> The best case for extending public transit to every suburb and exurb (never mind rural community) is probably on the same order. The worst case for EVs is a c

> The best case for extending public transit to every suburb and exurb (never mind rural community) is probably on the same order. The worst case for EVs is a couple of decades (to 80% of cars on the road; obviously there's a long tail that diminishes). Why are you using the standard of "public transit to every suburb and exurb" for transit and "80% of cars" for vehicle electrification? There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in the first-ring suburbs that we can tackle before the exurbs; those may be a lost cause for now, but a lot of people live in those inner suburbs! And that aside, we need to at least stop the bleeding, right? If metro area growth boundaries keep expanding outward, that means more cars on the road and more energy and materials needed to make that happen. If we don't allow existing towns to build up at all, the only way for them to build is outward. > I like the idea of more public transit and walkability, but I don't think there's any legitimate case to be made that these initiatives will meaningfully reduce our carbon footprint in the necessary timescales. Alone they won't, just like vehicle electrification alone won't. We need to both reduce VMT and electrify, and we need both now. https://rmi.org/our-driving-habits-must-be-part-of-the-climate-conversation/ https://rmi.org/our-driving-habits-must-be-part-of-the-clima... > but we could easily rezone to allow for a finer-grained patchwork of residential and commercial zones. The finer-grained patchwork means that less of any zone needs to be reserved for parking/cars (it's not just breaking one big parking lot into many smaller lots with the same total area--in a finer-grained patchwork, fewer people need to drive so the total area for parking/cars is lower) which in aggregate means more space for other things. This isn't separating walkability and density, this is higher density. This is the kind of thing we need!