hmm.. which car?

[Jean]

if there is enough density to get traffic congestion, there is enough density for a great public transit.

[loutfard]

For EU eremites looking to own a car, a used Dacia might be the obvious choice.

[Jean]

except no one is crazy enough to sell a dacia

[loutfard]

except no one is crazy enough to sell a dacia

You might be right about the individual buyers, but there's actually quite a number of companies using Dacias, especially Dokker vans. Companies usually renew their fleet on a predictable cadence.

[ducknald_don]

We're talking about getting those people to uproot their lives entirely. They are our farmers, low cost manufacturing, truckers, solar workers, ranchers, etc. Often their families have been established for several generations.

In most parts of the world that is happening naturally, people are migrating towards cities because that is where the opportunities are. Agricultural employment has plummeted over the last century because of improvements to farm technology. It's the same story with manufacturing, coal mining, etc. I don't see anything changing on that front.

The US has about 6x the population of the UK, but 40x the land area.

Interestingly I saw a stat the other day that said more Americans live in apartments than Brits.

[Jean]

but beyond that, "low" density is no excuse.
45 US states have a higher population density than norway, and norway has good enough or great public transport dependig on what you compare them too.
But it doesn't mean we need to force every rural area to go car free. If there is no transport issue, there is no reason to fix them.
What is sad, is that road cost a lot of tax money, and use up a lot of space, and in a lot of area, this money and space would be better spent on a public transport network than on larger road. Because traffic congestion suck, for people in them, for people living around them, and building bigger road isn't solving it, because of induce demand, and because more space used by roads increase the length of the average trip, making the amount of car on the road bigger at a faster rate.
Many car centric development don't even generate enough taxe revenue to maintain their roads.

[CS]

Except in Norway, they made the electric car so appealing that households that would have been limited to one instead bought two cars, with pretty much no infrastructure tax benefit.

Countries should introduce EV subsidies in a way that doesn’t widen inequality or stimulate car use at the expense of other transport modes,” Bjørne Grimsrud, director of the transportation research center TØI, told me over coffee in Oslo. “But that’s what ended up happening here in Norway.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2393 ... tesla-oslo

[chenda]

@CS - Interesting article, only confirms my beliefs that EV are mostly greenwashing, which do nothing to solve congestion and still require electric generation. To the point you wonder how ICE lite would emit lower carbon emissions than EV heavy, depending on the grid source.

[zbigi]

One thing I love about electric cars is how much quieter they are in cities (at lower speeds), esp. compared to the 25 years old BMWs with moron tuning mufflers that we have around here.

[mathiverse]

The vast majority of Americans (~80%) live in urban areas according to the US Census. The vast majority of urban areas have atrocious (in comparison to mentioned European systems) public transportation and walking-biking-human-powered transportation infrastructure even when the density is there. Two cities and their metropolitan area which I can name off the top of my head that are terrible are Atlanta, GA and Charlotte, NC, but there are many other cities besides those two. There is a lot of room for improvement before one would ever have to discuss the car usage of rural people. I think it's a straw man to cite car-dependent farmers and other rural populations as people we need to consider before we talk about infrastructure problems in the United States.

[Scott 2]

Living near a highway, I'm a fan of how quiet EVs are. I appreciate the low emissions while driving too. Maybe it's a net neutral, but they are in someone else's backyard.


I've spent thousands of hours commuting on trains. Made earnest efforts to use city and suburban buses. Taken the light rail, subway, etc. I really tried to make mass transit work for me.

These days, if I truly must go, I pick an off peak time and order a car. It's hard to imagine the US fixing that gap.

My favorite solutions remove the need to go somewhere.

[Jean]

@CS
I don't really see how it's related to my point. They might have made a mistake by susidising EV so heavilly, but they still had and have a decent public transport network with a low population density.

[delay]

@CS - Interesting article, only confirms my beliefs that EV are mostly greenwashing, which do nothing to solve congestion and still require electric generation. To the point you wonder how ICE lite would emit lower carbon emissions than EV heavy, depending on the grid source.

Agreed, it seems that EVs are not green in terms of energy efficiency. Energy conversion, transport and storage all cost energy. Battery production has atrocious energy and environmental costs.

An interesting aspect of EVs is that they do not pollute in the area where they are used. Pollution is where the electricity is generated, where the components of the car produced, and where the minerals are mined.

[sky]

Automated self driving taxi systems will wipe out old transit systems on the local level, while boosting city to city transit.

[ducknald_don]

Agreed, it seems that EVs are not green in terms of energy efficiency. Energy conversion, transport and storage all cost energy. Battery production has atrocious energy and environmental costs.

All that applies to cars with internal combustion engines as well. The question is which is better over the lifetime of the car and everything I've seen so far points to EV's being the better option.

[7Wannabe5]

I would note that one of the primary reasons I somewhat regret my choice of Smart car is that it isn't rugged enough for the terrible condition of the roads in the already-economically-collapsed realm where I currently reside. Hitting a giant pothole on those tiny tires is not my idea of fun. OTOH, nobody over the age of 8 would be able to squish underneath to steal catalytic converter, although I suppose a highly motivated team could simply pick it up.

[chenda]

I would note that one of the primary reasons I somewhat regret my choice of Smart car is that it isn't rugged enough for the terrible condition of the roads in the already-economically-collapsed realm where I currently reside.

In terms of SHTF scenarios our South African friends are way ahead of us: https://youtu.be/aLhWzMOccTg

[Jean]

@sky
taxi are less convenient than transit, and also less efficient. A few us cities tried to replace transit with uber, and it's apparently a complete faillure.

[okumurahata]

I believe that the prohibition of manually driving cars will happen sooner rather than later. Future societies will question why governments allowed manual driving, causing numerous deaths on the roads. If autonomous driving becomes a reality in our lifetime, it will transform the landscape entirely, akin to how Netflix subscriptions replaced buying or renting films from Blockbuster.

When you can travel from point A to point B in an autonomous vehicle, at a lower cost than public transport, and customize aspects like route, music, and temperature, car ownership is set to decline. We are moving towards that point; where people will move from A to B as inexpensively as possible without owning a car, avoiding the inconveniences of public transport and the associated costs of car ownership.

[zbigi]

As someone who did some work in AI space, I can tell you it's far from certain if self-driving cars will ever be possible, let alone in our lifetimes. Maybe they'll happen, but maybe they won't - impossible to tell at this point. Same as with a cure for cancer and a bunch of other things that humanity has been working hard at.
Also, if Peter Zeihan's predictions turn out to be true (he predicts that there'll be a lot less speculative tech investments from now on, because of demographic shifts), then the macro climate will not be favourable towards developing things like self-driving cars.