OT: Electric Vehicles--anyone driving them or seriously looked at them?

[AngryScientist]

Originally Posted by Llewellyn

Most of the anti-EV rhetoric isn't supported by evidence.

As always, with complicated big topics, There are valid points in both the pro and con aisle.

Here are the big current roadblocks, as I see it against mass adoption of EVs. They are supported by reality, which I view as evidence:

>Many many people in this world do not own a home or even access to a dedicated parking space. At-home charging is not possible for them, and once you remove the ability to at-home charge, the advantages of an EV diminish quickly.

>Access to superchargers. Superchargers are somewhat available in and around major cities, but once you venture much further out to the rural and poorer areas of the country, the availability dwindles fast. The network of chargers is simply not vast enough currently. Certain lifestyles EVs work perfectly for, others the inconvenience would be too major to get over.

>Availability of vehicles. We have three littleish kids. Our primary cars are a minivan and a midsize pickup, which we use for their intended purposes daily. Equivalent EVs do not exist.

>General cost. There are some affordable EVs coming to market now, but in general it's still a pretty expensive segment to buy into. Lots of people, like me, just buy used cars and drive them into the ground, and that part of the market is just not available yet with EVs

[verticaldoug]

I think ICE vs EV is the wrong conversation. Currently, society is organized on the premise of really cheap individual and wastedul transportation. Hence suburbs, exburbs, rural living.

Whether an ICE or EV, commuting to work one hour each way in your own car is wasteful. All you are really doing is playing with less waste on the margin.

How should human society organize going forward to maximise energy efficiency? That's the hard question. And how do you get there/

Between the doomsday prophet and the tech wizard, I still think we are eff'd.

I don't even own a car and live in a super energy efficient flat. But because I fly internationally so much, I am still an energy hog and killing the planet.

[corkycalvin]

Originally Posted by verticaldoug

I think ICE vs EV is the wrong conversation. Currently, society is organized on the premise of really cheap individual and wastedul transportation. Hence suburbs, exburbs, rural living.

Whether an ICE or EV, commuting to work one hour each way in your own car is wasteful. All you are really doing is playing with less waste on the margin.

How should human society organize going forward to maximise energy efficiency? That's the hard question. And how do you get there/

Between the doomsday prophet and the tech wizard, I still think we are eff'd.

I don't even own a car and live in a super energy efficient flat. But because I fly internationally so much, I am still an energy hog and killing the planet.

US can regulate all they want but if other big countries that don’t care about pollution will be a zero sum gain at the end. Kinda like a dog chasing its own tail.

[fourflys]

Originally Posted by verticaldoug

Whether an ICE or EV, commuting to work one hour each way in your own car is wasteful. All you are really doing is playing with less waste on the margin.

tell that to the folks who work in a larger, expensive city who can't afford it and MUST commute an hour (or more) into these cities.. and before you say "well, they don't have to have THAT job..", realize the thousands of hospitality, etc workers that work in cites like LA, San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, Boston, etc..

also, we have, probably, the largest "spread-out" modern country in the world.. there will ALWAYS be rural and suburban folks in the US.. at least if you want food delivered to your local grocery store that you can easily walk or bike to..

I would love it if the US had any sort of train system that resembled Europe, but I don't think that will ever happen.. so until it does, folks are going to drive.. BTW- there are hundreds of thousands who commute into the large Euro cities like London every day as well, they just have a much, much better way to do it..

[verticaldoug]

Originally Posted by fourflys

tell that to the folks who work in a larger, expensive city who can't afford it and MUST commute an hour (or more) into these cities.. and before you say "well, they don't have to have THAT job..", realize the thousands of hospitality, etc workers that work in cites like LA, San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, Boston, etc..

Actually I am not saying they don't need that job, I am asking how do you organize the city so there is affordable housing, and they can live closer and spend not so much time commuting and have a better quality of life. these are the big questions.

[AngryScientist]

I think it can all be boiled down to global overpopulation.

Too many people polluting, not enough resources to go around.

We're doomed.

[fourflys]

Originally Posted by verticaldoug

Actually I am not saying they don't need that job, I am asking how to you organize the city so there is affordable housing, and they can live closer and spend not so much time commuting and have a better quality of life. these are the big questions.

I would agree 100% with that statement.. also, as long as real estate continues as it is now, I don't see much changing in this regard..

[robt57]

Originally Posted by verticaldoug

Actually I am not saying they don't need that job, I am asking how to you organize the city so there is affordable housing, and they can live closer and spend not so much time commuting and have a better quality of life. these are the big questions.

How? I doubt there is a viable answer. We are a 24 mile commute [wife, me retired] outside Portland and the houses in the hood on avg are 4x what we paid 2012. Same house down the street rents for 2400.00/mo. last few years. And those renters are paying with money they paid income tax on, AND OR has state income tax.

Here you'd have to have a +2 hour [ea way] commute to get house 2/3s the cost with less than 45min commute. And I mean without traffic. 24 mile commute home is frequently +45 minutes for my wife. It is nice we are not both running tires off car for work...

[verticaldoug]

Originally Posted by robt57

How? I doubt there is a viable answer. We are a 24 mile commute [wife, me retired] outside Portland and the houses in the hood on avg are 4x what we paid 2012. Same house down the street rents for 2400.00/mo. last few years. And those renters are paying with money they paid income tax on, AND OR has state income tax.

Here you'd have to have a +2 hour [ea way] commute to get house 2/3s the cost with less than 45min commute. And I mean without traffic. 24 mile commute home is frequently +45 minutes for my wife. It is nice we are not both running tires off car for work...

It's possible, but requires changing expectations from single family homes with a yard and a dog, to multi-family residential etc.

When you look at the world's first cities and towns, they are all really compact mult-family residential. No Sprawl was possible. The enemy would get you.

Obviously, we don't want to end up in Victorian era slums or tenements in NYC, but there must be some happy medium,

But maybe we end up in little walled towns in our dystopian future fighting for resources. Who knows....maybe Immortan Joe ends up running the show.

(In reality, all change is hampered by the inertia from sunk cost in Real estate. No one wants to upset the valuation .)

[BdaGhisallo]

Originally Posted by fourflys

I would love it if the US had any sort of train system that resembled Europe, but I don't think that will ever happen.. so until it does, folks are going to drive.. BTW- there are hundreds of thousands who commute into the large Euro cities like London every day as well, they just have a much, much better way to do it..

It does, except it transports freight and not people. The US railroads keep the roads much less clogged than they would be otherwise by taking massive amounts of freight off of the highways and putting it on rails.

The US is simply too big to develop a widespread and "long distance" rail network for transporting people. It would simply take too long to get anywhere, which is why people fly so much. France, with its well developed passenger rail network, is 20% smaller than the state of Texas. Great Britain is smaller than Kansas.

[fourflys]

Originally Posted by BdaGhisallo

It does, except it transports freight and not people. The US railroads keep the roads much less clogged than they would be otherwise by taking massive amounts of freight off of the highways and putting it on rails.

The US is simply too big to develop a widespread and "long distance" rail network for transporting people. It would simply take too long to get anywhere, which is why people fly so much. France, with its well developed passenger rail network, is 20% smaller than the state of Texas. Great Britain is smaller than Kansas.

good points, but I was mostly thinking of local rail systems.. some cities have a light rail system that is pretty good, but they mostly limited in accessibility to many that could use it.

[benb]

Most of us don't travel cross country all the time.

EU/Asian style rail would work fine for the vast majority of passenger trips that would stay roughly in the same region and good high speed rail would be faster than our current system of drive to the airport, have to park, have to take a shuttle to the airport from the parking lot, wait in TSA lines, blah, blah and then do it all again at the other end picking up a rental car.

Stuff like:

NY <-> DC
Boston <-> DC
SF <-> LA
LA <-> San Diego
LA <-> Las Vegas
Chicago <-> DC

All those kinds trips that are the kind that high speed rail would dominate car travel or air travel for if we actually tried to make it work.

You need local transit at the other end too though, or locating rental car facilities near the high speed rail hubs.

I mean we kind of had all this and tore it out to prepare for our Autopia which is why it's so hard to build now.

Old passenger rail maps of the US are really eye opening to look at.

[BdaGhisallo]

Originally Posted by fourflys

good points, but I was mostly thinking of local rail systems.. some cities have a light rail system that is pretty good, but they mostly limited in accessibility to many that could use it.

I think one reason is that many of the "newer" cities in the US are too spread out for commuter/light rail to really work economically.

Look at NYC, for instance. At its core it is densely populated and industry is concentrated. Hundreds of thousands commute to work in a very small area so mass transit can work because you don't need a network covering many different nodes and its easy to get everyone to relatively few spots. A ridership on the lines in place is very, very high, spreading the cost of many users.

Compare that to somewhere like Phoenix or even LA. Sure, they have 'downtowns' but the concentration of population and industry isn't anywhere near as great as it is in the older cities like NY and Boston, even. A developed commuter network would have to cover far more territory and would be delivering fewer people to many more different areas and would be far less able to do so economically. It would be a lot more costly to build such a network and passenger numbers wouldn't be as high per destination, if you follow my rambling.

[jkbrwn]

Originally Posted by benb

Old passenger rail maps of the US are really eye opening to look at.

Looking at the Pacific Electric Railway map, for someone in SoCal, is one of the most depressing things one can do.

[benb]

Originally Posted by jkbrwn

Looking at the Pacific Electric Railway map, for someone in SoCal, is one of the most depressing things one can do.

For us it's the old Boston and Maine maps.

The bike path at the end of my street used to be a train line. They've got a train exhibit with a car that used to run on the line and the maps are super depressing as you used to be able to pick up train lines in every direction there. Today of course there are zero.

That line would take you into Cambridge, MA in a rapid fashion if it was still running, it's about 10 miles. The train surely had the right of way over the cars at the crossings, bikes of course have to cede the right of way at all crossings. It terminates at the Alewife subway station which then provides access to the Boston area.

But there were other train lines extending from there that would take you just about anywhere you wanted to go.

It wasn't even "can go to X major city". You could go to almost every small town.

Back when I worked in Cambridge I could ride my bike down to the subway station on the bike path in ~35 minutes. There is still a bus from my town that will take you to the subway station. It picks up on my street. But it takes an hour to take the bus to the subway station. So the bus + subway would take 90 minutes minimum to go ~15 miles to my office in Cambridge. Driving the car you could just barely make an hour, as long as you were going to work on the weekend or heading into the office at 4AM or something. There were plenty of days using the car meant a 3.5-4 hour round trip to go 30 miles.

The train line was torn out in the 80s IIRC to put the bike path in. So the period of utopian "cars are great" was very very short as driving here has been a hellscape for a long time already.