This is a very weird article. Isn't the main point of electric cars is to reduce carbon emissions? I don't remember Elon Musk saying that his cars would solve the problem of Urban Sprawl, traffic jams, or parking space?
Also, the problem is ill posed. I don't think road congestion can be solved by making a different car. It's a social problem related to jobs, schools and houses.
Buses and trains with good schedules are different cars ;) - while this is definitely a social problem, we can address at least part of it with better public transport.
> . It's a social problem related to jobs, schools and houses.
In many places, it's not.cits a lifestyle problem where people value their own perceived convenience without considering any externalities.
I live in a small (500k people) city, where the school you go to depends on what part of town you live in. Each school has probably less than a half mile's radius. Yet despite this, a large number of people still drive their kids to school.
People don't use trains because "they're expensive, and I might need to leave 8 minutes early or later some day", despite not considering the cost of fuel, parking in a city centre for a day, and maintenance of their car. They don't use buses because they're "inconvenient" despite tge fact a months bus pass in my city is cheaper than 2 days parking in the city, and all the major artery routes are served at 5-10 minute intervals during peak hours.
People living in these kinds of situations won't change unless they're forced to
> People don't use trains because "they're expensive, and I might need to leave 8 minutes early or later some day"
That's an unfortunate side-effect of trains having timetables. When a train is 5 minutes late, it's really frustrating because a) you don't have any agency, b) you usually cannot see anything related to the reason for the delay, and c) the idle waiting makes the time feel longer.
When a car is stuck in traffic for 30 minutes, it doesn't feel like you're losing 30 minutes. It just feels like a force of nature happening to you, and also it feels shorter than waiting for a train for 30 minutes because you're still engaged in the act of driving. You still have some agency because you have the choice of trying to change to that other lane that always feels like it's moving faster.
Indeed. The writer doesn't even challenge some of the more obvious problems with the comments they have collected e.g. self driving cars causing traffic jams as they look for parking - why would they look? Wouldn't they ask for a space, reserve one based on location, price, charging needs, then drive to it on a route that is less used than ones carrying time sensitive loads (food, people)?
Yes, BBC kind of hijacked the report to state the obvious: an electric car is still a car so if we don't want to litter cities with them we should use different means of transportation.
The report also addresses autonomous driving:
> The other great technological change under way on the roads is driverless cars.
> The report warns this dream could also turn sour as car owners may choose to live many miles from their workplace, using their car as a mobile office while sitting in traffic jams they have helped to create.
I have to agree. The article seems like a popularity peice for the politicians involved therein.
Also the graph comparing motoring costs to public transport costs is questionable.
Personally, we downsized from two car houshold to a single car. Car doing the school, grocery and weekend duty, Tfl for commuting.
The car costs about £30 (fuel) per week hauling up to five people at a time. Tfl costs £51 per week per person. If you mix Tfl + Train then it costs £77 per week per person. (Using the Train also has a noticable effect on my mental health, currently fortunate enough to have access to Tfl without relying on Train, hope that continues)
It's the amount of people that need to move from A to B which is the problem and not how they move from A to B.
If all the people switched to electric cars, it's still ALL the VERY SAME NUMBER of people. Local emissions may go down, but then the energy to charge all those electric vehicles will affect "something somewhere else".
If all the people stopped using cars, switched to bicycles, then it's still ALL THE VERY SAME NUMBER of people getting from A to B maybe at the same rate as they were before the switch. This will help with noise and emissions, but... the traffic will be the same.
In London, being on a bicycle is life threatening. Not saying that motorists and bus drivers are out there to "get 'em", rather there is very little space on the roads. Several times the typical scene is that of a biker being followed by up to ten cars until the cars get an opportunity to overtake. Which happens after several minutes due to lack of space.
> If all the people stopped using cars, switched to bicycles, then it's still ALL THE VERY SAME NUMBER of people getting from A to B maybe at the same rate as they were before the switch. This will help with noise and emissions, but... the traffic will be the same.
As someone who bike commutes 10 miles in the US, this couldn't possibly be the case for me.
There is almost never a car impeded by my presence. I spend part of my ride in a bike lane and most of the rest on a bike route through neighborhoods that aren't heavily used for car commuting.
Even when there are cars, they quickly have a chance to pass (and inversely in heavy traffic I filter right through them).
It's nice that that's possible for you, but I'm afraid it is not universally possible for everyone and everycity. E.g. bike access to our university (plus institutes etc.) when coming from the city is via narrow but heavy traffic road (to university, a bunch of suburbs, two autobahns), or an adjacent pedestrian path (with a lot of studends and badly trimmed overgrowth), or through the hills with forests and no direct path.
The solution here would add & maintain bike lanes (or a stand-alone bike road), but for the above example that would mean deforesting and cutting into 2 or 3 km of hillside. And for the duration of that effort, suspending the primary road between the city and {university, one suburb, one autobahn access} which also happens to be the secondary connection to {two additional suburbs, another autobahn access}.
Space is not at a premium the U.S. There is plenty opportuinity there to start working towards a very efficient transit infrastructure which will allow for Bikes, Cars, Buses and what not.
I have travelled/driven between the west coast and middle of Arizona (and somewhat into Utah) and road infrastructure generally was much much better than what we have here in the U.K.
As a relative/subjective view, consider that on most major roads in London, it will be difficult to place two London buses side-by-side. (try walking between Bank and let's say Baker Street)
In CA, Silicon Valley proper or south of San Jose or going even further into Southern California, most residential streets are large enough to allow parking even big RVs (almost as big as London Buses) adjacent and still leaving space for cars to move about. From what I remember of San Francisco, the main roads were very wide (streets not so much), it was not difficult to manoeuvre a Chevy Suburban, whereas in London you can rent a studio roughly the size of that vehicle.
> If all the people stopped using cars, switched to bicycles, then it's still ALL THE VERY SAME NUMBER of people getting from A to B maybe at the same rate as they were before the switch. This will help with noise and emissions, but... the traffic will be the same.
Won't the traffic be better with smaller transport (like bike)?
Modern day capitalism and the increasing specialisation of jobs combined with problems in the housing market means that people do extraordinary commutes. If the bus or the bicycle is your transport option then you are not going to be setting off at 6.30 in the morning to drive 100 miles to sit at a desk for 8 hours.
In the 1970's nobody drove 100 miles on a daily basis to get to work although there was a small army of travelling salesmen in 'rep' cars that did put in the miles.
Nowadays those reps are probably flying so nothing has improved on that front.
It is hard to untangle this mess, people have careers, kids at schools and considerable investment in automobiles. Also, when companies merge there can be highly dysfunctional travel arrangements going on as a result.
If it is bicycles all the way then that could mean electric bicycles, which means an effective maximum travel distance of 15 miles or an hour of travel time each way.
A government could unpick and sort the mess out, for instance, in the public sector you might find you have people from city A commuting to work in city B and vice-versa to do similar jobs, e.g. in the NHS or education. A government could look at this and use their weight to pay for people to do a job swap, so pay grades are the same but people are working locally. For instance, we have a secondary school French teacher in city A working in city B, and another in city B working in city A. There could be a straightforward incentive to un-do this travel mismatch, where everyone wins. Under normal circumstances opportunities for the French teacher in city A to get a job in city A might not come along. Same for the counterpart in city B.
This would have knock on effects in the private sector as the main earner in the household might be able to also go for a more local job at a lower pay rate with benefits in getting two hours of their life back every day.
The bicycle definitely can be part of this future, if the government could get a sizeable quantity of public sector workers to have local jobs part of the package could include electric bicycles.
> In London, being on a bicycle is life threatening.
Not really disagreeing per se, but I think it's worth taking a look at the numbers. I got them from Wikipedia [1]. The lastest numbers they have are from 2017: 721 thousand journeys per day and 10 deaths per year. That's 0.0000038% chance of death per journey (although presumably about 40x that for serious injury, or 0.00015% per journey). While I appreciate that it's scary to ride in traffic, very unlikely to ever be killed on a bicycle in London. Not good as it should be, but over the last 10-20 years you can see that improvements have been made and I hope we'll see more to come in the future.
Objectively speaking, I hear you. The numbers are in your favor.
And full disclosure, I have not yet tried cycling in London.
But from a car drivers perspective, to me it seems that if by any chance, I made a contact with a cyclist even at breaking speed, I would injur the poor soul very badly.
And when I play that back but me being the cyclist... I can't get myself to get on a bike.
I admit that I have done it in some non-busy places around about 2013. It is scary at first, but to be honest it's better than when I was riding in Canada. Drivers are pretty patient in the UK. I rode a fair amount in the countryside when I was there and I was really surprised at how careful drivers are when overtaking (and how patient they seemed to be). City driving is fairly low speed, though, which gives a cyclist an advantage because they have better acceleration. That allows them to get out of trouble most of the time.
Having said that, I don't want to take away from your point that a lot of people will always feel too uncomfortable to ride in city traffic and I don't blame them. It's just that I often hear people complain about the safety of cycling in London and it's actually a pretty safe city to ride in (though it can definitely get better). The previous mayor was notorious for spending money on improving cycling in London and I think the stats bear that out. I left the UK in 2015, so I don't know what the current mayor is doing.
This is not a response to Elon Musk, but to the UK's government, and in particular its report "The Road to Zero" (meaning zero CO2 emissions), which this report claims relies too much on the conversion of individual cars to EV to achieve its goals.
I still think the article has merit. If we just make more CO2 efficient cars without also curbing their use we might end up with more CO2 being produced due to Jevons paradox[1].
I especially worry about autonomous cars since, that would make taking long trips by car more convenient.
Though I'm a big proponent of pure electric vehicles, we should be acknowledging that they're still a large source of carbon emissions from manufacturing and in some cases electricity used. The most desirable option would be to move away from individually owned automobiles altogether.
E-bikes are the way to go. They fill the gap between bike-able distances and those requiring alternate propulsion for many people. And depending on your diet, they're in some cases more environmentally friendly than normal bicycles per distance traveled. That doesn't even matter, since both are an order of magnitude better than the automobile.
It's crazy that we're spending thousands to subsidize electric vehicles and mostly ignoring e-bikes.
I loathe car culture, but bicycles are very dangerous compared to cars, and e-bikes moreso. Motorcycles are approximately 30 times more dangerous than cars, and bicycles about 15 times more dangerous. Goes to figure that e-bikes would be somewhere between those two.
Plus, they are not usable in many weather conditions.
I've injured myself multiple times on bicycles, never as a result of a car, despite traveling a tiny sliver of the distance that I have in a car.
I've, thankfully, never been injured in a car accident.
I realize this is anecdotal, but there's strong reasons to believe bicycles are dangerous all by themselves. Traveling at high velocities with little protection on only two wheels is a recipe for accidents.
I assume velomobiles or recumbent tricycles would be much safer, if one doesn't mind the looks from passerby.
That's simply not true. Cycling in many European countries is no more dangerous than being an occupant in a motor vehicle and a significant proportion of cyclist injuries and deaths are caused by motor vehicles.
Proper cycling and walking infrastructure combined with a reduction of car usage in cities makes cycling an extremely safe activity. In addition the extra health benefits from physical exercise more than offsets any increase in risk from a collision at a societal level.
As for cyling not being usable in many weather conditions - perhaps in extreme winters, but in London there're very few days in the year, if any, that I can't happily ride the 22km round trip to work and back.
You don't need to die to injure yourself on a bike. I've hit ruts in the road and scraped my knee and torn pants. I've slipped my foot off the pedal and wacked my shin, cut my hand putting a chain back on the derailer, and nutted myself on the seat by hopping a curb.
Contrast that to the fact that I've never been injured in a car, even though I've been in a few accidents.
It is. Cars are by far the biggest danger to all other participants in traffic, including bicycles. There's a reason pedestrians have their own space separated from cars. Bikes have the same requirement, then we get drastically less risk.
Carbon emission from vehicle manufacturing is localized to the area they are manufactured in. The benefits of electric vehicles is that you don't have cities and suburbs full of smog from combustion engines.
You must live in a warm climate - these are the only people who suggest bikes as a replacement for vehicles. Riding a bike in the winter is really difficult. It's not impossible, it's just so much of a challenge that it's not even worth entertaining as an idea - just drive a car with a roof and heater.
Build some biking infrastructure, it is super cheap on top of existing roads. Take away a small amount of space from cars and parking between all major common destinations, and bike/pedestrian usage will skyrocket if they feel safe going anywhere nearby.
It's not quite as simple as that. At best you get cars parking in the bike lane and it's full of broken glass, at worst you have people cycling into a suddenly opened car door. Separating it properly costs a lot more. The Uxbridge Road (London) is due for some improvements but the high costs of doing it properly have meant they are now only doing shorter sections.
It is so tiring to hear the same silly argument again and again. Roads are already the best biking infrastructure, period. We cyclists don't want to lose our right to use it by being kicked off to segregated bike facilities. We don't need no cyclist apartheid: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/26/how-apartheid...
This is no either-or situation. In Germany a cyclist has to used a bike lane if available and else uses the road. Kids <= 8 are allowed to cycle on the pedestrian paths.
This is not true. In Germany bike lanes are only required to be used when there is a sign saying so (and when they usable and safe, which you cannot expect, sadly). By default bike lanes are optional.
I am curious, how do motorists react when you ride on a regular road with an optional bike lane adjacent to it? Because where I live, in Spain, they have built such "optional" lanes and when I ride adjacent to them I get a lot of harassment, which I didn't get prior to their construction in such places. So it seems the politicians build them and the motorists do the dirty job.
Some drivers indeed use the existence of such lanes as extra fuel for their harassment, which sucks: Very often these lanes are objectively dangerous for cyclists because they are way easier to be "overlooked" at intersections.
While driving culture generally is terrible in Germany, in my opinion, with people driving way to aggressively, the situation may be improving gradually. The idea of having to keep some distance when passing cyclists seems to have reached some drivers. (From court rulings 1.5 meters is the absolute minimum)
My point is that even when they are "optional" they are not. At least that's my experience riding in Spain, where they have built optional bike lanes but you get plenty of harassment from idiots who think you have to use. This happens in places where there was no prior harassment whatsoever.
The article you mention isn't related to segregated bike facilities, it talks about discrimination.
Car-centered road are not a good biking infrastructure, as cyclist don't feel safe on them, and only a marginal part of the population is willing to cycle when there is no proper cycle infrastructure.
For an example of cities actively encouraging bicycles, go see in the Netherlands, where they decided in the 50s/60s they actively decided didn't want cities to be car-centric.
You'll see a lot of bicycle-only lanes, segregated from the road. And tiny roads, that force cars to go slow.
That's exactly what segregated bicycle facilities are all about, discrimination. Of course in South Africa you were also discriminated by the color of your skin not just by your vehicle of choice. From the article: "When in 1935 a cycle lane was painted on Louis Botha Avenue, the city authorities touted it as a safety solution, but its true purpose was to get black cyclists from Alex out of the way of white motorists."
Roads are not car-centered. They are built for vehicles, and bicycles are vehicles. Bike lanes are built to keep us off the road that motorists believe it is theirs. Do you think cyclists didn't ride on the roads in the Netherlands before they built bike lanes? Of course they built them to let "progress" (i.e. the car) pass unimpeded.
Then why do I always bump into at least on or two car drivers (certainly not all) that harass me when I do not ride on the bike lane but on the road adjacent to it? Why do the motorists care where I ride if it wasn't built to clear the road for them?
I think you've slightly misunderstood. It's not that roads are car-centric by definition. It's that some roads are designed solely around cars, and that those roads are not pleasent to cycle on and sometimes dangerous. Bike lanes are there for those that feel unsafe cycling on the road (for whatever reason). I sometimes cycle on the road and sometimes the bike lane on my commute, depending how fast I want to ride that day. Some of my friends only use bike lanes and if that means they cycle more then that is a good thing.
fine, high speed controlled access freeways may have been built only for cars. But even in that case a regular service road parallel to it is still a much better solution that a bicycle path. I sometimes ride in such a service road.
A dedicated bicycle lane next to a busy multiple-lane road is often better than a service road because it's (hopefully) properly maintained, not strewn with bits of broken cars and doesn't stop suddenly at each junction. I would ride in such a service road if the alternative was a freeway but only as the lesser of two evils.
There's also the problem of busy junctions within settlements that are designed around cars. This is another example of where alternative bicycle-centric lanes and signalling are much better suited than the regular road.
Electric vehicles will solve the problem of localized pollution. The cities and dense urban areas will have less pollution and you will be actually be able to walk on the footpath without inhaling fumes from gas guzzling machines.
For me to take the train to work every day from London to Sunbury it works out to just over twenty pounds per day. For what I pay in commute fares is less then leasing and insuring a new car (which also won’t decide 5 minutes beforehand that it won’t be stopping at your station because it needs to make up time). I’m very pro getting people to give up their cars but I don’t see it happening In the U.K. until affordable alternatives exist
Ouch. I'm curious about the details. Do you have to pay the congestion charge or any tolls when you drive? Do you have free parking at your office? What's the petrol cost of a day's driving? How do the leasing and insurance costs break out daily?
I'm asking because when I ran the numbers for myself in a major US city, it turned out that driving was expensive enough that public transit and Uber would have been superior. But then our transit tickets were only a few dollars and most parking downtown was $20 a day.
So the normal congestion charge is around £11 per day but because I’m a resident and live in a congestion zone it’s £1 pound. However the CC only applies to the most central parts of London so many people don’t have to pay it. Daily fuel works out to £4.5 and my office has free parking. My Annual insurance for a newish Mazda 3 is £500 and while I bought my car outright i think a lease on a similar car would be around £220pm. B
Thanks! So you're looking at roughly £15 a day in overall costs. (Maybe a touch more when you add in maintenance and repairs.) It's interesting that if you had to pay the congestion charge or for parking, the scales would easily tip twards the train. So in conclusion, it's really too bad the transit tickets in London are so expensive since it's clearly pushing a lot of people to drive instead.
The UK Govt actually. There is a current call for Future Mobility plans - the Govt is putting a lot of money (£90M IIRC) into a tender process, to select 3 local authorities to develop future mobility plans over the next 10 years, integrating public transport, EV and EV charging, electric bikes, last mile solutions etc.
Cities should absolutely be doing everything in their power to make it safer and easier to get around without a car.
For me personally, any city urban enough for public transportation to exist at all is too crowded. My sweet spot is having no buses but still having dozen good restaurants within a ten minute drive.
> They should also incentivise local councils to build housing developments that are easy to access without a car.
This is becoming more and more normal in and around London. Developers build blocks of flats (increasingly tall blocks) without any parking at all, and the councils do not provide any resident parking permits for those living in the new flats. Because they simply don't have the space to do so.
Whilst not having a car in London can work (I don't have one), it's a total non-starter for many, especially those with kids. So now there's a load of new homes built, which looks great on paper for the council, but they are totally useless homes for many people.
Self driving taxis will be a lot cheaper than normal taxis and self driving electric taxis will be cheaper still. Basically that takes the two most expensive cost factors out of the equation (humans and petrol). This could become so cheap that even people owning a car might prefer it for short distances; or for their daily commute.
Self driving cars potentially also increase the road capacity as cars would be able to coordinate their moves and make more efficient use of the road.
So, that's two ways electrical and autonomous vehicles could contribute to reducing road congestion, which is what this article seems to be about.
People letting their car drive around for hours because they can't find a parking space sounds a bit far fetched. Self parking cars could park on the edge of a city though and pick the driver up when needed. This would also enable autonomous charging and address that issue.
I agree with your second point (self-driving cars might make more efficient use of roads), but I don't see how cheaper taxis is going to reduce road congestion?
It gets rid of parked cars, people looking for parking, etc. Also, you can service a dense city with a relatively small amount of taxis ensure they are not ridiculous SUVs, etc. And of course they can coordinate their actions and make better use of the roads as well. Then finally, if people would share rides, it gets even better.
But if taking a car gets cheaper, people who now walk, cycle, or take a bus will start taking cars.
Also, with self-driving cars that are cheaper, I expect that people who now drive a car to the suburbs will move further out of town to get cheaper housing because a) driving is cheaper and b) self-driving would mean they can do things on their commute (work, watch Netflix, etc)
I think the uncomfortable truth is that, to fight climate change, we must give up some luxuries. Flying, driving a car, electricity, low priced almost disposable clothing, electronics gadgets, etc. must get more expensive.
True, but there's a difference between owning a car and taking a car. Flying and driving will be a lot more sustainable once that goes electric. If lots of people take autonomous vehicles to get from A to B and we can find ways where that is sustainable; I have nothing against building more infrastructure to support that.
In any case this article was about road congestion; not about saving the planet. When it comes to that, I don't really believe in technical martyrdom where people voluntarily choose to not do lots of things they would like to do as a solution. And making you feel good about you through voluntarily declining to do certain things is nice and nobel but more of a form of hedonism than a practical solution. Nothing wrong with that but it's not a scalable solution in the sense that in the bigger picture of 7-9 billion people not following your lead, it's going to be statistically meaningless/irrelevant unless you convince them otherwise at unprecedented scale.
Assuming most travel occurs in the morning and evening rush hour, in your scenario some proportion of taxis only ever get used for those commutes. So at the extreme you have taxis that are used as much as private cars. So I would guess a self driving taxi fleet would have a higher cost than you, and there would definitely be room for buses and trains etc too.
At the end state will tax electricity same way to keep this wonderful tax income. No way to have cheap fuel, hydrogen, gas, etc will be taxed same way due to political reasons.
I don’t see a chance to ditch my car having family. It is clean, clean children seat, toys for travel, snacks for next trip, some water, some bad weather clothing. It is available all the time for me, no waiting, known condition.
> At the end state will tax electricity same way to keep this wonderful tax income. No way to have cheap fuel, hydrogen, gas, etc will be taxed same way due to political reasons.
But not clean electricity. The gas is taxed for the environmental reasons: it is endangering our planet. I don't know of any government taxing clean electricity.
Then why was it highly taxed before carbon emissions were considered a problem at all? I can tell you: because it's easy to tax (very much like estates).
Depends where you live I suppose but in the UK there are two taxes on fuel.
Fuel duty which has nearly always been on fuel, but left in place and manipulated as a tax on hydrocarbons - £0.5795 per litre
VAT is then added on top of this price, which has been around since 1973 - currently 20%
Currently there is no tax on electricity used for road vehicles, but we do pay VAT on our Electricity bills so it's fair to assume that the government isn't losing out a huge amount of money by people switching to electric vehicles.
It's similar to the way fixing a leaking pipe doesn't help with electricity. Electrification alone doesn't solve every problem.
Elon Musk seems to be taking on all of the cited problems, though. Electrification helps with emissions. Autonomy helps with parking spaces. Boring Company helps with traffic. If he's successful, we'll be whizzing around in silent and emissions-free self-driving Tesla pods that use Boring Co tunnels to travel at ridiculously fast speed. Sounds cool.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadThe headline feels like pure clickbait.
In many places, it's not.cits a lifestyle problem where people value their own perceived convenience without considering any externalities.
I live in a small (500k people) city, where the school you go to depends on what part of town you live in. Each school has probably less than a half mile's radius. Yet despite this, a large number of people still drive their kids to school.
People don't use trains because "they're expensive, and I might need to leave 8 minutes early or later some day", despite not considering the cost of fuel, parking in a city centre for a day, and maintenance of their car. They don't use buses because they're "inconvenient" despite tge fact a months bus pass in my city is cheaper than 2 days parking in the city, and all the major artery routes are served at 5-10 minute intervals during peak hours.
People living in these kinds of situations won't change unless they're forced to
That's an unfortunate side-effect of trains having timetables. When a train is 5 minutes late, it's really frustrating because a) you don't have any agency, b) you usually cannot see anything related to the reason for the delay, and c) the idle waiting makes the time feel longer.
When a car is stuck in traffic for 30 minutes, it doesn't feel like you're losing 30 minutes. It just feels like a force of nature happening to you, and also it feels shorter than waiting for a train for 30 minutes because you're still engaged in the act of driving. You still have some agency because you have the choice of trying to change to that other lane that always feels like it's moving faster.
The report also addresses autonomous driving:
> The other great technological change under way on the roads is driverless cars.
> The report warns this dream could also turn sour as car owners may choose to live many miles from their workplace, using their car as a mobile office while sitting in traffic jams they have helped to create.
Also the graph comparing motoring costs to public transport costs is questionable.
Personally, we downsized from two car houshold to a single car. Car doing the school, grocery and weekend duty, Tfl for commuting.
The car costs about £30 (fuel) per week hauling up to five people at a time. Tfl costs £51 per week per person. If you mix Tfl + Train then it costs £77 per week per person. (Using the Train also has a noticable effect on my mental health, currently fortunate enough to have access to Tfl without relying on Train, hope that continues)
It's the amount of people that need to move from A to B which is the problem and not how they move from A to B.
If all the people switched to electric cars, it's still ALL the VERY SAME NUMBER of people. Local emissions may go down, but then the energy to charge all those electric vehicles will affect "something somewhere else".
If all the people stopped using cars, switched to bicycles, then it's still ALL THE VERY SAME NUMBER of people getting from A to B maybe at the same rate as they were before the switch. This will help with noise and emissions, but... the traffic will be the same.
In London, being on a bicycle is life threatening. Not saying that motorists and bus drivers are out there to "get 'em", rather there is very little space on the roads. Several times the typical scene is that of a biker being followed by up to ten cars until the cars get an opportunity to overtake. Which happens after several minutes due to lack of space.
As someone who bike commutes 10 miles in the US, this couldn't possibly be the case for me.
There is almost never a car impeded by my presence. I spend part of my ride in a bike lane and most of the rest on a bike route through neighborhoods that aren't heavily used for car commuting.
Even when there are cars, they quickly have a chance to pass (and inversely in heavy traffic I filter right through them).
The solution here would add & maintain bike lanes (or a stand-alone bike road), but for the above example that would mean deforesting and cutting into 2 or 3 km of hillside. And for the duration of that effort, suspending the primary road between the city and {university, one suburb, one autobahn access} which also happens to be the secondary connection to {two additional suburbs, another autobahn access}.
I have travelled/driven between the west coast and middle of Arizona (and somewhat into Utah) and road infrastructure generally was much much better than what we have here in the U.K.
As a relative/subjective view, consider that on most major roads in London, it will be difficult to place two London buses side-by-side. (try walking between Bank and let's say Baker Street)
In CA, Silicon Valley proper or south of San Jose or going even further into Southern California, most residential streets are large enough to allow parking even big RVs (almost as big as London Buses) adjacent and still leaving space for cars to move about. From what I remember of San Francisco, the main roads were very wide (streets not so much), it was not difficult to manoeuvre a Chevy Suburban, whereas in London you can rent a studio roughly the size of that vehicle.
Won't the traffic be better with smaller transport (like bike)?
In the 1970's nobody drove 100 miles on a daily basis to get to work although there was a small army of travelling salesmen in 'rep' cars that did put in the miles.
Nowadays those reps are probably flying so nothing has improved on that front.
It is hard to untangle this mess, people have careers, kids at schools and considerable investment in automobiles. Also, when companies merge there can be highly dysfunctional travel arrangements going on as a result.
If it is bicycles all the way then that could mean electric bicycles, which means an effective maximum travel distance of 15 miles or an hour of travel time each way.
A government could unpick and sort the mess out, for instance, in the public sector you might find you have people from city A commuting to work in city B and vice-versa to do similar jobs, e.g. in the NHS or education. A government could look at this and use their weight to pay for people to do a job swap, so pay grades are the same but people are working locally. For instance, we have a secondary school French teacher in city A working in city B, and another in city B working in city A. There could be a straightforward incentive to un-do this travel mismatch, where everyone wins. Under normal circumstances opportunities for the French teacher in city A to get a job in city A might not come along. Same for the counterpart in city B.
This would have knock on effects in the private sector as the main earner in the household might be able to also go for a more local job at a lower pay rate with benefits in getting two hours of their life back every day.
The bicycle definitely can be part of this future, if the government could get a sizeable quantity of public sector workers to have local jobs part of the package could include electric bicycles.
Not really disagreeing per se, but I think it's worth taking a look at the numbers. I got them from Wikipedia [1]. The lastest numbers they have are from 2017: 721 thousand journeys per day and 10 deaths per year. That's 0.0000038% chance of death per journey (although presumably about 40x that for serious injury, or 0.00015% per journey). While I appreciate that it's scary to ride in traffic, very unlikely to ever be killed on a bicycle in London. Not good as it should be, but over the last 10-20 years you can see that improvements have been made and I hope we'll see more to come in the future.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_London#Statistics
And full disclosure, I have not yet tried cycling in London.
But from a car drivers perspective, to me it seems that if by any chance, I made a contact with a cyclist even at breaking speed, I would injur the poor soul very badly.
And when I play that back but me being the cyclist... I can't get myself to get on a bike.
Having said that, I don't want to take away from your point that a lot of people will always feel too uncomfortable to ride in city traffic and I don't blame them. It's just that I often hear people complain about the safety of cycling in London and it's actually a pretty safe city to ride in (though it can definitely get better). The previous mayor was notorious for spending money on improving cycling in London and I think the stats bear that out. I left the UK in 2015, so I don't know what the current mayor is doing.
I especially worry about autonomous cars since, that would make taking long trips by car more convenient.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
E-bikes are the way to go. They fill the gap between bike-able distances and those requiring alternate propulsion for many people. And depending on your diet, they're in some cases more environmentally friendly than normal bicycles per distance traveled. That doesn't even matter, since both are an order of magnitude better than the automobile.
It's crazy that we're spending thousands to subsidize electric vehicles and mostly ignoring e-bikes.
Plus, they are not usable in many weather conditions.
I've, thankfully, never been injured in a car accident.
I realize this is anecdotal, but there's strong reasons to believe bicycles are dangerous all by themselves. Traveling at high velocities with little protection on only two wheels is a recipe for accidents.
I assume velomobiles or recumbent tricycles would be much safer, if one doesn't mind the looks from passerby.
Proper cycling and walking infrastructure combined with a reduction of car usage in cities makes cycling an extremely safe activity. In addition the extra health benefits from physical exercise more than offsets any increase in risk from a collision at a societal level.
As for cyling not being usable in many weather conditions - perhaps in extreme winters, but in London there're very few days in the year, if any, that I can't happily ride the 22km round trip to work and back.
Contrast that to the fact that I've never been injured in a car, even though I've been in a few accidents.
As it stands, the current infrastructure is basically hostile at every level.
You must live in a warm climate - these are the only people who suggest bikes as a replacement for vehicles. Riding a bike in the winter is really difficult. It's not impossible, it's just so much of a challenge that it's not even worth entertaining as an idea - just drive a car with a roof and heater.
While driving culture generally is terrible in Germany, in my opinion, with people driving way to aggressively, the situation may be improving gradually. The idea of having to keep some distance when passing cyclists seems to have reached some drivers. (From court rulings 1.5 meters is the absolute minimum)
Car-centered road are not a good biking infrastructure, as cyclist don't feel safe on them, and only a marginal part of the population is willing to cycle when there is no proper cycle infrastructure.
For an example of cities actively encouraging bicycles, go see in the Netherlands, where they decided in the 50s/60s they actively decided didn't want cities to be car-centric.
You'll see a lot of bicycle-only lanes, segregated from the road. And tiny roads, that force cars to go slow.
A bike lane can be built because of racist motives, yet only a minority of bike lanes are built because of that.
There's also the problem of busy junctions within settlements that are designed around cars. This is another example of where alternative bicycle-centric lanes and signalling are much better suited than the regular road.
I'm asking because when I ran the numbers for myself in a major US city, it turned out that driving was expensive enough that public transit and Uber would have been superior. But then our transit tickets were only a few dollars and most parking downtown was $20 a day.
So the normal congestion charge is around £11 per day but because I’m a resident and live in a congestion zone it’s £1 pound. However the CC only applies to the most central parts of London so many people don’t have to pay it. Daily fuel works out to £4.5 and my office has free parking. My Annual insurance for a newish Mazda 3 is £500 and while I bought my car outright i think a lease on a similar car would be around £220pm. B
A planning that involves all aspects (direct or indirect) of the multi-faceted problem of mobility.
But hey, who has time for plannin'.
For me personally, any city urban enough for public transportation to exist at all is too crowded. My sweet spot is having no buses but still having dozen good restaurants within a ten minute drive.
I don't understand.
This is becoming more and more normal in and around London. Developers build blocks of flats (increasingly tall blocks) without any parking at all, and the councils do not provide any resident parking permits for those living in the new flats. Because they simply don't have the space to do so.
Whilst not having a car in London can work (I don't have one), it's a total non-starter for many, especially those with kids. So now there's a load of new homes built, which looks great on paper for the council, but they are totally useless homes for many people.
Self driving cars potentially also increase the road capacity as cars would be able to coordinate their moves and make more efficient use of the road.
So, that's two ways electrical and autonomous vehicles could contribute to reducing road congestion, which is what this article seems to be about.
People letting their car drive around for hours because they can't find a parking space sounds a bit far fetched. Self parking cars could park on the edge of a city though and pick the driver up when needed. This would also enable autonomous charging and address that issue.
Also, with self-driving cars that are cheaper, I expect that people who now drive a car to the suburbs will move further out of town to get cheaper housing because a) driving is cheaper and b) self-driving would mean they can do things on their commute (work, watch Netflix, etc)
I think the uncomfortable truth is that, to fight climate change, we must give up some luxuries. Flying, driving a car, electricity, low priced almost disposable clothing, electronics gadgets, etc. must get more expensive.
In any case this article was about road congestion; not about saving the planet. When it comes to that, I don't really believe in technical martyrdom where people voluntarily choose to not do lots of things they would like to do as a solution. And making you feel good about you through voluntarily declining to do certain things is nice and nobel but more of a form of hedonism than a practical solution. Nothing wrong with that but it's not a scalable solution in the sense that in the bigger picture of 7-9 billion people not following your lead, it's going to be statistically meaningless/irrelevant unless you convince them otherwise at unprecedented scale.
At the end state will tax electricity same way to keep this wonderful tax income. No way to have cheap fuel, hydrogen, gas, etc will be taxed same way due to political reasons.
I don’t see a chance to ditch my car having family. It is clean, clean children seat, toys for travel, snacks for next trip, some water, some bad weather clothing. It is available all the time for me, no waiting, known condition.
But not clean electricity. The gas is taxed for the environmental reasons: it is endangering our planet. I don't know of any government taxing clean electricity.
Then why was it highly taxed before carbon emissions were considered a problem at all? I can tell you: because it's easy to tax (very much like estates).
Fuel duty which has nearly always been on fuel, but left in place and manipulated as a tax on hydrocarbons - £0.5795 per litre
VAT is then added on top of this price, which has been around since 1973 - currently 20%
Currently there is no tax on electricity used for road vehicles, but we do pay VAT on our Electricity bills so it's fair to assume that the government isn't losing out a huge amount of money by people switching to electric vehicles.
It's not so much the wonderful tax income, but the necessary acquiring of funds in order to maintain the roads.
This is paid by taxes on fuel. Somebody has to pay for new roads and maintenance, when that string of revenue falls away.
Herearound fuel taxes are earmarked for roads and potentially public transport projects. It can't be siphoned off into the general revenue bucket.
Elon Musk seems to be taking on all of the cited problems, though. Electrification helps with emissions. Autonomy helps with parking spaces. Boring Company helps with traffic. If he's successful, we'll be whizzing around in silent and emissions-free self-driving Tesla pods that use Boring Co tunnels to travel at ridiculously fast speed. Sounds cool.