Are you gonna get an electric car anytime soon? (Or do you already have one?)

[Bobby Henderson]

I do not see adapting to fewer cars as viable in the USA (as a potential solution). About the only place where it is really viable is when one is working in a major city where the people density is so large that mass transit is viable and parking spaces are not. But, even then it is a serious compromise. I also wonder, with many jobs showing that they don't need an office setting if the need to move about just for work won't reduce the need for any transportation.

For the time being, the New Urbanism goal of people moving from the suburbs into urban centers (to yield a variety of social and environmental benefits) is a pipe dream or even an outright lie. All of the new housing being built in trendy urban districts is of the luxury priced variety. People waiting tables, tending bar or pouring coffee in any of those trendy urban shoppes will have hard time affording condos with $500K starting prices. Rent prices are exploding just as bad. Unless these service industry workers want to pile up four or more in a tiny apartment they're going to have to commute to their shitty jobs from some considerable distance. The people buying those $500K condos either already own big suburban spreads (and want a downtown crash pad) or they're buying the properties as investment vehicles.

New Urbanism is a bullshit ideal just as exclusionary as zoning practices that have shaped and Balkanized American suburbs for decades. The only way the New Urbanist ideal can ever possibly work is if people from ALL income classes can live and work together in the same area. Americans don't want that. A well-off person will freely bitch about a restaurant having lousy service from not being able to staff up properly, but he doesn't want any of those lower income trash workers living next door to him. While that fact of American life persists we will always need personal motorized vehicles to travel and commute significant distances.

Mass transit could be a solution, if it wasn't such a cost boondoggle loser to do in the United States. Absolutely no one digs riding on a city bus. We can't build anything related to passenger rail without the costs absolutely exploding.

A lot of different hurdles need to be leaped before EVs can reach "critical mass" adoption levels where internal combustion engine based vehicles can be fully replaced. The only kind of electrical vehicle I would consider buying within the next decade would be an electric powered bicycle. When I was in Colorado Springs recently I visited a Scheels sporting goods super store. They had some awesome looking (and expensive) bicycles in stock. Some were battery powered. Our biking infrastructure in Lawton absolutely sucks though. And too many motorists drive with their heads way way up their asses. Anyone commuting via bike is putting his life at very serious risk.

[Steve Guttag]

I don't think EVs need to be a light-switch type conversion...I think it will become the de facto standard over time. There will come a time when you won't have the option of buying a ICE type vehicle...even without legislation...more and more people will go that way. If the electric supply issue isn't addressed...that will slow adoption.

[Marcel Birgelen]

For the time being, the New Urbanism goal of people moving from the suburbs into urban centers (to yield a variety of social and environmental benefits) is a pipe dream or even an outright lie. All of the new housing being built in trendy urban districts is of the luxury priced variety. People waiting tables, tending bar or pouring coffee in any of those trendy urban shoppes will have hard time affording condos with $500K starting prices. Rent prices are exploding just as bad. Unless these service industry workers want to pile up four or more in a tiny apartment they're going to have to commute to their shitty jobs from some considerable distance. The people buying those $500K condos either already own big suburban spreads (and want a downtown crash pad) or they're buying the properties as investment vehicles.

Politics aside, but government policies may be needed to keep the cost of housing under control. Right now, with a shortage of everything, it's a pipe-dream (excuse my copyright infringment) to start affordable housing projects, but governments could very well incite them, so even a normal middle class family can afford to buy a "hipster condo" in a "hipster new-urbanist neighborhood".

New Urbanism is a bullshit ideal just as exclusionary as zoning practices that have shaped and Balkanized American suburbs for decades. The only way the New Urbanist ideal can ever possibly work is if people from ALL income classes can live and work together in the same area. Americans don't want that. A well-off person will freely bitch about a restaurant having lousy service from not being able to staff up properly, but he doesn't want any of those lower income trash workers living next door to him. While that fact of American life persists we will always need personal motorized vehicles to travel and commute significant distances.

So, the solution is more income equality? Those are some dangerous words in the US of A...

Mass transit could be a solution, if it wasn't such a cost boondoggle loser to do in the United States. Absolutely no one digs riding on a city bus. We can't build anything related to passenger rail without the costs absolutely exploding.

It's all the urban sprawl that's making all of those services very expensive. Running an efficient bus service in low density environment is simply not cost effective. The same is true with almost everything else: utilities are far more expensive and what about public roads?

Combine this with an ageing and shrinking population, stuff will eventually just be unmaintainable. And what about all those older people who will need some form of care or assisted living somewhere in the future?

A lot of different hurdles need to be leaped before EVs can reach "critical mass" adoption levels where internal combustion engine based vehicles can be fully replaced. The only kind of electrical vehicle I would consider buying within the next decade would be an electric powered bicycle. When I was in Colorado Springs recently I visited a Scheels sporting goods super store. They had some awesome looking (and expensive) bicycles in stock. Some were battery powered. Our biking infrastructure in Lawton absolutely sucks though. And too many motorists drive with their heads way way up their asses. Anyone commuting via bike is putting his life at very serious risk.

Electric bycicles are pretty awesome, even though they're still pretty expensive. The amount of lithium needed for them is tiny, compared to your average car. Over here, our biking infrastructure is pretty awesome, even compared with neighboring countries. I've driven around in cars for decades now and only recently I rediscovered the bike and how awesome it can be, how it actuallly inspires a more active lifestyle, even if the bike is an e-bike. Countries struggling with obesity, of which the one I'm currently living in is certainly one, should really try to actively promote biking, electrical or not. Municipalities should also invest in biking infrastructure, which is also far cheaper and less destructive than car infrastructure.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I'm not as concerned about the source of the electricity, in terms of is it green enough. I would not equate the efficiency of a power plant, regardless of energy source, compared to an ICE. The ICE efficiency is horrible, at best, and it goes down from there. One is down in the 20-35% range on an ICE. Mind you...coal is not great but they tend to start at the level where ICE is at its best and we are, increasingly using non-coal power...so that figure will only get better.

As for AC converters...EVs already do their own power conversion. The Level-1 and Level-2 AC power sources are, for the most part, "dumb" boxes...the inverters is happening under the hood of your vehicle.

Steve, am not talking about the cars inverter, but an indepent system comprised of roof panels and power walls to charge the car. I know a person doing this and he actually puts power back into the grid and gets paid for it. His home electric bill is usually zero.

[Bobby Henderson]

Politics aside, but government policies may be needed to keep the cost of housing under control. Right now, with a shortage of everything, it's a pipe-dream (excuse my copyright infringment) to start affordable housing projects, but governments could very well incite them, so even a normal middle class family can afford to buy a "hipster condo" in a "hipster new-urbanist neighborhood".

Very few local lawmakers have any balls at all to attempt putting a cap on housing prices or getting behind a housing development offering units affordable to middle or lower income workers. Same goes for politicians on the state level. There are few if any categories where the NIMBY factor is more intense than when well-off property owners mobilize against any projects related to affordable housing.

The people in the United States who determine where housing is built and what kind prefer building as much "R-1 zoned" single family unit stuff as possible. They prefer neighborhoods strictly separated by income class.

The lack of affordable housing, particularly smaller "starter" homes, is really going to bite the United States in the ass in the future thanks to what soaring living costs are doing to young adults now. Young people aren't that stupid. They know it costs an outrageous fortune to get married and/or have kids. A bunch of these people can't afford to move out on their own unless they do something like join the military or move to an entirely different region of the country. These trends will have a pretty negative impact on US generation demographics starting in the next 10-20 years. The "canary in the coalmine" moment will be when you start seeing school districts struggling to justify their existence due to a lack of new students.

It's all the urban sprawl that's making all of those services very expensive. Running an efficient bus service in low density environment is simply not cost effective. The same is true with almost everything else: utilities are far more expensive and what about public roads?

Sprawl alone isn't what makes something like a mass transit rail project expensive in the United States. It's all the years worth of regulatory and legal crap that does it. Even highways are getting very difficult to build in the US. If the Interstate Highway system didn't exist and the US tried to begin building it now the project would be hopelessly impossible.

Other countries tend to build big infrastructure projects like highways and passenger rail lines with a top-down approach. In places like China the national government can quickly bulldoze a path for a new highway or rail line and meet little if any resistance at all. In the US any small, local group has enormous power. They can upend the big picture plans of any project. This is one reason why the high speed rail project in California turned into such a quagmire. 50 years ago the US committed a lot of sins with eminent domain abuse, which lead to things like anti-freeway revolts. Now any highway or rail project gets suffocated with rounds and rounds of Environmental Impact Statements, Draft EIS, public comment hearings, lawsuits, etc. The US is pretty much losing its ability to build any big things. Elon Musk can talk all he wants about his Hyperloop thing. But he'll have to build it in another country if he wants to get it built at all.

Combine this with an ageing and shrinking population, stuff will eventually just be unmaintainable. And what about all those older people who will need some form of care or assisted living somewhere in the future?

If the US ends up with collapsing birth rates, like what has been happening in Japan and South Korea, we're going to see all kinds of pyramid scheme style things fail. I'm not counting on Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid to be around when I'm eligible to start drawing from it. There won't be enough of a tax base to keep it solvent. We might not have enough adults to even staff our all-volunteer military and be forced to bring back the draft or mandatory service. All these big suburban McMansions that are so popular with middle aged and older Americans may turn into "white elephants" no one wants 20 years from now. A child-less, single adult probably won't have much need for a 4000 square foot house and the high utility bills and property tax bills that go with it. I think "living small" is going to be a big thing in the future. Maybe at that point "new urbanism" might be a more practical thing, if things don't just go completely to hell.

[Lyle Romer]

Not that I have anything against electric vehicles, I personally have no plans to buy one anytime soon, if ever. The deal beaker for me is the limited range. Most models don't get more than about 300 miles per charge. I have relatives in Colorado and New Mexico (among other places). So I absolutely must have a vehicle that can drive at least 400-600 miles with only brief stops made for re-fueling. I don't know just how long it takes for an all-electric vehicle to fully re-charge, but I'm pretty sure it takes a whole lot longer than the 5 minutes or so it takes me to re-fuel my pickup truck.

I don't understand people getting politically offended at the sight of an electric vehicle. My own criticisms of them are on mere practical, realistic lines. The cost of ownership is pretty high; they're still pretty much priced as a luxury item. I already mentioned the limited range. The use of Lithium-based batteries can only be a short term, stop-gap solution. There's not nearly enough Lithium in the world for that material to be a realistic, long term replacement for oil. Lithium is not exactly a "renewable" energy. Plus the United States has only one Lithium brine pool facility. We're dependent on Lithium imports, mostly from Australia and China. I haven't seen much new going on with hydrogen fuel cell technology advancement. Fossil fuel oil has its own drawbacks, not to mention there is a finite supply of it too. The auto industry, scientists, chemists, etc need to somehow come up with some better ideas.

The range wouldn't be an issue if they could charge quickly. Also, the range is overstated because you need the range most when taking long highway trips but the range is based on the "combined" rating. An EV gets more range doing stop and go due to regenerative braking than cruising at 70+ MPH on the highway. The advertised range also doesn't account for things like using A/C or heat. With an EV that touts 300 miles range (which would take a very well placed charging station to roll in right before the battery dies to hit anyway) will probably barely get over 200 miles at highway speeds with A/C or heat running.

Hydrogen fuel cell based EVs are probably a lot more practical for range and speed of refueling.

If you never need to take long trips and can do all of your charging at home then an EV could make economic and practical sense. In a situation like yours it just isn't practical right now.

[Leo Enticknap]

We can't build anything related to passenger rail without the costs absolutely exploding.

Amen to that. The reopening of 9 miles of railroad between San Bernardino and Redlands is on the verge of completion after literally three decades since the initial proposals, with cost overruns pushing the likely overall project cost well north of half a billion. That is just to reopen a track bed that already existed with at-grade crossings: no serious new infrastructure was built. And it gets even better: literally none of the stations are within easy walking distance of a significant number of homes (the nearest to my home would be a good hour's walk away), and only two of them have nearby parking structures. Most are a 20-30 minute walk to the nearest residential areas. There will be no direct trains between the extended line and LA (you'll have to change trains at San Bernardino), meaning that anyone living in Redlands and wanting to get to a destination in the LA metro will have a 3-4 hour journey if they do it by rail, which is longer than driving the same trip through the teeth of the rush hour. There is only going to be one train an hour. I predict that there are going to be empty ghost trains going up and down that track, until the local government agencies behind this project eventually get sick of throwing money away, and close the line down again.

[Bobby Henderson]

I think it's pretty embarrassing how the United States, the so-called world's richest nation, doesn't have a real coast to coast high speed rail network. Our normal "slow speed" Amtrak network is mostly cobbled together on existing freight line track. A bunch of that service got upended today, thanks to a very likely rail workers strike by the end of this week. Just when I thought we were getting some good news with slowly falling fuel prices and what's happening in Ukraine, this rail strike may plunge us into yet another crisis. It's like we're living in a bad soap opera.

I can't wait to see what tickets are going to cost to ride California's high speed rail line from Bakersfield up to Fresno or Merced.

IIRC, the 2nd Avenue Subway project in Manhattan is the most expensive transportation related project in the country. The first phase (with 3 new subway stations on the Upper East Side) opened in 2017 and cost over $4.5 billion. The cost of Phase 2 (in progress) is estimated at $6 billion and won't open until 2027 at the earliest. Phases 3-4 aren't funded yet. The entire 8.5 mile line may cost well over $20 billion when or if it is finished.

[Frank Cox]

Mauritius has built most of a light rail transport system across the island for just over a half-billion US dollars.

It's an entirely new railroad built from scratch since there was no railroad before. There is 26km of track.

It's the Metro Express.

Here is one of the trains at Rose Hill Central Station.
1200px-Metro_Express_Mauritius.jpg

[Lyle Romer]

Very few local lawmakers have any balls at all to attempt putting a cap on housing prices or getting behind a housing development offering units affordable to middle or lower income workers. Same goes for politicians on the state level. There are few if any categories where the NIMBY factor is more intense than when well-off property owners mobilize against any projects related to affordable housing.

The people in the United States who determine where housing is built and what kind prefer building as much "R-1 zoned" single family unit stuff as possible. They prefer neighborhoods strictly separated by income class.

The lack of affordable housing, particularly smaller "starter" homes, is really going to bite the United States in the ass in the future thanks to what soaring living costs are doing to young adults now. Young people aren't that stupid. They know it costs an outrageous fortune to get married and/or have kids. A bunch of these people can't afford to move out on their own unless they do something like join the military or move to an entirely different region of the country. These trends will have a pretty negative impact on US generation demographics starting in the next 10-20 years. The "canary in the coalmine" moment will be when you start seeing school districts struggling to justify their existence due to a lack of new students.

An easy way to cap housing prices would be strict regulations that don't allow mortgages to be written if they monthly payment (principal+interest+taxes+insurance) will exceed a certain percentage of the income of the people taking out the mortgage. The prices will be capped because people will literally not be able to afford to pay more than a certain price based on their income and what they can pay for a down payment. However, politicians won't touch that with a 10 foot pole because it will be seen as discriminatory.

[Lyle Romer]

I think it's pretty embarrassing how the United States, the so-called world's richest nation, doesn't have a real coast to coast high speed rail network. Our normal "slow speed" Amtrak network is mostly cobbled together on existing freight line track. A bunch of that service got upended today, thanks to a very likely rail workers strike by the end of this week. Just when I thought we were getting some good news with slowly falling fuel prices and what's happening in Ukraine, this rail strike may plunge us into yet another crisis. It's like we're living in a bad soap opera.

I can't wait to see what tickets are going to cost to ride California's high speed rail line from Bakersfield up to Fresno or Merced.

IIRC, the 2nd Avenue Subway project in Manhattan is the most expensive transportation related project in the country. The first phase (with 3 new subway stations on the Upper East Side) opened in 2017 and cost over $4.5 billion. The cost of Phase 2 (in progress) is estimated at $6 billion and won't open until 2027 at the earliest. Phases 3-4 aren't funded yet. The entire 8.5 mile line may cost well over $20 billion when or if it is finished.

Is there really a need for long range high speed rail service in the US? Beyond 500 miles or so, airplanes are a faster way to reach a destination (even with connecting flights) and you don't need to build out tens of thousands of miles of infrastructure.

High speed rail makes sense in the US for highly traveled, medium range regional markets like the northeast. It doesn't make sense to spend enormous amounts of money to create high speed rail from NY to LA when an airplane gets you there in less than 7.5 hours including the time dealing with getting to the airport and going through security.

If you are worried about the environmental impact of air travel, modern jets are very efficient and keep getting more efficient with each generation. An A320NEO series or 737MAX uses around 40% of the fuel that a 757 used for the same distance. If the point is reached where we've replaced all fossil fuels with "green" energy (which won't happen in our lifetimes), synthetic jet fuel can be made using "green" electricity. It's way more expensive than distilled oil right now but in 100 years I'm sure it will get cost competitive.

[Leo Enticknap]

Agreed. The nations that do use high speed rail extensively (France and Japan spring to mind) have distances of around 100-400 miles between their major centers of population. Even over those sorts of distances, though, high speed rail is only viable with very large government subsidy. The longest inter-city high speed passenger rail link I can think of is Beijing-Shanghai (664 miles). Of the nations that are of comparable physical size to ours and have an extensive passenger railroad system (India and Russia strike me as the obvious examples), their long haul trains cruise at between 50-100mph. These lines exist because they were built before automobiles were mass produced, and then for a combination of economic and political reasons, a freeway network comparable to ours never followed them. Both leapfrogged the freeway (in the same way that some African countries leapfrogged landline infrastructure and went from nothing to cellular) and went straight to aviation for use cases where speed is more important than cost.

In our case, a typical coast to coast journey is in the ballpark of 3,000 miles. As a wild guess, I would speculate that you would be looking at the best part of a trillion to build a railroad capable of 250-300mph over that distance. The journey would then just be possible in one long day - likely 3-4 hours quicker than by air. If the cost of using it for passengers and time critical cargo were, say, 50% of the cost of air for only a 20% time hit, then maybe there would be a market for it. But if you're trying to recoup a half trillion dollar investment, I can't see how that would be possible.

[Steve Guttag]

Rail works best, particularly when talking about long distances, for time-insensitive cargo, of which human travel rarely qualifies. Humans will want the travel to occur when they need it and to where they need it. In metropolitan areas, particularly with common work hours, this can be accommodated more easily. But as you expand the range of the rail service, particularly when are not in a "corridor" like between DC and say Boston where there are major cities along the route where you have many get-ons/get-offs but say going between the coasts, that becomes impractical. You'd need to really break it up so both the short-hop and the coastal travelers could make maximum use of it. And, to make it worthwhile, you'd need to get the cost/time to favorably compare to air travel (or even personal vehicle). I don't see that in the US...it's too big for what it is and who would use it. And, you'd still need to accommodate the better utilization of the tracks...the freight. They would constantly need to be able to get out of the way of a fast moving passenger train without significantly adding to the time it takes to move the freight. The logistics would be quite difficult.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Rail works best, particularly when talking about long distances, for time-insensitive cargo, of which human travel rarely qualifies. Humans will want the travel to occur when they need it and to where they need it. In metropolitan areas, particularly with common work hours, this can be accommodated more easily. But as you expand the range of the rail service, particularly when are not in a "corridor" like between DC and say Boston where there are major cities along the route where you have many get-ons/get-offs but say going between the coasts, that becomes impractical. You'd need to really break it up so both the short-hop and the coastal travelers could make maximum use of it. And, to make it worthwhile, you'd need to get the cost/time to favorably compare to air travel (or even personal vehicle). I don't see that in the US...it's too big for what it is and who would use it. And, you'd still need to accommodate the better utilization of the tracks...the freight. They would constantly need to be able to get out of the way of a fast moving passenger train without significantly adding to the time it takes to move the freight. The logistics would be quite difficult.

Agreed! I have actually used Amtrack to send stuff that was in a hurry. And a few years back I even used Grethound Bus to send some freight. They were cheap 5 years ago to ship stuff...

[Bobby Henderson]

Here are two issues. One: air travel already sucks pretty bad and is getting even worse. Two: the United States has a lot more major population centers than just the Northeastern Seaboard and Southern California. People who live on the coasts conveniently keep forgetting that.

The airline industry in the US has really been a shit-show this year. Despite the terrible quality service airfare prices are soaring. That's what happens when customers have no credible alternative.

I wouldn't expect someone to ride a high speed train a really long distance, like from New York to Los Angeles or Seattle to Miami unless the person was doing something like sight-seeing or making stop-overs along the way. But a rail trip like Oklahoma City to Houston should be do-able. The United States has a lot of major cities spread across the country. The existing Amtrak slow-speed network is very deficient at linking those cities. It's not hard to chart out a high speed rail network that has a big city stop at least every 200-400 miles with the exception of the Pacific Northwest. High speed rail in the US is made impossible by lots of other NIMBY legal/political-driven factors.