We need to bring our cities back to human scale and not car scale.
Cities need to become more “dense” and have less aboveground car parking lots spreading everything out large distances. Think of a Walmart parking lot, have you ever walked to the store across the parking lot, or just drove instead? This is what’s happening in all cities.
We need cities where we can walk, cycle, and take transits such as trams, subways and trains.
Everything should be within a 15-20 minute walk or cycle around us, and we should not have to cross 7 or 8 car lanes of traffic.
You’ve got your fossil fuel apologetics down! A complete solution is obviously not going to be a single thing, and no one was saying that. Electrification is just one of many steps towards a liveable future
People mock the campaign against plastic straws, or the bans on plastic grocery bags, and the campaign for electric cars is ripe for criticism for the same reason: Eliminating plastic straws/bags does fuck-all by comparison to the scale of the problem, it was only meant to be symbolic of all the myriad things that we need to change, and we ignored all of the other things. Electrification of the private vehicle fleet is at best a stopgap to mitigate the impact of the private vehicles we can’t phase out quickly. There are tons of other steps we should take first, and take now.
Except that that’s not happening. We’re going full-ahead with electrified emotional support vehicles, like Rivian, with the U.S. giving tax credits for EV automobile purchases, ignoring entirely ebikes and micromobility devices. The vaunted $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill allocated only $108 billion for transit projects, and much more for roads. (While our roads and bridges are in disrepair, some states are using the money for new construction.) A number of cities have projects underway to construct bike lane networks, but no major reforms of the zoning and building codes needed to enable cities that are not built around cars by default anywhere. (My city has a good incremental plan in the works, kicking up furious, red-faced opposition from certain residents.)
In short, electrification of the vehicle fleet is about on par with switching to paper grocery bags or straws as far as effectiveness, and that’s all we’re even trying to do.
That is a great argument! Thank you! You’re absolutely right, few people are getting rich off the backs of everyone else and corruption and disinformation are allowing it to happen.
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