18 ms·

All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average)

All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average) and maintain/develop car dependency infrastructures. This is the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy and reducing massively our climate and biodiversity impact. I want those kind of factories to produce trains, bicycles... everything that can move people in a more efficient way than those "cars".

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy The worst except the others. Like sure, retooling our metropolises might be nice. But it’s also not only expensive but incredibly carbon intensive, to say nothing of not wanted by most of the world.
- wbl 2y ago
  It's not that expensive to put down a bike lane.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > not that expensive to put down a bike lane Scale-wise insufficient. We aren’t going to get to net zero with bike lanes.
    - recursive 2y ago
      Who said net zero? Perfect is the enemy of good.
      - jimjimjim 2y ago
        Comments like these need to be included in almost any discussion about transport or in fact any discussion about any change. Most people (or both sides) dismiss ideas because they are not 100% perfect. And ignore the fact that nothing can be perfect
        jujube3 2y ago
        If we only do a little bit, we'll only accomplish a little bit.
        recursive 2y ago
        Yes, we'd better not do a little bit. Surely then, we'll accomplish a lot.
        jujube3 2y ago
        Perhaps we could spend the billions on electric cars rather than on unused bicycle lanes.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > Who said net zero? OP is expressing dismay at EVs and suggesting building bike lanes instead. (Not in addition to.) The latter doesn’t solve the problem the former is being built to address. More bikes is nice. More EVs are necessary. Suggesting more bikes as an alternative to EVs isn’t perfect versus good, it’s fielding rubber ducks against battleships.
        recursive 2y ago
        > Not in addition to Interesting. I didn't read that at all, but now this conversation makes a little more sense. But suggesting bike lanes, not positioned as an replacement to cars, is a great idea.
  - robocat 2y ago
    It is outrageously expensive. "Building 101km of cycleways across Christchurch to cost $301m", population 405000, So that is $750 per person, which is about 1% of median earnings for a year. That is paid for mostly by car owners (via petrol tax and car tax) and a bit by home owners. And the new infrastructure is visibly under-utilised - at best a few % of traffic. You could force people to bike using laws and economics I guess... I would be interested to see a per-trip cost analysis for cyclists. There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere - bikes are great for some trips and some demographics. Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists...
    - jodrellblank 2y ago
      > There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere Roads pre-date cars. Cars muscled in and took over, forced humans off the roads onto sidewalks. Now car drivers say it cannot be economically justified for people to move around outside cars? This is "car-brain" thinking. If the cars were banned, people could walk and cycle and wheelchair and skate on the roads their taxes are already paying for. They aren't "car roads", they are just roads - cycles are allowed on them. Car drivers don't want to share, don't want to slow down, keep hitting and killing people, can't control their vehicles safely, so demand cyclists be moved somewhere else - then complain about the cost of doing that! People say cars have taken over, they want somewhere safe from the dangers of cars, car drivers say no it's too expensive to make yourself safe from me commuting through the places you live and work! It's crazy land. As if the only reason Christchurch exists at all is for cars to drive through. Can you point to a report that has a cost/beneift analysis of each individual road in Christchurch? Because when Urban3 set out to find out that kind of thing in USA and Canadian cities[2] they found that the dense urban centers ("poor") were the parts of a city with enough tax revenue to cover their infrastructure costs, and the sparse suburbs ("rich") were being subsidised by them. The people in city center apartments, possibly without cars, possibly transit riders, pay for the sprawling suburbs which need long roads and infrastructure serving relatively few houses and businesses, which don't generate enough revenue to pay for those roads, sewers, water pipes, storm drains, electricity supply, etc. New Zealand $301M is about £139M in UK pounds. Wikipedia has a list of road projects in the UK[1],including: - Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet. 16 km, £507 million. - Morpeth and Felton, 12.9Km, £260M. (Morpeth population: 14k) - M54 to M6 motorway link road, 2.5km, £200M. - Shrewsbury North West Relief Road, 6km, estimated £120M (population: 77k). - Arundel bypass, cost £320M (population: 3.5k). - Newark-upon-Trent bypass, 6.5Km, cost £400-£500M (population: 30k). Building more roads doesn't reduce traffic. It makes driving easier, quicker, more convenient, which increases the temptation to drive, increases the number of journeys, incentivises and encourages driving, makes traffic worse. Can you point me to a cost/benefit analysis of spending half a billion pounds on one of these road schemes to "reduce traffic" by doing something that doesn't reduce traffic, something that makes traffic worse? Spending 2-10x the cost of rail per km, while moving 1/20th the amount of people compared to rail, polluting more than rail? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_road_projects_in_the_UK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_road_projects_in_the_U... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Bike lanes and bikes aren't alternatives to most of what motorized transport is providing.
    - wbl 2y ago
      Most car trips are very short, and commuting to a CBD is easily served by transit.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        That still doesn't solve last mile supply of stores and offices, nor does it solve construction, policing, emergency services, etc. Each of those likely has possible alternatives to motorized transport, but they're all different alternatives. Meanwhile, today, they all share the same road network with regular civilian commute, sharing costs and mutually improving efficiency. Put differently: instead of imagining all passenger cars replaced by bikes, imagine all roads replaced by bike lanes, then extrapolate from that.
      - nradov 2y ago
        Most middle-class people, especially parents of small children, aren't going straight back and forth between home and work. They're making other stops for day care, school, shopping, after-school activities, gym, etc. Often there are tight time constraints which make public transit unusable. Like it would be impossible to use transit to pick my daughter up from school and get her to practice on time. It's a constant juggle and the childless young urbanites who dominate HN seem to be ignorant of how regular people live.
        RugnirViking 2y ago
        I find it so weird that people constantly speak as though public transport is this hypothetical maybe like a moon base or something. I use exclusively public transport, bikes, and walking. My whole family (with children) does. It's just not a problem. Children walk or cycle to and from school. By themselves. When they're very young their parents did go and pick them up sure, but then its a small school within walking distance. We rented a car and a trailer for a couple hours recently to move a double bed. It posed no problem, and was dramatically cheaper than owning a car for a month would be even if the car itself was free. I got a nice cabinet for my friend recently. We are going to take the drawers out and move it to his place on a bus. I don't think it would fit in your car.
  - at_compile_time 2y ago
    The problem with car-dependent cities is that they are very spread out. Why does public transit suck and why don't many people use the bike lanes? Because everything is far away. We've built our cities this way. Our tax system encourages it (by not taxing land value directly and exempting development from taxation), and our zoning requires it (my city is almost entirely zoned exclusively for single-family detached housing). Bike lanes are nice, but they don't make a 25-km ride through endless suburbia any shorter. You can't just copy the superficial traits of bikeable European cities and hope to get the same results. We need to fundamentally rethink the way our cities are allowed and encouraged to grow.
    - nradov 2y ago
      I don't use the bike lanes because most of the places I go don't have secure bike parking. I'm worried my bike will be stolen, and the local police don't take bike theft seriously. Some of the local dedicated bike trails have been essentially taken over as homeless camps, which are ironically full of stolen bike parts.
      - aziaziazi 2y ago
        Your concern of theft is a dominent reason cited for not using bikes in wester countries. Interestingly, bike theft per capita is higher in bike paradise like NL and Copenhagen while ranking in the least concerns of those users.
        kelipso 2y ago
        That’s the x thing is higher in higher population areas problem. You have to calculate the probability of your bike being stolen if you have a bike. So not bike thefts per capita but bike thefts per bike owner.
Teever 2y ago
No, the initial goal of this factory is to achieve dominance over the global automotive industry but the ultimate goal is to convert it into a machine that can spit out drones to invade Taiwain, South Korea, and Japan.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  Source? Zhengzhou doesn’t seem like where you’d put a factory you want to protect from the combined forces of Japan, Korea and America.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    You build the drones in advance of the conflict.
  - Teever 2y ago
    Where do you think the Chinese will build the factories that spit out drones en masse to invade their neighbours?
    - malermeister 2y ago
      Why do you think the Chinese will invade their neighbors?
      - Teever 2y ago
        Because that's what authoritarians invariably do. They abhor liberal democracies and seek to extend their domineering control over as many people as they can. The CCP is an absolutely tyrannical organization that denies their own citizens the rights that you and I take for granted. Why would they ever desire their neighbours to have what they deny their own people? Look no further than Hong Kong and North Korea to see what China wants for their neighbours. South Korea only exists as it does today because Western forces repelled Chinese supported North Koreans from conquering it. Japan only exists today because of American rebuilding after the destruction of Imperial Japan during World War 2. Taiwan only exists as it is today because of American support. China would have subjugated these entities and destroyed any chance of prosperity and independence that they had if not for the efforts of people who believe in individual autonomy and liberal democratic values. China only has the power that they do to day because of authoritarians in the west who tricked the world into thinking that globalism means that we should engage in trade with undemocratic societies. Because that's what authoritarians invariably do.
syndicatedjelly 2y ago
Why can’t both be done? Bicycles are already cheap, and an electric bike can be purchased under $1000. Not everyone is capable of limiting their commute to the ~10 mile radius an e-bike easily permits. Some of us still need cars, unfortunately. Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move. Is there some technology that enables high-speed travel and weighs less than a human, which seems to be an important criteria to you?
- simgt 2y ago
  Not sure about the weights-less-than-human part, but definitely bikes in trains
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move. 150cm-tall women here in Tokyo have no trouble with all of the above on a bicycle. If they can do it, so can you. They have e-bikes with child seats and cargo baskets, and they wear rain gear when it's raining.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - syndicatedjelly 2y ago
    I ride my bike a lot, but in fact need a car where I live if I want to go 10 miles in less than an hour. This is common in most of the US, and we don’t like this lifestyle either. Biking on the street with high speed traffic is not safe here, regardless of your height. Things are changing in the US. Car-centrism is on its way out, and walkable cities designed for humans are in. I’m really inspired by the new developments in my area. After covid, many US downtowns permanently shut down car traffic on core interior roads, and it’s made the experience 10x better. I agree, Tokyo is one of the most incredible places I’ve ever visited. I’ve tried to retain some of the sensibilities I observed there, and incorporate them into my lifestyle. Amsterdam similarly inspired me to revisit my lifestyle. If you hate the system you live in, make improvements!
okdood64 2y ago
Sounds swell. But people like cars. Not realistic.
nickdothutton 2y ago
Unfortunately the only places in the world that I know of building new cities are UAE, Saudi, Egypt, China. I don’t think any of those are building for car-less.
- foxglacier 2y ago
  Saudi Arabia's "The Line" is car-free.
  - Filligree 2y ago
    And reality-free.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
[flagged]
- justinrubek 2y ago
  Based on your comment, you've based your identity around something that requires packing the rest of us into traffic like cattle. Many people have died unnecessarily to support this lifestyle. Many more have their time utterly wasted as well. It continues to have drastic negative effects for all life on this planet. I agree that development shouldn't be chosen based on political beliefs; however, your argument is not without that. I'd ask for you to look into your own biases here. Do you truly have no individualism without owning a large metal structure and without forcing everyone else to as well? I find that difficult to understand. My individuality is so much more powerful than that.
- teitoklien 2y ago
  You might get downvoted a lot, but I feel the exact same way as you do. Trying to destroy cars is starting to become a political/religious belief. A lot of people think that people stopped being religious, they dont go to the church. But 24/7 Internet, TikTok, Youtube Shorts, etc, I think brought the Church to our homes in front of our eyes 24/7, the religion is different and there are many factions, but the obsession with trying to control every part of other people’s lives is starting to comeback. The people who strongly try to take away other’s freedom to drive cars, eat meat, or so, often like hypocrites support almond milk that is made by mass murder of pollinating bees in california, gazillions worth of water just to grow oats for oatmilk, especially in a world, where in a lot of places, water is considered to become far more scarce in 20 yrs than Crude Oil will be. Our world has societal problems sure, environmental too, but like always its technology, better, more advanced, much preferred ones, that can fix it, not this obsession with trying to take things away from people. The internet and being constantly glued to our phones, desks, letting activists indoctrinate people create echo chambers, is leading people to impulsively downvote everyone they disagree with, without any discussion. It has become a religious doctrine, with “sides” to pick, and the apolitical and the agnostic, treated as villains who “support the status quo”. I hope we can come out of this, what you said about boats and living by the sea, I’ve thought of it too, individualism is a beautiful thing, a human right hard fought across generations, passed on in our societies by our loved ones, who won this for us. I hope our democratic societies can keep it, defend it.
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tomjen3 2y ago
A bicycle is not suitable for the 100km trip to see my parents, and the only country that can operate trains at a satisfactory level is Japan (and maybe China, but I don't trust their data). So no, its either this or a gas car. Both are real solutions that work, today. Changing society from the bottom up is not.
- tacticus 2y ago
  or a bus. But then again it's amazing how we ignore the infrastructure costs of building and maintaining the roads to run the cars everywhere.
jajko 2y ago
For the 1000th time here, even extremely well developed public transport by US standards and various financial punishments for owning cars is simply not enough for people to drop them, the convenience is simply too high. Look at Switzerland, it has all you want - one of the best rail networks in the world, its tiny, rest of public transport is as good as western Europe can get yet... folks still keep buying new cars, highways are getting fuller every year. Maybe some AI driven community (or even private fleet) of shared cars to be hailed in Uber style on demand would work, reducing number of cars overall and the need to own personal one(s). Not there yet.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >Look at Switzerland, it has all you want - one of the best rail networks in the world, its tiny, rest of public transport is as good as western Europe can get yet... folks still keep buying new cars, highways are getting fuller every year. It sounds like Switzerland is very poorly managed then. Here in Tokyo, we have absolutely the best rail network in the world, and no, people aren't buying more cars and making the roads more crowded at all. The key here is that owning a car in the city is extremely inconvenient: the roads are frequently very narrow and slow, there's no convenient place to park, the few parking lots available are expensive (and likely not near your destination anyway, unless you're going to some large building (like a mall), and you're not even allowed to own a car in the city unless you have a place to park it, and can prove this to the police. There's almost no street parking. So trying to use a car to get around the city is just not very convenient at all, except for certain trips (e.g., going to a mall that has a parking garage, from your apartment where you're spending a huge extra amount every month for the privilege of a parking space). Taxis are a different matter, though: they exist and are somewhat popular, but they're pretty expensive.
- okaram 2y ago
  I don't think anyone envisions having no cars; public transportation make it so we don't need cars, and other nudges make it so we have fewer cars than we would otherwise have.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average) Actually, if you pay attention to scales and sizes, it's so very little to achieve so much. What you're seeing is tremendous efficiencies concentrated on a small piece of land, affecting transportation on a vast scale.
kristianp 2y ago
I agree that cars are at least double the mass they need to be. The size of cars needed for a school run or to drive to work are generally quite small, but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.
- felipelemos 2y ago
  > but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large. This is the reality in United States, but not in most of the world.
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    Sadly though, other countries are trending the same way.
acdha 2y ago
I’m a bike commuter, all on board for transit, etc. but too much of the world – especially North America – is built around cars exclusively and that’s not changing any time soon because doing so would require things like massive rezoning to avoid people needing to travel such long distances just to function. If we are going to have cars, I’d prefer they be smaller, safer EVs contributing ⅓ the carbon footprint of the status quo. Every bit of savings buys years to make further changes, and it directly saves lives and improves quality of life for a billion people. Even if climate change was not happening, it’d be worth doing for the improvements in cardiovascular health, disruption of sleep patterns and other consequences of engine noise, local water and soil pollution, etc.
p2detar 2y ago
There is a clear reason why such factories are being built in China and if you are a USA or German citizen, you wouldn't like it. In a BBC article from a couple of days ago [0], they hinted that China intends to take the lead into transitioning developing countries from fossil fuels to green tech. They produce batteries, EVs and solar panels. Just this year alone Pakistan of all the countries, imported 13 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels. For context - the UK has 17GW of installed solar in total. China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative. 0 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rx2drd8x8o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rx2drd8x8o
- timomaxgalvin 2y ago
  Pakistan has better geography for solar.
- lazyeye 2y ago
  How is the power being generated for all this manufacturing capacity?
  - mnau 2y ago
    60% coal, some baseload nuclear (5%), renewables (30%). They have massive dams (14% of electricity IIRC). Coal share is shrinking, a lot. Today, capacity factor of coal plants is below 50% (that's why you always see China builds coal plants... that stand idle) and their coal consumption has been more or less flat for a decade. The plan is to use coal plans when wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine. Natural gas is a national security risk due to imports, but they do have a lot of coal.
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      Out west coal drops a lot and green energy is more available. They are still limited by grid in getting green energy from west to east. They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.
pornel 2y ago
World's response to the climate crisis is already dangerously delayed, and we're at a point where we need anything ASAP. We've ran out of time to massively overhaul infrastructure everywhere. The US and UK apparently can't even build a single high speed rail line any more. Car dependency sucks, but we won't be able to fix that in the short term, but at least we can fix its oil dependence. Cleaner grid will also need a lot of battery storage, and EV demand helps scale that up.
- 8note 2y ago
  I don't think it's a particularly different timescale to swap from ICE to EV than to drastically reduce car dependence. What makes you think there's a big difference to where swapping to electric cars is easier than avoiding cars?
  - pornel 2y ago
    Credible reduction in car dependence needs well connected fast passenger rail networks, and changing urban sprawl to something denser with more local amenities. The first one is a major infrastructure project, the latter is largely unpopular with the people already living there (and Republicans react to the concept of 15-minute cities like it was a gulag). Infrastructure is still built as if it was business as usual, so can easily get blocked and delayed by decades on budgeting, bidding, consultations, NIMBYs, environmental surveys, etc. OTOH we've already got EVs, we have already been building infrastructure for them, and it's a smaller change more acceptable to people.
greenthrow 2y ago
You might as well wish that the factories produced teleporters. You're putting the cart before the horse. You have to fix the demand side first. I know there's an online demand for public transportation and bikes and if you are in that bubble it can feel like the whole world is with you, but in the real world, most people (obvs not everyone) prefers to have their own car.
- kalleboo 2y ago
  I think there's hope since the only thing people like more than their cars is being glued to their phones, and public transport enables you to do that during your commute.
hackernewds 2y ago
Believe it or not, but the buses and trains are also being manufactured in China. if you'd visit, you'd see that they have excellent public infrastructure, with multiple redundancies
- Symbiote 2y ago
  There is a downside. You need to show your identity card to buy a ticket. (or use an app which does this for you.)
deleted 2y ago
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jojobas 2y ago
Next weigh up your house, get ashamed, tear it down and live in a tent.
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
BYD make busses. They have something like a 20% market share in the EU and the number of EV busses in China is mind boggling and was an early sign that China was going to win the EV market: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231206-climate-change-how-chinas-electric-vehicle-revolution-began-with-buses https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231206-climate-change-h... BYD also have some kind of monorail product!

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy The worst except the others. Like sure, retooling our metropolises might be nice. But it’s also not only expensive but incredibly carbon intensive, to say nothing of not wanted by most of the world.

wbl 2y ago
It's not that expensive to put down a bike lane.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > not that expensive to put down a bike lane Scale-wise insufficient. We aren’t going to get to net zero with bike lanes.
  - recursive 2y ago
    Who said net zero? Perfect is the enemy of good.
    - jimjimjim 2y ago
      Comments like these need to be included in almost any discussion about transport or in fact any discussion about any change. Most people (or both sides) dismiss ideas because they are not 100% perfect. And ignore the fact that nothing can be perfect
      - jujube3 2y ago
        If we only do a little bit, we'll only accomplish a little bit.
        recursive 2y ago
        Yes, we'd better not do a little bit. Surely then, we'll accomplish a lot.
        jujube3 2y ago
        Perhaps we could spend the billions on electric cars rather than on unused bicycle lanes.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Who said net zero? OP is expressing dismay at EVs and suggesting building bike lanes instead. (Not in addition to.) The latter doesn’t solve the problem the former is being built to address. More bikes is nice. More EVs are necessary. Suggesting more bikes as an alternative to EVs isn’t perfect versus good, it’s fielding rubber ducks against battleships.
      - recursive 2y ago
        > Not in addition to Interesting. I didn't read that at all, but now this conversation makes a little more sense. But suggesting bike lanes, not positioned as an replacement to cars, is a great idea.
- robocat 2y ago
  It is outrageously expensive. "Building 101km of cycleways across Christchurch to cost $301m", population 405000, So that is $750 per person, which is about 1% of median earnings for a year. That is paid for mostly by car owners (via petrol tax and car tax) and a bit by home owners. And the new infrastructure is visibly under-utilised - at best a few % of traffic. You could force people to bike using laws and economics I guess... I would be interested to see a per-trip cost analysis for cyclists. There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere - bikes are great for some trips and some demographics. Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists...
  - jodrellblank 2y ago
    > There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere Roads pre-date cars. Cars muscled in and took over, forced humans off the roads onto sidewalks. Now car drivers say it cannot be economically justified for people to move around outside cars? This is "car-brain" thinking. If the cars were banned, people could walk and cycle and wheelchair and skate on the roads their taxes are already paying for. They aren't "car roads", they are just roads - cycles are allowed on them. Car drivers don't want to share, don't want to slow down, keep hitting and killing people, can't control their vehicles safely, so demand cyclists be moved somewhere else - then complain about the cost of doing that! People say cars have taken over, they want somewhere safe from the dangers of cars, car drivers say no it's too expensive to make yourself safe from me commuting through the places you live and work! It's crazy land. As if the only reason Christchurch exists at all is for cars to drive through. Can you point to a report that has a cost/beneift analysis of each individual road in Christchurch? Because when Urban3 set out to find out that kind of thing in USA and Canadian cities[2] they found that the dense urban centers ("poor") were the parts of a city with enough tax revenue to cover their infrastructure costs, and the sparse suburbs ("rich") were being subsidised by them. The people in city center apartments, possibly without cars, possibly transit riders, pay for the sprawling suburbs which need long roads and infrastructure serving relatively few houses and businesses, which don't generate enough revenue to pay for those roads, sewers, water pipes, storm drains, electricity supply, etc. New Zealand $301M is about £139M in UK pounds. Wikipedia has a list of road projects in the UK[1],including: - Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet. 16 km, £507 million. - Morpeth and Felton, 12.9Km, £260M. (Morpeth population: 14k) - M54 to M6 motorway link road, 2.5km, £200M. - Shrewsbury North West Relief Road, 6km, estimated £120M (population: 77k). - Arundel bypass, cost £320M (population: 3.5k). - Newark-upon-Trent bypass, 6.5Km, cost £400-£500M (population: 30k). Building more roads doesn't reduce traffic. It makes driving easier, quicker, more convenient, which increases the temptation to drive, increases the number of journeys, incentivises and encourages driving, makes traffic worse. Can you point me to a cost/benefit analysis of spending half a billion pounds on one of these road schemes to "reduce traffic" by doing something that doesn't reduce traffic, something that makes traffic worse? Spending 2-10x the cost of rail per km, while moving 1/20th the amount of people compared to rail, polluting more than rail? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_road_projects_in_the_UK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_road_projects_in_the_U... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Bike lanes and bikes aren't alternatives to most of what motorized transport is providing.
  - wbl 2y ago
    Most car trips are very short, and commuting to a CBD is easily served by transit.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      That still doesn't solve last mile supply of stores and offices, nor does it solve construction, policing, emergency services, etc. Each of those likely has possible alternatives to motorized transport, but they're all different alternatives. Meanwhile, today, they all share the same road network with regular civilian commute, sharing costs and mutually improving efficiency. Put differently: instead of imagining all passenger cars replaced by bikes, imagine all roads replaced by bike lanes, then extrapolate from that.
    - nradov 2y ago
      Most middle-class people, especially parents of small children, aren't going straight back and forth between home and work. They're making other stops for day care, school, shopping, after-school activities, gym, etc. Often there are tight time constraints which make public transit unusable. Like it would be impossible to use transit to pick my daughter up from school and get her to practice on time. It's a constant juggle and the childless young urbanites who dominate HN seem to be ignorant of how regular people live.
      - RugnirViking 2y ago
        I find it so weird that people constantly speak as though public transport is this hypothetical maybe like a moon base or something. I use exclusively public transport, bikes, and walking. My whole family (with children) does. It's just not a problem. Children walk or cycle to and from school. By themselves. When they're very young their parents did go and pick them up sure, but then its a small school within walking distance. We rented a car and a trailer for a couple hours recently to move a double bed. It posed no problem, and was dramatically cheaper than owning a car for a month would be even if the car itself was free. I got a nice cabinet for my friend recently. We are going to take the drawers out and move it to his place on a bus. I don't think it would fit in your car.
- at_compile_time 2y ago
  The problem with car-dependent cities is that they are very spread out. Why does public transit suck and why don't many people use the bike lanes? Because everything is far away. We've built our cities this way. Our tax system encourages it (by not taxing land value directly and exempting development from taxation), and our zoning requires it (my city is almost entirely zoned exclusively for single-family detached housing). Bike lanes are nice, but they don't make a 25-km ride through endless suburbia any shorter. You can't just copy the superficial traits of bikeable European cities and hope to get the same results. We need to fundamentally rethink the way our cities are allowed and encouraged to grow.
  - nradov 2y ago
    I don't use the bike lanes because most of the places I go don't have secure bike parking. I'm worried my bike will be stolen, and the local police don't take bike theft seriously. Some of the local dedicated bike trails have been essentially taken over as homeless camps, which are ironically full of stolen bike parts.
    - aziaziazi 2y ago
      Your concern of theft is a dominent reason cited for not using bikes in wester countries. Interestingly, bike theft per capita is higher in bike paradise like NL and Copenhagen while ranking in the least concerns of those users.
      - kelipso 2y ago
        That’s the x thing is higher in higher population areas problem. You have to calculate the probability of your bike being stolen if you have a bike. So not bike thefts per capita but bike thefts per bike owner.

Teever 2y ago

No, the initial goal of this factory is to achieve dominance over the global automotive industry but the ultimate goal is to convert it into a machine that can spit out drones to invade Taiwain, South Korea, and Japan.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
Source? Zhengzhou doesn’t seem like where you’d put a factory you want to protect from the combined forces of Japan, Korea and America.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  You build the drones in advance of the conflict.
- Teever 2y ago
  Where do you think the Chinese will build the factories that spit out drones en masse to invade their neighbours?
  - malermeister 2y ago
    Why do you think the Chinese will invade their neighbors?
    - Teever 2y ago
      Because that's what authoritarians invariably do. They abhor liberal democracies and seek to extend their domineering control over as many people as they can. The CCP is an absolutely tyrannical organization that denies their own citizens the rights that you and I take for granted. Why would they ever desire their neighbours to have what they deny their own people? Look no further than Hong Kong and North Korea to see what China wants for their neighbours. South Korea only exists as it does today because Western forces repelled Chinese supported North Koreans from conquering it. Japan only exists today because of American rebuilding after the destruction of Imperial Japan during World War 2. Taiwan only exists as it is today because of American support. China would have subjugated these entities and destroyed any chance of prosperity and independence that they had if not for the efforts of people who believe in individual autonomy and liberal democratic values. China only has the power that they do to day because of authoritarians in the west who tricked the world into thinking that globalism means that we should engage in trade with undemocratic societies. Because that's what authoritarians invariably do.

syndicatedjelly 2y ago

Why can’t both be done? Bicycles are already cheap, and an electric bike can be purchased under $1000. Not everyone is capable of limiting their commute to the ~10 mile radius an e-bike easily permits. Some of us still need cars, unfortunately. Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move. Is there some technology that enables high-speed travel and weighs less than a human, which seems to be an important criteria to you?

simgt 2y ago
Not sure about the weights-less-than-human part, but definitely bikes in trains
shiroiushi 2y ago
>Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move. 150cm-tall women here in Tokyo have no trouble with all of the above on a bicycle. If they can do it, so can you. They have e-bikes with child seats and cargo baskets, and they wear rain gear when it's raining.
- deleted 2y ago
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- syndicatedjelly 2y ago
  I ride my bike a lot, but in fact need a car where I live if I want to go 10 miles in less than an hour. This is common in most of the US, and we don’t like this lifestyle either. Biking on the street with high speed traffic is not safe here, regardless of your height. Things are changing in the US. Car-centrism is on its way out, and walkable cities designed for humans are in. I’m really inspired by the new developments in my area. After covid, many US downtowns permanently shut down car traffic on core interior roads, and it’s made the experience 10x better. I agree, Tokyo is one of the most incredible places I’ve ever visited. I’ve tried to retain some of the sensibilities I observed there, and incorporate them into my lifestyle. Amsterdam similarly inspired me to revisit my lifestyle. If you hate the system you live in, make improvements!

okdood64 2y ago

Sounds swell. But people like cars. Not realistic.

nickdothutton 2y ago

Unfortunately the only places in the world that I know of building new cities are UAE, Saudi, Egypt, China. I don’t think any of those are building for car-less.

foxglacier 2y ago
Saudi Arabia's "The Line" is car-free.
- Filligree 2y ago
  And reality-free.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

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justinrubek 2y ago
Based on your comment, you've based your identity around something that requires packing the rest of us into traffic like cattle. Many people have died unnecessarily to support this lifestyle. Many more have their time utterly wasted as well. It continues to have drastic negative effects for all life on this planet. I agree that development shouldn't be chosen based on political beliefs; however, your argument is not without that. I'd ask for you to look into your own biases here. Do you truly have no individualism without owning a large metal structure and without forcing everyone else to as well? I find that difficult to understand. My individuality is so much more powerful than that.
teitoklien 2y ago
You might get downvoted a lot, but I feel the exact same way as you do. Trying to destroy cars is starting to become a political/religious belief. A lot of people think that people stopped being religious, they dont go to the church. But 24/7 Internet, TikTok, Youtube Shorts, etc, I think brought the Church to our homes in front of our eyes 24/7, the religion is different and there are many factions, but the obsession with trying to control every part of other people’s lives is starting to comeback. The people who strongly try to take away other’s freedom to drive cars, eat meat, or so, often like hypocrites support almond milk that is made by mass murder of pollinating bees in california, gazillions worth of water just to grow oats for oatmilk, especially in a world, where in a lot of places, water is considered to become far more scarce in 20 yrs than Crude Oil will be. Our world has societal problems sure, environmental too, but like always its technology, better, more advanced, much preferred ones, that can fix it, not this obsession with trying to take things away from people. The internet and being constantly glued to our phones, desks, letting activists indoctrinate people create echo chambers, is leading people to impulsively downvote everyone they disagree with, without any discussion. It has become a religious doctrine, with “sides” to pick, and the apolitical and the agnostic, treated as villains who “support the status quo”. I hope we can come out of this, what you said about boats and living by the sea, I’ve thought of it too, individualism is a beautiful thing, a human right hard fought across generations, passed on in our societies by our loved ones, who won this for us. I hope our democratic societies can keep it, defend it.

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tomjen3 2y ago

A bicycle is not suitable for the 100km trip to see my parents, and the only country that can operate trains at a satisfactory level is Japan (and maybe China, but I don't trust their data). So no, its either this or a gas car. Both are real solutions that work, today. Changing society from the bottom up is not.

tacticus 2y ago
or a bus. But then again it's amazing how we ignore the infrastructure costs of building and maintaining the roads to run the cars everywhere.

jajko 2y ago

For the 1000th time here, even extremely well developed public transport by US standards and various financial punishments for owning cars is simply not enough for people to drop them, the convenience is simply too high. Look at Switzerland, it has all you want - one of the best rail networks in the world, its tiny, rest of public transport is as good as western Europe can get yet... folks still keep buying new cars, highways are getting fuller every year. Maybe some AI driven community (or even private fleet) of shared cars to be hailed in Uber style on demand would work, reducing number of cars overall and the need to own personal one(s). Not there yet.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>Look at Switzerland, it has all you want - one of the best rail networks in the world, its tiny, rest of public transport is as good as western Europe can get yet... folks still keep buying new cars, highways are getting fuller every year. It sounds like Switzerland is very poorly managed then. Here in Tokyo, we have absolutely the best rail network in the world, and no, people aren't buying more cars and making the roads more crowded at all. The key here is that owning a car in the city is extremely inconvenient: the roads are frequently very narrow and slow, there's no convenient place to park, the few parking lots available are expensive (and likely not near your destination anyway, unless you're going to some large building (like a mall), and you're not even allowed to own a car in the city unless you have a place to park it, and can prove this to the police. There's almost no street parking. So trying to use a car to get around the city is just not very convenient at all, except for certain trips (e.g., going to a mall that has a parking garage, from your apartment where you're spending a huge extra amount every month for the privilege of a parking space). Taxis are a different matter, though: they exist and are somewhat popular, but they're pretty expensive.
okaram 2y ago
I don't think anyone envisions having no cars; public transportation make it so we don't need cars, and other nudges make it so we have fewer cars than we would otherwise have.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

> All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average) Actually, if you pay attention to scales and sizes, it's so very little to achieve so much. What you're seeing is tremendous efficiencies concentrated on a small piece of land, affecting transportation on a vast scale.

kristianp 2y ago

I agree that cars are at least double the mass they need to be. The size of cars needed for a school run or to drive to work are generally quite small, but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.

felipelemos 2y ago
> but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large. This is the reality in United States, but not in most of the world.
- kalleboo 2y ago
  Sadly though, other countries are trending the same way.

acdha 2y ago

I’m a bike commuter, all on board for transit, etc. but too much of the world – especially North America – is built around cars exclusively and that’s not changing any time soon because doing so would require things like massive rezoning to avoid people needing to travel such long distances just to function. If we are going to have cars, I’d prefer they be smaller, safer EVs contributing ⅓ the carbon footprint of the status quo. Every bit of savings buys years to make further changes, and it directly saves lives and improves quality of life for a billion people. Even if climate change was not happening, it’d be worth doing for the improvements in cardiovascular health, disruption of sleep patterns and other consequences of engine noise, local water and soil pollution, etc.

p2detar 2y ago

There is a clear reason why such factories are being built in China and if you are a USA or German citizen, you wouldn't like it. In a BBC article from a couple of days ago [0], they hinted that China intends to take the lead into transitioning developing countries from fossil fuels to green tech. They produce batteries, EVs and solar panels. Just this year alone Pakistan of all the countries, imported 13 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels. For context - the UK has 17GW of installed solar in total. China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative. 0 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rx2drd8x8o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rx2drd8x8o

timomaxgalvin 2y ago
Pakistan has better geography for solar.
lazyeye 2y ago
How is the power being generated for all this manufacturing capacity?
- mnau 2y ago
  60% coal, some baseload nuclear (5%), renewables (30%). They have massive dams (14% of electricity IIRC). Coal share is shrinking, a lot. Today, capacity factor of coal plants is below 50% (that's why you always see China builds coal plants... that stand idle) and their coal consumption has been more or less flat for a decade. The plan is to use coal plans when wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine. Natural gas is a national security risk due to imports, but they do have a lot of coal.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Out west coal drops a lot and green energy is more available. They are still limited by grid in getting green energy from west to east. They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.

pornel 2y ago

World's response to the climate crisis is already dangerously delayed, and we're at a point where we need anything ASAP. We've ran out of time to massively overhaul infrastructure everywhere. The US and UK apparently can't even build a single high speed rail line any more. Car dependency sucks, but we won't be able to fix that in the short term, but at least we can fix its oil dependence. Cleaner grid will also need a lot of battery storage, and EV demand helps scale that up.

8note 2y ago
I don't think it's a particularly different timescale to swap from ICE to EV than to drastically reduce car dependence. What makes you think there's a big difference to where swapping to electric cars is easier than avoiding cars?
- pornel 2y ago
  Credible reduction in car dependence needs well connected fast passenger rail networks, and changing urban sprawl to something denser with more local amenities. The first one is a major infrastructure project, the latter is largely unpopular with the people already living there (and Republicans react to the concept of 15-minute cities like it was a gulag). Infrastructure is still built as if it was business as usual, so can easily get blocked and delayed by decades on budgeting, bidding, consultations, NIMBYs, environmental surveys, etc. OTOH we've already got EVs, we have already been building infrastructure for them, and it's a smaller change more acceptable to people.

greenthrow 2y ago

You might as well wish that the factories produced teleporters. You're putting the cart before the horse. You have to fix the demand side first. I know there's an online demand for public transportation and bikes and if you are in that bubble it can feel like the whole world is with you, but in the real world, most people (obvs not everyone) prefers to have their own car.

kalleboo 2y ago
I think there's hope since the only thing people like more than their cars is being glued to their phones, and public transport enables you to do that during your commute.

hackernewds 2y ago

Believe it or not, but the buses and trains are also being manufactured in China. if you'd visit, you'd see that they have excellent public infrastructure, with multiple redundancies

Symbiote 2y ago
There is a downside. You need to show your identity card to buy a ticket. (or use an app which does this for you.)

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jojobas 2y ago

Next weigh up your house, get ashamed, tear it down and live in a tent.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago

BYD make busses. They have something like a 20% market share in the EU and the number of EV busses in China is mind boggling and was an early sign that China was going to win the EV market: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231206-climate-change-how-chinas-electric-vehicle-revolution-began-with-buses https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231206-climate-change-h... BYD also have some kind of monorail product!