[ethagknight]

I flipped through the summary of that report, and I would think there is almost surely no way this is true, unless focusing on worst case assumptions like aggressive driving styles and very poorly maintained vehicles.

Your conclusion that there is not “any healthy level of private cars coexisting” is heavy handed. There is a balance, but I suspect it’s more of a jealousy/equality issue. Heavily taxed and high quality requirements can surely lead to a healthy coexisting. Limiting trips to when they are truly worth the cost is an equation to be solved.

[SequoiaHope]

If EVs don’t emit tailpipe emissions then 100% of their emissions will be those things. They’re also heavier and so have more tire wear. It seems not unintuitive to me that their emissions might push the boundaries of strict modern emissions standards.

For taxing cars, you’re still leaving so much car infrastructure out there. It swallows the world. Six months ago for the first time ever I got a job where I could bike to work. The world is so much different from a bike. It becomes clear how dangerous cars are to humans, and how they chop up our cities in to little rectangles. I’m constantly at risk of being hit by cars that don’t stop. I love being on my bike. I feel like I’m part of the world. I ride rain or shine thanks to nice gear. We give up so much to have a world with cars. We could move our road budgets to trains and bike paths and have so much more space and health and life.

[tom89999]

Cycling to work is nice. But if you are young, sitting all day in a warm office. Think of blue collar workers that are hungry, exhausted and also people getting older. Its fucking annoying to wait for the bus that does not show up, the stupid beeps whenever the doors open and the slow movement in general. Lucky i am at home in half an hour, laws now require you to commute to work in up to 1.5hrs if you cant afford a car or should use public transportation. Electric bikes are no solution, the minerals and energy must be produced to transport people like me. I will buy a motor driven classic Vespa, fuel consumption is 2l for 80 mls and i am at home without dispruption and waiting. Plus i got a new nice hobby to maintain it. No new vehicle was produced, no rare earth was needed. Fuel is produced every day for the plastics of the EV and for many other things like pharmacy and so on. No new bike needed to be shipped from china where all that stuff is made. Sure you are right with vegan biking, but not all folks can do it.

[ianleighton]

If you like repairing the vintage Vespa, great project and that sounds fun. That’s worth a lot!

But I will curse at the stink of the exhaust from the crappy old motor when you ride by. Try an e-bike (you can get one built more locally surely), or an e-Vespa (or hell, make that your project to convert the vintage Vespa into a silent sleeper Vespa with crazy performance!). Electric is so, so much more fun.

Worrying about that small amount of “critical minerals” needed for a bike/Vespa is a conspiracy to distract you from the fact that oil is also extracted and has negative externalities, we just live with those already.

[SequoiaHope]

Not all folks can do it, but here in Oakland there are plenty of folks who could do it if we had better paths, but don’t because the roads are very dangerous for bikes and we have poor bike paths. This means we can get more people on bikes. Also I’m in favor of changing more than just bike paths - we could improve housing affordability so that people don’t have a 1.5 hour commute to their work. Also I have three bikes that are 15 years old. Buying a used bike uses even less resources than a used Vespa. I do have a newer ebike though. They’re really nice when you have more stuff to carry or longer distances to travel!

[Mawr]

Wow, that is a lot of loosely connected nonsense.

> Think of blue collar workers that are hungry

The what now?

> exhausted

There aren't many jobs that physically exhaust you to the point of not being able to walk (biking is no harder than walking). Especially since leg muscles are super hard to tire out.

> people getting older

Pretty much the same as above. If anything, the elderly prefer biking to walking, it's easier on the joints.

> Its fucking annoying to wait for the bus that does not show up

Less or more annoying than waiting when your car breaks down?

> Electric bikes are no solution, the minerals and energy must be produced to transport people like me.

Right, manufacturing a 30kg bike has costs, unlike manufacturing a 1500kg car.

> No new vehicle was produced, no rare earth was needed.

That's not how the economy works. Also, buying used is better than buying new if everything else is equal (it's not in this case), but whatever vehicle you bought was produced at some point.

> Fuel is produced every day for the plastics of the EV and for many other things like pharmacy and so on.

Er, what? I guess you think your vehicle is made out of grass and runs on water or something?

> Sure you are right with vegan biking, but not all folks can do it.

Not all folks can do it, so let's stick with 99% of people using cars to get around :)

Nice try with the vegan rage-bait.

[andrepd]

It's not "jealousy"... I've lived in a city where having a car was virtually mandatory, and I've lived in a city where you could safely bike everywhere. There's NO QUESTION which one I prefer.

Even my most reactionary and car-loving extended family members had this opinion when they visited :)

[appreciatorBus]

My desire not to inhale brake & tire particulate, not to be killed while walking to the store, and not to subsidize others expensive lifestyles, is not rooted in jealousy.

I owned a car once, it was sometimes convenient, interesting & fun, but it was also often infuriating, terrifying and expensive. If I can pull it off, I'd prefer to never own one again. I don't really care if anyone else owns them, I just don't want to subsidize them or have their externalities imposed on me.

An alternative to outright bans is to make some good faith attempt at estimating externalities and internalizing them, and reducing subsidies such as free, or below market rate public land for private vehicle operation & storage. But this is difficult and it's not clear the politics of it would be much better than an outright bans. If a good faith effort determined that operating a car while not being subsidized and not inflicting externalities on others, cost a significant amount of money, then the whole effort would be castigated as limiting driving to the very rich, and probably wouldn't go very far. So it feels like we end up with either "everyone drives everywhere all the time for everything and it's the govt's job to shovel public funds & land at it" or outright bans in popular areas.

Cars, oil, and the internal combustion engine, are all tremendously useful, and we would be foolish to pretend otherwise. But all tools have their ideal uses and all tools can be misused & overused to bad ends, both for the tool user and for others.

A world of 100% gasoline car ownership where the car was simply a fun toy for kick ass weekend road trips, and cities had never been bulldozed to make room for them as substitutes for our legs, would be a pretty great world, even if it involved a bit more pollution/externalities/subsidies than some utopian car free world.

[fragmede]

public escalators and moving walkways are a concept for cities from a century ago that we largely missed out on.