this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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While public transit is great. It's a lot more expensive to setup, and even more expensive to make convenient if the city wasn't built with public transit in mind.
It's just not a medium term solution for most north american cities, I do desperately hope that cities will start investing more in public transit, and encourage more dense housing, but realistically that is a 30-80 year timeframe. And that's assuming 100s of municipal governments all get on board. The political lift here is also very large.
The reality right now in North America is, if you're heavily advocating against electric vehicles, all you're really doing is adding support to the oil and gas industry trying to stop the outright ban of ICE cars.
We need to do more public transit, and we need to stop using ICE vehicles.
Actually maintaining car infrastructure is quite a lot more expensive than setting up public transit. The issue is that the effects of climate change are here and will get worse faster and faster while EVs are a drop in the ocean as far as solutions are.
Sure, advocate for EVs if you want but don't pretend they will have a meaningful effect with the environment unless you can replace every ICE vehicle globally and even then public transit would have a massively higher impact while easier and cheaper to implement.
The highest impact for climate change would be to force the 10 or so companies that produce like 70% of CO2 to not do that or just bomb their factories or something.
Which car infrastructure are you talking about in this case?
Roads and parking mostly
Roads don't really go away with public transit, they might need less maintenance overall, but they still need to exist in some form, and roads lasting 10% longer doesn't seem like a huge savings
Parking is mostly privately owned, so saving money on parking doesn't really make more money available to invest in public transit.
Tram tracks last forever and don't need roads. Also cars and trucks are responsible for like 90% of road damage, for example pedestrian roads last decades with zero maintenance. If cars and trucks got Thanos snapped the budget for road maintenance would be miniscule.
I guess if you don't include buses in public transit. And pretend that all people live within a 5km walk of existing public transit. You're right.
But otherwise you're just oversimplifiying the situation and vastily underestimating how much it actually costs to build a full team network through rural areas.
I'm saying build trams and trains, both require like no maintenance, are cheap to build and solve the most issues. It's a better investment than EVs.
You're suggesting that teams and EVs solve the same problems. But they don't.
EVs replace ICE vehicles. Public transit replace cars in areas that are dense enough to make them viable.
The reason public transit isn't everywhere because they are expensive to build and maintain.
Yes build them, but suggesting that teams and trains are a replacement for EVs today is completely false and is only hurting your argument overall.
Of course there are exceptions, there are people who live in the absolute ass end of nowhere and they should have a car but those people are a tiny minority. They are in fact such a minority it makes no difference if they drive an ICE car or an electric one when it comes to climate change.
The vast majority of people live in cities, towns, villages, etc. Hook those up with train tracks and if a city is big enough build trams in the city and you got 99% of the people covered, while reducing road maintenance budget to almost nothing, improving local air quality massively, reduce microplastics from tires to pretty much nothing, make noise pollution a thing of the past and reduce tailpipe emissions to a negligible amount.
This is where I think you have a skewed picture of reality.
In North America 20% of people live in rural areas.
As much as I wish that was "vast majority" it isn't.
Your simple view of public transit doesn't line up with the realities in North America. I wish it did, but it doesn't. And unfortunately your uninformed arguments are the fuel actual opponents of public transit use to justify their position.
It doesn't help the cause to spread uninformed arguments
I don't live in the US. Are you saying 20% of all people in the US live outside any settlement?
Even if that's the case that's one country, it's applicable to every other country.
Every country I look up has at least 15% of their population loving in rural areas.
Yes this means that ~20% of most countries live outside low density towns or high density cities.
Rural doesn't mean a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Small towns and villages should absolutely get a train connection.
Rural does mostly mean farmhouses and houses in the woods. And yes small villages should get a train connection. But remember you're suggesting this is a cheap and easy solution when compared to EVs, what you're suggesting would be very very expensive.
So you're saying the US has enough farmhouses in the middle of nowhere away from any settlement for about 70 million people? That is definitely not the case for Europe at least.
Also that's still cheaper than maintenance for roads.