Electric cars' design could spark new environmental challenge

[Self Reliance]

"However, in the EU as few as 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled. This has an environmental cost. Not only do the batteries carry a risk of giving off toxic gases if damaged, but core ingredients such as lithium and cobalt are finite and extraction can lead to water pollution and depletion among other environmental consequences."

source [emphasize mine]

Someone needs to look into adding pantographs to cars and catenaries to roads, get batteries out of the equation.


But then cars would become street cars with tires. Or continue improving the internal combustion engine, but reduce the number of miles traveled by car.

I live in an urban area, I have a car and so does my spouse, I'm never giving up my car, but I would really like it if I could make more of my trips without needing to use my car. That's all I'm advocating for.


If you live in a rural area, you will need a car and that will probably never change until teleportation is invented.

The whole concept of working in crowded dirty urban environment is a model for antiquated academics who are invested in it. Stop perpetuating it. Taxing the hell out of people to try to build mass transit in cities where it doesn't exist is a fools errand. Time for a new model where people are freed from commuting. In the connected world of today more and more people work remotely and only periodically need to visit an office and colleagues. For 10 years I have enjoyed driving for pleasure and not for daily slogging my way into an office.

How nice for you. Try working in a burger joint, shopping center, construction site, or warehouse from home.

I work in Machine Learning and Computer Vision, I could do all my work from home, and not a single employer I had allowed us to work from home. Not the 5-person startup, not the Fortune 100, and none of the companies that fall somewhere in between.

"We put so much money into our office building, we need you to be here" is their usual argument. It is stupid, since we don't really interact or socialize at work other than thru email and messaging, so what's the point? We could save time and fuel working from home, and free the roads for people who truly need to drive to work.

[09W]

What part of fewer people are living in rural areas and more people living in urban areas compared to the 1950s did you not understand?

An irrelevant stand-alone factoid.

Are more people moving to urban areas... or is population growth resulting in ever-spreading urban / partially urban areas; a self perpetuating scenario?
And is there less, equal or more mass transit per square mile of urban area- where was that chart?

[Ed753]

An irrelevant stand-along factoid.

Are more people moving to urban areas... or is population growth resulting in ever-spreading urban / partially urban areas; a self perpetuating scenario?
And is there less, equal or more mass transit per square mile of urban area- where was that chart?

Excellent Point!

[Self Reliance]

An irrelevant stand-alone factoid.

Are more people moving to urban areas... or is population growth resulting in ever-spreading urban / partially urban areas; a self perpetuating scenario?
And is there less, equal or more mass transit per square mile of urban area- where was that chart?

Why do I have to produce the data and not you? The burden of proof is on you, but since the country has less railroad miles now than it did in the 19th century there is obviously work to be done.

[09W]

https://www.newgeography.com/content...w-york-expands

>>"The New York metropolitan area grew by enough land area to add more than 700,000 residents between 2000 and 2010, even after the decentralization reported upon in the metropolitan area as defined in 2000. The expansion of the metropolitan area occurred because the employment interchange between the central counties and counties outside the metropolitan area in 2000 became sufficient to expand the boundaries by more than 1,000 square miles"<<

>>"...New York became greater by more 1 million residents as a result of the changes in commuting patterns. The addition of Allentown (Pennsylvania – New Jersey) and the East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania metropolitan areas expanded the New York combined statistical area by another 2,700 square miles (7,000 square miles), bringing the population to 23.1 million. Altogether, the metropolitan area and combined area land area increases added up to 3,700 square miles"<<

Yep; urban/partially urban areas have spread due to population growth and commerce/employment patterns. It's not that people are moving, it's the urban boundaries that are. Common sense.

[09W]

According to the US DOT, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, commuter rail travel in 1980 was 6,516 million passenger-miles. in 2017, that number was 12,321.

Total transit passenger-miles (motor bus, trolley bus, light rail, heavy rail, commuter rail) went from 39,854 million in 1980 to 57,012 million in 2014.

Enough data for now?

[NHRATA01]

How nice for you. Try working in a burger joint, shopping center, construction site, or warehouse from home.

Well when one goes to college, one can avoid working in retail or a warehouse. However we have a very vocal subset of the population intent on telling their kids that going for an advanced education and learning about fluid mechanics or macroeconomics is libruhl indoctranashun and will turn them into commies, so we'll have a lot of future burger flippers who will be out of the job when the college grads who learned programming in between cry closets and Marx lectures manage to develop the AI to automate the burger flipping process.

[Self Reliance]

According to the US DOT, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, commuter rail travel in 1980 was 6,516 million passenger-miles. in 2017, that number was 12,321.

Total transit passenger-miles (motor bus, trolley bus, light rail, heavy rail, commuter rail) went from 39,854 million in 1980 to 57,012 million in 2014.

Enough data for now?

Buses don’t count, I’m talking about rail. We had thousands of street car miles that were removed.

[richmond2000]

Buses don’t count, I’m talking about rail. We had thousands of street car miles that were removed.

I disagree the "goal" is LESS driving miles and MORE transit miles the increase in ALL modes INCLUDING busses is of value

and the posted stat shows RAIL usage UP almost 100% and all mode up 70+%

[Self Reliance]

Buses don’t count, I’m talking about rail. We had thousands of street car miles that were removed.

I disagree the "goal" is LESS driving miles and MORE transit miles the increase in ALL modes INCLUDING busses is of value

and the posted stat shows RAIL usage UP almost 100% and all mode up 70+%

What other way of reducing congestion than having people drive fewer miles? Be it through telecommuting or a multi modal transit system?

Buses aren’t bad, I’m not against buses, but a bus will still be stuck in traffic just like a car.

Rail usage is up, because the USA is more urban than ever. Where I live I’m seeing more and more high rises, and there’s a skyscraper being built that will be the tallest in the Western Hemisphere outside of NYC and Chicago. So at least where I live is becoming more dense, yet the city has less rail miles than it did in the 1920s, and a far cry of the plan the city had in the 1910s.

I think the future of cities in the US will depend on how successful the Tysons experiment is. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/tysons/

[BlackGTP]

If you google "are any subway systems cost effective" there are a few interesting articles out there, though some are old. My summation is for rail to be cost effective you need a very densely populated city, such as NYC.

The below is interesting, especially the links to federal sites at the bottom...

http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/tra...-effectiveness

[Vagon11]

If you google "are any subway systems cost effective" there are a few interesting articles out there, though some are old. My summation is for rail to be cost effective you need a very densely populated city, such as NYC.

The below is interesting, especially the links to federal sites at the bottom...

http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/tra...-effectiveness

Mass transit is a absolutely huge loss leader in Austin. Some simple numbers. Of the 324M dollars in revenue, 24M came from fares. The biggest component was the slice of sales tax they take. That netted them 228M or 10X fares. The rest came from grants etc(taxes basically). When they added light rail, I calculated they could have bought every single rider a very well equipped Benz E class car. It was 80K per rider. The riders I think pay 10 bucks round trip.

[BlackGTP]

Mass transit is a absolutely huge loss leader in Austin. Some simple numbers. Of the 324M dollars in revenue, 24M came from fares. The biggest component was the slice of sales tax they take. That netted them 228M or 10X fares. The rest came from grants etc(taxes basically). When they added light rail, I calculated they could have bought every single rider a very well equipped Benz E class car. It was 80K per rider. The riders I think pay 10 bucks round trip.

Yes, I seem to remember the only rail system in the USA that is cost effective is NYC... I'm all for rail as I think trains are cool, but as with everything else they need to make financial sense and not a pie in the sky tree hugging boondoggle that probably does more harm to the environment and costs a lot of money than if nothing was done. Plus one thing I never see done is the environmental cost of building a rail - lost trees, emissions of the heavy equipment building the rail, pollution from making the raw materials for the rail, etc.. I bet for smaller cities the environmental payback never happens (along with the economic) and a net hurt was put to the environment.

[09W]

Yes, I seem to remember the only rail system in the USA that is cost effective is NYC... I'm all for rail as I think trains are cool, but as with everything else they need to make financial sense and not a pie in the sky tree hugging boondoggle that probably does more harm to the environment and costs a lot of money than if nothing was done.

There seems to be a growing mindset that costs don't matter anymore, only wishes & dreams do. Good luck in the long term with that as a guiding principal.

[Neanderthal]

There seems to be a growing mindset that costs don't matter anymore, only wishes & dreams do. Good luck in the long term with that as a guiding principal.

Wishes and dreams, and coolness and "won't THOSE FOOLS be impressed by this!" mindset. Kommiefornia high speed rail is still struggling and will no be completed in the lifetime of a typical 30 year old GMI'er.

Yet it can be done:

Taiwan is a far poorer place than California — with median household income just one-fourth of ours—but still it managed to afford high-speed rail. It’s far less populous, with only 23 million people, but its fast trains attract a huge ridership.

Taiwan’s high-speed rail resembles what California’s might have been if we hadn’t lost our nerve.

Taiwan’s population, like California’s, is mostly along its west coast. So at the century’s turn, Taiwan started construction on a high-speed rail line linking Taipei City, in the north, to Kaohsiung, in the south. That’s a distance of 225 miles, about the same as California’s planned first phase of high-speed rail, from San Jose to Bakersfield.

But Taiwan began operating its line in less than seven years, at a cost of $18 billion. It’s unclear whether California’s will ever be finished, or what the costs, estimated at $68 billion, will be.

Paradoxically, Taiwan’s project was completed less expensively because it didn’t do high-speed rail on the cheap.

While California established an underfinanced government authority to lead the project, Taiwan’s biggest businesses came together to create a private corporation. The deal to establish the corporation gave the government a minority stake and created a concession: the company would operate high-speed rail for 35 years, after which it would have to give the system back to the government.

Construction difficulties that have been used as excuses in California were surmounted in Taiwan. Taiwan’s project met strict environmental requirements, protecting a beautiful-but-endangered bird: the Pheasant-tailed Jacana. While California blames earthquake faults for delays and higher costs here, seismically active Taiwan built safely to incorporate risks from earthquakes — and from hurricanes and landslides. And even as California’s high-speed rail authority was stymied by the costs of viaducts and tunneling, Taiwan created a system with even more tunneling and the world’s second-longest bridge, the 97-mile Changhua-Kaohsiung Viaduct.

https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local...236384818.html

Reminds me of that skating rink story from years gone by.