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And in turn, trains are far more energy efficient than all kinds of cars. Trains are subsequently beaten by both electric and non-electric bicycles, which are t

• throwaway894345 4y ago
  We’re not going to replace cars with trains in the timescales necessary to deal with climate change, even if we could convince everyone to upend their lifestyle. It just isn’t going to happen.
  • hot_gril 4y ago
    Yeah, would basically require demolishing most cities and rebuilding them around the train lines. Moving non-physical jobs to home has more potential.
    • occz 4y ago
      Cities were demolished to accommodate cars in the past, I see no reason why such a retrofit would be impossible in the other direction. There is some potential in reduction by moving jobs to WFH when possible, but this is not mutually exclusive with migrating to energy efficient means of transportation and urban development. Hence, I don't think it's relevant in the discussion.
      • hot_gril 4y ago
        In what way were they demolished? Cars allow for urban sprawl. People now have homes in places where they rely on cars to get to work. I also have a theory that widespread WFH makes dense cities obsolete. Dense cities seem to originate from big money appearing somewhere and everyone building around it, eventually reaching the typical situation where the highest-paid can afford to live there and everyone else commutes in and out. If the housing, roads, or public transit are expanded, more people come and saturate them again, because the commute is worth the pay. (If it's just roads, such commutes are super polluting.) But when the execs and higher-paid workers don't need to be there in person, it dominoes. There's no extra money to be made providing physical goods/services in that area, and no incentive for such a forced commute or crammed living quarters. Physical laborers end up working locally, and more isolated, less dense, lower-income but lower-cost-of-living cities form. I used to work in SF and observe these things closely, and now I'm watching what happens as many of the techies leave.
        • occz 4y ago
          >In what way were they demolished? Cars allow for urban sprawl. People now have homes in places where they rely on cars to get to work. Highway construction demolished a lot of neighbourhoods in cities. In the U.S, the demolished neighborhoods were also disproportionately low-income and majority non-white neighborhoods. >I also have a theory that widespread WFH makes dense cities obsolete. Dense cities seem to originate from big money appearing somewhere and everyone building around it, eventually reaching the typical situation where the highest-paid can afford to live there and everyone else commutes in and out. If the housing, roads, or public transit are expanded, more people come and saturate them again, because the commute is worth the pay. (If it's just roads, such commutes are super polluting.) But when the execs and higher-paid workers don't need to be there in person, it dominoes. There's no extra money to be made providing physical goods/services in that area, and no incentive for such a forced commute or crammed living quarters. Physical laborers end up working locally, and more isolated, less dense, lower-income but lower-cost-of-living cities form. This is only really true if work is the only reason someone would live in a dense city, and it's not. Cities are a thing because they allow for economies of scale in all things, be that culture, dating, transportation or otherwise. This efficiency is somewhat obscured by a plethora of reasons right now - car-oriented infrastructure subsidised by people not utilizing that infrastructure is one of the higher ones on the list.
          • hot_gril 4y ago
            > Highway construction demolished a lot of neighbourhoods in cities. In the U.S, the demolished neighborhoods were also disproportionately low-income and majority non-white neighborhoods. The space a highway or other road takes up is nowhere close to the space it allows to inhabited, though. LA County is the perfect example of an area that has grown via roads to become non-viable for trains. It's just too spread out. Without the roads, tons of households would be cut off from jobs they commute to, again the low-income ones. I'm not justifying the original construction of the highways, just saying what would happen if we went back. > This is only really true if work is the only reason someone would live in a dense city, and it's not. Cities are a thing because they allow for economies of scale in all things, be that culture, dating, transportation or otherwise. Regular cities make sense for that. You get two of each kind of business in proximity, and most people are good with that. Dense cities go beyond that point and get to where less scalable resources become strained, like housing. It's a clear sign when people are commuting from outside that something is wrong. Yes, some people still prefer the excitement, but usually just the young and single. SF pre and post tech boom, and during/after 2020, gives you an idea of how many people are just there for the work.
      • throwaway894345 4y ago
        At a minimum, because there is very little political appetite for it (apart from left-wing urban professionals) in large part because it’s an insanely inefficient way to meet climate goals (compared with building out clean energy sources and electrifying fossil fuel applications like cars), but also because it’s insanely invasive (it requires pushing everyone into a lifestyle they don’t want).
  • occz 4y ago
    Ok. On the other hand, a complete migration to EVs won't solve the climate crisis either, as they are not energy efficient enough. Combine this with the fact that car-oriented developments are energy-inefficient in other ways - single family homes are way worse with regards to energy efficiency, lack of walkability makes car travel mandatory, larger infrastructure requirements are again worse woth regards to energy efficiency, and so on. Does this mean we should throw our hands up and not make an EVs? No, that would be a bad strategy, a complete non-option. We must halt the climate crisis, this is quite frankly mandatory. So, how do we tackle this issue? If we want to deal with the problem in a timely manner, we have to work within the framework we already have today. This means some degree of replacing ICEs with EVs. Crucially though, we need to realize that the framework itself is bad, and requires replacement in the future. This means halting investments in non-sustainable built environments, building energy-efficient transportation infrastructure to connect existing places where it makes sense, and only building new places with appropriate transportation infrastructure. Defeatism is not on the roadmap.
    • throwaway894345 4y ago
      No one is arguing that EVs will solve climate change. They are necessary but not sufficient, and their issue isn’t that they aren’t efficient enough, it’s that (1) our grid isn’t yet fully clean and (2) cars don’t account for a sufficiently large share of emissions (so 100% of clean power for cars doesn’t address emissions for other applications). > single family homes are way worse with regards to energy efficiency, We’re definitely not going to get everyone into small urban apartments in the next 50 years. We couldn’t build the necessary apartments fast enough, and the costs would be enormous for a relatively small reduction in emissions. The better value for money is building out our clean energy capacity as quickly as possible and disincentivizing waste via carbon pricing. > Defeatism is not on the roadmap. Cool, then let’s just terraform Mars and call it a day. Of course, we have to be realistic which means no terraforming Mars or building hundreds of millions of apartment units and equivalent rail infrastructure.
  • alkonaut 4y ago
    Most people still don’t own cars. Far from it. The key must be to ensure that billions of people don’t need to pass through the 1950-2000 infrastructure dead-end that e.g the US took, by betting on the car as the transportation mode of choice.
    • jotm 4y ago
      Just skip the bs restrictions on people other than you and mass murder them. Road to hell is paved with good intentions or something.
      • alkonaut 4y ago
        Come again?
        • jotm 4y ago
          People arguing for restricting others' freedoms while enjoying them themselves is what I see. Good old genocide is the ultimate conclusion to that and undeniably the most effective option.
          • alkonaut 4y ago
            You mean I’m arguing we should work to have fewer cars in e.g Asia? And that’s whose restricted freedom? Those who have good enough infrastructure to not need cars? I don’t get it. The idea is not not force people to need cars by building poor infrastructure and poorly planned cities. I’d love to not need to own a car (and I’m not American). Not sure why you keep talking about genocide and to be honest it’s not quite coherent.
            • jotm 4y ago
              And it's a great idea, good thought. I used bicycles in cities where it was possible. But that, and public transportation, only goes so far. A personal car gives incredible freedom, especially to the poor. Suddenly they can live affordably far from work, choose better work places, do work on the side, transport luggage on the cheap. Inevitably, the only way to stop people from getting cars is to make the licensing and their cost prohibitively expensive. So they will take overcrowded trains that may not be on time, and/or live in closets or be lucky not to get into a serious accident on a bike/moped in a city not made for them. Solving battery energy density and EVs are a good compromise. But yes, you're right, cities should not be planned around cars. Imo, there should be more of them actually, but alas it seems that's a lost art and everyone's gathering in whatever big cities were made in the past couple of centuries or earlier. Genocide is a dumb example stemming from my belief that death is better than life in squalor heh. Obviously most people don't think that.
• throwawaylinux 4y ago
  Is that a bicycle pedaled by a human, i.e., who converts calories into work at about 25% efficiency? Does it take into account the farming and supply chain costs of that food it's about 15% efficiency by calorie, compared with gasoline which is close to 90% efficient IIRC. Or is it just food/fuel energy -> work?
  • occz 4y ago
    You can dig into the numbers on this helpful article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
    • karthikb 4y ago
      That article explicitly states that it doesn’t account for the energy or emissions required to produce the fuel. The lifecycle emissions of an EV depend on how the electricity was generated, and the total emissions of cycling depends on the diet of the cyclist - even though the energy per distance is the same regardless.
  • hot_gril 4y ago
    Gasoline isn't 90% efficient. But yes, there's a study showing that a bicyclist with a meat-heavy diet is overall contributing more CO2 per mile than a modern ICE car. Electric bike is way more efficient.
    • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      This reminds me of the classic "if you wash recycling with water heated with electricity generated with coal it's not very carbon efficient". Yes, that might be true, but it's the "coal" that's the issue, not the recycling. It says so little useful about recycling that it's basically a lie. But it does suggest we should phase out coal, not just to make recycling cleaner, but for everyone that uses electricity. Similarly, I assume this study looked at red-meat reared in a GHG callous manner. Which says basically nothing about bicycles, but does tell us that we should take the obvious steps we're already aware of to decarbonize food. Not because it helps cyclists be more efficient, but because it's a smart thing to do for everyone who eats. > Indeed, the use of fertilizers, methane gas released from livestock like cattle and massive food waste all contribute to the vast carbon footprint of food production. Since land is both a source and a sink of CO2, land-clearing for new agricultural terrain in tandem with deforestation drives harmful emissions, equating to approximately 26% of the global total.
• hot_gril 4y ago
  I'd expect the train to be more efficient than the bike in terms of (load mass) * (distance traveled) / (energy used). Proportional to the size of the load, you lose a lot of energy to air resistance on a bike. Trains only push the air out of the way once on the front, and they're long, plus there's less friction from the wheels.
  • occz 4y ago
    Looks like trains will beat out bicycles in some cases, but they lose out to e-bikes and e-scooters. Check the table in this helpful article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
    • Xylakant 4y ago
      I’m certain we’re missing something in that article. An electric bike shouldn’t be more efficient than a normal bike - it’s heavier and the wind resistance is the same. My first guess is that the power use for the electric assist only considers the electric assist, not the human riders portion.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • Izkata 4y ago
        Heavier would seem like a benefit to me, wouldn't inertia improve its score over longer distances?
        • Xylakant 4y ago
          No, the only things that matter are the losses and those are due to air resistance (same), rolling resistance (increases linear with weight) and losses due to braking/acceleration (grows quadratic with weight). Heavier is always worse. Note that electric bikes usually don’t even have recuperative braking due to the complexities involved. If heavier were better, we’d see all Tour de France riders use cast iron wheels and frames ;)
• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Most sane government policy acknowledges this, even european right-wing governments: Decarbonising Transport: A Better, Greener Britain https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1009448/ https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... .pdf > But we cannot, of course, simply rely on the electrification of road transport, or believe that zero emission cars and lorries will solve all our problems, particularly for meeting our medium-term carbon reduction targets to 2035. Road traffic, even on pre-pandemic trends, was predicted to grow by 22 percent from 2015 to 2035 much of it in cities, where new roadbuilding is physically difficult and disadvantages communities. > We cannot pile ever more cars, delivery vans and taxis on to the same congested urban roads. That would be difficult for the roads, let alone the planet, to tolerate. As we build back better from the pandemic, it will be essential to avoid a car-led recovery. As I said in “Decarbonising Transport: Setting the Challenge” in March last year, we must make public transport, cycling and walking the natural first choice for all who can take it. Many journeys are short, could be done differently – and were done differently, in the very recent past. Even ten years ago, for instance, more children walked to school. We want to reduce urban road traffic overall. Improvements to public transport, walking and cycling, promoting ridesharing and higher car occupancy, and the changes in commuting, shopping and business travel accelerated by the pandemic, also offer the opportunity for a reduction or at least a stabilisation, in traffic more widely. That will benefit everyone, drivers included. So to me it feels like those who use this as an opportunity to undermine EVs, aren't really helping.
  • occz 4y ago
    >So to me it feels like those who use this as an opportunity to undermine EVs, aren't really helping. My position is a general anti-car position, with a particular disdain for ICEs. See my other comments in the thread for my thinking on the way forward.
    • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      I am also anti-car, but it's a better sales pitch to suggest that in dense urban areas, removing pollution, reducing carbon and avoiding congestion can be done hand in hand with the shift to EVs than set them as opposites. The extra leverage that urban traffic has to prioritise zero local emissions, lightweighting for pedestrian safety, vehicle redesign for visibility, silent operation, small vehicles for avoiding congestion (e.g. cycle couriers) is a lever to get general road transport and rural trucks to low emissions faster. It also lets more people into the cities (which is happening anyway but ICE vehicles are slowing it down)
• rahen 4y ago
  > it would be wise to invest in a world where we move more towards these superior modes of transportation This simply is pre-WWII urban planning. We used to have sustainable cities and comprehensive passenger rail systems before we teared them down for cars and suburbia.
  • occz 4y ago
    Yes indeed. The fact that conservatives broadly have taken the position supporting of cars and car-oriented development is one of the most absurd things imaginable. Socialized inefficient infrastructure that was not even a thing a hundred years ago being considered a conservative policy, a real hoot.
    • ghoward 4y ago
      I'm not sure how much of this is true. I'm a conservative, and I would love to have more walkable/bikeable cities and to not need a car.
      • occz 4y ago
        >I'm not sure how much of this is true. I'll admit to this not being an opinion I hold based on any kind of scientific observation, this does seem to be an opinion I have anecdotally observed among rural- and suburban-populations, which tend to lean more towards the conservative political spectrum than their urban counterparts. >I'm a conservative, and I would love to have more walkable/bikeable cities and to not need a car. Kudos.
    • throwaway894345 4y ago
      I’m not a conservative, but the independence that cars provide holds a certain appeal and aligns fine with conservative values. Anyway, conservatives happily embrace new technology all the time (almost all conservatives have a smartphone and an Internet connection, and those developments are much more recent than cars); adopting cars isn’t a contradiction at all—clinging to trains and bikes would be the contradiction.
  • 4y ago
• choeger 4y ago
  But energy efficiency is not the single goal and it shouldn't become it. The most energy efficient mode if transportation is to stay put. The most energy efficient form of living is a bunk in some barracks and so on and so forth. And some point we have to acknowledge that life is spending energy so why not on individual travel?
  • occz 4y ago
    This is true. However, car-oriented development and car travel is inferior to alternative modes of transportation in essentially all other aspects as well, so this point does not run counter to these superior modes of transportation.
    • foxhill 4y ago
      most other aspects. not all.
    • choeger 4y ago
      People aren't dumb. Cars are expensive yet extremely popular. Thus, car travel is superior when it comes to satisfying the needs of the owners. Train travel is often more costly and much more inconvenient. Air travel obviously doesn't work on short routes. Travel by bike comes closest in terms of cost and convenience, but only in good weather, for extremely short routes, and with relatively little baggage. That being said, cities don't have to look like the US dystopian suburb. Germany, for instance, is full of towns and cities that are walkable, bikable, and impose no artificial restrictions on car ownership and usage. It's the big cities that have problems with cars due to space constraints. But that's not an inherent property of cars. They start to see similar issues with cargo bikes and will arguably face problems with kitchen ownership at some point.
      • occz 4y ago
        >People aren't dumb. Cars are expensive yet extremely popular. Thus, car travel is superior when it comes to satisfying the needs of the owners. Train travel is often more costly and much more inconvenient. Air travel obviously doesn't work on short routes. Travel by bike comes closest in terms of cost and convenience, but only in good weather, for extremely short routes, and with relatively little baggage. This is purely a function of contemporary car-oriented infrastructure, nothing more. People do indeed select the choice that is most convenient, and the built environment as is today does favor the use of cars. Though, for all the reasons mentioned in this thread, and more, this is a grim mistake. >That being said, cities don't have to look like the US dystopian suburb. Germany, for instance, is full of towns and cities that are walkable, bikable, and impose no artificial restrictions on car ownership and usage. It's the big cities that have problems with cars due to space constraints. But that's not an inherent property of cars. They start to see similar issues with cargo bikes and will arguably face problems with kitchen ownership at some point. Cargo bikes scale far better than cars. Germany, while better than the U.S, is still not peak built environment. As a nation they lean quite a bit on cars.
• radu_floricica 4y ago
  This is a very naïve view. It's technically correct (the best kind of correct?) but it's also missing the point by a wide margin - the "spherical, frictionless cow in a void" missing the point. You're correct in the sense that trains and bicycles are, true, more energy efficient. I'm not even looking for numbers here, because it's irrelevant. What you're missing is that real humans occasionally need to move a mattress. Or just bring home groceries once a week. Or have kids. Or that a full quarter of the population are seniors. Or that quite a few people live in places with hard winters. You think it's a coincidence that Netherlands is the country of bicycle riders? Gulfstream :) They hardly have any snow or ice - just walk around in the street there, and it'll hit you that most buildings have windows that take up half the wall. Cold is just not a concern there, the way it would be in a lot of other places. If you compare an EV with a train on an energy efficiency PoV, yes, the train may be twice as efficient (or less?). But an EV covers 80% of energy requirements (it's CLEAN, cheaper than gas, less carbon generating, less likely to subsidize oil-based dictatorships), while also not having you haul a toddler, an infant and 3 bags of groceries through snow from the train station half a mile away.
  • occz 4y ago
    >You're correct in the sense that trains and bicycles are, true, more energy efficient. I'm not even looking for numbers here, because it's irrelevant. On the contrary, it's highly relevant in a world where we have a very pressing energy issue. >What you're missing is that real humans occasionally need to move a mattress. Cargo-bikes can cover many of the transportation use-cases the average person has, and the rest can be covered by utilizing shared transportation vehicles. No private vehicle ownership is necessary here, and private vehicle ownership and its use as the primary mode of transportation is >80% of the problem. >Or just bring home groceries once a week. Cargo-bikes, closer shops, public transportation, grocery delivery and/or higher frequency of shopping solves this >Or have kids. Cargo-bikes, public transportation solves this >Or that a full quarter of the population are seniors. Bicycles, public transportation solves this isse. Additionally, car infrastructure is more exclusionary to seniors than the alternatives - same with children, who are not allowed to operate a car. Not to mention people with disabilities. All more discriminated against by car infrastructure than the alternatives. >Or that quite a few people live in places with hard winters. You think it's a coincidence that Netherlands is the country of bicycle riders? Gulfstream :) They hardly have any snow or ice - just walk around in the street there, and it'll hit you that most buildings have windows that take up half the wall. Cold is just not a concern there, the way it would be in a lot of other places. Bicycle rates are not statistically correlated with neither local climate, nor topology for that matter. Infrastructure is more or less the sole deciding factor. >If you compare an EV with a train on an energy efficiency PoV, yes, the train may be twice as efficient (or less?). But an EV covers 80% of energy requirements (it's CLEAN, cheaper than gas, less carbon generating, less likely to subsidize oil-based dictatorships), while also not having you haul a toddler, an infant and 3 bags of groceries through snow from the train station half a mile away. Essentially all of these problems can be solved satisfactorily with alternatives. Note that clean is also relative - the alternatives are very significantly cleaner than car-oriented transportation. And we have barely even touched the subjects of transportation mode lethality nor economic discrimination, which are hugely significant - cars kill more than any other mode of transportation, and is more expensive both on the individual and societal level, making them a huge burden for poor people.
• hackerlight 4y ago
  Couldn't agree more, but if car owners get to vote in politicians who then force non-car owners to subsidize their new EV, it's going to be very hard to get them to understand common sense.
• concordDance 4y ago
  Time has great value, we only have a limitdd amoint of it and getting to spend less of it in transport and more of it spdnding time with loved ones or making art is good. Those forms of transportation are slower than cars.
  • occz 4y ago
    >Time has great value, we only have a limitdd amoint of it and getting to spend less of it in transport and more of it spdnding time with loved ones or making art is good. Agreed. So much time gets killed by the mathematically unscalable car infrastructure, where many many hours get killed when people are stuck in traffic. These hours are essentially impossible to make more productive as well, as drivers are unable to perform other tasks while at the wheel. Public transportation does not suffer from this shortcoming, and bicycle infrastructure is inherently more scalable and hence traffic congestion is not a thing when it comes to bicycle infrastructure. Time spent bicycling also doubles as exercise, further enhancing the time-efficiency of this mode of transport. >Those forms of transportation are slower than cars. Not inherently. This is a mere matter of infrastructure, nothing else. Dense urban environment and rapid transit is clearly less time-wasting than the suburban car-oriented development, in essentially every aspect imaginable.
  • coalteddy 4y ago
    It seems like you have never been to a well connected and dense city, that has good public transport and bicycle infrastructure. Bikes and public transport can be at least twice as fast if not faster. Everything can be built closer together because you don't need all the wasted parking space and huge streets that cars require. I can really recommend the Youtube channel "Not Just Bikes". It has made me hate cars for all the useless space they take up, all the pollution (noise, air, rubber) they create, and the danger they present to anyone not in a car.
  • Xylakant 4y ago
    I bike roughly 30 minutes to work. The route I take crosses a bridge at the end and a point that’s notable for having traffic jam up. In perfect road conditions, no Traffic jam, the same distance by car takes 25 - 30 minutes, plus required time for finding a parking space. In the morning/evening traffic, it’s easily 10-20 minute on top of that. For distances around 10-20 km in the city, an ebike is absolutely competitive to a car.
• fho 4y ago
  Funny side note: the German high speed trains are called InterCity Express ... short ICE. Writing this from one right now, going 200 km/h while having breakfast.
• fho 4y ago
  I would assume that electric bikes are in turn beaten by electric velomobiles. Those easily go 25+ km/h with muscle power alone. As long as you are reasonable fit a motor that is restricted to 25 km/h is dead weight on those most of the time.
• _ph_ 4y ago
  While I also think that humanity would be better off with less cars, I think one shouldn't mix up those matters. To some extend, humanity needs cars and we should push for making those cars as efficient and environmental friendly as possible. Hence electric cars. They are the technology which allows us to use cars into the future. However I agree, wherever possible, less cars would be good. Public transit and bicycles work well in those regions, which have the proper infrastructure. Some European cities are quite good in this respect, others are following. Fun fact though: between an efficient electric car (like the Tesla Model 3) and an electric train or even a Diesel bus, there is little efficiency difference, in a lot of cases the electric car wins. But trains win on not contributing to congested streets etc.
• tigerlily 4y ago
  Ok then, what about a bike on the rails? Kind of like a jigger, but pedal powered.
  • occz 4y ago
    That would probably be quite efficient from an energy-standpoint, but we'd need too much rails to make it work at scale. Cool as hell, though. When going to visit one of my grandparents, I usually pass by a decommissioned railroad that now does bicycle draisines for tourism-purposes. I really should go ahead and ride that some day, it seems like a lot of fun.
• agumonkey 4y ago
  cargo bikes are getting trendy
• scotty79 4y ago
  So the best way would be to just use electric bicyclea and scooters for daily commutes, trains for long range transport of people and delivery service backed by trains and electric cars and other vehicles, possibly state sponsored to some degree for all deliveries long range and short range.
  • occz 4y ago
    Indeed.
• dreamcompiler 4y ago
  Any time the subject of electric car efficiency comes up the first comment is always "we should build trains." The perfect is the enemy of the good. In the US, trains would require an expenditure of trillions of dollars with a multi-decade long fiscal commitment for an idea that's deeply unpopular with the citizenry. Ain't gonna happen here in our lifetime. Maybe in other countries, but not the USA. You can buy an electric car today.
  • wyre 4y ago
    You can also buy an electric bicycle today, too, for 1/10 of the price of an EV.
    • dreamcompiler 4y ago
      Indeed, and I have one! But I cannot use my electric bike to visit my relatives in a different state. That's what my EV is for. (And it has a rack so we can take our ebikes on the trip too.)
• loceng 4y ago
  You got me wondering: how will Boring Company's Loop and Hyperloop faire in this same regard? Hyperloop being near vacuum to remove/reduce friction from the area, while vehicle likely on floating MagLev skate, accelerating up to 1,223 kmph should certainly beat all current technology?
• jefurii 4y ago
  I like trains. I really really like trains. I used to live in Japan so I know what life is like when it's organized around trains and it's awesome. I hate the sprawled-out American suburbs where everything is so far apart that walking, or even biking in some places, is just not practical. That said, I just can't see America reorganizing already built-up areas around trains, if only because it would require the government to purchase too much land just to lay the tracks. I absolutely think that all new development should be done in a transportation-first level of density. But the existing burbs are a lost cause. And so we end up with electric cars.