[dublinben]

You’re right that EVs are not enough to solve this. We also need to significantly reduce the amount of traveling in all cars, electric or not.

The good news is that there are fast and cheap solutions that cities can implement nearly overnight. Cities like Paris showed in recent years that “pop-up” bike lanes can be installed very quickly, and significantly increase travel by bicycle.

Many cities also have a bus system, which would also be positively transformed with just painting some bus lanes on existing roads.

The short term fixes support the longer term changes (enabling walkable communities, allowing more efficient compact housing, etc.) that we also need to be adopting as fast as possible.

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/10/13/cycling-through-covid...

[jdshupe]

> We also need to significantly reduce the amount of traveling in all cars, electric or not.

I agree with the idea of this but in saying this you are forgetting about ~20% of the US populace that lives in rural areas.[1] I personally live ~1 hour from the nearest city. The area I live in has no access to high-speed internet to enable remote work, and the cost of driving to the city for a good paying job is still money ahead than taking a low paying job closer by. I also know I am not the only one of my neighbors in this boat.

This goes back to my original point, I think we have made the change too late. Sure we can implement solutions in cities with relative speed but the type of large scale changes that it would take to help areas, like where I'm at, will be too late by the time they are finished.

[1]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america...

[dublinben]

Obviously, this isn't a one-size fits all solution. But even per your numbers, the vast majority (80%) of American's don't live in rural areas. The solutions I mentioned are the biggest bang for the buck because they are the most broadly applicable.

Even for those that do live in rural communities, this isn't an intractable situation with no possibility of improving. First of all, many rural communities existed before the invention of the automobile. They began as compact towns centered around the train station. Nearly all of them have lost passenger rail access, but places like Germany, Austria, and Switzerland show that this need not be the case. Traditional community planning would allow many people to accomplish daily tasks within town without a car, even if one was used to travel outside of town.

Second, fewer people should be living an hour away from their job in an urban center, and nobody should be forced to. It must be affordable and convenient for everyone to live close enough to their job so as to enable them to easily get there without a car, but this is not a problem that can be solved overnight.

Third, we must invest in an effort to install fiber optic internet access in these communities, in a 21st century repeat of the Rural Electrification program of the 20th century. Remote work is a vital lifeline to stave off the steady decline of population in rural areas.

Rural communities face several existential threats, climate change is just one of them. Hopefully there can be some synergy among solutions that will make these communities more resilient in every dimension, not just climate.