My friend’s work is over an hour from his house by public transport—if public transport is working, and it’s a weekday. If it isn’t working well, if it’s late, if it’s a weekend or holiday, then it’s closer to two hours (or more).
It’s 15 minutes max by car.
And he lives in a place with good public transportation.
Until we improve how public transportation runs, so that it really is designed around how people need to get from A to B, cars are going to be the more popular choice.
Come to my mind, for a while back in the nineties and two-thousands, there was a push to abandon those dirty public transportation devices like buses and trains in favor of biking, walking, etc., but it mainly ended with people switching to cars. Maybe there was some industry push.
Yeah, the hope is that we transition from combustion engines to no cars.
I’m all for public transit, but I will mention for the sake of honesty, Paul Weyrich, the creator of the Heritage Foundation had a bizarre fixation on trains from an early age.
Government funding for basically anything else related to common public good was forbidden, but for some reason trains were like his one “thing” he believed the government should fund.
Moving Minds: Conservatives and Public Transportation
So I’m all for public transit, but I would still demand public accountability. We deserve to know exactly who is profiting from any publicly funded projects.
Edit: He wrote a lot, and frequently found a way to sneak something about his public transportation fetish in just about everything he wrote (even somehow in a blog post shitting on New Orleans days after Katrina), but this is probably one of my favorite takes:
Bring Back the Streetcars! A Conservative Vision of Tomorrow’s Urban Transportation
What’s Right with This Picture?
Everything. It is a fine summer day in New Westminster, British Columbia, in the year 1909. Car 39 has stopped briefly on Park Row on its way into town. It carries its passengers through a world that is ordered, serene, at peace. Their eyes feast upon the glories of Queen Anne architecture. They hear the birds and the trolley wire sing a duet in an ether as yet unpolluted by engine noise or boom boxes. Their poised servants, the motorman and conductor of the car, stand as visible assurances of responsibility and reliability. God is in His Heaven and all is right with the world.
🤣 This would be so hilarious if we weren’t all watching the U.S. being torn apart as a direct result of his life’s work.
We deserve to know exactly who is profiting from any publicly funded projects.
i’m not familiar with that information being hidden
Nothing you do as an individual will ever be as bad as the commercial fishing industry.
Wrong! I could become the president and nuke the world. Boom, worse than industrial fishing.
Hahaha!
Oh, sorry. I meant
MUAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Except the president cant just ‘nuke’ the world. They can give the order, but theres a whole chain of command that actually fires the nukes.
What about electric public transit? EV buses are becoming quite popular in Korea.
The nearest major city to me has had electric buses since 1940. There are power cables overhead and poles that link the bus to the grid. No need for expensive flammable batteries that need extensive charging.
Trolley busses still have batteries, they just get charged by the overhead wires while the bus is driving.
As long as they’re being purchased as a replacement for buses that are either at the end of their life or being donated to smaller communities, then sure. This said from the perspective of an American whose city, state and federal governments refuse to fund the public transit that we already have. (╥_╥)
Also Germany
Stupid sexy skeletor
Where I live there is 0 public transport. I charge my EV with my own solar panels. So I think I am okay.
You are way better than the average car owner but it still takes a lot of energy to build an electric car. For the environment it would be even better if the batteries are used in buses and electric bikes, then more people can transport themselves with less pollution.
Of course, but they’re doing the best they can.
Next step would be attending city/town hall meetings, and slowly advocating for more and more public transit over time.
The dream of coast-to-coast public transit, the likes of which we saw before WWII, is still possible
Bike/Electric scooter + public transport is a peak mobility, but public transport isn’t even built for that :(
Fr, if the British gov stopped arresting every one who rides an electric scooter then the bus might actually be an attractive option
Well I mean Ireland doesn’t arrest electric scooters but you can’t bring them into transport because, ahem, batteries can explode.
so can a lot of things
I mean from engineering perspective batteries in the board part do get damaged when you damage the board by hitting the floor, and they have increased chances to catch fire when your charge them. And when they do, they fucking destroy everything around. You can’t really stop it either.
Key point: when you charge them. There is no reason to assume that would happen in tram or something.
But I have to be together with people!
I’d rather drive my bike to work.
Yes, though not always as accessible.
The problem with electric cars is two fold as far as I understand it:
- The electricity it uses is not sustainable.
- It has lots of tracking etc and in some cases remote control.
I’d say long term, neither of those should be problems
The electricity it uses is not sustainable.
Many EV users also go for solar panels to alleviate energy costs. Also as a country’s electrical grid modernises, it should make use of a greater share of renewables given they’re cheaper than the alternatives now.
It has lots of tracking etc and in some cases remote control.
Slightly less certain, but I’d hope this kind of thing is legislated away at some point. There’s also always customer choice, there will be manufacturers that compete on the privacy angle if enough of us care
The main problem with EVs is it doesn’t solve any of the problems inherent to cars being treated as the main mode of transportation in a given area. Places like that will see EVs as the solution compared to an alternative of investing into better public transit infrastructure.
Infrastructure that is basically inevitable, since we know now that any town/city that eschews anything but car transit will ultimately bankrupt themselves on road maintenance alone.
I would suggest different downsizes:
- EVs are much heavies, and they wear down the road, and everything else
- tire particles are going to be the next problem after fossil fuels
Solution: trains, more trains, even more trains.
Tracking is not unique to electric cars, just new cars.
Large power stations are more efficient than small engines.
Many electric car owners also have solar panels.Refining enough fuel to transport an average car 100km uses enough energy to transport an average electric car 50km. That’s just refining, not including searching for or collecting the oil, or transporting the fuel to fuel stations.
It’s so much electricity that most oil refineries have dedicated coal or gas power stations.As long as you are only considering cars, electric cars are superior in almost every way, and are constantly getting better.
A diesel bus is still better than an electric car (although an electric bus would be better still). Trains and trams would be ideal, but require more upfront cost, so are easier for lazy or corrupt politicians to oppose.
Good point about tracking being a newer car problem.
Sadly where I live busses are not accessible to me since:
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They are infrequent.
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They do not have a ‘live map’ so make me extremely anxious since I don’t know where I am nor where to stop the bus.
Where I’m from, in the UK, there’s a lot of wind power because it’s cheaper and the labour government of 97-2010 invested in it.
So electricity is greenest and cheapest overnight, so my car knows to charge itself starting when the cheap overnight electricity tariff kicks in. I save about 80% over what I used to party for petrol.
I do not miss going to the petrol station one bit.
Yes Nissan have my car’s location all the while but otherwise they wouldn’t be able to report it to me via the app. And I trust them much more than I trust Google and Google not only knows where I and my phone are all the time, they also know what apps I use for how long and if I accidentally press the button their assistant gets to see a screenshot. Worrying that Nissan know where I parked the car doesn’t compare.
Anyway, it’s just the most fun to drive car I’ve ever driven. So much acceleration! So smooth!
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While the power source that generated the electricity is not necessarily sustainable, power plants should have more at scale Features to limit the pollutants than a traditional petrol engine.
Or at least the power plants should if one lives in a civilized society…
civilized society
I’m sorry sir but such a thing does not exist, I fear you must have dreamed it.
The problem with EVs is that in almost all ways other than local pollution they are just as bad as ICE vehicles. They
- need massive amounts of asphalted space for roadways and parking
- use this space very inefficiently and cause traffic congestion at any given spike in traffic
- drive urban sprawl and thus make housing less sustainable (more sewage,water supply, electric supply, heating, roads/person required)
- urban sprawl stretches everything far apart and makes public transit much less feasible so people who can’t drive cars struggle to get places, for example kids can’t walk to school or take public transit, instead must be driven
- are loud (because tyres rolling is the driving source of noise)
- are dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists
- their dangers and tendency to cause traffic congestion inhibit other, more efficient and sustainable modes of transport so that when not regulated properly, they take over all of the streetscape as is evident in most western places
Also, those tires on asphalt are one of the leading contributors to environmental pollution from all the shedded microplastics.
YES, can’t believe I forgot that point.
This is a general complaint about vehicles, not necessarily EVs, and extends to trucks, motorcycles, and basically anything that gives humans more range than their feet.
This position would probably be best directed at the city planning office.
This is a general complaint about vehicles, not necessarily EVs
Yes, that’s like the whole point of my post, being E doesn’t fix 90% of the issues caused by individual motorised transport vehicles. And city planning can’t do anything about these inherent issues either, they can merely decide to make good, sustainable cities or car friendly cities. Good city planning policies stand in direct contrast to the amount of cars expected to be driven.
And I’m saying this not to shit on EVs, they must clearly replace ICE vehicles as soon as possible, but to warn that they will not fix the unsustainable state of affairs in transportation. Loads of people appear to actually believe they do and that’s sort of dangerous. We’re not gonna fix jack shit if we just transition these vehicles to being electric while further increasing car dependency and sprawl. We’re gonna make it even worse.
Bus lanes and light rail!
the wear of the tires constantly pollutes the environment with synthetic material dust (rubber, plastic, etc). much more so, than from buses, because every car has to move more of its weight around per passenger.
I would love public transit if it didn’t add an hour each way to my commute
For me, I usually accept around +50% of travel time for the convinience of beeing able to browse lemmy, watching videos or reading in general on public transport. Then it doesnt feel like I wasted my time like I would have taking the car.
It would be faster if it didn’t have to squeeze past the private cars filling the lanes
Like ~15 years ago I heard peter singer saying that the emissions from the lifetime use of a car were lower than those from making it, so you should only ever buy a second hand car.
That was before widespread EVs though.
I often wonder how long you have to use a 2nd hand gas car for, before the emissions outstrip those of making a brand new EV.
threeish years apparently, given you run it on green electricity.
Something is screwy with the power generation part of that graphic, or the person who made it is basing it on a country that doesn’t have much wind or solar power.
In the UK there are cheap tariffs for overnight electricity because of all the wind power.
If you’re in America, you’re pretty much fucked for green transport in any case. Canada has some great trolly bus and underground public transport because of all the hydroelectric power. My home city has only been buying electric buses for a long while now.
Well, there is a good chance the data is distorted for fossil interests. It’s from 2021 too!
2025 vehicles are miles ahead! (Literally).
They have those solid-state batteries that charge in 5 minutes. There is the lightyear prototype that was insanely expensive…but it could run for decades given optimal light, and 40km/h or bellow speed with it’s solar panels.
source is polestar and rivian, as noted in the graphic.
solid-state batteries are not yet viable at vehicle scale.
lightyear went bankrupt in 2023.
Oh, nice…
That’s what I get for forgetting we live in Warhammer 2k
We could always stop doing that.
I’m struggling just to earn enough breathing space to think. I need a lot of time, and I dreamed of self-sufficiency for a while now. Even have my own Lemmy idea related to Solarpunk.
yeah we can’t have nice things
I got a 2019 used nissan leaf in 2020 (the lessee didn’t like it), but it looked new. My coworkers tripped over themselves to tell me that the production of a vehicle is worse for the planet anyway. Then, when I explained that it was used, they all responded that the electricity was probably dirty anyway. I charged it at the company garage or at my town’s public spots, both of which were solar powered.
You always get FUD about EVs from people who don’t like the idea that they might be responsible for unnecessarily harming the planet and their neighbours through their actions and would far rather believe that you’re just as bad as them. It’s BoTh sIdES but for polluters.
My old petrol car consumes 4.5L/100km. New Hybrid EVs consume 4.5L/100km because it takes a lot to move the heavy hybrid system.
Solution: I use public transport a lot unless I can’t. That’s my hybrid mode of transport.
Public transport is always king but you are also supposed to plug in the hybrid vehicle.
Also they’re blatantly not comparing like for like.
For example, the Toyota Yaris has a petrol-only version that get 4.6 to 5.8L/100km, whereas the (non-plugin) hybrid version of the exact same car gets 3.8L/100km, so all this guff about “it takes a lot to move the heavy hybrid system” is clearly FUD.
