efficiently, the citizens did not use them. That plays out in real life as well, except it is much more difficult in real life to just break out the bulldozer to re-engineer the city to make it more mass transpo friendly.
notJim 7y ago
"Simple" things like good bike lanes and traffic calming enable cities to redesign gradually, and of course this is largely already happening (perhaps too slowly) in many cities.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
nextos 7y ago
Some cities in mainland Europe are like this already. They make cars unnecessary. Even bikes, as you can walk everywhere. I'm talking about midsized cities (100-300k inhabitants) that are really compact thanks to 4-8 levels in every apartment block and ubiquitous use of lifts. Lifts are the disruptive technology. They make energetically efficient cities possible and cheap. I also find these cities much more nice to live in. Nice parks, avenues and shopping streets. I guess they are the heirs of the Hellenic tradition of valuing meeting squares a lot. In contrast, as much as I like other aspects of Anglo-Saxon societies, their terraced or detached house model is energetically unsustainable, and yields both liveless suburbs and downtowns.

dtwest 7y ago

That doesn't work in many low density areas (prime example is American suburbia). So your answer for those people is to make them move to a more dense area that can support such solutions. Which isn't a bad idea, but it's a much harder thing to accomplish.

kennywinker 7y ago
Ebike/scoot to transit hub, trains to commercial areas. It’s not rocket science.
- flyingfences 7y ago
  Bikes and scooters are great (provided there are safe riding lanes and trails) until there's any weather. If I have to show up at work looking presentable then biking through a downpour simply isn't an option. If there's any sort of snow or ice on the ground then biking simply isn't an option.
  - dannyking 7y ago
    Yes. You also need to factor in things like having young kids. Before I had them taking an ebike to a train would make perfect sense. Now though, without a car it would be incredibly difficult to get them to daycare and make it to work on time without waking up before Dawn.
    - wffurr 7y ago
      You can't put the kids on the ebike to daycare? Seems like that would be faster and easier than dealing with a car. Just wait until you start in on the total mess that is school drop-off when every parent decides they have to drive their kid to school. Much faster to breeze past the stopped traffic on a bicycle, unstrap the kids and send them on their way, and bike to the train.
      - mises 7y ago

gxqoz 7y ago

Interesting article from CityLab on why plugging public transit EVs into a city can be more challenging and expensive than originally planned: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/06/electric-bus-china-grid-ev-charging-infrastructure-battery/591655/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/06/electric-bus-... "That’s what Philadelphia discovered when it decided to expand its existing fleet of e-buses with newer models—ones that featured bigger batteries. The city failed to recognize in the early planning process that it would be prohibitively expensive to acquire land in its busy downtown area for charging stations along the bus routes. So they decided to install all the charging infrastructure in the bus depots."

wffurr 7y ago
The MBTA found that CNG buses had the lowest lifecycle cost and cost per greenhouse gas reduction. Diesel-electric hybrids have maintenance issues, and battery electric and hydrogen buses have significant capital costs which makes it difficult to realize the significantly lower operational costs. https://www.abettercity.org/docs/Alternative%20Propulsion%20Systems%20Final.pdf https://www.abettercity.org/docs/Alternative%20Propulsion%20... However, even pure diesel buses are much more efficient at moving people than single-occupancy vehicles. It's also worthwhile to note that a real plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions would necessarily include substantial capital outlays: not just bus charging infrastructure but grade-separated rail, dedicated busways, bus rapid transit, cycle and scooter infrastructure, etc. etc. Not to mention all the other climate adaptions that need to happen at an infrastructure level.

golover721 7y ago

It’s never going to be a one size fits all solution. While all the things you mention work for “some” people, an EV is the best option for “some” people.

wffurr 7y ago
Yeah, which is why it's such a huge problem to jam cars everywhere, even places they don't belong like city centers.
m463 7y ago
Like old people, or people who don't want to fall down and break a wrist or hip. (and then there's what elon musk says -- all lease return model 3's will be added to the tesla automonous taxi network)

steelframe 7y ago

> Yet another reason the real answer to the climate crisis isn't EVs If our objective is to significantly reduce carbon emissions from people moving from point 'A' to point 'B', fully electric vehicles are a red herring solution. It's more realistic and cheaper to focus on plug-in hybrids. That way you can achieve 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from driving 4-wheeled vehicles without requiring new infrastructure or requiring people to drastically change their habits. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/14/reducing-carbon-emissions-hybrid-vs-plug-in-hybrid-vs-battery-electric/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/14/reducing-carbon-emissio...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

bin0 7y ago

And yet, public transportation is not the same. Americans love their cars because we are a very independent people who appreciate the ability to go where we want, when we want. An EV could at least conceivably be a replacement, though that will be difficult until they can charge in a time comparable to that of a gas station fueling and go as long or longer. I don't want to have to plan around some schedule set by a committee. Issue number two: other people. Public transportation is not as nice as a car because you are not insulated from others. I can run my AC nice and high and listen to a pod cast in peace and quiet in my car, even if I've got to deal with jostling cars on the outside. In a train/bus/etc, you never know what you'll get. Half the time there's some one with music blasting, or cussing loudly. The other half they guy next to me smells awful or takes two seats because he's a land whale. If by some miracle neither of those things is true, all the seats are taken. Public transportation sucks, I like my car, and see no personal reason to switch to a less-comfortable and less-available form of transportation for the sake of some one else's political win.

m463 7y ago
Public transportation takes a lot of time. It doesn't necessarily lead to an efficient workforce. The hour of commute time saved by driving could probably be translated into percentage points of GNP for a country.
- bin0 7y ago
  I'm not sure how any of this contradicts my comment. Or were you agreeing?
  - m463 7y ago
    I was agreeing.
- esoterica 7y ago
  If you live somewhere with good public transportation, it is much, much faster than driving. Trains don’t have to sit in traffic.
7y ago

stevenhubertron 7y ago

Agree. I have an ebike and commute 8 miles each way. It's been fantastic and I arrive home in the afternoon feeling fresh despite it being 95F out.

baron816 7y ago

Hopefully (from a convenience standpoint) driverless will be the solution. Could still be zero emissions. Hard to imagine half the country migrating to denser areas within 30 years.

zimprop 7y ago

I 100% agree, not only are they much lower impact on the environment but from an implementation perspective are far simpler. I find it kind of funny that people talk about the future of travel and transit being automated electric cars that can pick one person up and take them to another predetermined place without the passenger's intervention. I immediately think it kinda sounds like a bus or a train. I think we have gotten into the habit of falling so in love with convoluted high tech solutions that we overlook the most basic and straightforward answers to these deep problems

m463 7y ago

Actually, the switch from incandescent to LED street lights could easily smooth this over. The old incandescent street and traffic lights were frequently hundreds of watts, on long chains over large distances. This can be repurposed to car charging with little in the way of power delivery redesign.

ColanR 7y ago

It's been entertaining to read the discussions (below) about how to make this practical. So far, it looks like the only way to make this work is to a) live in a city, or rebuild your suburbia into a city, and b) construct your entire life around riding that bike - choose a job with a tolerant boss, spend extra hours every day showering and changing clothes after biking, etc. I'd rather drive an air-conditioned car, sit in traffic for that hour or two, and enjoy my private backyard (however small it may be).

zanny 7y ago
Instead of constructing your life around a bike you construct it around a car. You can't commute to work any other way, if it breaks down you are bound to mostly Uber as a backup strategy to get anywhere. Except those car-centric environments you live and work in are a more effective gate to keep the poor out than the grandest gated community. Almost no where else on the planet is the idea of a city being a tiny urban core surrounded by hundreds of miles of single family houses in spiraling one lane streets of sprawl the norm. Its a purely American fixation on centering all human activity around cars. And for your benefit, even - the world would be alight in a raging inferno if we ever tried to globally house everyone in quarter acre single family houses with 4 hour single-occupancy car commutes every day.
- baggy_trough 7y ago
  It's more accurate to say that life has been optimized for convenience and net happiness, and that ain't a bike.
- ColanR 7y ago
  > construct it around a car I don't, actually - it's that a car is far more useful than a bike. I drive 25 minutes to work; I haul (5 bike-ride-loads of) groceries several miles to my house; I visit friends anywhere from 1-5 hours away; I casually drive into the city and back. Even if I felt like riding 10 miles each way, rain or shine, or using public transit, it takes so much less time to drive my car, and I have to either find multiple clever solutions to each of the other activities I use the car for, or just go without. My car gives me freedom from limitations; bicycle dependency only adds to them. To use a bike instead of a car, I have to fundamentally adjust my life, in every way for the worse.

ip26 7y ago

I bicycle, ride buses & trains, I have an e-bike and I love it. But realistically we have between ten and thirty years to fix all this. That's not enough time to reinvent the entire world from the ground up, so in addition to the technologies you list I am also hopeful for EVs, synthetic fuel, and so forth.