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At some point, the illusion that we will be able to avoid changing our transportation infrastructure in the US, will be unmaintainable. The problem is not in E

At some point, the illusion that we will be able to avoid changing our transportation infrastructure in the US, will be unmaintainable. The problem is not in EVs, it's in private automobiles, our settlement patterns, and our utter lack of funding public transportation in all of its forms.

pseudosavant 4y ago
At some point we need to stop acting like transportation solutions for areas with orders of magnitude higher population density than the US are obvious solutions. Infrastructure for a country like the Netherlands (a popular “see we should bike” example) with a population density of 459 people per km^2 is going to be completely different than the US with its 35/km^2. It is just as naive to think the US can remake its transportation infrastructure to be like Europe, as it would be to expect every road in Italy to be made wide enough for a Ford F-150 Raptor. Places in the US with high population densities (NYC, DC, Chicago, SF, etc) often do have far better public transportation than the rest of the US.
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  > with a population density of 459 people per km^2 is going to be completely different than the US with its 35/km^2. This is a silly comparison though. Large swaths of the US are either completely uninhabited or nearly completely uninhabited. If you want a better comparison, look at New Jersey. Its population density is 488 people per km^2, so a little higher than the Netherlands even, yet its infrastructure is dismal comparatively despite having the density to support Netherlands-style infrastructure. Almost all major population centers in the US look like this -- dense enough to support much better, but yet we don't have it. The fact that it wouldn't work in the vast rural expanses of e.g. Wyoming don't mean that it wouldn't work for our big metropolitan areas.

pseudosavant 4y ago

At some point we need to stop acting like transportation solutions for areas with orders of magnitude higher population density than the US are obvious solutions. Infrastructure for a country like the Netherlands (a popular “see we should bike” example) with a population density of 459 people per km^2 is going to be completely different than the US with its 35/km^2. It is just as naive to think the US can remake its transportation infrastructure to be like Europe, as it would be to expect every road in Italy to be made wide enough for a Ford F-150 Raptor. Places in the US with high population densities (NYC, DC, Chicago, SF, etc) often do have far better public transportation than the rest of the US.

CydeWeys 4y ago
> with a population density of 459 people per km^2 is going to be completely different than the US with its 35/km^2. This is a silly comparison though. Large swaths of the US are either completely uninhabited or nearly completely uninhabited. If you want a better comparison, look at New Jersey. Its population density is 488 people per km^2, so a little higher than the Netherlands even, yet its infrastructure is dismal comparatively despite having the density to support Netherlands-style infrastructure. Almost all major population centers in the US look like this -- dense enough to support much better, but yet we don't have it. The fact that it wouldn't work in the vast rural expanses of e.g. Wyoming don't mean that it wouldn't work for our big metropolitan areas.