But yeah that would require work, let's just cry about losing convenience and continue perpetuating the same cycle again, since we have no options but to commit to our clearly unsustainable model
That would not solve the problems like transporting goods from ports and warehouses to stores or transporting equipment that a plumber or drummer needs to do their job. We'll still need electric trucks and vans.
Presumably the parent has something more drastic in mind, like leveling every city and replanning it around bikes and extending public transit to every rural community. Basically treat every place like a dense urban area or force people to move into dense urban areas. At least those are the common, facile alternatives presented by the anti-car side of these debates. It's just urban chauvinism.
I've never heard an anti-car person call for public transit in the sticks. It doesn't seem viable to me[0], and I'm pretty anti-car as is. Most people live in cities or suburbs now and I don't see that changing anytime soon - so it doesn't really make sense to disrupt the lives of people living in rural areas.
While "make everything dense again" is kind of the end-goal, the way we get there isn't so much by "forcing" people to move into dense urban areas. At least, not unless you consider markets to be a form of coercion, in which case everything is "forced" all of the time and I have no argument for you. What happens is that we stop overplanning zoning codes, let commercial and residential zones mix, and allow the market to do it's job rather than just lining the pockets of whoever bought into the neighborhood 30 years ago.
As to your point about urban chauvinism, I do want to point out that while New Urbanism (the thing you're talking about) is really prevalent in urban spaces, so are NIMBYs. It's not so much "everyone should live like us"; it's an argument between people who want city centers to actually be cities and people who still think mixed-use land is the path to crack-era Manhattan. Dense urban spaces are already so desirable now that pretty much every formerly-cheap neighborhood has been gentrified to the hilt. If more people want to live in a dense urban area, then why shouldn't the housing market be allowed to cater to that desire and expand the urban core outwards or upwards?
[0] Though I may be wrong about this. Part of the reason why Amtrak still exists in it's current form is because it's a de-facto subsidy from Acela[1] riders to rural towns with no airport links.
> I've never heard an anti-car person call for public transit in the sticks.
I don't think anti-car people call for rural public transit as much as they ignore rural, suburban, and exurban areas altogether. They call for "banning cars" (or drastically reducing them) without articulating how this would actually work outside of dense cities.
> While "make everything dense again" is kind of the end-goal, the way we get there isn't so much by "forcing" people to move into dense urban areas. At least, not unless you consider markets to be a form of coercion, in which case everything is "forced" all of the time and I have no argument for you. What happens is that we stop overplanning zoning codes, let commercial and residential zones mix, and allow the market to do it's job rather than just lining the pockets of whoever bought into the neighborhood 30 years ago.
I'm kind of fine with this (I like walkable neighborhoods!). I would like more mixing of residential and commercial (more, smaller shops), but I think it's a foregone conclusion that this would result in the kind of dramatically increased density that makes European-style public transit ubiquitous (a lot of people like space, and there's a lot of it in the US). I certainly don't think that's going to happen on a time scale that allows us to skip EVs while meeting climate targets like the OP suggests.
> As to your point about urban chauvinism, I do want to point out that while New Urbanism (the thing you're talking about) is really prevalent in urban spaces, so are NIMBYs. It's not so much "everyone should live like us"; it's an argument between people who want city centers to actually be cities and people who still think mixed-use land is the path to crack-era Manhattan.
I'm not sure what New Urbanism is, but I would be fine with urban people quibbling about how urban spaces should look (I live in a major US city); however, this debate isn't scoped exclusively to cities.
> Dense urban spaces are already so desirable now that pretty much every formerly-cheap neighborhood has been gentrified to the hilt. If more people want to live in a dense urban area, then why shouldn't the housing market be allowed to cater to that desire and expand the urban core outwards or upwards?
I don't think this is true except perhaps in NYC or the Bay Area. But in general I don't think anyone has a problem with the concept of expanding urban density (although there's surely some NIMBYism from people who don't want their suburb to be the target of urban expansion).
GP specified that mass adoption of EVs was not the solution, not that there were no applications for EVs in a carbon-zero future. Just like the carbon offsets in the OP article, simply replacing personal vehicles with EVs does little to nothing to reduce either the global energy expenditure or carbon emissions, it simply moves the energy budget around. Especially true when a plurality of electric power generation still comes from burning coal and natural gas. Removing personal vehicles does reduce both energy expenditure and emissions (to the extent it is feasible, which covers probably >50% of personal vehicles; remember, while most of the US is not urban, most people live in urban areas)
EVs, like carbon offsets, are a necessary part of a carbon-zero future, but they don't actually get us any closer on their own.
How is that going to work out politically? You think a majority of voters are gong to support banning all personal automobiles? In the US, banning personal firearms is non-starter, and car ownership is even more deeply embedded.
But yeah that would require work, let's just cry about losing convenience and continue perpetuating the same cycle again, since we have no options but to commit to our clearly unsustainable model