I've been saying this for a while. Not only that, but electric cars are substantially heavier than their ICE-powered equivalents, meaning both tires and roads wear out more quickly. Plus, there's a ton of pollution and other environmental damage caused by battery production that at least partly offsets the lack of tailpipe emissions.

As loathe as I am to admit, because I'm a car enthusiast and I enjoy driving, cars cannot be the default mode of transportation everywhere indefinitely; they will always need to exist, but should mostly be for small centres with no capacity to implement transit infrastructure and last mile type of things.

Good thing DOGE and the rest of the Trump fueled Republicans are foaming at the mouth to completely eliminate federal funding for the California high speed rail project. Thank God they're going to save us from affordable transportation for the masses in favor of continuing to murder the planet actively by distributing microplastics into every square millimeter of the Earth.

Yet another example of how pretty much every problem is, at its heart, a zoning problem:

• Microplastics? Too much driving, because trip origins and destinations are too far apart to be walkable.
• Greenhouse gas emissions from cars? Too much driving because not enough walkability.
• Greenhouse gas emissions from housing? Poor efficiency because too many single-family homes exposed on all sides instead of high-density housing with shared walls.
• Greenhouse gas emissions from concrete production? Using way more of it than we really need to build huge amounts of unnecessary parking (and much wider streets than we'd need for bikes + transit + only delivery vehicles).
• High housing prices? Not enough housing density.
• Obesity? Sedentary lifestyles, i.e., not enough gym of life.
• Racism? Redlining.
• Wealth inequality? (Among other things), protecting rich landowners from market forces by eliminating competition from multifamily developers that would build out the land to its highest and best use.

See also, this video: The Housing Crisis is the Everything Crisis. He almost gets it, but fails to connect that very last dot, which is that the housing crisis is itself caused by bad, density-restricting zoning!

We just need to swap all roads out with big orange hot wheels tracks. I don't know if it'd solve the problem but at least it's a suggestion and it'd be sick as hell.

If we had those flying cars we were promised, this wouldn't be an issue.

Does anyone know of another efficient mode of transportation that has near-zero surface friction?

Because that would be a gamechanger

The solution is fewer and lighter vehicles. Everyone purchasing oversized EVs is the exact opposite of the solution.

Mass Transit (trains and light rail) Pushbikes, e-bikes, Subcompact, and micro/Kei cars are the answer.

There is no alternative suggested. The purpose of this movement is to tax heavy EVs. I think that makes it distraction.

The smaller the EV the more range per kwh, and so smaller batteries are needed which makes them more affordable. It is not unreasonable to tax heavy vehicles, but the punch line that motivates this piece is "EV's bad". They could have recommended micromobility for example.

whatever happened to the green tire technologies that get announced by the big mfg and then never come to market.. like the mushroom based materials

Electric cars are not THE solution.

This is why I raised the topic of airless tires a while back. They're not the solution, but they last longer than traditional tires. Initially they were rated to last a lifetime, but that's not profitable so they put an end to that.

fuckcars

Ban tires!

The American auto industry

Lobbyists

Conservatives

The existence of hundreds of thousands of miles of asphalt paid for by the American taxpayer

Oh, right. Well, I'll just wave my finger once a year and... die, eventually.

The other day I was wondering how miraculous tires are - fucking balloons lifting the heaviest vehicles on land.