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> This sentiment is just contrarianism, I think. I really don't think it is. We're thrusting ourselves into just new problems. Yes, we move away from old probl

by bmitc 3y ago

> This sentiment is just contrarianism, I think. I really don't think it is. We're thrusting ourselves into just new problems. Yes, we move away from old problems that gas-powered cars have, but we move into new problems. For one, EVs perpetuate the idea of the car, which is perhaps the most dangerous part. Then, there's all sorts of new things like building out the infrastructure required for EVs and mining the new materials. For example, have you looked into the areas where lithium mining occurs? It is not a clean process and brings its own new problems, especially for the local people. You have foreign owned and operated companies move in and suck out manufactured value from the land, all the while polluting the local ecosystem. It's oil all over again. It isn't contrarianism to point out that a solution is not the solution everyone thinks it is. Yes, we should probably switch to EVs, but we should be switching away from cars as a whole. But we're not. Cars are selling more than ever. It's not contrarianism to simply look at facts rather than hype.

sokoloff 3y ago
Cars are selling, despite their high economic price, because they're incredibly useful. Make competing modes of transit at least one of more useful at no more cost or no less utility but at a lower cost and people will switch incredibly quickly. That's a tall order, because the modern automobile is a wonder of transport speed, comfort, and convenience.
- cutemonster 3y ago
  > Cars ... incredibly useful Not where I live, in north western Europe. Here the subways are fast, and not many use cars inside the city. Many buses and bike lanes too. Here, cars are slow: traffic queues, finding a parking lot. But the subway never runs into any traffic queues. And the subway is many times cheaper than a car's monthly cost. And I can read HN on the subway
- wizofaus 3y ago
  I'd only add "...because they're incredibly useful, AND government policy has consistently favoured such a mode of transport over all other alternatives". The amount spent by governments on maintaining road infrastructure dwarfs all other transport spending, the amount of land dedicated to parking and driving space is mindboggling, and of course the amount spent on ensuring the global oil industry has been able to reliably and safely deliver fuel to vehicles is beyond comprehension* (and almost certainly one of the reasons the transition to EVs will be slower than technology might otherwise allow - vested interests with billions to lose will do anything to keep their share of the spoils). Not to mention the fact that we've yet to actually start truly paying for the long term environmental and health costs of allowing our cities to be so dominated by a single mode of transport. *) it's estimated up to 20% of the US's defence budget is spent protecting oil supplies for a start, which effectively acts as a subsidy of around 70c a gallon.
  - yokem55 3y ago
    You aren't wrong that government support of automotive transport is immense. But that government support comes from decades of popular electoral support for those policies from all across of the political spectrum. Why? Because cars give people more convenient and independent transportation then just about any other mode. And people push their politicians and representatives to support that kind of transportation. If you want to undo the car centric culture and economy, you cannot just ignore the broad base of popular support it enjoys.
    - jeromegv 3y ago
      But we also built our society to make the car more convenient. Can’t remember the ratio but the amount of parking space available per car is absolutely insane. That means a relatively cheap access to put your giant car almost anywhere you go. Most cities are built around that idea and that makes other form of transportations almost impractical. So yes the car is convenient but we also built many things to make it more convenient. In places where subways/rapid transit are made more convenient, there’s of course less parking and less road space and naturally % of car ownership goes down It’s a choice. It’s not naturally always based on the merit of the car.
      - gdilla 3y ago
        800 parking spots per car in the US.
        AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        Source? A quick Google turns up 8 as a common number, not 800.
        sokoloff 3y ago
        Does "800 parking spots per car" pass the sniff test? There's order of magnitude 1 car per US resident. Does it seem like there are 800 parking spots per US resident? A quarter of a trillion total parking spots? I doubt my car parks in 800 unique places (including different street parking spots as unique) in a given year. On the smaller end, call each space 16'x8'. That puts a little more than 2% of the entire land mass of the US as parking spaces (assuming I didn't get any of the exponents wrong).
- midasuni 3y ago
  Cars have such a low price because the cost of them is not born by the person purchasing them.
  - listenallyall 3y ago
    Are there any large-scale public transportation systems that aren't reliant on huge government subsidies? London: 3.6b pounds https://www.google.com/search?q=london+tube+government+subsidy&oq=london+tube+government+subsidy&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigAdIBCDg3NThqMGo3qAIAsAIA&client=ms-android-samsung-rvo1&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=london+tube+government+subsi... New York: $7.2 billion https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics Amsterdam: 370m euros for 3 months service https://www.railjournal.com/financial/dutch-government-provides-e370m-to-cover-public-transport-losses/#:~:text=THE%20Dutch%20government%20has%20announced,the%20third%20quarter%20of%202021 https://www.railjournal.com/financial/dutch-government-provi.... Ok, Hong Kong appears to turn a profit.
    - dukeyukey 3y ago
      Not many, especially if you include car travel - very few roads are privately built, compared to what the government does.
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      This is the wrong question: the right question is whether public transit is more subsidized per passenger-mile (or freight mile) than our road networks. (Even more abstractly, it doesn’t matter whether or not public transit is highly subsidized, so long as the positive externalities of that subsidization are deemed worth it. You don’t get to the size and density (and corresponding economic output) of cities like NYC by allocating personal parking space for every resident.)
- jh00ker 3y ago
  One application of (EV) cars is the robotaxi. Once this solution reaches critical mass, car ownership as we see it today will drop off. If I can send my car out to be a robotaxi while I'm at work and/or :^) asleep, then how much do I care that MY specific vehicle return to bring ME home, when I could just use any other robotaxi available? So then I don't own a car at all and ownership elsewhere falls and the number of total cars drops to the number needed to handle only the maximum number of simultaneous rides.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    Robotaxis don't have anything to do with and certainly aren't dependent upon EVs. I highly doubt robotaxis ever make it. And at that point, why not invest in other infrastructure. It's pointless to have big vehicles carrying one or two people.
    - abecedarius 3y ago
      Once cars start being designed for robotaxi use, it makes economic sense to be much smaller: most rides are one-passenger. (Though who knows what crazy outcomes you end up with under the regulators.)
      - michaelmrose 3y ago
        This is an excellent point here are a few more. EVs are usually designed for consumers convenience insofar as being able to travel a substantial distance between charges to accommodate a minority of actual use when user may need to travel further than the average commute inside the city. A company that operates a fleet of taxis can purchase a very large number of short jaunt single/dual passenger EV and a much smaller number of large vehicles and task the former with the majority of rides either charging frequently when unused or hot swapping batteries when theirs get low. Therefore weight and ergo tire dust might be decreased even more so than one might imagine from size alone due to the reduced battery needs. One might also suppose that in exclusively urban environments it might make sense to provide harder tires designed to produce less dust and less aggressive driving than human drivers to the same end.
- maest 3y ago
  > because the modern automobile is a wonder of transport speed, comfort, and convenience. It's also heavily subsidised and its cost does not include a signficant chunk of externalities. Also, this has been discussed to death, but a large chunk of car usage can be replaced by other modes of transportation. However, that transition requires upfront infrastructural investment. Sadly, arguments like yours ensure that investment won't happen. So, externalities will keep piling up, until the situation will get dire enough that 1. it can't be ignored anymore and 2. it's too late to meaningfully undo the damage.
  - Tostino 3y ago
    Think of how differently the 20th century would have played out if we didn't have such a demand for oil.
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      energy is what replaces human labor and also makes things possible that human labor can't even provide. Our energy desires in the future will grow even higher. It's not a defect in human nature, it's a defect in the laws of thermodynamics. Stop fighting it, you're wasting energy.
    - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
      For example if you google "why did Japan enter WW2" the summary answer is: > "Faced with severe shortages of oil .. Japan decided to attack the United States and British forces in Asia and seize the resources of Southeast Asia."
      - ffgjgf1 3y ago
        It’s the other way around. They lost access to oil because they entered WW2. Had they not decided to invade Indochina (and China before that) US wouldn’t have embargoed oil exports to Japan.
        fsckboy 3y ago
- graywh 3y ago
  We've also engineered our society to make cars too convenient and necessary.
- walleeee 3y ago
  this framing, in making no reference to the thermodynamics of transportation, or of the human economy in general, mistakes mythology for reality pursuit of convenience and immediate utility with scarcely a thought for consequences propels us toward hard physical limits at speed
- efreak 3y ago
  Taking the bus is inconvenient, especially in Los Angeles. We do not have a great public transit system. However, it is far cheaper than car insurance. One bus ride is $1.75 these days, which is quite a bit--but it also includes transfers up to at least an hour after you get on. I usually get a ride to work, and I take the bus home daily, except on the rare occasion I manage to get a ride home with someone at work. *I pay $0 in car insurance, gas, maintenance*. I pay $1.75 for the bus on most days, while others might have to pay $3.5/day; A day pass is $5 if you need to make a third trip during the day, or go backwards for shopping (taking the same line in the opposite direction doesn't count for a transfer)
- adrianN 3y ago
  If you spend a hundred years optimizing your infrastructure for one mode of transport while disregarding all others, it's not surprising that it's the most convenient, or indeed the only possible, mode of transport for a majority of people.
ltbarcly3 3y ago
> It isn't contrarianism to point out that a solution is not the solution everyone thinks it is. Literally nobody thinks that EV's will reduce microplastics. What are you even talking about? EV's have the potential to dramatically reduce our reliance on gasoline. Current EV technology is far from perfect, but do you think people will just stop having personal transportation? Do you think it's better to keep using gasoline cars forever? So you agree that some kind of non-gasoline personal vehicle is likely to be dominant for some time as a method of personal transportation, unless you are just ignoring reality completely or think that people will magically change how they live in even more fundamental ways without incentives to do so, which is magical thinking. So EVs are inevitable, since there is no other credible alternative to gasoline personal vehicles that is even proposed, and EVs are starting to displace gas vehicles in significant numbers. So keep shouting as much as you like about how we need to 'stop normalizing the idea of a car' but just realize that less than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 1% of the world will even bother to listen to it, and in the meantime we are likely to end up building several billion electric cars before another alternative comes around. If you want to change the world, develop the technology that makes it make sense to act the way you want people to act, because nothing else will persuade anybody.
- bmitc 3y ago
  > Literally nobody thinks that EV's will reduce microplastics. What are you even talking about? Not that, for starters. Is there data that proves inconclusively that electric vehicles AND the new infrastructure and mining and every other systematic thing that comes along with them and doesn't currently exist is actually (not just hopes and dreams) less impactful on the environment? Because as far as I can tell, your comment relies on that, and I haven't seen that data. I could care less about holding on to gas-guzzling cars. I would just like to understand things better before jumping headlong into a "solution" that may or may not be any better. And there are massive incentives for companies to jump into EVs, so there is a lot of conflict of interest with EVs. Can corporations and investors be trusted when they stand to make a fortune? Again, my point is to reach an understanding. I do not currently understand why EVs are some bastion of hope when it comes to cars. The best data that I have seen does not account for disposal of batteries nor the mining, long term maintenance and upkeep and continual use of EVs, infrastructure, etc. when it comes to EVs. And if they are better, then where is the crossover point when all this is considered? Is it 10 years? 50 years? And yes, I do think re-enforcing the car is not a good idea. You can think it's unrealistic, and sure, in the short term it probably is. But we shouldn't just throw our hands up and reach for a new "solution" that just brings new problems.
ip26 3y ago
Your problem with EVs is that they don’t eliminate the idea of cars? Let me guess, your problem with the Impossible Burger is that it doesn’t eliminate the idea of eating meat? Entangling ideology with progress is a recipe for getting nothing at all. We see this consistently in climate activism and drug activism. If you try to use a crisis (say, global warming) as a wedge to force your ideology (say, austerity) on the public, you get zero progress on said crisis.
- zbentley 3y ago
  That's a disingenuous response. The idea of cars and car culture have significant negative externalities (the tire pollution in TFA/GP, shitty urban planning, classism/marginalization of people who can't own cars, and so on). Those externalities might be worth it, or they might not. But that's not "entangling ideology with progress", that's just ... pointing out the drawbacks of a progressive initiative (EVs). Put another way, the idea of a burger decoupled from the beef industry has few negative externalities. The idea of a car decoupled from fossil fuels does.

by bmitc 3y ago

sokoloff 3y ago

Cars are selling, despite their high economic price, because they're incredibly useful. Make competing modes of transit at least one of more useful at no more cost or no less utility but at a lower cost and people will switch incredibly quickly. That's a tall order, because the modern automobile is a wonder of transport speed, comfort, and convenience.

cutemonster 3y ago
> Cars ... incredibly useful Not where I live, in north western Europe. Here the subways are fast, and not many use cars inside the city. Many buses and bike lanes too. Here, cars are slow: traffic queues, finding a parking lot. But the subway never runs into any traffic queues. And the subway is many times cheaper than a car's monthly cost. And I can read HN on the subway
wizofaus 3y ago
I'd only add "...because they're incredibly useful, AND government policy has consistently favoured such a mode of transport over all other alternatives". The amount spent by governments on maintaining road infrastructure dwarfs all other transport spending, the amount of land dedicated to parking and driving space is mindboggling, and of course the amount spent on ensuring the global oil industry has been able to reliably and safely deliver fuel to vehicles is beyond comprehension* (and almost certainly one of the reasons the transition to EVs will be slower than technology might otherwise allow - vested interests with billions to lose will do anything to keep their share of the spoils). Not to mention the fact that we've yet to actually start truly paying for the long term environmental and health costs of allowing our cities to be so dominated by a single mode of transport. *) it's estimated up to 20% of the US's defence budget is spent protecting oil supplies for a start, which effectively acts as a subsidy of around 70c a gallon.
- yokem55 3y ago
  You aren't wrong that government support of automotive transport is immense. But that government support comes from decades of popular electoral support for those policies from all across of the political spectrum. Why? Because cars give people more convenient and independent transportation then just about any other mode. And people push their politicians and representatives to support that kind of transportation. If you want to undo the car centric culture and economy, you cannot just ignore the broad base of popular support it enjoys.
  - jeromegv 3y ago
    But we also built our society to make the car more convenient. Can’t remember the ratio but the amount of parking space available per car is absolutely insane. That means a relatively cheap access to put your giant car almost anywhere you go. Most cities are built around that idea and that makes other form of transportations almost impractical. So yes the car is convenient but we also built many things to make it more convenient. In places where subways/rapid transit are made more convenient, there’s of course less parking and less road space and naturally % of car ownership goes down It’s a choice. It’s not naturally always based on the merit of the car.
    - gdilla 3y ago
      800 parking spots per car in the US.
      - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        Source? A quick Google turns up 8 as a common number, not 800.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        Does "800 parking spots per car" pass the sniff test? There's order of magnitude 1 car per US resident. Does it seem like there are 800 parking spots per US resident? A quarter of a trillion total parking spots? I doubt my car parks in 800 unique places (including different street parking spots as unique) in a given year. On the smaller end, call each space 16'x8'. That puts a little more than 2% of the entire land mass of the US as parking spaces (assuming I didn't get any of the exponents wrong).
midasuni 3y ago
Cars have such a low price because the cost of them is not born by the person purchasing them.
- listenallyall 3y ago
  Are there any large-scale public transportation systems that aren't reliant on huge government subsidies? London: 3.6b pounds https://www.google.com/search?q=london+tube+government+subsidy&oq=london+tube+government+subsidy&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigAdIBCDg3NThqMGo3qAIAsAIA&client=ms-android-samsung-rvo1&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=london+tube+government+subsi... New York: $7.2 billion https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics Amsterdam: 370m euros for 3 months service https://www.railjournal.com/financial/dutch-government-provides-e370m-to-cover-public-transport-losses/#:~:text=THE%20Dutch%20government%20has%20announced,the%20third%20quarter%20of%202021 https://www.railjournal.com/financial/dutch-government-provi.... Ok, Hong Kong appears to turn a profit.
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    Not many, especially if you include car travel - very few roads are privately built, compared to what the government does.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    This is the wrong question: the right question is whether public transit is more subsidized per passenger-mile (or freight mile) than our road networks. (Even more abstractly, it doesn’t matter whether or not public transit is highly subsidized, so long as the positive externalities of that subsidization are deemed worth it. You don’t get to the size and density (and corresponding economic output) of cities like NYC by allocating personal parking space for every resident.)
jh00ker 3y ago
One application of (EV) cars is the robotaxi. Once this solution reaches critical mass, car ownership as we see it today will drop off. If I can send my car out to be a robotaxi while I'm at work and/or :^) asleep, then how much do I care that MY specific vehicle return to bring ME home, when I could just use any other robotaxi available? So then I don't own a car at all and ownership elsewhere falls and the number of total cars drops to the number needed to handle only the maximum number of simultaneous rides.
- bmitc 3y ago
  Robotaxis don't have anything to do with and certainly aren't dependent upon EVs. I highly doubt robotaxis ever make it. And at that point, why not invest in other infrastructure. It's pointless to have big vehicles carrying one or two people.
  - abecedarius 3y ago
    Once cars start being designed for robotaxi use, it makes economic sense to be much smaller: most rides are one-passenger. (Though who knows what crazy outcomes you end up with under the regulators.)
    - michaelmrose 3y ago
      This is an excellent point here are a few more. EVs are usually designed for consumers convenience insofar as being able to travel a substantial distance between charges to accommodate a minority of actual use when user may need to travel further than the average commute inside the city. A company that operates a fleet of taxis can purchase a very large number of short jaunt single/dual passenger EV and a much smaller number of large vehicles and task the former with the majority of rides either charging frequently when unused or hot swapping batteries when theirs get low. Therefore weight and ergo tire dust might be decreased even more so than one might imagine from size alone due to the reduced battery needs. One might also suppose that in exclusively urban environments it might make sense to provide harder tires designed to produce less dust and less aggressive driving than human drivers to the same end.
maest 3y ago
> because the modern automobile is a wonder of transport speed, comfort, and convenience. It's also heavily subsidised and its cost does not include a signficant chunk of externalities. Also, this has been discussed to death, but a large chunk of car usage can be replaced by other modes of transportation. However, that transition requires upfront infrastructural investment. Sadly, arguments like yours ensure that investment won't happen. So, externalities will keep piling up, until the situation will get dire enough that 1. it can't be ignored anymore and 2. it's too late to meaningfully undo the damage.
- Tostino 3y ago
  Think of how differently the 20th century would have played out if we didn't have such a demand for oil.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    energy is what replaces human labor and also makes things possible that human labor can't even provide. Our energy desires in the future will grow even higher. It's not a defect in human nature, it's a defect in the laws of thermodynamics. Stop fighting it, you're wasting energy.
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    For example if you google "why did Japan enter WW2" the summary answer is: > "Faced with severe shortages of oil .. Japan decided to attack the United States and British forces in Asia and seize the resources of Southeast Asia."
    - ffgjgf1 3y ago
      It’s the other way around. They lost access to oil because they entered WW2. Had they not decided to invade Indochina (and China before that) US wouldn’t have embargoed oil exports to Japan.
      - fsckboy 3y ago
graywh 3y ago
We've also engineered our society to make cars too convenient and necessary.
walleeee 3y ago
this framing, in making no reference to the thermodynamics of transportation, or of the human economy in general, mistakes mythology for reality pursuit of convenience and immediate utility with scarcely a thought for consequences propels us toward hard physical limits at speed
efreak 3y ago
Taking the bus is inconvenient, especially in Los Angeles. We do not have a great public transit system. However, it is far cheaper than car insurance. One bus ride is $1.75 these days, which is quite a bit--but it also includes transfers up to at least an hour after you get on. I usually get a ride to work, and I take the bus home daily, except on the rare occasion I manage to get a ride home with someone at work. *I pay $0 in car insurance, gas, maintenance*. I pay $1.75 for the bus on most days, while others might have to pay $3.5/day; A day pass is $5 if you need to make a third trip during the day, or go backwards for shopping (taking the same line in the opposite direction doesn't count for a transfer)
adrianN 3y ago
If you spend a hundred years optimizing your infrastructure for one mode of transport while disregarding all others, it's not surprising that it's the most convenient, or indeed the only possible, mode of transport for a majority of people.

ltbarcly3 3y ago

> It isn't contrarianism to point out that a solution is not the solution everyone thinks it is. Literally nobody thinks that EV's will reduce microplastics. What are you even talking about? EV's have the potential to dramatically reduce our reliance on gasoline. Current EV technology is far from perfect, but do you think people will just stop having personal transportation? Do you think it's better to keep using gasoline cars forever? So you agree that some kind of non-gasoline personal vehicle is likely to be dominant for some time as a method of personal transportation, unless you are just ignoring reality completely or think that people will magically change how they live in even more fundamental ways without incentives to do so, which is magical thinking. So EVs are inevitable, since there is no other credible alternative to gasoline personal vehicles that is even proposed, and EVs are starting to displace gas vehicles in significant numbers. So keep shouting as much as you like about how we need to 'stop normalizing the idea of a car' but just realize that less than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 1% of the world will even bother to listen to it, and in the meantime we are likely to end up building several billion electric cars before another alternative comes around. If you want to change the world, develop the technology that makes it make sense to act the way you want people to act, because nothing else will persuade anybody.

bmitc 3y ago
> Literally nobody thinks that EV's will reduce microplastics. What are you even talking about? Not that, for starters. Is there data that proves inconclusively that electric vehicles AND the new infrastructure and mining and every other systematic thing that comes along with them and doesn't currently exist is actually (not just hopes and dreams) less impactful on the environment? Because as far as I can tell, your comment relies on that, and I haven't seen that data. I could care less about holding on to gas-guzzling cars. I would just like to understand things better before jumping headlong into a "solution" that may or may not be any better. And there are massive incentives for companies to jump into EVs, so there is a lot of conflict of interest with EVs. Can corporations and investors be trusted when they stand to make a fortune? Again, my point is to reach an understanding. I do not currently understand why EVs are some bastion of hope when it comes to cars. The best data that I have seen does not account for disposal of batteries nor the mining, long term maintenance and upkeep and continual use of EVs, infrastructure, etc. when it comes to EVs. And if they are better, then where is the crossover point when all this is considered? Is it 10 years? 50 years? And yes, I do think re-enforcing the car is not a good idea. You can think it's unrealistic, and sure, in the short term it probably is. But we shouldn't just throw our hands up and reach for a new "solution" that just brings new problems.

ip26 3y ago

Your problem with EVs is that they don’t eliminate the idea of cars? Let me guess, your problem with the Impossible Burger is that it doesn’t eliminate the idea of eating meat? Entangling ideology with progress is a recipe for getting nothing at all. We see this consistently in climate activism and drug activism. If you try to use a crisis (say, global warming) as a wedge to force your ideology (say, austerity) on the public, you get zero progress on said crisis.

zbentley 3y ago
That's a disingenuous response. The idea of cars and car culture have significant negative externalities (the tire pollution in TFA/GP, shitty urban planning, classism/marginalization of people who can't own cars, and so on). Those externalities might be worth it, or they might not. But that's not "entangling ideology with progress", that's just ... pointing out the drawbacks of a progressive initiative (EVs). Put another way, the idea of a burger decoupled from the beef industry has few negative externalities. The idea of a car decoupled from fossil fuels does.