[michaelteter]

For occasional commutes, 115km one way is ok (not for me, but it's not unthinkable).

But 115km each way (230km round trip) 5 days per week is a problem. We should not be doing this, at least not in individual cars. That electric car is still creating a lot of particulate pollution from the tires on the road, not to mention its contribution to general traffic.

The focus should be on how to reduce the commute distance (or eliminate it as often as possible), and to build/use efficient mass transit systems.

So much of our intellectual and financial energy seems to be directed toward overclocking the horse and buggy - with diminishing returns. At some point it's time to step back and rethink the greater system. (I believe that point was 20+ years ago, when it became clear that cities would continue to become the population growth centers.)

[MuffinFlavored]

> So much of our intellectual and financial energy seems to be directed toward overclocking the horse and buggy

I don't personally think it's realistic to expect everybody/all people (who mainly work for a living/work hard) to ask them to give up the luxury of spending their hard earned money on being able to transport themselves (to and from their job) in something other than the comfort of their own car. I think you're suggesting "we should all be doing public transport, it's more efficient."

You aren't wrong, but there's a human/emotional element/aspect here.

[JimtheCoder]

Personally, my time in my car is some of the only pure "me" time I have, and I would hazard a guess that it is the same for many others.

A car to me is a personal, climate controlled cocoon, where I can turn on whatever music I want, have a coffee or a snack, and escape for the 30 minutes or however long it takes to reach my destination...without the chance of being bothered by anyone else, much less any of the other belligerents that you are sure to find on public transit from time to time.

I will continue to own and drive my own car for this simple fact...

[VBprogrammer]

I love driving as much as the next person but being on the roads at commuting time is hell on earth. Battling all of the other sleep deprived idiots to travel 3 miles in an hour. It's awful.

[dzikimarian]

For me it's 15 minutes in pretty relaxed traffic and music/audiobook. Garage to office door + easy detour to shop if necessary.

In the summer bike is nice alternative, but during bad weather there's nothing comparable to the comfort of car.

Please remember not everyone lives in bay area with long commute and mild weather all year long :-)

[michaelteter]

The article was about that person's reality of 230km round trip commute each day, and the discussion was related.

A 15min commute as you have is a different situation (much better!). Nobody is trying to take away your car. I realize that it is often framed that way in US media, as if the options are public transport OR private cars. I have a car in the Netherlands which I use for some trips where public transport is not the better choice. But when possible, especially when going from one major city to another, public transport is such a nice luxury. (It also means I can go have fun at that late night party and never face the decision of whether to drive somewhat inebriated or not.)

[dzikimarian]

Well I met guy on HN, who was adamant that bike is always the right choice, as long as you dress properly. Given recent 30cm of snow, then melted by rain I kinda disagree :-)

But yes, if we try to complement them, not just ban, this is very reasonable. I also travel by train quite often because it's simply very convenient compared to car.

[dsfyu404ed]

The people doing 151km trips aren't doing that. They're only spending the "busy" end of their trips under those conditions.

[xracy]

Okay, but what if we could do that in a way that each person didn't take up 100 Sqft?

I get it might not be exactly the same, but walking/biking/Public Transiting with headphones in for a period of time is all that and more. And with the exception of a bike, you can do all of those things without having to sit in traffic...

[michaelteter]

> Okay, but what if we could do that in a way that each person didn't take up 100 Sqft?

This would probably make some people uncomfortable, but one fantasy I can imagine which might be nice is to have private transport capsules. We could own our own capsule and decorate/style it to our liking. It has common exterior form factor, with power, plumbing, etc. connectors.

We go from home to the nearest capsule station (where ours is in automated storage). We schedule picking of the capsule so it is ready for us upon our arrival. We set the destination, hop in, and the delivery system takes us for a ride. Hell, with a nice private capsule you could sleep, watch movies, work, even have "fun" with a partner. The system (ideally) ensures you arrive at your desired capsule station end point, whereby you exit and set your storage option.

This would take more space than current public transport (a lot more!), but it would take less space than a typical individual car, not to mention less roads as the exchange systems would be optimized and operating in three dimensions.

[xracy]

I think the problem with this, is that, like the original post states. It's still trying to optimize the horse and buggy.

Anything that's giving you a per-person riding experience is not going to perform as well as batching a bunch of people together for a common ride.

[michaelteter]

This would still be mostly a common ride, although the space requirements would be increased significantly. But with the automation and routing systems (and coordination) it would be far superior to cars on roads.

[TeMPOraL]

> what if we could do that in a way that each person didn't take up 100 Sqft?

I think GP's point is that it's more about space than about travel. Walking, or being on a public transport with headphones on, doesn't replace that - it's at most a very poor substitute.

The point is to be able to hide from other people - to have some minimum personal time, in a personal space, free from nagging and expectations of your spouse, children, friends, co-workers and bosses. Driving in a car to work enables this, because for the duration of your commute, you can ignore everyone's calls and requests guilt-free. It's the law that says you can't pick up a phone on the road. It's dangerous. You're also not driving for fun, you're driving to/from work. Nobody can have any expectations of you during that time. Yes, commute in traffic is torture. That's a feature. It gives you plausible deniability.

I may be breaking some unwritten fight club rule by spelling it out loud. Sorry. Also, I don't drive - to work or otherwise. But to the extent what I described above is a major part of car ownership, more and better public transport won't help, because it doesn't address this major part.

[michaelteter]

This still smells like some greater problem. If retreating into our own private cars, solo, is the only way we can get some solitude and space from others, then we have painted ourselves into a corner.

Long ago I briefly shared an office with an "old guy" - an expert in a particular topic which gave him more freedom to behave strangely and not get fired. His strange behavior was to spend half of his lunch hour at his desk, leaned back, mouth wide open, napping. That was traditionally not acceptable behavior in a professional environment, but he apparently decided it was for him. So he did it. While it was a bit of a shock at first to the other employees, eventually we all became accustomed to it and even kept our voices down in the hallway outside when we new it was his nap time.

The point is that we have the freedom, even if it seems scary, to make some decisions about how we want our lives and how to get the balance we need. I am only just starting to learn how to do this.

The commute drive solo time is clearly not the same quality of solo time as many other options (choose your favorite).

When I had young children and a busy house, and my normal full time job, the bathroom was my solo space. Unsurprisingly, people didn't seem too interested to come bother me when I was in there. So I would read entire books while seeking solitude. Instead, it is conceivable that I could have just gathered everyone and made some agreements about what we all need, including sometimes privacy and quiet. Granted, a toddler will not respect those agreements, but the spouse can help ensure it works most of the time.

[TeMPOraL]

I agree with your points - though I think you're underselling the "even if it seems scary" bit.

I love your bathroom example, because it speaks to the same need as the "car commute solo space". You say:

> it is conceivable that I could have just gathered everyone and made some agreements about what we all need, including sometimes privacy and quiet

And the same is be true of me (having small children too), and of the aforementioned commuters. We could. But, for some reason, we don't. Can't explain it, but the very idea feels truly scary. That's why the comment upthread resonated so well with me - I don't drive, but I understand striving to get "solo time" in a way that doesn't have to be justified directly, but instead is a plausibly deniable side effect of some external necessity (like having to commute to work).

[michaelteter]

> Personally, my time in my car is some of the only pure "me" time I have, and I would hazard a guess that it is the same for many others.

I totally get this, and I was in the same situation for many years (the young children period of my life).

However, imagine that instead of a 1hr commute, the commute was 30 minutes. Now your day has 1 hour "free" that you could choose to spend doing something for yourself. Maybe it's gym time, or maybe a music practice room in a building near your office, or yoga in the garden of the office rooftop.

As I say, I did share that same feeling when I was doing the normal commute/family thing. But it still points to a problem. We should be able to find or make the time and space to have a cocoon of calm or whatever we need and still have a life+family+work. I don't think that a small side-effect of solo driving in traffic which provides something like that cocoon is at all the right way to get the life balance we need.

[lancewiggs]

However this personal decision comes at a tremendous cost to the rest of society, and we are not pricing that correctly.

[otikik]

> without the chance of being bothered by anyone else

They can still crash into you. Belligerance also exist behind the wheel, and it can can kill you.

[xracy]

I think this is the wrong way to think about it.

It's not about taking away people's cars, it's about making public transit so good (and building cities/neighborhoods that you don't need a car in), that you don't want to take a car, because it's less convenient.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muPcHs-E4qc&t=569s&ab_channe...

I think this quote really nails it: "A developed country is not where the poor have cars, it's where the rich use public transit"

It's also worth noting that car driving is the worst kind of positive feedback loop (not a positive thing). Cars need Parking, which makes it harder to put things close together, which makes you need to drive places to get there, which makes you need parking. And cars are much bigger than humans, so the amount of space needed for cars, also increases much bigger than it would for humans.

[yellowapple]

Not to mention that public transport doesn't go everywhere. Even places with healthy and robust public transit networks only reach a subset of a metro area, and only a subset of that has routes that stop with acceptable frequency.

I think the answer lies in things like e-bikes, mopeds, and motorcycles. Rail as a high-speed backbone and an e-bike for last-mile sounds close to ideal - especially if I can charge the bike while on the train. Bike lanes ought to be the rule rather than the exception. Bike racks and moped/motorcycle parking spaces (ideally - again - with outlets for charging batteries) could and should be ubiquitous.

[michaelteter]

Fortunately more cities are starting to experiment with car-free zones, and they are making shared or subscription bikes (e-bikes often, at least in hilly places) more common. People in those areas report being much happier, and actual communities seem to begin to form as there are more people crossing each others' paths on a regular basis.

[dagw]

For me the weakness with public transport isn't so much getting around in the city (I basically never drive in the city), as it is getting out of the city. Getting to my favourite down town restaurant is 15 minutes by car or 20 minutes by public transport door to door, so I take public transport and don't have to worry about parking. Getting to my favourite hiking spot by the coast is 30 minutes by car or 2+ hours by public transport, so I take the car.

[acdha]

I’m hoping there’ll be a more mature rental / car share market, too. It’d make a lot of sense to have no/low-car city centers (e.g. accessibility and delivery only zones, low speed limits & non-prioritized roads, etc.) and more high speed road infrastructure on the edge of cities but the people I know who’ve had significant issues with things like Zipcar reservations seems like the greatest barrier for that. If people are use to going when they want, you need to deliver reliable availability to get them to reconsider.

[yellowapple]

Even putting vehicle storage on city edges (and/or concentrating it close to highways) would mitigate a lot of the problems we currently see with car-centric infrastructure. Even if I own my own car, I don't necessarily need it to be close by if I can rent a garage somewhere - so long as I can get anywhere in town (including said garage) easily and quickly via public transit and/or bike and/or foot.

[otabdeveloper4]

There's a lot of ways to describe commuting in traffic jams, but the word "comfort" is probably not in the top ten.

[pizza234]

> I don't personally think it's realistic to expect everybody/all people (who mainly work for a living/work hard) to ask them to give up the luxury of spending their hard earned money on being able to transport themselves (to and from their job) in something other than the comfort of their own car

Societies don't need to ask citizens to choose a given mean of transport; they can route their choices them by making some means more convenient and other ones less.

Increasing car costs and reducing lanes/streets/parkings, while making the public transport more frequent/extensive/comfortable, will make citizens choose public transport (or more sustainable means) themselves.

On the other hand, when cities are developed (in certain cultures or at least areas) with private transport in mind, and it can be hard or impossible to redesign for public transport.

[generalizations]

> Societies don't need to ask citizens to choose a given mean of transport; they can route their choices them by making some means more convenient and other ones less.

I'm reading that as, "we don't need to ask, we can just make them do it." Which to me is pretty arrogant.

[sagarm]

Society has made the choice so far to make owning a car as convenient and inexpensive as possible, while allocating almost no resources to other options. And no, usage fees including gas taxes don't cover the cost of roads -- let alone the land usage, externalities, and supporting infrastructure like drainage.

[landemva]

> Society has made

Big eu cities are expensive to park cars. Not inexpensive. Some cities such as Stockholm are banning commuter cars.

[michaelteter]

HN has a pretty strong majority of US readers, I think. And as I'm American, I recall that many other Americans have little idea what life is really like outside the country. (What goes on day to day, or how life works, in other countries is just not well understood.)

From the US-centric view, society (or rather, energy and automotive companies and their lobbying) has made the decision to put all the focus on cars, and to even put intentional negative spin against public transport.

It seems to be slowly changing in some states or a few cities within some states. And yes, it does seem to be very different depending on which way an area leans politically. The "red" (Republican) areas are vehemently against public transport and frame it as the government trying to take away people's rights to go where they want (in their own cars).

Unfortunately for the areas trying to put energy into public transport and non-car alternatives, there is a vast amount of corporate finance and influence that works against it at all levels of govenerment.

[pizza234]

> I'm reading that as, "we don't need to ask, we can just make them do it." Which to me is pretty arrogant.

It was never "asked" in first place; there was a large discussion on HN around the article about automakers driving the policies (https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history).

It's also not forcing anybody; it's a shift of conveniences. In a hypothetical situation with fantasy metrics, making a city 2x as comfortable for sustainable means (bikes, motorbikes, public transport) and 0.5x as comfortable for cars will not force anybody to use the former - people who love their time in the cars will still be able to.

(I stress that this applies to cities where logistics make a restructuring possible, which is not the case everywhere)

[abenga]

The US already "makes" commercial and residential building developers dedicate large proportions of their lots to meet minimum parking requirements in order to make it easier for people who want to drive do so. Is this "pretty arrogant" as well?

[janef0421]

I don't think most people see car commuting as a luxury. It's very stressful.

[MuffinFlavored]

Tough to say “most”. You’re probably right but a non-zero amount of people who pay luxury cars like Mercedes/BMW want a) status symbols but b) the time they spend in their vehicles as enjoyable.

[MrMan]

this is an argument from 1985. there is no room for this kind of selfish thinking now

[entropicgravity]

And not to mention the epidemiological aspect, hello covid. A compromise situation could be individual transport but much smaller than current cars. Because EV's scale much more easily than ICE technology it's practical to have EV's with, say, a three person occupancy that take up half of a current car lane. This is the best of both worlds. Single occupancy vehicles and a city's transportation infrastructure doubles at zero cost.

[janef0421]

E-bikes are quite close to what you are describing, and are already remarkably popular.

[erik_seaberg]

Speaking of range, ebikes today vary a lot, some do 100 miles but some can only do 20 (which wouldn’t even get me to the office on the shortest route).

[hammock]

> That electric car is still creating a lot of particulate pollution from the tires on the road

And brake dust, which includes a lot of metal

[philshem]

One-pedal driving does minimize the use of the brakes by using the motor to decelerate.

I can’t find an English wiki article, but here is German

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Pedal-Driving

[michaelteter]

Regenerative braking, I think you mean?

It's definitely preferable to grinding brakes to slow the vehicle both because of the reduced wear/pollution and extended range gained from the small bit of charging that occurs.

[ceejayoz]

EVs make substantially less of that, due to regenerative braking.

[hammock]

What portion of drivers use one pedal?

[gambiting]

You don't need to have the one pedal driving enabled to reap the benefits. In all EVs and PHEVs you brake with the electric motors first even when using the actual pedal - normal brakes are engaged only past a certain threshold.

Also to give a personal anecdote, in my Volvo XC60 PHEV, I've just had the inspection done and after 24k miles the brake pads are 5% worn. That's insane for a 2.2 tonne SUV with 400bhp. If it wasn't a PHEV I can guarantee that the pads would be nearly worn by now.

[bluGill]

While EVs do use less brakes than ICE, they still should last a lot longer than you give them credit for.

Of course it's depends on how you drive, but if you are not getting 100k miles out of your brakes the problem is not the car but the driver.

[gambiting]

Sure. My last car was a Mercedes AMG that needed new pads every 8-10k miles, so I might be a bit biased. But TBF my car before that was a Land Rover Discovery 3 and that was eating pads like crazy despite not driving it aggressively at all - I attributed it to the weight of the vehicle.

[cwalv]

> if you are not getting 100k miles out of your brakes the problem is not the car but the driver.

This is just false. If you get 100k in your non-EV before having to replace at least your front brake pads, you must be racking up highway miles.

[potatochup]

> you brake with the electric motors first

This is not true. At least for Teslas, the brake pedal only controls the friction brakes (they are hydraulically coupled). Same with a Chevy bolt. Unsure on other EVs

[Tagbert]

Yes, Tesla is an outlier in the EV business. They only have one-pedal driving with regen or fully friction braking with the brake pedal. That is not true of the Chevy Bolt.

Almost every other EV (and hybrid) on the market does blended regen with the brake pedal. Regen is applied when you first press on the brake pedal. As long as the pressure is mild to moderate, regen is used. If you press hard (as in emergency braking) the friction brakes are engaged. When you get below about 10mph the friction brakes are also applied as regen is minimal at that speed. The result is that these cars will do regen whether you are using one pedal driving or not and their brakes will wear much less often.

I’m not sure why Tesla doesn’t do blended regen. Early one the manufacturers didn’t have the algorithms tuned and you could feel the transitions but that has not been the case for several year. It seems that Tesla just never bothered. They seem to expect you to only use one-pedal driving and some people do.

One think to watch for if you only use one-pedal driving, your friction brake pads can get rusty from disuse. Then when you do press on the brake pedal, the brakes may grab or may not decelerate as quickly as expected. Some people find that their brake pads are actually frozen from rust and don’t work at all. It is a good idea to once in a while use those friction brakes to scrub off the surface rust.

[josephcsible]

In Teslas, any time your foot is completely off the accelerator, you're getting maximum regenerative braking. If you then press the brake pedal too, you're getting maximum regenerative braking plus friction braking.

[ericd]

I assume most Tesla drivers, at least, it’s definitely the happy path. I probably use my brake pedal once every few hundred miles.

[potatochup]

The EPA uses whatever the default settings for the car are, so it's usually on my default. Anecdotally most people I know use it

[shever73]

Most EV drivers, I’d say. My sample size is small, but me and my friends who have EVs all drive with one pedal.

[limitedsupply]

Are there EV drivers that do not? I don’t think I could ever go back to using 2 or 3 pedals.

[roland35]

I only use one pedal in stop and go or city driving. Otherwise it's harder to maintain smooth speeds and is less efficient than just coasting.

[seanmcdirmid]

Cruise control should solve that problem no?

[seanmcdirmid]

Most of them as far as I can tell. It’s one of the main buying points to getting an EV.

[revscat]

My Model S is approaching 90k miles and I have not needed to replace the pads. It has two pedals.

[amelius]

And their increased weight makes them much harsher on roads than normal cars. They wear down roads faster, and I suppose they also produces more particle pollution than normal car for this reason.

[dahfizz]

Threads like this read like EVs are double or more the weight of an ICE car.

EVs are a couple hundred pounds heavier in average than an equivalent ICE car. In terms of road wear, it's still a rounding error compared to industrial trucks.

[rhn_mk1]

The road wear is said to be proportional to the fourth power of axle load. http://www.cyclelicio.us/2014/fourth-power-rule-road-tax/

That means you deal twice the damage by increasing weight by only 20%. Seems in line with electric car weight difference.

[dahfizz]

Yeah, that's my point. A single garbage truck is going to do more wear on the roads than thousands of passenger vehicles. Anything besides industrial vehicles is negligible.

[amelius]

A garbage truck has many tires to distribute the load. Also they accelerate/decelerate differently.

[Gibbon1]

Yeah turns out an electric drive train is much lighter than a gasoline one which offsets the battery weight somewhat. Gasoline engines aren't light, nor are the transmissions. Currently I think the weigh penalty is about 15-20%.

My guesstimate is if they can increase the energy density of batteries by 30-50% the weight penalty will disappear. Some of the reduction is the weight reduction of the battery and some is due to cascading effects on the rest of the car.

[cbsmith]

"couple of pounds heavier"??!?! That's understating it.

Seriously, a Model 3 is ~500 lbs heavier than Honda Accord, and a Model Y is significantly heavier than a Model 3.

[dahfizz]

Typo, fixed. I could have sworn I typed "couple hundred pounds".

But to your point, a bmw 430 is also around 500 pounds heavier than a Honda Accord. Nobody sees a BMW and freaks out about tire wear. But people seem to hyperfixate on any small negative of EVs.

[cbsmith]

> But to your point, a bmw 430 is also around 500 pounds heavier than a Honda Accord.

At the heaviest weights, yes, but the heaviest Accord weight and the lightest 430i weight are only 148 lbs apart... and the Model Y can weigh in almost 400 lbs heavier than the heaviest of 430i's.

> Nobody sees a BMW and freaks out about tire wear.

You mean, so long as it's not an EV? ;-)

Seriously, nobody freaks out about a BMW 430i's tire wear, because that of the branding of the car. It's like freaking out over coffee increasing your heart rate.

> But people seem to hyperfixate on any small negative of EVs.

We're obviously talking to different people. At least the folks I know talk about how crazy heavier cars keep getting across the board (case in point: https://www.capitalone.com/cars/learn/finding-the-right-car/...).

[sliken]

Be fair, those aren't comparable cars. BMW Model 3 and the Tesla model 3 are pretty similar in size, weight, and cost. The fastest of both is AWD and the Tesla is 4072 pounds and the M3 Competition and M3 Touring (the 2 variants with AWD) are 3924 pounds to 4116.

The non performance models are similar as well, the current BMW 3141-4023 pounds (the AWD are of course on the heavier side, and the Tesla model 3 is 3814 pounds.

[ericd]

Because of the weight scaling characteristics (damage done corresponds to fourth power of axle weight), it’s irrelevant if trucks are allowed on the same roads. The damage increase done by EVs is probably not even worth considering.

[dsfyu404ed]

Any light vehicle traffic is basically inconsequential for any road build to handle any amount of medium trucks or heavy trucks.

Complaining about the 9000lb EV hummer makes for some great circle jerks among the demographics that hate people who drive normal hummers but the road basically doesn't care about them.

[Tagbert]

Almost all EVs that are not Teslas, use blended regen with the brake pedal. When you press on the brakes, regen is used for light to moderate braking and the friction brakes only come into play on hard braking. Most EVs product little brake dust and their brakes last a long time due to this regen. Teslas are the anomaly here.

[pelasaco]

My curiosity here, but is it true as well for bikes (e-bikes or not) using disc brakes? As fair as I understand they are really similar with car's one...

[longitudinal93]

Judicious use of regenerative braking practically eliminates brake dust.

[Tade0]

> That electric car is still creating a lot of particulate pollution from the tires on the road

I hear this a lot, but how much pollution is it really? It surely doesn't register on any municipal particulate measurement station.

[replygirl]

https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...

[paulryanrogers]

Interesting that driving style has such an outsized impact. Perhaps aggressive driving and tire composition should be regulated.

[dashundchen]

I think auto infrastructure should be designed around lower steady speeds with roundabouts and stop signs and lights, at least in the US. Right now we have high speed limits, wide roads which encourage speeding, but a lot of stop signs, long stop lights and driveway filled stroads that are terrible for everyone.

I'd like narrower lanes, bump outs raised intersections and crosswalks to slow traffic. Reduce curb cuts and driveways to cut down on conflicts - thinking Dutch style access streets and alleys that connect to the less interrupted travel lane.

The added benefit of lower speeds would make it safer for bikes and pedestrians and reduce auto crash fatalities.

Slower steady speeds would reduce stooa go, dropping noise and particulate emission from acceleration.

[adrianN]

Cars should be smart enough to automatically adapt the allowed driving style to their surroundings. There is no reason why cars should be able to accelerate at maximum torque on normal city roads. Or go their max speed.

[xracy]

There is no way to regulate aggressive driving other than to take people off of the roads.

[paulryanrogers]

Driving is a privilege. Acceleration could be recorded (in vehicle or from intersections) then tickets mailed to vehicle owners.

[replygirl]

probably more effective to regulate the weight of vehicles by use than to broaden the definition of reckless driving. for safety, too

[xnx]

or tax tires

[paulryanrogers]

According to the linked article excluding some compounds would be lower hanging fruit. Though I agree tires could use a higher tax given how much of a problem they produce.

[reducesuffering]

CA does have a tire tax of $1.75 per tire.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

I worked in a temporary office for a summer next to a large overpass. It had no AC so we had the windows open most afternoons. The amount of particulate that would coat everything in just a single afternoon shocked me.

[Gibbon1]

I had a link once to a government paid for study that claimed tire and brake dust were about 5-10% of the dust produced by light cars. The rest being tailpipe emissions. Of course brake dust, tire dust, and exhaust PM2.5 aren't the same types of dust. So feels to me like grasping for straws especially considering no one makes the same arguments against large SUV's and trucks.