this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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Electric vehicles
While I completely agree transit, and walkable cities are much better, EVs are not nothing. More importantly, given the amount of time to build transit and walkable cities, EVs get us many of the advantages NOW
Also important to remember that not everywhere can be made walkable or makes sense to make public transit. You don't want a bus route that picks up 2 people every day. That's just worse than those 2 people having their own electric car.
A lot of people in the world are living in rural places where public transit is worse for the environment and bikes aren't a realistic way to get from a to b. In these places electric vehicles are the only better alternative.
Not as many people in the world as you think. By definition of remote parts of the world, very small amount of people actually live there.
I lived in a remote part of the world in the village of barely 50 people. We had a small bus coming through it twice a day, and if you needed to go to the town, you just went there in the morning and returned in the evening in the bus. Some people had cars they were using once every couple of weeks, but most people didn't. Bikes and walking was the most used form of transportation. Most of the people there were there for the sole reason of being far away and not needing to rush to the nearest city often, that's kind of the whole thing.
The shit you're describing is mainly uniquely American problem, people living in bumfuck nowhere but commuting to town using their gasguzzler, not only it's not universal, it's actually very not normal.
My perspective is coming from Denmark. Around most of the country, a car is essential. Most of the country is farmland. People live on this farmland, and without a car, getting to work, buying groceries, getting to the doctor, is simply not feasible.
I don't own a car, because I live in a city, but I grew up somewhere, where you can't live without a car.
So why do people live out there? Because they're farmers, construction workers and everything else an area with a lot of agriculture needs.
Are you seriously using denmark as an example of car dependence?
This is the extent of the danish rail network in 1930, there is no reason any part of denmark needs to be car dependent.
Yes I am. I don't expect people to ride a bike 10 km til at bus station in places where it's simply not feasible to make bike lanes.
Edit. Not to mention. You ride a bike 10 km to a bus, then take that bus for 20 minutes to a trainstation, then wait anything between 5 to 55 minutes for a train to show up, then ride that train for 1 hour to get to a big city, and then take another bus for 20 minutes to your job. No way am I spending 4+ hours in transport every day, if a car can do it in 1,5 hours.
your country is the size of the netherlands and equally flat, what precisely is the reason they can do it and danes can't?
Also, 10km at e-bike speed (25 km/h) is not even half an hour, and if there aren't tons of cars on the roads then you don't need bike infrastructure beyond covered parking, so what's the problem with biking that distance?
But can the Netherlands do it? Do they only bike in the rural parts?
Sure, if people could just ride 10 km and then be at work, I see the point in it. But there are A LOT of places that are much further from the bigger cities where the actual jobs are. Out there you'd need to ride 10 km to even get to a bus, that may or may not come by once every hour. That bus can take you to a trainstation where a train will usually come by every hour. Then you can take that train to a bigger city where you can work, but that can easily be an hour. So at this point, if you time your initial bike trip to the bus right, you may already spend in excess of 2 hours, just to get to a large city where the jobs are. Now you need to take another bus to get to your actual job. Meaning 4+ hours round trip. It is not feasible for a person with family to do this.
Sure the person can just move to the city, where houses cost 5x more, and simple appartments cost half their paycheck.
Yes, mostly. At least in the rural parts where I visited, the bike path is the norm and everyone is using it.
Then you move closer to your job. Communing form whatever remote farm to a city every day for work is absolutely not normal. Living close to work is what most of the people do (by definition), and it works for most of the people. Worst case scenario you move to a town-satellite that is connected to a big city via rail network. If fucking Russia figured it out, Denmark can do it too, it's not a rocket science. Farm workers who work on their farms and live their isolated lives still will have to use cars, but first of all they're in a minority, even in agrarian developed countries it's like 1% of population give or take. For everyone else cars is not a necessity and the best and only option, and if it is, it's a failure of infrastructure and needs to be fixed first priority.
Yes and no. The problem is too much of the world is unnecessarily built that way. This is one of the fundamental reasons why it will take so long to implement: we need to change where people prefer to live.
Note I said “prefer” before y’all get up in arms about forcing people to move. We’ve spent way too many years giving rural people a lot of the same infrastructure as urban people and it’s just not sustainable. The thing is that even relatively small towns can have denser walkable areas and useful transit. Without forcing anyone to uproot, we ought to be able to get a good 80% or more of the population to not require a car.
here in sweden more than 80% of the population already lives in an urban area, and contrary to what some people want to believe it's perfectly fine.
Someone from the US will always chime in about how we’re different, bigger, more spread out, but that’s BS.
We have a fantastic interstate highway system, amazing air travel facilities, but we’ve not spent enough time or money on other possibilities. We emphasized people’s privacy on their own lot at the expense of being unable to walk anywhere