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Why Norway, the poster child for electric cars, is having second thoughts – we can't let them crowd out car-free transit options
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- Authors
- David Zipper
- Published
- Oct 31 2023
- Word count
- 2418 words
I own a small (and cheap) EV but I really resent when Norway is held up as a model for any other country's EV adoption. Norway literally made it very punitive to buy a gas vehicle to the point that you'd have to be quite stubborn and rich to make that choice as it would cost you thousands more than buying an EV version of the same vehicle. The subsidies they gave out were quite costly to all taxpayers, but this is a country that has vast wealth based on decades of selling oil and gas so they had plenty to burn (pardon the pun).
But as the article states, once the subsidy was reduced to "only" the first 45k of the EV price, the sale of more expensive EVs plummeted. So are Norwegians REALLY choosing EVs? Or are they socially engineered into making the only financially logical choice for their transportation? Why would anyone pay 64k for a gas vehicle that has an EV version for 50k with the bonus of no tolls, and special lane use? And is that the even doable in any other country that doesnt have its vast wealth?
I have no problem if someone wants to buy a new Tesla Model 3 ($64k for the AWD in Canada) but there's no way that average income taxpayers should be the one paying for that wealthier buyer's choice. If they can afford it, great. If they can't, they should buy something else but the thousands in subsidies to engineer change that consumers don't find attractive unless someone else pays for them have got to go - we shouldnt be paying for our wealthier neighbor's choices when there are plenty of other options, including a used EV.
ps. Annual new car sales in Norway: 175,000 which is how many car sales there are in Alabama. Its just 1.2% of the US 14 million sales. Socially engineering change is a LOT easier for such a small number of sales.
I understand where you're coming from, but that's how a market based system works. Currently, many countries subsidize the oil and gas industry. If we want to move to systems like heat pumps and solar, we probably should tax oil and gas while subsidizing beneficial technologies.
People respond to financial incentives, and that can create social momentum. Electric cars have real world upsides; they're a lot more fun and pleasant to drive in my experience (one pedal driving is awesome). Electric bikes are lovely too with the motors practically flattening hills.
The US currently subsidizes the sales of large pick-up trucks and heavy duty SUVs through emission regulations that favors building the largest car body possible. We can do better in a way that's beneficial for the planet and people.
We subsidize the pants out of Oil in the US. We provide direct subsidies to oil/gas companies to a tune of about 20 billion dollars a year directly from the tax payers. So in a sense we've made it very punitive to buy anything but an ICE vehicle.
Every time Ive looked into oil and gas "subsidies" it turns out that they aren't actual subsidies in the direct sense. Like no one is actually GIVING the consumer $1000 to go put gas in their tank or to buy an ICE car. The oil and gas "subsidies", are largely tax breaks or exemptions, not cash subsidies, particularly for exploration and development. Considering that a large part of that "subsidy" is to foster more development to create more product which is sold and TAXED HEAVILY at the consumer level, as well as producing well paying jobs that are also taxed heavily with income tax that is an entirely different thing than literally GIVING an end user consumer $10,000 to go buy a particular type of car. One has a net benefit to the government aka taxpayer's pocket the other is a net drain on the taxypayer's pocket. They are not the same thing at all.
Source: I live in oil and gas country. My job and half of my family's jobs would not exist if it wasn't for the oil and gas industry. If my EV and all the other EVs in town were to disappear, no one would even notice. Not even our auto dealers who generally don't support them and don't want to carry them - but our town would definitely notice if the oil and gas industry disappeared. We might survive. But just barely.
Tax breaks are subsidies, and whenever anyone says an industry is subsidized, tax breaks are what I usually assume they're referring to since they're the most common type of subsidy. Especially since money given by the government to an individual, group, or company is usually referred to as "grants", "benefit payments", or "capital injections" and not "subsidies" (even though those are technically subsidies too, as are soft / interest-free loans and advances).
I guess the correct terminology we're looking for is "indirect" subsidy and "direct" subsidy. Those are two very different things in my book. If Shell gets to drill a well and doesnt have to pay tax on their drilling equipment thats not taking anything out of my pocket as a taxpayer and its not a benefit to a single person, its spread out to Shell's shareholders and possibly their employees. If my neighbor buys a Tesla and gets 10,000 subsidy from the government, thats money directly out of my pocket as a taxpayer as it cant be used for other gov programs or services, but in that case it only has a very direct benefit to him. Sure, 100 years from now it might help lower the world temp by .00000001 degree for his single Tesla, but realistically he is the only one benefiting by that large amount of money.
Materially direct and indirect subsidies have basically the same impact I would think. If you’re shopping for a car and could save $10k in taxes by purchasing an EV vs receive $10k in a cash rebate for purchasing an EV, what’s the difference? Perhaps timing - if you’re wealthy when you get the money doesn’t matter as much. Also depending on how you structure the subsidy maybe poorer folks don’t get it if it’s a nonrefundable tax credit
Either way you’re encouraging more spending on whatever you’re subsidizing.
I think you misunderstand the effect of those subsidies. Without them gas at the pump would be more expensive, so yes they are GIVING them to the consumer. Whether or not the government gives you personally a $1500 tax break to purchase a car or the manufacturer $1500 reduction in costs the cost to the consumer is the same. The EV subsidy is an incentive to go buy a car, which is TAXED HEAVILY, and in turn spurs consumption of the product which creates well paying jobs as also taxed heavily with income tax. Your own argument makes sense on both of these markets, it's not like oil/gas is unique.
I think this is an important thing to point out. Oil and gas, like any industry, supports livelihoods, and that is important. There are lots of industries the federal government supports to ensure jobs are created, Americans are employed, and taxes are paid. My company get's over half our revenue in federal R&D grants from the National Science Foundation. Largely they don't care what happens with our tech, what they care about is how many additional jobs we create. And this is true regardless of if you are an EV producer or an Oil/Gas company.
This feels like the heart of why this is such a passionate issue for you. The outcomes of federal EV subsidies is going to have a real tangible impact on your friends and family, so I understand you being opposed to them. Similarly to how someone might feel in a town that sprung up around a Tesla or Rivian plant. For many of us though this isn't as tangible, and I start weighing out what I would prefer. For me it's higher efficiency and lower emission transit. I'm not even that jazzed up by EVs, I'd rather we throw those subsidies at rail.
Once we're talking about "industry towns", it feels similar to the debates around single payer healthcare. During the 2020 Democrat primaries, CNN gave a very clear voice to folks in Illinois who were employed by insurance companies who said "We'd have huge unemployment in our towns if it wasn't for Blue Shield. Medicare for all would ruin us!" I was taken aback. I personally had to pay $6000 dollars out of pocket when my insurance changed from a PPO to a HMO on an MRI I had booked before the new year (put me into debt for 2 years). I've had relatives be denied for all kinds of claims, including chemo. Many folks are bankrupted by medical debt. So I get mad and I say, "You know what, fuck that. Why are we subsidizing an industry that is making it worse for so many of us?" I'm not mad at the folks who work there, but man are our subsidized dollars doing a lot of damage within my community.
I think lots of folks see oil and gas in a similar light. Lots of us are concerned about climate change and we've seen lots of evidence of obstructionism and malfeasance from the large actors in the oil/gas industry.
The point of the article is that it would be better to eliminate cars entirely. That way we don't have this inequality any more and we can use superior transport methods (rail, walking, cycling).
One option: limit the speed limit to 20 mph in cities and legalize all forms of small electric vehicles on city streets. Make it just as safe and practical to go around town in a small electric golf cart as it is in a car.
You could even do this in big cities like LA. Do the freeways even manage 20 mph during commuting times? Why couldn't the freeways of LA be filled with electric golf carts?
Yes, it seems like a silly solution. Golf carts certainly don't have the sex appeal of full sized cars. But they're the type of urban transport solution we really could use right now. Unlike E-bikes, they don't require a ton of personal sacrifices. You don't get rained on, and they can be enclosed enough to have heaters and AC. They can easily do a grocery run for all but the largest families with them. And for the batteries needed to make one full-sized electric vehicle you can make ten golf carts.
The only real downside to them (other than our aesthetic biases) are they're obviously not as safe in collisions as full-sized vehicles. And that's why perhaps we should implement a blanket 20 mph speed limit inside all cities. Feel free to drive your full sized vehicle through the city streets if you want, but you're limited to no faster than a bicycle or golf cart can travel. E-bikes are even more material efficient than golf carts, but they do require certain sacrifices in terms of dealing with rain and other weather.
Limit vehicles to 20 mph inside city limits and also legalize all forms of small electric vehicles. You can drive your car fast when you're going between cities, and you can still use your car to get around town. But while you're within city limits, we limit you to the speed of a bicycle to make sure you're not a danger to the people traveling around in smaller vehicles.
The point is not to make it so that you can ONLY get around by golf cart and small electric vehicle. The goal is to bring cars, while inside cities, down to more human-compatible velocities. And speed is the single greatest factor that affects the lethality of vehicle collisions, whether against pedestrians, cyclists, or other vehicles. 20 mph in a golf cart against a vehicle is still a bad time, but the same is true for cycling or walking. At the reduced speed, all vehicle collisions will be far less deadly. And more collisions can be prevented entirely.
Now, in your case, you might not want to go a pure golf cart route; many won't. Maybe one of you commutes via a golf cart, and the other commutes by a full-sized vehicle. You take the full-sized vehicle when you want to get groceries. Or you could go all golf cart and take an uber to get groceries, or, god forbid, public transit! (I've seen plenty of people manage kids and grocery runs on the bus.) Or you could all ride bikes to the grocery store, the kids on regular bikes, and the parents on cargo bikes. The options go on and on.
Honestly, that seems perfectly reasonable. If you really want to make a city truly friendly to small efficient vehicles, bicyclists, pedestrians, etc., you need to limit the speed of vehicles within the city to human-scale velocities. A 30 minute commute really isn't that unreasonable. And, your commute will be less likely to be slowed by congestion due to the more efficient use of road space which comes with large numbers of small vehicles traveling slowly. (Small vehicles and cyclists take up less space, and the slower speeds mean shorter following distance is needed.) And yes, it might increase commute times for some, but as a whole it is a massive, massive timesaver for the community. Decreasing car dependence means decreasing reliance on car payments. So many American families are broke because they literally drive themselves into poverty. The average US household spends something like 17% of their budget on transportation. If they work 40 hours, the average worker must work 7 of those just for their vehicle costs. (And this is median, for the working poor who can't commute via public transit, this would be much higher.)
If we limit speeds and, in turn, make roads much safer for cycling and small vehicles such as golf carts, it will allow people to chose cheaper transport options. If that allowed our hypothetical worker to cut their transportation costs in half, that would free up 3 and a half hours worth of earnings, or 42 minutes per day. Long commutes would get a little longer, but the reduced vehicle costs would more than make up for it.
Golf cart communities aren't as ridiculous as they sound! They're a very real thing that check a lot of boxes for many people. Bloomberg had a good article about one: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-golf-cart-kingdom/
If they have a place to put it, this seems fine? If we got to this point in the US, with only one car per household and not used on the average day, we’d be doing great.
Declaring victory and killing the subsidies seems fine too.
If it's not used much, it will last a long time. On a per-year basis, I don't think the environmental cost is very much.
The Environmental Protection Agency states that 18% of EV emissions are specifically from the battery and 17% are from related manufacturing and EOL emissions. That's 35% of total emissions from just creating the vehicle. Not trivial. They are destructive.
Data is clear that the lifetime emissions of an EV are significantly better than a gasoline car, which is why we should pivot from gasoline as fast as possible. But the absolute emissions of using electric vehicles are still high. Even were the US to operate on a completely green grid (which it won't for at least 25 years), there are significant localized environmental impacts associated with elemental mining.
Modern techniques have begun to partially to outsource resource extraction to deep-sea ocean trenches instead of child laborers in Africa, but the practice probably isn't any less environmentally damaging. The jury is still out, but it might even be worse, just less visible (to humans).
Rather than saying that the absolute carbon emissions are "high," it seems like it would be better to know what that number is for a variety of vehicles, so that we can do comparisons to other things?
It seems doubtful that it's the same for all electric cars, considering that they have very different prices and presumably costs and manufacturing methods.
The EPA's diagram estimates something like 150g/mi greenhouse gas emissions for an EV. This is an unhelpful unit for your question, unfortunately. That scale also doesn't make sense on its own for manufacturing, hence their disclaimer. The way they've settled on the percentages is presumably by identifying the absolute carbon emissions of an average lifetime driver based on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) plus quantifiable absolute average emissions from manufacturing, then demarcating them in percentages. The source notes:
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Climate Portal states:
The former estimate would involve lighter mining techniques and a green grid, and the latter would involve less scrupulous techniques and a coal-heavy grid like China's.
McKinsey & Company state:
Where CO2e refers to "CO2 equivalent," because gases other than just CO2 may be emitted as well. If I understand the units correctly, McKinsey estimates that global EV production emissions of just the battery would be about
85 kg CO2e/kWh * 80 kWh (example battery size) = 6800 kg CO2eper vehicle battery. If we double that to account for the production of the rest of the vehicle (per the EPA data referenced above), that's 13600 kg CO2e per vehicle.Edit: it is unclear to me whether this kWh refers to the kWh capacity of the battery being produced (i.e., the bigger the battery, the more materials it requires and therefore the more emissions it induces) or the kWh spent by the manufacturer in producing the battery independent of the size of the battery (which seems an unhelpful metric for them to specify). My calculation assumes the former, and it aligns with MIT's estimate, so I think it is right.
The EPA has a greenhouse gas equivalency calculator which is not really a calculator, but you would seem to be able to use it to convert units as needed. I'm going to rely on figures explicitly written though. For comparison, the EPA provides this value for current electricity-related emissions:
Household electricity use has slightly increased since 2009, but this data is still pretty accurate. That's about 6360 kg of CO2e emissions to power a home for a year. Therefore, the manufacturing process alone of an EV would be approximately equivalent to the electricity use of a typical home for about two years. At a 10-year auto replacement rate (generous), that's maybe five cars for someone's lifetime, or 10 years of emissions of powering your home just to create the vehicles that you may or may not use. In my opinion that is not trivial. This is also assuming that your household only has one vehicle, which is not necessarily accurate; and that you never drive your car(s), which is definitely not accurate. Real emissions from auto use would therefore be higher. At the VMT rate assumed by the EPA, manufacturing and using your vehicles would be equivalent to ~30 years of household electricity use. That is certainly not trivial.
At a time when we have to reduce carbon emissions as a society, not just stop them from increasing, every bit counts. We have to recognize that EVs are the watered-down version of climate action suited to the tastes of the typical Western neoliberal, not a revolutionary change to our sustainability practices. The transportation sector is a major contributor to pollution through direct emissions, and the indirect emissions associated with manufacturing even the most "environmentally friendly" vehicles are significant. Because automobiles are not an efficient means of transporting the majority of individuals the majority of places they want to go, it is not appropriate to incorporate them heavily into a net-zero strategy at the expense of more efficient options like trains, bicycles, and walking.
That’s a good attempt, but unfortunately it doesn’t really help us much. To do comparison shopping when looking for a car (or deciding on an alternative), I’d want to have its embedded carbon as a mass, measured in kilograms or pounds. I assume the cost depends on range, so it would be a reason to avoid buying more range than you need?
But it occurs to me that if you’re buying a car that will mostly sit in the garage and you won’t be putting a lot of miles on, maybe buying a used gas car is the way to go, if the embedded carbon is lower? Leave the electric cars to people who will put a lot of miles on them.
(Similarly, the best use for a Prius is as a taxi, not sitting in an elderly retiree’s garage.)
I think anyone who really cares about carbon emissions will want to know the real numbers though? Also, carbon taxes would be better because a lot more people will pay attention and try to minimize the embedded carbon, whether they care about it or not.
The comparison does give us a very clear incentive not to build electric vehicles that we aren't going to use, based on the characteristics of a typical vehicle, which most people will be buying.
Are you asking for a rate of manufacturing and battery emissions per kg of the finished battery and/or finished vehicle? (That is, manufacturing emissions per mass of the car.) Or a different metric? If you want, I can see if I can find some manufacturer statistics tomorrow. I have never explored this problem with this level of specificity, so I will have to take some time to find a useful data source.
I don't think it changes the society-wide narrative much, though. A Toyota Prius Prime weighs about 3500 lbs (1600 kg) and an electric Ford F-150 perhaps 6000 (2700 kg). That is a non-trivial range from the average assumed by the EPA. Let's napkin math that at a typical weight of 2150 kg (probably too low given the number of SUVs on the market). If we assume (perhaps erroneously, or perhaps not) that overall weight corresponds directly to non-battery material use, then maybe we could see a decrease in non-battery manufacturing emissions of ~25% by choosing a Toyota Prius Prime over my imaginary "typical" car. If you somehow also got a half-sized battery (can you even do that?), you could cut emissions for that sector by 50%. Napkin math proposes emissions of 8500 kg CO2e for the little car with a little battery. Even optimistically, that would be six years of household electricity use over your lifetime, or 18 years including driving.
I'll try to get back to you with a metric that may be more useful when individually choosing a vehicle to purchase. I am not sure how realistic a generalization of kg CO2e/kg of car is to this use-case that may possibly be largely manufacturer-specific, but I'll see if I can determine anything useful.
@skybrian I was looking for manufacturer-specific emissions across all models, but I can't really find that information. You could approximate this by evaluating which country a manufacturing plant exists in. Then use that country's energy makeup to modify a manufacturing emissions "greenness" variable based on the scale provided by MIT above. In short: multiply the emissions from a completely green grid (the minimum realistically possible manufacturing emissions) by 6.67 to approximate the emissions from a fossil fuel-centric grid (like that of China or most US states).
Rabbit-hole based on production emissions from some actual cars, probably not useful
Data highlighted by The Guardian in 2010 suggests that producing the Citroen C1 (805 kg) emits 6000 kg of CO2e; the Ford Mondeo (1402 kg) 17000 kg of CO2e, and the Land Rover Discovery (2400 kg) emits 35000 kg of CO2e. That corresponds to 7.45 kg CO2e/kg car mass, 12.13 kg CO2e/kg car mass, and 14.58 kg CO2e/kg car mass. On average, across those three models, that's 11.39 kg CO2e/kg car mass, according to the Guardian.
These are gasoline cars, so the manufacturing emissions of an equivalent EV would be higher, perhaps approximately twice as high per EPA estimates. We can say 22.78 kg CO2e/kg car mass to include the battery. The global energy generation mix has become slightly more renewable since 2010, but apparently only from about 20% to about 30% (a respectable but modest 50% increase). I guess that would've meant 28.48 kg CO2e/kg car mass if the figure were 0%, so at 30% that's 19.93 kg CO2e/kg car mass. If we stick with our "typical" EV weight of 2150 kg, we can use MIT's production emission range figures to estimate how many kg of emissions correspond to a kg of produced car. Let's check our work against their known emissions values:
2150 kg * 19.93 kg CO2e/kg car mass * greenness constant of 1 (global avg) = 42850 kg CO2eModify that constant to account for the makeup of renewables in the regional grid. That result seems preposterously high and is not in line with MIT's production figures. It is possible that production processes have become more efficient overall since 2010, so that even though an EV today is quite polluting to manufacture compared to a gas car today, an EV today is less polluting than a gas car from 2010. A bold hypothesis, but conceivable. It is likely that my calculations include a major mechanical error that I have not recognized. Because I have no desire to resolve this questionably derived equation I am going to drop this thread and just stick with MIT's figures, which are recent and do not involve an excessive amount of speculation and napkin math anyway.
Based on MIT's production emissions range for a typical EV battery (2400 kg CO2e for the battery to 16000 kg CO2e for the battery), multiplied by two to account for the non-battery production process of the EV per the EPA (probably inaccurate), and the mass of a typical EV, which I assume to be 2150 kg, we have:
2400 kg CO2e * 2 / 2150 kg = 2.23 kg CO2e/kg of car mass16000 kg CO2e * 2 / 2150 kg = 14.88 kg CO2e/kg of car massWhere the variable amount of CO2e is determined by the manufacturer's processes and their country's renewable energy makeup. In the US or China today, assume near the higher end of the range. In most of Europe today, assume slightly lower. In Iceland or Norway today (with their very high renewable share), assume somewhere around the middle. In the future, shift all of those toward the lower estimate to reflect a slightly more green energy grid and better battery manufacturing processes. These calculations do not include the emissions associated with importing a foreign vehicle, if applicable.
Keep in mind that the "optimistic" value probably incorrectly assumes that non-battery emissions would scale in an equivalent way to battery emissions. This would be true for grid energy use, but probably not true for mining and manufacturing emissions specific to batteries, which would decrease to a lower absolute value because they are inherently more environmentally damaging than acquiring common materials. So the optimistic value is probably too low. But this does very roughly answer your question about "embedded" or "embodied" carbon in an EV, albeit with a lot of guessing and rounding and caveats.
I also stumbled across this "CO2 everything" website which produces lifetime emissions comparisons of different car, but it does not include manufacturing emissions. I guess you could combine an estimate of a particular vehicle's manufacturing emissions based on its mass (as I've postulated) with the fuel efficiency emissions described on this website.
I think my ultimate statement is still the same: manufacturing an automobile, including an EV, is damaging to the environment. As a society, we should not do it if we are not going to drive our cars much. As a society, we should do it less in general because it is important to eliminate overall carbon emissions to reach net-zero. As an individual seeking a vehicle for personal use, the least worst action would be to buy an EV with a small range (small battery) and a low mass, at least as far as manufacturing goes. The vehicle's fuel efficiency is still very relevant, assuming you will actually drive it. As an individual, you would obviously have to contend with lifestyle questions when making this decision.
Thanks for looking! This should be easier to research.
This argument is a bit slippery, going from “better alternatives exist” to “they need to expanded to be a useful replacement.” It’s the difference between understanding the present and imagining the future.
Sometimes there is better alternative transportation for some trips, but that’s not true of all trips, in general. Even in cities that have a lot of mass transit like New York, there are gaps, neighborhoods that aren’t served well, or trips that require lots of transfers.
Theoretical alternatives don’t actually count when you’re figuring out how to get somewhere (or whether to go at all). They will count after they’re built. I think it’s important to try to imagine and advocate for future improvements, but we should be clear we’re doing it.
This reminds me of Norway's proposed railway connection to Tromsø ("Nord-Norgebanen"). For NOK 200 billion ($18 billion USD) and serving a relatively sparsely populated area compared to Oslo, I understand why the project is not a priority. There are probably more useful ways to allocate rail spending nearer to population centers. But I think this is still an example of Norwegians being uninterested in spending money on transit while having no problem spending billions of kroner on EV subsidies.
I hear people making these same comments a lot and frankly it's gotten to be rather annoying.
There are people who have spent years studying this field, but generally speaking they're not the one's you'll find on an internet comment section. The conversations about it are going to reflect the much broader strokes of what the experts say but without the nuance. I think I understand some of the nuance, and as such your opinions of it kind of feel like a bad faith interpretation of what people are asking for - though of course, I don't suspect that's what you're trying to do in the least. I don't see anyone suggesting we displace large populations to demolish and rebuild them. The things that I see that seem to have the most popular support behind them are the most tepid solutions - things like removing a subset of zoning restrictions and minimum parking ordinances, or changing the ways that roads are built to make them more friendly to pedestrians and cyclists. I'd dare to say that they aren't even real solutions; they're just the bare minimum that's needed to hope and pray that the free market fixes everything.
I'm not saying that trains, busses, and other mass public transportation options are not the important thing. I'm saying that it's a secondary thing that comes from building cities and towns in such a way that they become useful. That requires building them in such a way that makes them traversable without cars.
I won't pretend to know how to improve the Bay area because I've never been there before. I couldn't possibly tell you what life is like there or why they have the problems they have. But I can tell you that where I live in California, everything is designed to make life easier for people who own cars at the expense of people who do not own cars. The same is likely true in the majority of the Bay area. I've mentioned this idea before in other contexts, but the problems we are dealing with today are not because there is some evil conspiracy, but simply because the people who speak up the most like it this way. If we want to make changes, the problem is not figuring out how - at least not from a broad perspective. The problem is getting more people open to accepting solutions that will work in their specific neighborhoods. There is no one-size-fits-all answer.
This is a lot more understandable of a position. And I don't think you're wrong at all about displacement; I'd be lying if I said that it could be done without any. But one thing to consider is that insisting in a "right now" solution is going to make that displacement much more painful and traumatic for the people involved. That's why most people are more open to the "free market" type solutions, and why I tend to gravitate for them personally.
I live in the far east side of LA county, so to me everything is suburban sprawl. When it comes to your bike lane example, I would tend to agree with you; the bike lanes by my home are all up and down hills and don't really connect to much; they basically end when they reach commercial areas! They're basically just there for leisure use. But if I were to go to Long Beach there's a big part of the land there that is a big flat grid with lots of mixed commercial and residencial areas. Bike lanes there are actually useful! You can conceivably take your bike out, go get dinner, buy a new outfit, pick up groceries, and take everything back home easily.
Another thing that is common in my area is commercial areas that are dying. There's a big mall near me that takes up a huge plot of land and if you go inside you'll find that the owners are desperate for renters and most of the big brands have fled. It's so close to death that they are closing at 6PM on weekends. It's the perfect candidate to tear down and rebuild as a mixed-use walkable neighborhood. But generally speaking that's not something the government can (or is at least willing to) do. It's something that would need to be specifically encouraged.
I really feel what you're saying about infrastructure debt. There are road construction projects near me that have been happening for years with absolutely glacial pace. I cannot conceive how it could possibly take that long to get some of these projects done. But the reason why we have so much infrastructure debt is because building for automobiles is unsustainable. That's why it's so important to reduce dependency on them.
There's going to be pain no matter what option we choose. I don't want to minimize the pain of displacement, but I do believe that there's more positive effects from choosing to minimize car dependency over some (hopefully) short term housing instability.
The problem is that the people that own property in those areas probably don't think there is a problem that needs to be solved. The younger generations and the rental population are the ones with the most need for structural changes but the least influence to actually change it.
People won't think there is a problem if they haven't seen a better way to do it.
Precisely! That's why I'm saying that right now awareness is the most important thing.
I live in a single-family house and I have a car, so I'm not living with any major problems in my life. But I like to imagine what it would be like if I could just ride a bike to a small grocer for what I need, when I need it, instead of having to plan the whole week in advance and then going to the grocery megastore in my vehicle that I have to personally operate and invest more than a hundred dollars a week to use. At a minimum I'd like to see less giant empty parking lots so we can minimize the urban heat island effect.
I have no kids. But I also don’t know anyone who is against school busses. Being pro-walkability doesn’t mean getting rid of cars, trucks and busses. They still have their uses.
With all due respect, I don't think you're talking to people with those kinds of views here. I've seen people like them too, but they're very uncommon.
Better for who?
The real answer is to make it more frustrating to drive. We don't need to relocate swaths of people, we need to convert roadways into public transit/pedestrian corridors. The issue you're talking about is a problem because we build transit around roadways. Same with walking and bike infrastructure. No wonder it's shit.
Driving has to be a less desirable, less viable option. That means removing parking, reducing the size of freeways, reducing road access. All of those have added benefits to the community. Additional space for commercial projects, housing, or parks. Viable land for transit development. Safer and faster walking/biking.
I think the question you're actually asking is "how do we get this AND continue to prioritize cars" and the answer is you can't. It would be easy enough to develop a general plan and we even have the resources to do it. There just isn't anyone brave enough to face the backlash of such a comprehensive project.
Agreed. But it's not just that. It's that north Americans highly value their independence. Their freedom to move when they want, to wherever they want. It's part of our cultural makeup. You could provide FREE light rail transit or bussing and many would still choose their car for transportation because we just don't like being tied to a fixed schedule to fixed locations nor do we particularly like sharing our personal space unless we're forced to.
I think this is a broadly accurate cultural assessment, but the fact that North American auto ownership is lower in cities with relatively good transit systems, such as New York, suggests that Americans and Canadians are not as obstinately attached to the rugged individualism of personal transportation as the zeitgeist suggests they are.
New York City's 46% rate of auto ownership is an outlier, but part of a visible trend (note that this is 22% in Manhattan vs. 83% in Staten Island; see more granular data—in some neighborhoods it is as low as 7.5%). It's followed by Newark's 58%, DC's 63%, and others. San Francisco is at 70%. Toronto is apparently around 72%. Except for New York and New Jersey, those values are supermajorities, but even cities like Boston (66%) and Philadelphia (71%) have generally limited and ineffective public transit (unnecessarily so), especially regionally, so I wouldn't expect New York figures. Rural populations are not part of this remark.
People choose a mode based on how convenient it is for their lifestyle. The cost of public transit isn't the primary barrier for most people, definitely not for car owners. Rather, the reason urban and suburban North Americans are reluctant to orient their lives around being car-free or car-lite is because public transit options are usually not fast/frequent enough to make it frictionless, and transit mostly doesn't efficiently go where they want. In metro areas, increasing transit ridership is mostly a matter of infrastructure and operational improvements, not exclusively or even mostly a culture shift. The latter is a natural result of the former.
The "culture shift" that North Americans need to make is being okay with allocating funding toward transit projects which demonstrably return more in economic benefits than they cost (on the order of 5x annual spending). Currently, most people are under the false impression that improving transportation they don't personally use is a waste of money. This belief, while understandable, is categorically wrong, and it makes it harder for politicians to allocate funding toward transit even though it would benefit their constituents.
This underscores the importance of operating integrated inter-modal connection services, such as light rail and bus connections to heavy rail. This involves several logistical challenges, namely the need to integrate fare schemes across different modes, which tangibly reduces ridership friction. Philadelphia's SEPTA manages this rather well, with a single unified fare (SEPTA key) across all modes, with the unfortunate exception of PATCO service to New Jersey. But for the most part, the fare structure is coordinated and relatively frictionless. By contrast, New York City's disjunct transit agencies (MTA, Metro North, LIRR, NJ Transit/PATH) have traditionally had separate fares and communicate poorly with each other. The new OMNY system is much-needed.
I agree that having dedicated infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists is useful for safety and to change actual usage patterns. Walkability advocates are on the same page. Generally, I don't think activists are generally satisfied with half-measures like hourly regional rail service or unprotected bike lanes.
I agree that actual safety issues on transit are worth addressing. Most (all?) activists agree that safety is important for transit systems to reasonably operate. They are generally happy for agencies to employ more transit police and/or social workers to address safety issues or perceptions of those issues. City budgetary officials do not particularly care, which is why agencies routinely lack the funding to do this. "Activists" who oppose the presence of transit police and/or social workers in transit systems are usually suburban college students who do not regularly engage with transit systems and have limited exposure to safety concerns.
There is something to be said for distinguishing between actual threats to safety (such as being robbed), which are a legitimate concern but statistically relatively rare, with perceptions of threats to safety (such as observing an erratic individual on a metro and/or fear of being robbed), which are relatively common. I wrote a brief comment on the psychology of safety in transit systems and its effect on ridership last month which discusses this.
We've had this debate in another thread. "Freedom" by means of car is only able because other freedoms have been sacrificed to make it so. I am not free to bike from major city to major city. I am not free to get to town to town without a car. You're using a very narrow definition for freedom. I also from the US and the general "we" you're using is more of a you.
I agree it's a tough road ahead. I think the tide is starting to turn slowly. Cities are getting more crowded and suburbs are sprawling further. In many of the metros across the US traffic is increasing and I think folks are starting to make the connection that adding more lanes doesn't abate traffic, it drives it. With any big change things need to get bad enough for folks to try something radical.
Other options are more top down. Look at California and the required rezoning of cities to accommodate higher density housing. The threat of Builders Remedy has radically changed the discussion around housing and NIMBYism in municipalities across the state. Our own little town balks at any change and has now pushed for the quickest rezone for 1200 additional homes possible. I can imagine similar state level mandates for transportation, though perhaps not for Houston.
Nice, that's where I grew up.
California has already removed the parking minimums for new developments close to public transit (within half a mile of a public transit stop). I'm hoping there will be expansions of these law changes in the near future.
You are preaching to the choir! And this is precisely why I am optimistic. We're currently seeing the tipping point with housing and laws are starting to change. Hopefully transit will follow. We will need top down financing from the fed, but we are moving in the right direction (at least in CA).
I actually joined my municipal planning commission to support the housing element and general plan updates. It's so interesting to see just how progressive our initial general plan was in terms of complete streets and pedestrian/bike focused infrastructure. I'm hoping to ratchet it up on the inbound rewrite with extensions for biking and tangible ADA requirements when conducting routine road maintenance.
I mean, this article is from Vox, so they aren't going to do a deep analysis of a particular city's transit system. I can't answer every part of your question, but I can summarize the three main areas of improvement in the US:
Various organizations are interested in promoting various interpretations of higher density in urban areas. This may include infill (mostly of parking lots), upzoning (allowing homeowners or developers to build denser buildings in traditionally low-density areas), completely new construction (usually in anticipation of a new transit line), and more. The public is vaguely aware of these processes.
At its core, addressing path dependency in the US is not a dramatically different problem than elsewhere. Most people decide on a mode of transportation based on how quickly and reliably it gets them to their destination. If you improve speed and frequency of transit, driving becomes correspondingly less attractive. Other factors matter too, but those ones apply anywhere in the world and to any mode. American cities are generally not very good at this which is one reason why car dependency remains entrenched. There are a number of technical problems involved here, and a lot of financial ones, but for the most part it is not an impossibility. Examples of organizations studying these issues include the Effective Transit Alliance (ETA), whose newest report on New York City infrastructure I would like to talk about on Tildes when I am finished reading it—it covers exactly what you are looking for (well, for NYC) in a fairly accessible format—and TransitMatters, whose reports focus on Boston.
Reducing the costs of capital projects and maintenance is a more insidious problem, largely the domain of serious train nerds. There exist a small number of professional organizations which study this issue, notably the Transit Costs Project. The public is utterly unaware of these processes. While news media often report on inflated budgets for transit projects, they rarely meaningfully explain why cost overruns happen on a granular level. I have shared content from Alon Levy in the past, a transit expert whose academic focus is this specific problem, especially as it relates to the Northeast Corridor.
You would be surprised how many NEC-like population distributions there are in the United States. See: Where High-Speed Rail Works Best. Instead of speaking generally about the "dissimilarity" between the NEC and the rest of the country, I think it is more useful to focus on population density figures. Using a city-pair gravity model, in which potential high-speed rail (HSR) corridors are identified based on the size of a particular city (node) and the distance between pairs of nodes (edges), we can identify a large number of dense corridors in the US, including large portions of the West Coast. You can use a HSR corridor as a proxy for an area that is relatively similar to the NEC and has potential to be more similar because it is feasible to improve transit access to a relatively similar extent.
Trams/streetcars can fill this niche, as can more frequent and accessible bus service. Trams have higher capacity, which is why they are often a useful mode. I spent a considerable amount of time riding the Île-de-France tramways in Paris this year, mainly line T3a. These systems used ovehead catenary wires for electric power. You can instead power trams with a third rail system; these are safe for street-running as long as you use a segmented at-grade power supply system (see 3.1 § Road surface contact rail power supply), but this is expensive. The ideal solution is to be critical of NIMBY policies and use systems that actually work even if they are not absolutely aesthetically perfect, but it's certainly possible to avoid the catenary wires if that is a priority for the Bay. If you're interested in seeing trams in your region, I recommend reaching out to a local representative with documentation of potential engineering implementations.
A slightly lower capacity alternative is bus rapid transit (BRT), which usually entails creating dedicated bus lanes and more streamlined routes for buses. You can also give BRT buses signal priority at intersections. It is useful to create accessible "boarding islands" for all bus routes that make level boarding possible and do not interfere with bike lanes (these are common in Paris and elsewhere). When connected with heavy rail, BRT can be an effective means of transportation through areas that are not served by trains. They are further complemented by non-rapid bus routes for particularly local service. I recently shared a link about a BRT line in Portland, OR which includes observations on its success from Jarrett Walker. If you're interested in seeing more BRT in your region, I also recommend talking to a local official.
The actual solution here (and you may detect a pattern) is upgrades to infrastructure and rolling stock. Transit agencies can advertise all they like, and people can genuinely enjoy taking transit, but if it isn't at least as fast or as convenient as driving, ridership will remain limited. Solving this problem requires local, state, and federal funding for capital investments. I cannot comment on all of Caltrain's infrastructure problems, but I can speak to at least one ongoing project which has the capacity to dramatically improve operational efficiency and therefore the speed and frequency of service.
Caltrain currently runs diesel trains, not electric ones. From an operational efficiency standpoint, this is the worst thing ever: diesel locomotives are expensive, heavy, slow (both in acceleration and max speed), unreliable, maintenance-intensive, loud, and produce localized environmental emissions. The best alternative, called an Electric Multiple Unit (EMU) traincar, addresses literally all of these problems. The only real barrier is electrifying the track, either through catenary wires or third rail. The ETA's NY report happens to have a section on EMUs which I will quote:
The 25%+ improvement to travel times resulting from electrification alone would be very significant. So you'll be pleased to hear that Caltrain is currently electrifying its tracks using funding from the California High-Speed Rail Authority, various California local and state agencies, and the Federal Transit Administration.
In general, additional infrastructure upgrades that improve rail efficiency, reliability, and end-user productivity include level boarding (which improves access for wheelchair users but also significantly improves alighting times for able-bodied passengers), grade separation (which eliminates all interactions with car and pedestrian traffic, improving safety and allowing for much higher safe operational speeds; and potentially separation from freight rail traffic, which can also reduce delays), double-tracked or quad-tracked segments or sidings in areas with higher traffic (which allows for express trains to pass local trains without slowdowns). Joe Biden's 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law may be a source of funding for additional upgrades, if needed. I'm not sure off the top of my head how relevant each of these are to Caltrain's operational efficiency, but if you're interested in seeing any of these upgrades in your region, I again recommend talking to a local official.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law does provide $800 million to a program called the "Advancing Equitable Workforce Development for Infrastructure Jobs," which should at least partially address employee training gaps for a meaningful period of time. This funding was only possible because of the BIL. Previous administrations, and those of one political party in particular, have intentionally neglected infrastructure investments for decades.
The issue in transit construction is not necessarily just due to a shortfall of workers in absolute terms but rather general incompetence resulting from Anglocentric xenophobia, among other things. American planners literally refuse to learn from other countries, relying on ineffective construction paradigms and insisting on reinventing the wheel instead of adopting obviously superior methodologies developed elsewhere. Many of these problems are managerial at their core. I recommend reading some of Levy's commentary on this matter.
There is more at play, including requirements to sometimes use American-made products in federal projects. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law does allocate some funding to encourage domestic manufacturing which should alleviate this in some ways, including incentives for additional traincar manufacturing plants in the US from European companies like Alstom. Additionally, the ridiculously litigious atmosphere of infrastructure development in the United States, and weaponization of environmental regulations against rail projects that would demonstrably help the environment relative to comparable highway or airport expansions, increase project costs significantly. These have contributed to significant delays in the construction timeline of California High-Speed Rail, for instance. This problem is more difficult to solve.
I think we're off-topic? This article is about Norway. You seem to be almost entirely concerned with what people think about cars in the US. Yes, we're self-centered, but try to rein it in a little?
The article is interesting for what we can learn about Norway. There's unfortunately some verbiage about "lessons learned" for other places, but it still seems like what to do in the US is out of scope, and the article would be tighter if all references to the US were removed.
Agreed. The article was a pretty interesting perspective into Norway's EV policies and its evolution over the years. After reading the article, I was expecting much discussion regarding the main topics of the article, rather than the few concluding paragraphs centred on the US (which I agree, does detract from the rest of the article).
Unfortunately, it seems the discussion has heavily veered off-course. The vast majority of comments aren't remotely connected with the contents of the article at all! Most of the page have been deviated into completely unrelated contentions and other miscellaneous matters, rather than the main subject matter — Norway's EV policies!
In the hopes of saving the thread, I've labelled the top-level root comment off-topic.
Yes, you’re right, the comparison to the US is definitely there in the article. (Many news articles will play up local angles to try to attract readers.) But I think we get to decide for ourselves which part of the article is most interesting, and in this case it’s the reporting on what’s going on in Norway, which is most of the article.
Yes, that’s fair, and I was wrong to say that doing the comparison with the US is off-topic.
However, I’d like to push back against the idea that you need to understand and appreciate an article by figuring out the main point and seeing if the the supporting evidence supports the main point. (And, presumably, if it doesn’t hold up then the article is no good.)
Sometimes the main point is kind of dumb, just a news hook. We can read articles any way we like. We can appreciate an article just for the reporting in it. It’s possible to learn interesting things from articles we disagree with, and even from people we ideologically disagree with. We can appreciate good examples for themselves, instead of thinking of them as just supporting evidence.
I hate to see articles dismissed on Tildes because people don’t read them with the idea of finding something interesting in them. Instead they’re often judged by which side the author is on and what’s the main point they’re trying to make.
In this case it was rather striking how quickly the conversation moved to talking about transportation issues in the US. That discussion is mostly independent of the article, which has barely any reporting about transportation issues in the US. But I guess that’s what people wanted to talk about.
Yes, nearly every article shared here does have some kind of point to it because it wouldn't be interesting otherwise. We are biased towards reading articles this way, in part by the UI which has an emphasis on headlines. (Also, we see articles about a variety of subjects in random order, and that has effects too.)
A question that's useful to ask for a scientific paper is "what did they actually do?" (What were the experiments?) Sometimes the conclusion is about people or animals in general, but the experiment was in mice. That's not terrible since there are good reasons to do experiments in mice. We do expect the results to often generalize. But this generalization that might not hold up. Part of reading critically is to understand the gaps between what they did and the conclusions they claim can be drawn from it.
In this case, the author went to Norway and talked to people there about transit stuff, learned about the history of car use and public transportation in Norway, and so on. We can ask, okay, what would you expect a reporter to learn about transit from a trip to Norway?
And sure, maybe the conclusions were overblown and that's a fair criticism, but it's an interesting trip report anyway.
I think it’s possible to learn things from biased reporters, as long as they’re not so biased that they make stuff up or misrepresent what they encounter. Most experts do have opinions. But yeah, there’s a question of trust.
Okay, fair enough. However, I don't think it's fair to say it's just an editorial. Editorials are opinion pieces that are typically written without doing any reporting.
Talking to people in Norway and writing up what he learned is reporting, whatever else he wrote.
To make change you educate people. Show them why they should want to replace the extra lanes with light rail, BRT, and bike lanes.