02-28-2022, 02:54 PM
(02-28-2022, 12:27 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: Here is a piece I found which indicates that the electric vehicle won't really be the earth's savior:
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/06/18/e...t-save-us/
Where I live (this is a rural area) a three-mile bicycle ride is unsafe. I am hemmed in by two two-lane blacktops with official speed limits of 55 mph. That's not to say that people drive 55 on either. One of them is straight, flat, and with nothing to stop for for twelve miles. It has practically no shoulder, so if someone drives boozily aside your bicycle you may be lucky to go into the ditch. Needless to say it has been a speeder's paradise. I reported that to the state troopers, and within a couple weeks I saw people pulled over. I frequently walked a dog around there and I didn't want my beloved pooch becoming just another instance of road-kill.
In the post-WWII era America had about half the population that it now does, so it could get away with urban sprawl as it cannot now. Know of course that much of that development is approaching the end of its expected life, along with the infrastructure (streets, sewers, schools, power grid) built for it. Low-density sprawl with a car-dependent populace is itself brutal to the environment, and it may not be sustainable.
Electric vehicles still require parking space.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.