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Comment by adwhit | Hacker News Reader

Are electric cars genuinely seen as part of the solution to climate change? Surely there is no place for cars in our utopian green future, they are terribly inefficient means of transportation and completely anti-social and anti-urban. The future is in advanced metro systems, high speed rail, cycling etc. In this future, cars would become decided niche.

I had never thought of Tesla being one of the 'good guys', especially with Musk's backward - even reactionary - views on public transport.[1] It hadn't occurred to me that this might not be mainstream thought.

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t...

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The United States, Canada and others are too sprawling and sparse for that. Cars are going to be a fact of life for a very long time yet.

As far as helping to solve climate change, cars are part of it, but I wish people paid much more attention to the larger contributor: Agriculture.

I often get the feeling that people think changing cars to electric will solve the problem. It's important and helps, but it's just one piece of the pie. Not the biggest piece of it either.

Europe is also large, and there is much better public transportation. If the US really wanted to replace cars, the US could replace cars. The problem is we equate cars with 'freedom', so we are doomed to live forever in the past until that changes (or we destroy ourselves)

It's not just 'freedom'. It's a practical matter given the vast distances between even individual houses in certain parts of the US. Europe, as a whole, is large, but European nations individually are not very big in relation to a lot of US states. People should absolutely be able to travel within their countries however best suits them.

> but European nations individually are not very big in relation to a lot of US states

Um, those countries are interconnected, so yes, it's way easier to travel vast distances in Europe through multiple countries in the US than it is to travel around without a car in nearly all of the states in the US. For example, want to get across Texas without wasting away in a series of greyhound bus stations? Good luck.

You're proving my point that it's not practical to get around a lot of the US without cars because it's just so much bigger. Most travel is within your own country and blanketing the sparsely populated US with non-car alternatives is just not practical.

For what it is worth, according to Eurostat, cars are pretty important over there, too.

"Three quarters of trips by EU residents in 2016 were within their own country."

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

"Passenger car was by far the most important mode for passenger transport in all Member States."

"Passenger cars accounted for 83.1 % of inland passenger transport in the EU-28 in 2015, with motor coaches, buses and trolley buses (9.2 %) and passenger trains (7.7 %) both accounting for less than a tenth of all traffic (measured by the number of inland passenger-kilometres (pkm) travelled by each mode)"

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

I guess they like freedom over there, too.

> You're proving my point that it's not practical to get around a lot of the US without cars because it's just so much bigger.

No, my point is that if a group of countries can figure out how to improve transportation across themselves for similar distances, then why can't even individual states figure it out? They could, if they wanted to, but "freedom to drive" and other excuses.

You don't even need to "blanket" the country in tracks, for example. Connecting all major US cities would be a HUGE improvement over what exists today.

I'm not at all arguing that cars are unimportant, it's just that here in the US it is the only one of two choices for transportation (for almost all of the US) that we have given ourselves for moving between cities. The other option is air travel, which is expensive in terms of money and rights/privacy.

All that for 7.7% of passenger traffic seems a bit wasteful given the cost of construction in the modern US. The boondoggle that is the California "High Speed" Rail multiplied by the lower 48 states a few times over does not at all seem worth it versus other infrastructure improvements that need to be made.

1) it doesn't have to be a boondoggle, but it generally is because of US citizens' love of cars

2) 7.7% is a nontrivial number, and I expect it to increase if transportation became more accessible

Europe also has ~3x the population density of the US, higher still if you don’t include some of the sparsely populated Eastern European States.

While I can’t profess any expertise on this topic, it strikes me as a possibly reasonable hypothesis that the sheer emptiness of much of the central US could have some kind of bearing on trying to make sustainable continent-wide public transport more difficult than in Europe.

Colorado for example, roughly the same size as the entire U.K., has around 50 people per square km. The U.K. has over 300. Even France, regarded in Europe as a largely rural State beyond a few large cities, is over 100.

There is no getting rid of cars for the foreseeable future, making them electric is the obvious next step for reducing their environmental impact

If we can't get rid of cars I'm really not sure there is a future.

Seems a bit hyperbolic. Even if mass transit was ascendant/dominant, you'd still have "last mile" issues where only a car would suffice.

Wishing for cars to go away is as pie-in-the-sky as wishing POTS or Email would disappear. Simply not going to happen - it's too ubiquitous.

Unfortunately at the cost of a lot of human suffering in countries where coltan[1] is mined.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan

In most of the country, per passenger, per person transported a mile, cars are more efficient than public transportation. Electric cars take less than half the energy per mile driven. So they definitely have a role.

The reason why is that a bus has to run whether or not it has passengers on it. A lot of empty buses without passengers are running around all day and night in most metro areas.

So yes, public transit makes a lot of sense where it makes sense. But it only makes sense within a relatively small number of very dense cities.

Can you please cite your sources.

According to this article as long as you have about 11 people on a bus its more efficient. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/11/can-we-please...

In my experience, in most US cities where I've taken the bus, having even 11 people on the bus is not that common, especially later at night. Probably Uber Pool would more efficient than the vast majority of night buses, at least, in the US, and self-driving cars using a similar system even more efficient.

Yes, they are. Even if they get their energy from fossil fuels for now, it's a whole lot easier to replace a few hundred power plants than it is to replace millions of ICEs and all the associated sunk cost that they represent.

It's also just generally easier to make electricity from renewable sources than to directly power cars with them.

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