jbdoug

Highways (and resulting sprawl) aren't the result of free market economics -- they are a policy decision.

https://www.ibisworld.com/us/bed/government-funding-for-high...

Well we spend the last 60 years reengineering all our cities to be car-centric, so who's to say we can't undo that? Most of the top 100 US cities existed before cars, we just hollowed out all the urban cores in service of having ample street parking.

I currently live in Ann Arbor, MI (the 244th largest city in the US) without a car. If they built a Trader Joes downtown I would have 0 issues being car free. The city has built a number of fully protected bike lanes downtown that I hope get expanded further into the greater community, and seems to be doing a good job of making the downtown denser as well. It certainly can be done.

Yeah that's pretty solid!

Yeah it seems like, in Boston at least, grid carbon intensity peaks between 12 and 8pm and is at its lowest around 4am. It's probably on a case by case basis though -- if you live in an area that still burns a lot of coal, your base load is likely to be pretty dirty (though of course in that case it probably doesn't matter when you charge your car, unless there happens to be a lot of solar as well).

I'm pretty sure the base load (which what you're drawing from off of peak hours) is largely produced by fossil fuel generation because those sources don't have the variability of renewables (I don't think a lot of solar is being produced at night...).