More and more young people are choosing bicycles, buses and trains over owning a car out of the sheer cost.
That's not really a choice, is it?
What do you mean. They could still choose crippling debt.
That’s not really a choice, is it?
Isn't it? In less car-centric places not having a car is entirely valid choice to make.
I could quite easily afford a car, but parking where I live is a nightmare and I can get get to 99 percent of my destinations either on my bicycle or if further away, by taking a train.
There's some penalty in terms of convenience and traveltimes (especially out in the farmland, even though I can almost guarantee i'm faster on my bicycle than anything on four wheels within the city I live in), but that's easily overshadowed by cost saving in my case by not having to buy and maintain a car and honestly also a gym membership which costs both money and the far more irreplaceable commodity of time.
I could quite easily afford a car,
Good for you. Not everybody can and not everybody lives in less car-centric places.
Yeah. That's what I said? Why so heated?
You'd have to sweat a bit more to see me heated, sweetie.
I hate this sentiment so much, because it implies that everyone can just wait for change: "Just go buy another gas powered car until that rail road line is built".
If you can afford an electric car (instead of your current gas powered car) today please buy one or you are part of the problem. If you don‘t need it anymore, because of that rail road line, sell it. Electric cars are much better for the climate & the surroundings. They can also be important for electric grid stability.
Additionally since Copenhagen was mentioned: In the last ten years car ownership in Copenhagen actually increased (https://kk.statistikbank.dk/statbank5a/SelectVarVal/saveselections.asp). Just because people take the bike every day doesn‘t mean that they don‘t own a car.
PS: I live in the city center and don‘t own a car. Never have.
I hate this sentiment so much, because it implies that everyone can just wait for change:....
Pretty sure that Greenpeace does not want people to wait for change - they push for it
I hate this sentiment so much, because it implies that everyone can just wait for change:
Also: "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good [enough]."
Societal Progress is an exercise in iterative steps. Electric cars today, something even better tomorrow (and by tomorrow I mean in fifty to a hundred years because lord knows people refuse to fund mass transit in some countries).
Look if you give me the money I'll build a whole fleet of dirigibles. Those are mass transit.
Did you miss the word "just" in the title?
I know that some people will miss it and act accordingly. The car industry in Europe build up more electric car production capacity than people were willing to buy. The industry transformed faster than society. They are now correcting their plans which is so sad to see. I know that for some an electric car is just unaffordable, but for many others it is just too inconvenient, unreasonably priced or they wait for hydrogen cars (I had these discussions a lot). Climate change is what is inconvenient. There is no time too waste.
Well.. I'm sure there would be ways to make electric cars more affordable.
Either by government policy or by company policy. You could for example shift the extra cost of your EVs to the ICE cars. There is no law that mandates how your cars need to be priced. You could literally swap prices of ICE cars vs EVs.
Since ICE cars are bought more you could probably raise their price only a bit, but drop EV prices massively until it evens out or shifts.
We need public transport. Electric cars are like methadon for carbrain, it's better, but not really.
We need public transport.
And plenty of safe and comfortable bike paths - the cheapest, and often fastest option.
And, if you look at the transport capacity of bike paths in persons per hour passing, they are absolutely incredible. Far more than most large multi-lane streets for cars. Cykelslangen in Copenhagen has at rush hour times a vehicle frequency of 2 per second - that's 7200 vehicles per hour. Cars would need a motorway through the city to reach that capacity.
One of the many more good things about bikes is that they release expensive public transport resource for those which do really need them - people who are too ill, too old, incapacitated, or need to go too far distances to get there by bike. We should think of public transport in cities as an extension and supplement of a bike-centered system, not as the main option.
I would love it if the local light rail had a car to lock your bike up while you ride the train.
Yes. And painting a white line along the side of the road doesn't cut it.
There is not going to be a one size fits all solution for all countries and regions.
In cities you need public transport and walking/biking facilities. Car infrastructure is too expensive.
In suburbia, getting households to go from dual car to single car, you need public transport and bike facilities.
For rural, public transport is not really cost effective, so you are going to need to incentivise self power generation and home charging. Popularizing from high speed ebikes might be a good option though.
I'm on the edge of suburbia, butting up against ag rural. It's ten miles to the next town either direction. My bike gets forty on a full charge. And most of the streets (with the exception of the major roads every couple miles, most of which have functional bike lanes) are one and a half lanes wide, 25 MPH and I usually only see people walking their dogs and the postmister when I'm out there. My 20mph governed ebike does great for getting me around locally. I ended up slapping a collapsible 35L milk crate on the back (I think that's the right volume) for when I need to pick up a couple hundred pounds of kitty litter. Which the wife says is tomorrow yaaaay
I guess my point is (I actually have one this time!) I bet a bunch of rural folk could do pretty well using an ebike as their primary vehicle
They're slowly adding bike lanes along some rural roads in Sweden. I wish they'd hurry it up, because with e-bikes and cargo bikes you could just skip having a car, especially if they added some good bike garages near bus/train stations.
I think so too, e-bikes are very underrated. it becomes a problem if the distances get to 30-50 miles between townsthough. Maybe some battery swap tech with solar recharging stations could do the trick.
Battery swap is here, since I can unplug and remove mine with the turn of a key. I just need more batteries
But what about the quarterly profits? We need more each quarter, not less.
In Copenhagen, a city that has a long held reputation for being bike-friendly, a whopping 62% of people choose to cycle their commute.
I did that too when I lived in Copenhagen. And it's also the fastest way to get around.
But now I live in the countryside, and here we absolutely need cars, but everyone on my road drive electric, and half of us have solar panels. So in that way I don't think our environmental footprint is worse than living in an apartment in the city. Because we to a large degree are energy self sustained.
The problems of car dependency go beyond carbon, though - it's also about road danger, space demand, micro plastics, the exclusion from society of people who can't afford cars, the exclusion of disabled people, etc etc. Changing the engine doesn't address these and we need to work towards reducing reliance on this form of transport
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