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

[Bobby Henderson]

It probably won't be something for current generations, but people can adapt and will need to, as I don't see how this suburbanism will ever scale to a rapidly shrinking working population.

The next couple of decades will be uncharted territory for the United States. The generational demographics issue, aka the worsening baby bust, will create big problems in more sectors of our economy as well as our nation's ability to defend itself. Our armed forces aren't even hitting recruiting numbers targets right now.

But shrinking population does not equal everyone moving into city centers. Despite all the sales pitches for New Urbanism the ideology is still a bunch of douchebag bullshit. Not everyone is a damned millionaire. As I said before, convincing everyone to live in the city core will be an impossible pipe dream as long as "revitalized" urban districts remain priced for rich people only. If there is no housing inventory for not-rich, but still working people the New Urbanist folks need to get fucked with their sales pitch.

I've had it with America's knee-jerk habit of punching down. Us assholes don't even think twice when we treat some service industry worker, such as a lady behind a cash register, like they're worth less than dog shit. Here's the thing: even the most wealthy enclaves in this nation depend greatly on "worthless" service industry workers. We take it for granted there will always be someone to wait tables, stock grocery store shelves, flip burger patties, etc. But we don't do shit for making it possible for these "worthless" employees to live within walking distance of their shit-pay jobs. The situation is disgusting hypocrisy. It has to stop.

High cost states like New York and California are not only shedding hundreds of thousands of people on a steady basis, but many of the people who are leaving are young adults who have most of their career life-spans ahead of them. It's not like they want to leave, but the choice is often either being stuck living with parents or leaving the state in order to live like a grown-up. That's a lot of tax base leaving for more affordable locations. For now, many of these people are merely moving to more affordable cities in places like Texas. But that won't last. The biggest urban centers in Texas have already seen housing go into over-priced, not-affordable territory. Austin's real estate price bubble is now in the process of bursting.

What we may end up seeing is a migration away from these super-sized mega-cities out to more modest sized cities and towns where there is still plenty of space to build. Super-fast Internet is increasingly common in ever smaller cities and towns, making all sorts of business possible anywhere. There is an increasing same-ness in out-of-home activities like eating at restaurants, going to cinemas, etc. Big cities now only have a lot more of the same thing. That would work against the notion of getting more people to live in major city cores. And it would work against getting people to give up driving personal vehicles.

Another big problem in America: we can't build a passenger rail line of any kind without it costing a stupid fortune. Even if the commuter rail line is a glorified trolley car service we'll figure out how to make it cost billions of dollars. No one is building that kind of stuff in a city with 100,000 people. Small cities like mine are stuck with part time city bus service at best. And is there anyone anywhere who enjoys taking the bus?

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Why do you think they call it Tax-achussetts?

I've only been there a few times, never knew it was that bad there.

[Randy Stankey]

Good grief! I looked it up and it's a State wide personal property tax on vehicles. Assesed at $25 per $1000 value. Glad I don't live there...

Why do you think they call it Tax-achussetts?

[Marcel Birgelen]

It probably won't be something for current generations, but people can adapt and will need to, as I don't see how this suburbanism will ever scale to a rapidly shrinking working population. If the suburbs start to become unlivable ghost towns, people will eventually leave. We've seen this happen before. The problem though is that there is far too little new "urbanist" development, so if people move, they often move from one badly laid-out neighborhood to a new one, hopefully just a slightly better designed one.

For an American city, I guess New York has a very good public transit system, but it's certainly far from being perfect and in general feels very run-down and at the edge of capacity. A friend of mine used to live Midtown Manhattan, but moved to a waterfront property in New Jersey, with the PATH station right next door. He was literally one PATH stop away from the Oculus. Another alternative was the ferry. Going to work via PATH/subway took him like 20 minutes. Trying to do the same by car any given workday would be a nightmare, including finding a space to park the damn thing and New York parking spots are amongst the most expensive in the world. I'm not sure if it was the commute that got to him, but he moved to Austin a while ago. I guess that's where the new gold is nowadays.

I think New York is a bad example for urban development in general though, as it has become way too expensive to live or operate a normal business there, especially in Manhattan and most of the popular neighborhoods. This obviously isn't a New York only problem, but it's on full display if you just take a little walk through Manhattan. It also feels like everybody is close to the breaking point. Many smaller businesses seem to have given up and neighborhoods that used to be filled with small shops are slowly starting to look like I remember Times Square from the 1980s. I haven't visited for a while, but from what I hear from friends and family, San Francisco is even worse, where large parts nowadays look like Skid Row in L.A., complete with tent camps and heaps of garbage, like in a southern Italian city, where the local city has an argument with the local Mafia clan that runs the garbage disposal services.

Not the entirety of mankind needs to live in some dystopian megacities like New York, L.A.,Chongqing or Tokyo, but it's clear that we can't give every human nor family on this planet a car and certainly no EV. So, in order to keep stuff livable, we'll have to build walkable, livable cities at normal scales. I consider this more feasible and a bigger solution for our problems than sending people to some still non-existent colonies on Mars. There is nothing of value on Mars, other than to prove that we can go there. But sustaining life on the surface on Mars on a good day, is 10 times harder than sustaining life on the harshest place on this planet and I've not even factored in the costs to actually get them there...

[Bobby Henderson]

Very few American cities are set up where it can be somewhat practical to live without a personal vehicle. Those cities are typically the oldest ones, built-up before the automobile took off in popularity. Rail travel or the horse and carriage were the primary modes of long distance travel when cities like Boston and New York were going through their original boom phases of growth.

It's all but impossible to live without a personal vehicle in smaller American cities, towns and rural areas. Outside of the very biggest cities options for public transit get limited pretty quickly.

My town, Lawton has a city bus system, but it only runs Monday-Friday during daytime hours. Its bus routes cover only a limited part of the city. Only so many buses run at a time. So you might be waiting a while at the bus stop, even if you time things right according to the posted schedule. The bus service survives in part on government subsidies because it doesn't have nearly enough ridership to stay in the black. Anyone without a vehicle will have to take a cab (or an Über) if they can't get access to a city bus. The cost of rides in a cab or ride-sharing vehicle add up quick.

Even in a city with easy access to public transit (such as NYC) the commuting experience can be a real time-draining pain in the ass. When I commuted from Staten Island to college in Midtown Manhattan it would take 90 minutes each way. 30 minutes on a city bus, 30 minutes on the Staten Island Ferry and another 30 to get from Battery Park to 23rd Street. Three hours drained every day just commuting.

In the Summer of 1988 I worked a temp job at Merrill Lynch headquarters next to the original World Trade Center. There were a few times I had to work late. Rather than just let me commute home the usual way (subway-ferry-bus) they had their car service drive me back to Staten Island. At that time of the evening the ride took less than 20 minutes. It was so nice.

[Ryan Gallagher]

It's very hard to impossible to change the mindset of the living population, unless you unleash extreme measures like war on them. Still, I tried to change mine. It's still a work-in-progress, I'm waging war with my inner-self, but slowly, we may be getting somewhere.

But let's be honest with ourselves: The new generations will probably have to cope with the fact that the idea of everybody owning a car may not be sustainable and an EV simply isn't a wildcard solution to this problem. In the end, an EV is still a car, needs considerable resources for the amount of transportation it offers and only changing the power source, doesn't change the reality around it, it only makes it more complicated.
In the end, the solution will be to change the way we all live and work together. The suburban sprawl, now very common in the U.S., but also since having flourished in many places all over the world, where having access to a car is essential for living, may not be attainable for the vast majority of the living population. Especially, if the trend of an aging population not only continues in the more developed countries, but also takes hold in the many still rapidly developing countries.

If you live in a place that offers decent public transport, then having access to a car can become an option, rather than a necessity. The way I had organized my life back a few years ago, having access to a car more or less 24/7 was an absolute necessity, my life could not function without it. The way I live right now, I have access to all my basic living needs by foot and I'm not living smack in the middle of a large city, the neighborhood has simply been organized in such way, that this becomes a possibility. The only reason I would need a car for, is visiting relatives and friends that don't live near easily accessible public transit.

I'm also happy to live in a country that has considered the bike to be a serious transportation option and thus invested quite some efforts in a bike infrastructure that actually works. I regularly take the bike to work nowadays and since I switched to an E-bike, I don't care too much that it's 15 miles every way. Taking the bike also saves me from visiting the gym, something which I hate and consider a waste of my time. Over the years, someone apparently commissioned some pretty beautiful biking infrastructure with dedicated biking paths through parks and forested areas that were not there even 15 years ago. Those paths keep you away from other heavy traffic, which makes much of my "daily commute" much like a cycle-through-the-park, which is more relaxing than I thought it would be.

Also, if I have appointments elsewhere, if I can go there by train, I'd do so. Having access to a stable 4G/5G network and a power socket in case your battery-powered gadgets may burp on you, helps in getting work done, while you'd otherwise would be stuck behind a steering wheel.

Not everything is perfect... it's still easy to simply take the car instead of the bike, especially if I have a good excuse, like the weather. Trains do have delays and if this train involves Germany, you can be absolutely sure your journey ends in a rather expensive, but almost certain complete failure. In Germany, the car is still the gold standard of transportation, much like in the U.S., trains have become an afterthought and as such, are a complete joke and therefore a pain to use. I can understand why people tend to bypass those kinds of systems whenever possible,

I'm on nearly 20 years without a car (in Austin, with reasonably shit public transit). But you have to be content with your world being somewhat "small" and spending quite a bit more on housing to be where you need to be. Things got a bit easier with the ride-sharing/scooters/etc... now at least there is a convenient 3rd option to the bike or public transport. Actually 4th option most days, my commute is walking distance if I feel like 20min and the weather is playing nice. After hours I tend to not walk, feel much safer from random downtown mayhem at two wheel speeds.

[Marcel Birgelen]

It's very hard to impossible to change the mindset of the living population, unless you unleash extreme measures like war on them. Still, I tried to change mine. It's still a work-in-progress, I'm waging war with my inner-self, but slowly, we may be getting somewhere.

But let's be honest with ourselves: The new generations will probably have to cope with the fact that the idea of everybody owning a car may not be sustainable and an EV simply isn't a wildcard solution to this problem. In the end, an EV is still a car, needs considerable resources for the amount of transportation it offers and only changing the power source, doesn't change the reality around it, it only makes it more complicated.
In the end, the solution will be to change the way we all live and work together. The suburban sprawl, now very common in the U.S., but also since having flourished in many places all over the world, where having access to a car is essential for living, may not be attainable for the vast majority of the living population. Especially, if the trend of an aging population not only continues in the more developed countries, but also takes hold in the many still rapidly developing countries.

If you live in a place that offers decent public transport, then having access to a car can become an option, rather than a necessity. The way I had organized my life back a few years ago, having access to a car more or less 24/7 was an absolute necessity, my life could not function without it. The way I live right now, I have access to all my basic living needs by foot and I'm not living smack in the middle of a large city, the neighborhood has simply been organized in such way, that this becomes a possibility. The only reason I would need a car for, is visiting relatives and friends that don't live near easily accessible public transit.

I'm also happy to live in a country that has considered the bike to be a serious transportation option and thus invested quite some efforts in a bike infrastructure that actually works. I regularly take the bike to work nowadays and since I switched to an E-bike, I don't care too much that it's 15 miles every way. Taking the bike also saves me from visiting the gym, something which I hate and consider a waste of my time. Over the years, someone apparently commissioned some pretty beautiful biking infrastructure with dedicated biking paths through parks and forested areas that were not there even 15 years ago. Those paths keep you away from other heavy traffic, which makes much of my "daily commute" much like a cycle-through-the-park, which is more relaxing than I thought it would be.

Also, if I have appointments elsewhere, if I can go there by train, I'd do so. Having access to a stable 4G/5G network and a power socket in case your battery-powered gadgets may burp on you, helps in getting work done, while you'd otherwise would be stuck behind a steering wheel.

Not everything is perfect... it's still easy to simply take the car instead of the bike, especially if I have a good excuse, like the weather. Trains do have delays and if this train involves Germany, you can be absolutely sure your journey ends in a rather expensive, but almost certain complete failure. In Germany, the car is still the gold standard of transportation, much like in the U.S., trains have become an afterthought and as such, are a complete joke and therefore a pain to use. I can understand why people tend to bypass those kinds of systems whenever possible,

[Leo Enticknap]

"New Urbanists" have promoted a city planning ideology where everyone should move to the city core and simply walk and ride bicycles everywhere. That whole idea is a freaking utopian pipe dream.

Ironically, they should really be called very old urbanists. For the 13 years before I emigrated, I lived about 300 yards outside the city walls of York, England. Supermarkets, pubs, restaurants, the movie theater at which I worked when I moved there (and which was the reason for my moving there) ... all were within a 10-minute walk of home. The layout of the city center is basically as the Romans designed it, though expanded during the millennium or so after they called it quits and buggered off back to Italy. Given that knocking down buildings between 500 and 1,500 years old to build two-lane streets would be somewhat politically incorrect, there is (or at least, there was, when I left) an 8a curfew for vehicles delivering to businesses within the city walls, after which, if you want to go there, you have to do so on foot.

I could have lived those 13 years in York without owning a car, with only minor inconvenience. The reason I kept one was because (a) the apartment I rented came with a garage, and (b) the car I had when moved there was a decade old, completely paid off, I maintained it myself ... in short, the cost of owning it was no more than that of buying rail tickets to where I needed to go, when I needed to go there, but gave me a lot more flexibility.

In contrast, many American cities either did not grow into major settlements until almost everyone having a car became a thing, or were young enough that they could be adapted (roads widened, underground parking garages built, etc.) relatively easily and cheaply. It would be as physically and politically impossible to redesign LA to enable most of its residents not to need a car as it would be to demolish York Minster. So if the EV conversion is going to happen, it needs to happen around, and compatible with, cities and 'burbs that are already here, lived, and worked in.

[Bobby Henderson]

America's gasoline tax system is already pretty badly broken. When the 18.4¢ federal rate was established in 1993 total gasoline taxes amounted to between 25% and 33% of the total purchase. In 1993 the national average price per gallon was $1.11. Today fuel taxes are ranging between 10%-15% of the total purchase. Oklahoma has some of the cheapest gasoline in the nation, some stations here in Lawton have 87 octane gasoline at $2.67 per gallon currently. The price per gallon is considerably higher in other states. The cost of building and maintaining roads is far greater now than 1993 cost levels.

Matters are made worse by lawmakers at varying levels re-directing fuel tax revenue into other not-roads places. When Oklahoma raised its fuel tax by 3¢ per gallon the extra funds were slated to go into public schools for several years and then phased back to road funding later. Oklahoma still has school teachers leaving the state in droves (or refusing to come here in the first place).

Something has to change with how streets and highways are funded. Americans aren't going to give up their vehicles. Most Americans live in locations where they can't do without a motor vehicle. "New Urbanists" have promoted a city planning ideology where everyone should move to the city core and simply walk and ride bicycles everywhere. That whole idea is a freaking utopian pipe dream.

The cores of most American cities have turned into extreme high cost of living zones only for the richest few people. In the trendy "Bricktown" section of Downtown Oklahoma City most of the people waiting tables at restaurants, cooking food or doing other service industry jobs have to commute considerable distances to work those low pay jobs. Meanwhile all the high priced condos built up in that downtown area are either owned by people who also have much bigger primary homes in the suburbs or the condos are owned by institutional investors. New Urbanism will always be a bullshit idea as long as the working class is price-excluded from participation.

That underscores the fact that America's need for highways and personal vehicles isn't going to go away any time soon. If most people are driving electric vehicles then some other method for funding road building and maintenance will be required.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Good grief! I looked it up and it's a State wide personal property tax on vehicles. Assesed at $25 per $1000 value. Glad I don't live there...

[Randy Stankey]

All cars. They’ve even doing it for years.
It is in addition to gas taxes at the pump.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Cambridge, MA and other places have excise taxes on all cars principally garaged within it's borders. They use vehicle registration data to tell.
Every year, you get a tax bill based on the type of car and its age/value. Don't pay it and you can't register your car.

If there was a per-car excise tax on ALL cars, I'd agree if only begrudgingly. We have to pay for the roads somehow. Right?

However, if it was a tax on only certain cars, I'd be against it.

Are you talking about EV's, or all cars? Otherwise am not sure what you're getting at, but that excise tax is normally collected at the gas pump. That way, even out of towners help pay for the roads they are using. IDK, perhaps Cambridge doesn't charge that excise tax at the pumps... but the 38 other States I've driven in certainly do.
Here is some info on the gas tax and the rate each State charges...

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/s...ax-rates-2024/

[Randy Stankey]

Cambridge, MA and other places have excise taxes on all cars principally garaged within it's borders. They use vehicle registration data to tell.
Every year, you get a tax bill based on the type of car and its age/value. Don't pay it and you can't register your car.

If there was a per-car excise tax on ALL cars, I'd agree if only begrudgingly. We have to pay for the roads somehow. Right?

However, if it was a tax on only certain cars, I'd be against it.

[Leo Enticknap]

It's nicknamed the political "third rail," a metaphor with the third rail power delivery method to trains. If you touch the third rail you will be electrocuted and die, so in the political sense, a "third rail" issue is one on which such an overwhelming majority of supporters of all the major parties agree on one position, that someone running for office who advocates the opposing position (e.g. legalizing sex with five-year olds) is likely to kill their chances of election; or where public opinion is equally divided, not along party lines, and you are therefore unlikely to gain an electoral advantage by coming down on one side or the other (e.g. year-round daylight savings time). All the polling I've seen suggests that pay-per-mile (or kilometer) is firmly in the former category, and Marcel's description of what happened to the idea in The Netherlands and Germany tends to support that, too. I take Lyle's point that it is technically possible to implement it without tracking individual vehicle movements, but few are likely to believe any government which claims that it is being implemented that way.

[Marcel Birgelen]

In the Netherlands, unlike countries like many southern European countries, toll-roads are almost non-existent. The Netherlands can be considered less conservative than the United States on most issues and has historically had very high taxes on both automobiles and fuel. A pay-per-kilometer approach for road usage taxation has been tried since the 1990s and has since failed multiple times, because of numerous issues, ranging from technical feasibility to costs and privacy.

Germany, where cars are a far greater status symbol than in the Netherland, but where there are also almost no toll roads, has introduced a "per kilometer" taxing system for heavy traffic classes on motorways (the notorious German Autobahn), but for cars, there still is only a "flat fee" tax. All attempts to introduce "usage-based" billing seem to fail sooner than later. In Germany, the same seems to be true to the non-existent general speed limit on the German Autobahn...

Some things are a bit like the 2nd Amendment in the U.S., practically untouchable.