Cars fulfill a very self-indulgent narrative. ‘I get to decide where and when I travel’, makes people feel “free” snd “important” even when millions of them are silently coming to the same decisions-- like going downtown at 09:00 on weekdsys-- that allow huge efficiency plays.
Notice how many ads feature fantasies of open roads and trips to faraway attractions, not the real world of “I need to sit in rush hour traffic from 6:30 on to get to the Work Factory”
Maybe public transit needs to focus its message on the freedom from drudgery it offers-- you don’t have to be staring at the driver in front of you, scanning the traffic reports
Exactly! This is why I love micromobility and quality public transit so much. With micromobility like electric scooters or bikes, I can zip past traffic in the protected cycle lanes in my city. With the frequent metro service in my city, I know I can show up to the metro station at basically any time and know it’ll be a max 5-minute wait for the next train. And when I’m on the train, I can just chill and scroll on my phone or read a book instead of stressing about traffic. The freedom to think about something that isn’t traffic.
I’d say it is more about
convinceconvenience. You decide when you leave and you leave from your door. You don’t risk being late to work because you missed the train by 1 minute (baring queues, but you get the point).This can also be achieved by high frequency transit.
Yeah, if the train comes every five minutes, that’s going to be way more consistent than traffic over time.
Really depends where you live. In my town I also decide when I leave, and I don’t risk being late because I missed the train by one minute. I’ll just take the next one. More risk of being late because of car traffic.
The problem when people compare cars to public transport is that they compare the current state of public transport in their area. We need to compare what would happen if we were spending as much billions as we do on cars.
If I’m doing a short trip locally in the city, I get that convenience out of my bike. There are times I would have taken a taxi somewhere, but when the app told me how long it would take for my driver to arrive, I just end up cycling there (often rolling past some long lanes of traffic in the process). That process can be even better if a city is built with safe biking paths.
Unfortunately that’s super weather dependent and seasonal. Plus, some of us would be a sweaty mess by the time we biked to where we needed to go.
Bikes don’t have to be seasonal. Some Nordic countries have well maintained and plowed biking networks and they see significant use throughout the winter.
Because many of us live in places where you must use a car, there are no alternatives
In such places electric public transport is nothing but a pipe dream
I dunno what country you are from, but here in the US of A, the monopolies that own all the train infrastructure make sure to keep trains as public transportation as cost prohibitive as possible.
Because North Americans were tricked by the oil and car companies in the 50s to think that car ownership was part of being human, and now we’re addicted to sitting in traffic, breathing fumes, and killing pedestrians in the name of muh freedom.
since wen this sub is full of carbrain? like bruh.
Yeah what is going on? Seems like every other comment is full on car-brain-cars-are-freedom insanity. No enough orange pilled people here. Is the opposite of the orange pill the sad grey pill?
I am amazed as well. Did they just sub every community with the word ‘car’ in it?
no idea but its just sad. even the reddit version is beter.
Making up slurs like “carbrain” for people who think differently than your echo chamber is fuckin’ lame as shit. You look gross from the outside, FYI. Found this post by sorting my “All” feed by Hot, not a member of your echo chamber.
Carbrain can be pretty succinctly defined as thinking this tiny little online community is the echo chamber, and not your entire car-default existence in your car-default country with your car-default parents neighbors teachers transit networks and policies
OK sure, you’re the majority. Let me know when you succeed in remodeling all the metropolitan areas of America with your great influence.
Until then, I’ll be happily driving around to wherever I please in my cars or on my motorcycle.
Yeah, I’m not sure you read that correctly, but you did switch from ‘oh no I’m being bullied’ to ‘haha nobody cares nerd’ so maybe you did figure it out. Anyway, nobody cares that you have a car, it wasn’t even your choice to get one.
haha nobody cares nerd
The worrying thing here is the assumption that we can choose…
The world has 2 billions individual cars. Lithium extraction rate may not be sufficient to make 2 billions cars by 2030… and that’s assuming we don’t need lithium for computers, smartphones, but also not for batteries for the grid (because no solar cell works at night and wind farms are not on demand erther), and… not for electric trucks! Then comes the question of the other metals: copper, nickel, cobalt, …
Trains will not work everywhere for everyone, but not deploying them now and fast will be a severe issue for North America when resources will get scarce.
We need a smart mix of trains, buses, subways, tramways, shared vehicles, bikes, everything but one individual car per person. That era will come to an end because we’re closer to the bottom of our planet’s natural resources stock than the beginning.
There’s not even a real option of keeping gas cars a little while more, as cheap oil is also coming to an end.
The difference between accepting this and “choosing” individual cars is how ready countries will be when resources will get scarce. It may get ugly…
I love trains
Trains aren’t 100% the answer, but cars should be the last answer. Still we should electrify cars.
yeah, electricity should just be used everywhere.
most other energy types can be easily and efficiently converted to it, and it makes it easy to increase efficiency.
(power production and consumption are separated in electrical cars, so by making your power stations more efficient you make all of the cars that use them greener)Sadly most electricity production is via coal or gas. What’s needed primarily is to use less of those, for all reasons and uses. EVs just shift fossil consumption to where people don’t see it.
EV’s are so much more efficient that even running from electricity produced by coal, they are significantly better than ICE (internal combustion engine) cars. Just the electricity used to refine enough fuel to drive 100mi would be enough to drive an average EV more than 60mi. (This detail gets conveniently left out when comparing ICE cars to EVs).
We still need to decarbonise the grid, and as that happens, all electric cars (regardless of age) will become less polluting too. Having an unclean grid is not an excuse to keep using ICE vehicles.
Batteries used gives you150 ebikes for every e-car
I love good public transport. It’s great to not have to worry about parking or having to drive. Good cities, like many in Europe and New York in the US, a car isn’t really required.
But out in the countryside, a car is a must. Electric cars are massively better for the environment and way cheaper to run (like tenth the cost with a night rate).
Also, no offense here but saying NYC or European cities are good is a perspective I would not agree with. I do not want to live in a high rise apartment and there are a lot of people who do not want that.
European and NYC people are used to it, but that doesn’t make it good.
Having that many people in one place is actually not good. Some of them never experience being in nature. Living conditions aren’t great. It’s cramped and expensive.
All of this so they can say that using public transportation is good? That’s ridiculous.
Edit: Downvote me all you want. This is the truth. Cities are not good.
Depends on the city. Sure, some are high rise, which isn’t for some, but they aren’t all like that. London for example is relatively flat but has an excellent public transport system. Same with Paris and Brussels. Essen seamer good while I was there. Utrecht was great. Amsterdam too (but it’s just grim due to all the drug tourists). Most European cities are walkable and have at least a basic level of usable public transport.
NY was the only American city I’ve been to which had a decent transport system I used. Seattle I saw trams but was on business with Texan sales people, trams with out the question. Austin buses felt very much like what only poor people used and walking the 2 miles from the apartment to the office, involved some fence holes and minor trespassing to be even possible. Mostly nice river walk though.
All cities should have decent public transport and be walkable. Car based urban sprawl has got to go. Older, pre-car, cities are often the nicest.
Edit : Wuppertal, that was my German favourite. It’s like an alternative timeline city. Love its "floating tram.
hardly any european cities primarily use high rises for housing
The majority that I have been in have multistory apartments. Worse is they are incredibly small. I would never want to live my life in them.
“Multistory” isn’t the same thing as “high-rise.” A five-floor Boston walk-up like I lived in for a month back in 2013 is a “mid-rise” at most, and plenty of density can be achieved with two- or three-story townhouses or even relatively small stand-alone houses on relatively small lots.
And okay, cool. No one’s gonna make you, no matter how much you fantasize about someone trying. Literally all we argue for here in terms of housing is not having SFH be the only real option like it is in most of the US, so I’d politely request that you stop telling us wrongly what our position is.
Cars can pick me up 10 feet from my front door(my car). No train tracks within 5 miles of me. I would love if their were tracks closer.
Yeah, that’s what the post is about.
B-but think of the iNdIvIdUaL!
Because cars aren’t stuck to tracks.
cars are stuck to roads and much less efficient everywhere many people need to go. cars are basically useful where only few people live or work.
I mean technically cars are only stuck to roads if you’re a law abiding citizen.
Roads allow for significantly more freedom of travel than trains because it would be cost prohibitive to build rail networks everywhere a car can reach.
Each mode of transport has its niche and one cannot replace the other.
If you can’t conveniently travel by train, that is a failure of the design of your city, not trains. If the destination a train took you to was walkable you wouldn’t need a car, because the train could cover the large distances, and you could simply walk from the train to your necessary locations.
“City”
This guy thinking everyone lives in urban centers.
Are they going to run a train to every remote village in Italy? Will everyone in Iceland travel to Reykjavik from their farms around the country by rail? Are we going to install rail on every island of Greece just so people don’t have to drive?
Sure, if we can build the infrastructure for cars there, why not trains too. You’re quite closed minded. But also, why can’t you just bike in a village? I mentioned cities because that’s where trains tend to be, genius.
There’s trams, there’s bikes, there’s buses, etc. etc. etc.
And trains aren’t stuck to roads. And planes aren’t stuck to roads. And ships aren’t stuck to roads.
Electric cars don’t solve a lot of the root problems of cars. They still require massive amounts of energy to move thousands of pounds of steel. They also still rely on sprawling roads and parking lots.
Absolutely. And the benefit trains have over cars is that you can reduce the amount of other stuff per person needed to get people moving.
For a local train of mine that seats 93 people with empty weight of 54 metric tons, that comes out to ~0.58 tons/person.
My sedan weighs in at about 1.5 metric tons empty, and since I’m the only one that uses it, my weight footprint is ~1.5 tons/person.
Forget about fuel economy too. Trains don’t have traffic (most of the time) to deal with, meaning they can accelerate to coasting speeds and spend most of the ride at best-efficiency. Cars are subject to traffic conditions, meaning efficiency can be as-designed by the manufacturer, or it can be much, much worse on a per trip basis if you contribute to the daily rush hours on freeways.
There is also much less friction on rails compared to rubber on roadways. If demand increases the length of the train can be increased or more trains added. This helps prevent the cycle of needing more lanes (rail lines in this case).
energy is a non-issue
Electric motors are between 95 and 98% efficient, while ICEs are in the 80’s on a good day.
You are aware that electric trains also use electric motors, just like electric cars do, right? And you are aware that electric cars rely on an electric battery while electric trains rely primarily on overhead electric power lines, are you?
That means cars require one extra component and an extra conversation of energy which trains don’t need. Every conversation of energy reduces efficiency of the final outcome. The more conversations, the less efficiency.
Trains use: power lines -> electric motor
Cars use: power lines -> electric battery -> electric motorFurthermore, bigger machines can be built to be more efficient than smaller ones. So bigger motors can use (electric) fuel more efficiently than smaller motors.
I was responding to your assertion about EVs not being much better than ICEs.
Big Auto has been destroying any idea of high speed rails for decades. Our trains are complete trash because of car lobbyists.
![[meme] Trains are 100000x easier to electrify and automate than cars, so why does everyone keep talking about electric and driverless cars?](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/11c37658-7c32-4cc2-b12c-6ced348bd09d.png){kind=link}