It's financially disastrous for poor people to take a loan to buy a depreciating asset that sits parked 95% of the time. And requires monthly expenses for insurance and parking.
Moving to EVs means middle- and upper-middle class people have a decision to make: spend money on switching, or join everyone else in public transit.
The middle income quantile spends $11,000 per year on transportation. The median US car payment is $749 new and $529 used. The sooner we force middle class people and up move to EVs—which they can afford to do—the sooner we can create a robust market for used EVs for the bottom quantile.
[1] One of the biggest differences I noticed between Baltimore, where I lived, and rural Oregon, where my wife’s family is from, is that people in Baltimore are trapped in dangerous neighborhoods with no job prospects. Their lack of mobility turns them into wards of the state. People in rural Oregon are just as poor, but they can move around looking for housing and work. E.g. someone who loses their job can move in with family in the middle of nowhere and still commute to find part time work or pursue job leads in the towns.
Completely agree.
> And in the lowest income quantile, households spend over $6,000 per year on transportation.
And that's a much bigger impact on personal finances, proportionately, than higher-income people.
> because the alternative is paying much more money in rent and losing the flexibility to pursue job opportunities in different places
Because that's how American cities are built. Destroy yourself financially (and healthwise - 1h/day in the car is awful) driving, suffer through terribly long commutes on a bus route that drives everywhere, or rent shitty "luxury" shoeboxes near work. I agree it's not practical to fix it in the short-term. I just resent middle- and upper-middle class people opposing government incentives to switch to EVs because "it'll hurt the poor". Like no, the poor are screwed either way, you just don't want to pay up.
It’s not just “American cities.” Even in Tokyo—which has transit better than what Americans could ever aspire to build—getting around on public transit takes much longer than driving. And it can take even longer if you change jobs and your workplace is no longer near the same train like as your previous workplace. Even with Tokyo’s amazing infrastructure, people using public transit there don’t have as much geographic flexibility in finding jobs and housing as my wife’s lower income family members in rural Oregon and Idaho.
Citation needed.
"People in Tokyo have less flexibility in finding jobs compared to rural Oregon".
Citation strongly needed. The sheer volume of jobs and opportunity in Tokyo simply bears no comparison to Oregon or Idaho.
Most cars are apparently owned outright / not currently financed? 66% according to this source at least:
https://accountinginsights.org/what-percentage-of-cars-on-th...
They each know that without time boxed regulation they'd all try to defect and let the others take the early losses leading to the entire industry collapsing.
It's fixing a prisoners dilemma.
It has nothing to with urbanism or social engineering, it's just about the need for transportation.
> We have a perfectly acceptable drop in replacement for gas cars in the form of EVs.
No, we don't. Not yet. There are still serious problems around charging that remain showstopper issues for many, mostly lower-income, people.
Meanwhile, public transit keeps people poor by limiting their ability to move around for better jobs and housing. It’s a huge unnecessary tax on poor people to try to yoke them to public transit in the name of climate change mitigation.
My point is that if we take away people's gas cars before having an alternative that works for everyone, that's bad. And we don't have an alternative that works for everyone yet.
This is an interesting one. Public transit can pretty much only be built after there is demand. Because we limit growth so much, there are very few places where we have allowed growth that would support transit.
If you were to overturn land use regulation as a whole, you would get dense places, and then we could get more transit...
I like the goal: no more gasoline cars. And if governments can grow a pair and set a realistic end date for them it would work out great. A suggested timeline: no gasoline cars manufactured after 2028, no new sales after 2030, complete road ban after 2037 unless you buy carbon offsets etc.
The roadmap I suggested above is already highly aggressive and will generate massive pushback. Doing it overnight would be disastrous. No politician will do it while Americans remain in love with their gasoline tanks.
Our nation's continuing to emit a little CO2 from automobile tailpipes is not so dire a danger that we can't meet our goal with a sufficiently drastic tax on fossil fuels, enabling those few consumers and organizations that benefit the most from emitting CO2 from automobile tailpipes to continue to emit a little.
It is hard for policymakers even to imagine all the ways an outright ban on something will incur costs -- and most of the time, they shouldn't even try.
mcc1ane•4mo ago