this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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In optimal cases, measuring only movement and not taking in to account wasted movement, some EVs can match the efficiency of some trains while moving point to point (assuming none of that movement is wasted). But we know there are some inefficiencies and externalities that decrease that efficiency. Let's see if we can fix them.
Parking is the biggest problem with everyone having a car. Looking for parking is necessarily wasted.
https://transfersmagazine.org/magazine-article/issue-4/how-much-traffic-is-cruising-for-parking/
Holy fuck! That's a HUGE amount of waste in a good scenario. Crazy, like 95% of the time cars are parked anyway. This is just insanely poor design. Let's fix that. OK, so the first thing we need to do is find some way to share those vehicles. This would also fix the problem where people keep buying larger and more inefficient EV trucks. How can we do that? Maybe we could have some kind of car share program or something, like lyft and Uber. Oh yeah, those are super inefficient actually and really abusive to their employees. We really need some kind of automated system, like some kind of robotaxi to avoid that car parking problem. OK, so let's make a fleet of autonomous taxis that drive around the city based on some kind of optimized pattern. Great, now we've eliminated (or at least limited) the parking problem.
But you know, it would be easier to share these taxis if we didn't go door to door. Like, maybe we could have well defined routes for these autonomous taxis. Autonomous driving technology is actually really awful and gets confused really easily. It's much easier to travel specific routes anyway. Great, now we have a bunch of cars that travel specific routes so people can share the cars. We drop some inefficacy by not having every car go door to door as well. Excellent.
OK, but now every taxi has a computer on board. They all have to keep track of each other's movements. We're definitely losing some efficiency here. Let's combine some of them. We could cut a few of them up and weld the passenger compartments together to make long taxis. Then we could physically connect a few of the long taxis together so they can have centralized control. Great.
There's still a lot of starting and stopping though to pick everyone up. What if we shared the getting on and getting off time. What if we made some kind of shared taxi stop and then everyone who wanted to get on or off could just wait at the stop and get on and off at the same time. Can't really argue that that wouldn't be better.
You know, if we have these shared routes and shared stops I bet we could get rid of even more of the complexity by just putting the whole thing on a track and getting rid of the whole steering controls. That would take less computers, so it would be more efficient. Oh wow, if we have a track we could also get rid of those heavy metal microplastic spewing tires. OK, so now we've got big metal taxis that are linked together and travel on a track with metal wheels.
I wonder if we could take better advantage of that shared entry and exit stations by running on some kind of schedule. Then a bunch of people could gather together and all get on our off at the same time instead of having to individually call for taxis when it's convenient for them.
Oh, wait, every single one is still carrying it's own battery. It's way more efficient to move electricity itself than moving batteries. Since we're already running on a track, we can take the batteries out and have some kind of central power delivery via maybe overhead cables or something.
OK, so we've made EVs more efficient by making them shared, getting rid of wasted space, eliminating some of the excess from trips, running them on a schedule and a track, making specific stops, and taking out all the extra battery weight. Let's take a look...
Huh. Interesting.
I wonder if we could like... put it in some kind of underground tube and maybe electrify the rails for power delivery instead. You know, to get rid of the problem of it getting stuck in traffic...
Huh. Cool. I guess I accidentally did an Adam Something.
You go back and tell me which of these proposed efficiency improvements actually reduces efficiency and we'll talk.
Parking is a problem only in cities. 20% of the population lives rural.
Better than predefined routes is aggregated ride sharing like MOIA. Which is essentially a big taxi.
Excellent? Sort of inconvenient, people have to walk to the nearest station. Especially with groceries. And impractical for the elderly, disabled and small children.
Why is particulate matter in trains stations so high?
If everything is so efficient, why on earth needs a tram 15 kWh per passenger per 100 km?
I was specifically talking about cities. I'm glad we can agree that 80% of people should not own cars. Let's talk about the rest.
As someone who grew up in actually rural areas, I need to point out that there are two types of "rural." There's farm land and there's suburbs. Suburbs are a parasite that kills cities. They drain city resources without having a high enough density to pay for those resources with their taxes. They fill cities with cars and they don't produce anything of value. Suburbs must be destroyed.
Farmers actually do something useful. They, and the communities that support them, should be treated like full citizens instead of as a second class. This means they also deserve the same infrastructure, bike lanes and train stations, as cities. There are some trade offs to living in rural areas. Things do take longer and are harder to get to. You have to do a lot of things yourself.
When I was growing up we drove our trash to the dump because we didn't have garbage service. Personal vehicles sometimes make sense here, but absolutely not giant trucks to haul some milk and eggs. Motorcycles and kei cars are more than enough in most cases. Even for kei cars you should have to justify it purchasing it by providing you live in a rural area and to have a truck should require a commercial license.
But people who just want to use rural areas to defend their use of cars in cities often don't realize how many people in rural areas can't drive. They don't know the absolute hell of being completely isolated and reliant on a parent to do anything. They don't know how hard it can be to take care of someone who's disabled or elderly, who relies on a caretaker to get to every appointment or activity. Functional infrastructure would significantly improve the lives of a lot of rural people, and cars often get in the way of that. You will grow old and you will be part of that group. Do you want to be trapped? With functional infrastructure, elderly people can use mobility scooters or microcars safely in bike lanes.
Rural areas don't have to be car centric. There's nothing innate about rural areas the forces people to rely on cars for everything. They're designed that way. They can be designed differently.
The elderly are often not safe to drive, so your solution is not more convenient. It's to trap them at home or have them risk killing someone. A functional city that's not designed around cars makes it easy to get groceries by other means, more convenient means that don't involve the potential of accidentally murdering someone. There aren't really any places in Amsterdam, for example, where you're more than a few minutes bike ride from one or a half-dozen grocery stores.
It can be inconvenient to walk to a station, but it's far more inconvenient to not be able to walk or bike anywhere because your whole city is just roads and parking lots. Cars kill cities by decreasing density below the point where commerce is sustainable. Go look at a picture of Huston if you want to see what happens when you let cars win.
As opposed to 20 for EVs? Even cherry picked numbers beat cars. Oh and why are those numbers even that bad? Cars. Cars decrease demand for transit. The London metro is 4.4.
And that 20 kWh per 100p-km doesn't take in to account manufacturing, shipping, and disposal or any consumables like...uh.. tires, which are a petroleum product. Well tuned vehicles operate more efficiently, which is why personal vehicles can never be as efficient as well used mass transit.
There's a fundamental limit on the efficiency of large scale transit and it's realized by mass transit. Any possible improvemnt that could be made for individual transit could just as easily be applied back to mass transit for a higher efficiency.
Your ride sharing example highlights the same thing again. That's actually pretty similar to the last mile soliton for Sound Transit in Seattle. They send a van to pick people up and drop them off at transit stops, which reduces the justification for personal cars even more.