mrchaotica

mrchaotica t1_jbhmyyy wrote

> It is interesting that the proposition of creating the option for alternatives is often pushed back against by people in the communities; they simply don't want to pay for things they won't personally utilize, even if many people will utilize it, it'll improve the area, and over time it'll lead to densification around the routes over the coming decades. They don't want to deal with driving around bike lanes, watching out for bikers, less parking, or slower speed limits.

What's really interesting -- and I'm not faulting you for it, by the way, since it's a super common misconception -- is that this entire argument is backwards!

The real issue isn't that we're trying to spend extra money on alternatives; it's that we're trying to stop spending orders of magnitude more money massively subsidizing driving cars. In reality, those people are on the other side of the selfish spending argument because they're the ones forcing the rest of society to spend money benefiting them.

Remember, bikes don't need special lanes except to make them safe from encroachment by cars.

Driving places isn't inherently better; it only became so because we spent the last century demolishing our perfectly-good downtowns to build parking lots, spending trillions of dollars on highway projects, rewriting zoning codes to force private property owners to provide plentiful "free" parking at their expense, and otherwise bending over backwards to accommodate them.

In contrast, if property owners were free to build traditional development (i.e., if we abolished the government regulation restricting them from doing so) people would freely choose to walk and bike places instead of driving because those would be the quicker/easier/better option.

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mrchaotica t1_jbcfo5y wrote

> As to what mrchaotica said... if rather than spending all our resources and time on plug-in EVs (aka more automobiles), we instead spent those resources on re-defining transportation by building the necessary infrastructure to reduce overall driving miles, we wouldn't even need to replace all the cars on the planet to rapidly reduce emissions. A PEV (e-bike, e-scooter, EUC, e-sk8) use a tiny percentage of the overall materials and battery cells of a plug-in electric car, especially long range BEVs, and use a tiny percentage of the energy per mile in comparison. If we really cared about rapidly reducing global emissions and pollution, there's your solution.

First of all, thank you for supporting my point.

That said, as insane as it sounds since global warming is a huge problem, emissions are actually the least of the problems with cars! The more basic issue is that car-centric development is the root cause for almost all of our other problems, from the housing crisis, to obesity, to poor mental health/lack of socializing (due both to the time/stress of commuting and the lack of "third places" that exclusionary zoning creates).

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mrchaotica t1_jbcejpp wrote

If by "the environment" you mean the place where humans live, EVs are not better because they take up just as much space and therefore ruin cities with excessive highways and parking lots just as much as ICE cars do.

In the long term, cities have to be made walkable -- not just for fixing global warming, but also for fixing things like obesity, the housing crisis, the fact that the suburbs are financially insolvent, etc. too.

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mrchaotica t1_jbbad1u wrote

Nobody said do nothing. Why are you being dishonest?

The thing we really need to be doing is fixing our infrastructure and zoning so walking/biking/transit become more popular, not just substituting EVs for ICE cars while keeping our shitty car-centric sprawl.

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mrchaotica t1_jbb9vt9 wrote

Nah, people loved their early EVs (GM EV1, along with some converted Rav4s, etc.) even despite the lead acid or NiMH batteries. They just mostly weren't allowed to have them because they were limited-production things, leased instead of sold, and mostly marketed to businesses.

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mrchaotica t1_ish7923 wrote

> There was a theory that they came from the area in the ocean where the currents carry all the garbage that makes it’s way into the water. Unsure where that is in relation to the Sargasso Sea.

Exactly the same place, because sargassum is carried by currents the same way the garbage is.

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