this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
359 points (87.5% liked)
Technology
59594 readers
3434 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Even a subcompact automobile takes up an entire traffic lane and an entire parking space, and providing such spaces is what ruins cities.
The future is designing our cities for walking, biking and transit, not replacing our disastrous car sewers of gasoline cars with disastrous car sewers of electric cars.
Completely agree, people are not zooming out enough to understand the real problems. Our spread out car centric infrastructure has externalities past just the fuel issues on the cars themselves. Our car centric culture is largely responsible for a huge boom in energy consumption outside of just driving. There is a huge cost to spreading out beyond cars. I think the biggest is our trend in occupying larger and larger single family homes and larger and larger office spaces which require heating and cooling (Which is a little more than double the environment cost of cars iirc). One of the benefits of densification is that you often share a wall with someone else that is also heating and cooling and there is far less energy loss. Those energy costs far exceed our transit issues, but are directly related, in that cars allow density to reduce and therefor people to consume more energy at home and their place of work. And if people are still unwilling to densify then we need to greatly increase the energy efficiency of single family homes and businesses by 4 fold. Better insultation, better windows, better appliances, across the board.
The thing that bothers me about the communication around electric cars is not that they are an improvement, because they most certainly are a good stop gap to one of our many issues, but people like to singularly focus on car fuel type like it is the focal point of climate change when it really is urban and suburban car centricity that is a much larger issue. Electric cars wont stop climate change, they only slow it down a little. Countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc are far closer to becoming carbon neutral partly because car centricity is not a focus in these places, people live closer together and use all types of transit that supplement each other. And yet no one would claim any of those places are unpleasant to live, far from it they are some of the most desired places to live in the world. We need to start modeling the rest of the world off of the design improvements those countries made over the last 60 years.