A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
A two hour commute in an electric car is still two hours in crushing, soul destroying traffic. People ask me why I take a train and a freeway bus for my two days on campus, and I ask them why not? My drive is three minutes from my house to the train.
But in suburban Southern California, public transit is "for freaks and losers." That was deliberate marketing.
Need to pick your battles tbh.
If you tell every driver to give up driving, the planet ain't getting saved.
Need to pick your battles tbh.
Trump admin cuts $60M for bullet train. Can railway from Dallas to Houston still happen?
The high-speed rail project intended to connect Houston and Dallas in just 90 minutes.
We literally cannot build trains in this country because we self-sabotage every opportunity.
Houston is getting $4B to redo I-45 but can't be spared $60M on state mandated planning for an already established rail route.
This isn't a question of abolishing cars. It's a question of abolishing trains which we appear dead set on doing.
You can't really expect a man advised by the CEO of the world's most valuable car company to make a decision in favour of public transport.
And frankly the man would cut his own dick off if he thought it would be of use to the poor.
In any case, the real alternative to cars was staring us in the face all through COVID. How many people wake up every day, jump into 2-3 tons of their own personal metal, drive for an hour, only to sit staring at the same screens they were looking at through Remote Desktop for 18 months, then do the same thing to get home?
But we can't have that forever, because fuck us.
The alternative would really fuck up your jobs is the thing. Yes commuting sucks and the issue of being forced to commute is a waste of reources, time, and just a show of power.
Until you realize opening that kraken of questions will just lead to worse job disparity. Physical space usually demands physical effort and labor, a basic sense of meeting one another in an AI infested world. You'll be competing in the same market for jobs, just your boss has a bigger pool and you're just as small.
You can’t really expect a man advised by the CEO of the world’s most valuable car company to make a decision in favour of public transport.
He literally also had a rail company that he'd been plugging for over a decade.
the real alternative to cars was staring us in the face all through COVID. How many people wake up every day, jump into 2-3 tons of their own personal metal, drive for an hour, only to sit staring at the same screens they were looking at through Remote Desktop for 18 months, then do the same thing to get home?
There's material benefit to second and third spaces when collaborating on large, long term projects. And suburbanization is as much at the root of the two hour commute as simple office work.
That said, sure. Telecommuting does quickly what infrastructure improvements would need decades to accomplish.
But we can’t have that forever, because fuck us.
Everything has to be in the service of the short term profitablity of landlords.
I agree. My boyfriend and I were forced to buy a car some years ago because public transport in our area kept cutting budgets to the point that he would have to get up at 3.30-ish in the morning in order to get to work at 8.
We were avid users of public transport for our whole lives and wanted to support it until we were no longer given a choice, but to cave. If I have to go somewhere nowadays, he drives me because of how shit public transport has become in our country. It is genuinely pathetic. He made this decision on both of our behalf after a longer train ride of mine ended in me being stuck on a train station an hour away from home at 2 in the morning, having to wait for the next train home at 4.30. He jumped in the car and came and got me and that was one of the last times I used public transport. Really sucks when you want to support it, but it doesn't want to support you.
When I have a full disk and have no storage space left. I open a program and see a visual representation of the largest files taking space. I clear them out first because its easy and quick.
For some reason, when we have too much CO2 going into the atmosphere, we see the visual representation of who is polluting the most, and take care of the smallest, little fragmented space. We don't select the larger chunks like industry, aviation, marine transport, we pick each individual car and press delete.
Look, cars have to change and Americans will have to be dragged kicking and screaming but It kind of pains me when someone looks at an old car someone is driving, using it way past its intended lifetime, and tells them they are the problem. While being perfectly fine taking an airplane twice yearly and ordering shit from china, shit they will forget they ordered before it actually arrives..
We don’t select the larger chunks like industry, aviation, marine transport, we pick each individual car and press delete.
In fairness...
The nuclear powered cargo ship is already here.
And as China is the premier builder of trans-Pacific cargo ships (1,500 to 1,700 ships per year, which is more than the US has built in the last ten) this is technically getting addressed.
Also, incidentally, the premier electric car manufacturers are almost entirely East Asian. The only functional airplane manufacturer is French. Heavy industry in the US is on the verge of total collapse (outside AI and Bitcoin mining).
The US plan to cut emissions is basically just Degrowth.
That because the big files right now are the OS. Just deleting system32 isn't a good idea, but moving to a more efficient system is difficult. So we do the easy thing and delete old PDFs, and maybe some old games. But the system needs to be changed, and the sooner the better.
I get it. Is there really no bigger fish to fry? Cars are the only ting? I mean, yeah, we've put laws or goals in place to replace them slowly and thats good. Better we start the process as soon as possible. Are we doing the same for the bigger fish too?
Nice. A flase dichotomy so the right can cut EV subsidies as well as not spending on public transport.
A flase dichotomy
It's illustrative of our national economic strategy. Which is to subsidize private consumer manufacturing rather than to directly invest in higher quality infrastructure.
This isn't a false dichotomy, its a deliberate strategy of Patriarchal Libertarianism (which has mutated into full throated corporate fascism).
I often wonder how the emissions generated by producing and shipping a new electric vehicle compare to just keeping your old ICE vehicle until it rusts to pieces. Like how long does it take to break even from that?
It depends how quickly you put on miles (and which study you base the calculation on). For most EVs, they break even with the emissions of an ICE car at about 15k miles. By 200k, the EV emitted 52% less emissions compared to the average car.
If the electric grid is powered by more renewables in the future, that would jump to 78% less emissions at 200k.
A very long time. On the order of multiple decades, IIRC. Realistically, keeping an old ICE vehicle in proper running order beats the carbon footprint of purchasing a new EV.
My daily driver is a '98, I keep it running without codes in efficient closed loop and keep up on all the maintenance.
Now, the classic Ranger to electric conversion I want to do, not sure what the footprint is.
efficient closed loop
you carry oxidizer?
Closed loop in the ECU, i.e. check engine light is off. That means it's reading the O2 sensors, including post-cat, and adjusting fuel injection for efficienct burn.
That efficiency gets you better gas milage, better acceleration, and lowered emissions.
A very long time. On the order of multiple decades, IIRC
Not true. It also very much depends on where your power comes from (coal/sun).
Skimmed that article. If I'm reading it right, it's 100k miles for a NEW EV to match the carbon footprint of a NEW ICE. That larger footprint is due to the batteries and rare earth/copper.
I.E. this doesn't account for the carbon footprint of making a entirely new car vs keeping an old one running well.
Those figures also assume all virgin materials for batteries. The reality is that as more batteries are built, they will reach a critical point where battery recycling is a major source of elements for new batteries. We're only just now coming to that point where there are 10+ year old EVs out there that have batteries that need to be recycled.
Also those studies all look at the super inefficient 3rd world exploitation of minerals and labor to get lithium. There are new techniques being developed out in the Salton Sea (desert in southern california) that extract lithium from ground water pumped in a closed loop. The expectation is that production technique alone will be enough for the entirety of the next few decades of American need. And that's a far, far more efficient technique.
this doesn’t account for the carbon footprint of making a entirely new car vs keeping an old one running well.
Part of the problem is deliberate Planned Obselecence as an industrial manufacturing strategy. Cars - particularly American cars - begin to fail after ten to fifteen years. Finding parts becomes more difficult over time, finding skilled mechanics even more so, and risks of accident (particularly on highways with speeds exceeding 55mph) lead to cars getting totaled before they've been fully exhausted.
I'll spot you that simply yanking new ICE cars off the road and replacing them with electrics is wasteful. But when you're talking about a ten year old vehicle, the math for those next ten years gets fuzzier as the risks inherent in ownership rise.
Incidentally, this is why mass transit improvements are an overall better play. Swapping old cars for new is never going to be as efficient as swapping cars for buses and trains, which are maintained as a fleet rather than as an oddball assortment of flavor-of-the-month private vehicles.
Thanks for the source.