Give me a dumb electric car and ill buy. And/or make insurance/power less expensive. Its around 50-60c per kilowatt and goes up as I use more electricity. Cost of gas is actually cheaper where I am at…and I hate it.
Until then, ill probably stick with my old car.
I hate how corrupt California is. It’s almost break-even for me to run a generator at home instead of buying electricity from PG&E.
This is 100% the problem. And the weight. And the charging infrastructure.
I’m not opposed to EVs, but they haven’t solved the problems I need them too yet.
I would love an EV with all the bells and whistles of an early 1990s vehicle. ABS, AC, and an mp3 player plugged in to the tape deck.
No spyware, touch screens, smart anything, automatic anything, no ultra-high-beams that shoot retina-burning light.
Hmmm, I got an old square body work truck I’m eyeing for an Edison conversion some time in the future and doing exactly that. Plug in hybrid, so most days, I wouldn’t even need to start the engine.
Good riddance to ICE automobiles, but we really need EVs to be a short-lived transitional technology to walkable zoning and public transit.
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Serious question: How do you envision this transition for sprawling suburbs? Specifically places like Texas where everything is so spread out? The answer on an individual level is to just move. At the city or state level, I can’t even imagine a “perfect scenario” way to fix those areas.
Specifically places like Texas
Simple: we cut the Commie crap, abolish heavy-handed “big government” zoning* restrictions that infringe on landowners’ God-given property rights, and let the Free Market sort it out!
red-tailed hawkbald eagle screechNo, seriously – only the over-the-top 'murica tone was a joke. Left to their own devices, people naturally tend to build reasonable things.
The current prevailing modes of development only exist because government policy forces them to exist by prohibiting everything else almost everywhere. It was very much a utopian [sub]urban planning experiment, promulgated by Federal policy from the top down. Take this FHA bulletin from 1938, for instance: they were literally labeling traditional development “bad” and the beginnings of all the suburban development patterns (that we’ve realized are terrible ideas in retrospect) “good”. (Keep in mind the strength of these recommendations: developers didn’t have to follow this guide, but if they didn’t their project was gonna get redlined, which means their customers wouldn’t be able to get financing to buy their product.)
NIMBYs and car-brains love to think that car-dependent American development patterns are the “natural” result of the “free market,” but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
We’d also need to fix the public transportation infrastructure in two very important ways, neither of which are the naive suggestions of slapping on bike lanes or transit to the existing shitty dendritic street network we have in all that suburban sprawl now:
- Buy out houses at the ends of culs-de-sac to reconnect the street grid and reduce block size (at least for pedestrians and cyclists, if not for all transportation modes)
- Redesign stroads into either proper roads (see 8:55 in the linked video), proper streets (9:26), or proper roads flanked by proper streets (12:44).
As for those “naive suggestions:”
Don’t get me wrong: we definitely should do transit; it’s just that it doesn’t work very well until after you’ve got decent density and last-mile walkable connectivity. It should happen at least concurrently with street redesigns and zoning reform, if not subsequently to them.
As for cycling infrastructure, I’m a huge fan of that, too – in the short-to-medium-term. It’s just that, as you ascend to the higher levels of urbanist thinking, you come to a realization: bike lanes are actually car infrastructure. Seen from a car-supremacist perspective, bike lanes seem like they’re for cyclists because building them on roads dominated by cars increases cyclists’ safety and encourages more cycling. But seen from a sufficiently-urbanist perspective, you come to realize that streets are for people and cars are interlopers, so getting cyclists “out of the way” of drivers with separated infrastructure only enables speeding and makes the street worse! We are very, very far away from getting over that hump though, so for now we should be building separated bike infrastructure pretty much everywhere as fast as we can.
(* And yes, that includes Houston.)
Thank you for such a thorough response!
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You’re welcome! TBH, this is kinda my “thing” and I got a little carried away…
People “getting a little carried away” creates some of the best comments on the internet!
Off the internet, too.
Not sure why you’re using Houston as an example here. There’s little zoning in Houston and it’s a sprawling mess. You couldn’t pay me to live there.
First of all, because the person I replied to asked for an answer that applied to “specifically places like Texas” and it amused me to lean into it. Second, but more importantly, because it’s a popular misconception that Houston lacks zoning (it just lacks the word, not the concept, and goes about it in a more ad-hoc fashion) and I was trying to head off replies like yours. I mean, if my thesis is that getting rid of restrictive zoning will go a long way towards fixing the problem and the inevitable rebuttal is “but Houston doesn’t have zoning and still has the problem,” then I obviously have to address Houston, right? So I tried to do it preemptively… and then you wrote your comment anyway. womp, womp
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This is a solved problem. The only hurdle is human culture.
So not a solved problem?
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I’m with you, but that’s just not going to be the case, sadly. Cities would need to be entirely restructured, and that’s going to inconvenience major real estate holders, which means it’s going to be a fight every step of the way.
And I presume the food on farms will just autonomously jump onto your kitchen counter?
“I don’t know man, I just like the noise and smell of gas.”
Yes, you enjoy the destruction of your remaining brain cells, we already knew that.
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I know people who unironically say that about leaded gas. Thomas Midgley may be the most evil person in history when you consider the broader effects of giving an entire global generation lead poisoning.
At the very least, even ignoring the huge climate benefits, I’ll just be happy for them to go so I don’t get woken up by idiots cars with crap mufflers
