The point is to get everyone in a private vehicle so they burn more fossil fuels, (directly or indirectly through the power grid) use up more tires and require huge pork-barrel infrastructure projects.

And God forbid Americans with money should have to ride buses and trains alongside the poors.

When gas prices were spiking and a coworker was blaming it on Biden, I said this was why we needed to put more money into public transit so we can take the bus to work instead of burning our own gas to go back and forth.

He got FURIOUS.

"You want me to ride a bus?" he demanded. "You want ME to ride a bus!?!"

And he went away in a huff.

Thank you Binro.

My wife does not drive, neither does her mother, and my own mother recently had knee surgery and can't operate a car at the moment. The bus is literally their only option. People like your coworker can't see past their own nose to understand that for some people mass transit is the only way to have mobility. This shit attitude angers me beyond belief and results in chronically underfunded public services and it fucking sucks.

Its a vicious circle.. In Denmark for example public transport is not looked down upon, but thats cus its *awesome*, cheap, convenient, pleasant, basically superior to a car in every way for transporting humans.

The reason its so awesome is cus the density of Danish cities is suitable.. A Danish has medium density (like c. 5 story building tightly packed) *everywhere* There's no crazy density spike in the city centre, the city is uniformly dense and at the edge it simply stops and you are in farmland now.

Because of this density, services and amenities work. like schools, shops, hospitals, and public transport routes.. You can have a public transport route anywhere in a danish city and there will be enough people and amenities within walking distance of it for it to be profitable and thus high quality, it can be profitable to run 24 hours a day and very often.

US cities on the other hand follow the detroit model of having a pointless hyper-density spike in the centre with some office skyscrapers which seem to only be built for tax reasons.. and then the density immediately goes down to almost nothing, just hyper low density suburbs stretching on for 100's of miles. So services just dont work, if you plop down a hospital or a tram line there are nowhere near enough people within its walking distance catchment area for it to be sustainable.

So because of the situation you are already in, at any moment the "best" course of action is to double down dig yourselves deeper into the hole, more roads, more cars.

Purple Cat is right. It's the density that is a huge part of the problem.

Another huge part of the problem is that American buses and rail are almost never on time or are usually late. I live in a fairly large american city. If I wanted to commute to work downtown (or to my former jobs) I have two options.

1) The bus which is 2 hours each way, which doesn't always leave at the time I am there so I have to add an additional 7 min or so of a wait at the bus stop each way, plus more time for each transfer.
2) My car which is 30-35 min each way with no transfer, and I have the room in the car to give me the option to go grocery shopping or buy other things I need on the way home.

Even in NYC, the subways, while on time, are usually filthy, overcrowded, and subject to a lot of crime and harassment - especially if you're a woman and alone.

We can't just slap subways and mass transit everywhere in america and fix the problem. Not when we have systemic issues of crime, when we are never able to be on time anywhere, and when our urban centers and suburban population is so spread out.

But, there is a feasible solution in turning the cars we already use into something a lot more safer, energy efficient, and reliant on renewable energy. The only problem is that FSD is a very difficult problem to solve, and until it's all 100% automated, FSD may never be perfect.

First; an M3 is a BMW.

Second; the big problem with teslas and their owners is about a decade of musk an various Tesla sycophants on youtube claiming, and appearing to show, that autopilot is already flawless and is so good that you can turn it on and safely take a nap in the back seat. And then on top of that decade of propaganda deluding Tesla ownerfans into using the car while not paying attention to the road, musk releases a system called Full Self Driving. So a bunch of Tesla owners are utter fucking idiots just turning on their glorified cruise control assist system and playing with their phones for the whole trip.

Yes there are a lot of problems with Elon fans ruining it for the rest of us, and if I was super rich I would take over Telsa and turn it into a much better company, but alas I'm not.

That said, I realize M3 can refer to BMW but it's also easier to type out M3 than a model 3, and that's what people in the Tesla forums/communities type out because it's easier.

I am happy with an electric car, I'm happy with the ride, the quiet, the comfort, and how easy it is to maintain. But, I'm not asking for the crazy things like FSD that are just not there yet and probably won't be for a long time.

Oh yeah and I've lived almost a year with Autopilot. Late at night on a big highway with few cars around it's been mostly flawless. It hasn't made that many mistakes. I had ACC on a few Hondas and that was much buggier than my Tesla.

When it's busy I've tried Autopilot and a few times it's gotten closer than I'd like to other cars, and I am always paying attention, but to be frank it's done a decent job so far with very few issues.

The Rivian is 7,000 pounds, the Model 3 is 5,000 lbs. Until we find better battery technology and can balance the weight of the batteries with the range we need I'm not sure what else we can do.

I still have to constantly remind myself that my car is 5,000 lbs and I need to be a lot more careful around cars that are half my weight or less, but the weight does make the ride pretty smooth though.

Make the cars out of carbon and design them to reduce weight instead of just adding battery and horsepower.

My i3S, with the gas motor, is 3,300 lbs.

if the existing EVs all require hundreds/thousands of pounds of rare minerals to be even minimally functional, and these incredibly expensive and material-intensive batteries don't even last a decade before requiring replacement, and are generally charged by energy derived from fossil fuels anyway, what benefit to society justifies the outsized risk/wear to infrastructure that these vehicles create?

trying to force EVs to serve the role that ICE vehicles serve (in this infrastructure designed exclusively for ICE vehicles) makes no sense at all. with current battery technology, trying to make a 300+ mile EV ends up creating these dangerous and wasteful monstrosities that aren't even as good as ICE vehicles that cost half as much money

imho the focus should be on creating highly efficient, desirable, and affordable sub 50 mile EVs, and building out infrastructure to make their use seamless with a widely expanded public transit scheme

I didn't know EVs were so much heavier than ICE cars. I recall reading that road wear/damage from vehicles goes something like the mass of the vehicle to the 5th power, other factors being equal. I.e. a vehicle twice as heavy does about 32 times more damage to the road even if they are going the same speed.

it's because something has convinced people that it's possible for the average car user to replace an ICE car with an EV with almost no lifestyle changes, so the only EVs that most people would consider buying have to have this insane battery

I love how batteries being an issue means we should just give up on the electric cars and stop right now, please shut up cracker smack you’re making yourself look bad

I can’t ride a bicycle 20 miles each way to work nor do I get to sit on my ass in an air conditioned office the whole day to recover my stamina.

if you want people to ride bicycles to work they need to live near their jobs, and to achieve that we need to radically change the way we build cities and access housing

Correct. So let's fucking do that instead of accusing cyclists of being bougie ableist assholes.

I cycle to work, and I agree that cyclists are assholes.

coulda built a whole lot of rail for what we sent to Ukraine this year, for what we spent on *new* cops this year, for just the increase in funds over last year that elected Democrats gave to the pentagon for no reason at all

You sound like an old man, are you?!