That’s because it’s impossible to just rip out oil our cars from the current economy and city design. It can’t be a bandaid that gets ripped off.
Getting rid of ICE cars is the easy part. All we gotta do is ramp up electric production and distribution. Decades of neglected maintenance and upgrades. And hopefully done now using cleaner fuels like solar/wind/nuclear.
Getting rid of cars…well, that’s gonna take massive redesigns of suburbs and cities. Can’t let perfect be the enemy of good here. Gonna have to build up intra-city mass transit as well as increase park-and-ride availability and utilization for the suburbs. But even then, nobody in the burbs is gonna ride their bike 3 miles to the grocery store with two kids in tow to be able to carry home maybe two or three days worth of groceries.
But nearly every suburb was designed, or spent the majority of its incorporated days, around personal cars. Thats gonna need a lot of unfucking.
I’ve stayed at not one but two different beach houses, in different towns, that look on paper to be really close to the beach. But due to no cut throughs, private property, fences and culs de sac, what should have been a 5 or 10 minute walk to the shore became a 20 minute walk to the edge of the beaches sprawling parking lot. With two little kids and a beach cart, a 5-10 minute walk along backroads, totally easy. A 20 minute walk, half of which along busy streets (which, when there are sidewalks, they’re overgrown with prickly bushes and poison ivy, pushing you out into the shoulder) before even getting to another 10 minute walk across a parking lot before you touch sand, does not a good vacation make.
I prefer to put the goal first and let people’s ingenuity take care of the solution. If I had a fleet of battleships in orbit of earth, I’d start by saying “every car is getting blown up with plasma guns on 1 Jan in five years, with or without people inside”. Then I’d watch everyone with a shred of self preservation do whatever needs to be done to fix the problem. It’s just a matter of willpower and determination, it’s not like these problems can’t be solved in a few short years.
That’s because it’s impossible to just rip out oil our cars from the current economy and city design. It can’t be a bandaid that gets ripped off.
Getting rid of ICE cars is the easy part. All we gotta do is ramp up electric production and distribution. Decades of neglected maintenance and upgrades. And hopefully done now using cleaner fuels like solar/wind/nuclear.
Getting rid of cars…well, that’s gonna take massive redesigns of suburbs and cities. Can’t let perfect be the enemy of good here. Gonna have to build up intra-city mass transit as well as increase park-and-ride availability and utilization for the suburbs. But even then, nobody in the burbs is gonna ride their bike 3 miles to the grocery store with two kids in tow to be able to carry home maybe two or three days worth of groceries.
But nearly every suburb was designed, or spent the majority of its incorporated days, around personal cars. Thats gonna need a lot of unfucking.
I’ve stayed at not one but two different beach houses, in different towns, that look on paper to be really close to the beach. But due to no cut throughs, private property, fences and culs de sac, what should have been a 5 or 10 minute walk to the shore became a 20 minute walk to the edge of the beaches sprawling parking lot. With two little kids and a beach cart, a 5-10 minute walk along backroads, totally easy. A 20 minute walk, half of which along busy streets (which, when there are sidewalks, they’re overgrown with prickly bushes and poison ivy, pushing you out into the shoulder) before even getting to another 10 minute walk across a parking lot before you touch sand, does not a good vacation make.
I prefer to put the goal first and let people’s ingenuity take care of the solution. If I had a fleet of battleships in orbit of earth, I’d start by saying “every car is getting blown up with plasma guns on 1 Jan in five years, with or without people inside”. Then I’d watch everyone with a shred of self preservation do whatever needs to be done to fix the problem. It’s just a matter of willpower and determination, it’s not like these problems can’t be solved in a few short years.