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by biehl 1097 days ago
It seems possible to do both. Both encourage the shift from fossil cars to EVs and to encourage more cycling and public transport.
2 comments

Sure, we should do both in the same sense that we should floss twice a day and we should stop kicking children. One of them is more urgent and makes a bigger difference, so efforts should be focused on that one.
That seems like a good example because I can't see how resources are being kept away from "stop child kicking" in order to promote flossing. Doing both is entirely reasonable.
The resource that is in conflict is political attention. The more politicians and voters focus on EVs, the less is done to improve the walkability and public transit in our cities. EVs distract us from the real enemy: traffic.
Traffic is bad, but fossil traffic is strictly worse than EV traffic. So again, it seems possible to advocate both less traffic and that the remaining traffic should be better.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Even the Bay Area cannot get together and make meaningful improvements to non-car commuting infrastructure. I recall how many years it took just to get the dang bus lane from Richmond district to downtown. I will take any incremental positive changes I can get.
We can do both, of course. But making a sufficiently global change to our ecological dystopian future involves some sociologically hard problems:

Human population, the sociology of capitalism, industrialised consumerism, the unscalability of communities problem (both established structural debt and newer dysfunctional debt) and the consumerist voting fallacy ("I will vote with my money").

If there were fewer people, if there were less industrial-scale consumerism, if communities were scalable, if consumers were in fact globally engaged as purchasers and voting citizens...

I have heard an environmental scientist say that the order of responsible choices from worst to best is:

= buy an ICE vehicle

= buy a zero-emission EV

= DO NOT buy a vehicle

Of all the difficult sociological challenges that could certainly bring change, it seems that those likeliest to change are the human population (fewer) and zero-emission vehicles (more).