The problem is that to effectively fight climate change you need to cut emissions in five to ten years, and not fifty to a hundred, and in a nation where even a solidly blue locality openly dedicated to fighting climate change can take ten years and hundreds of millions of dollars to open a bus lane, it should not come as a surprise that many people with the resources to do so are choosing an imperfect solution now rather than running for office so they can get a bus line to their neighborhood in a few decades.

This is before we get to the fact that even nations which world leading public transport systems known for connecting to every small village and house still have plenty of cars and highways, people just don’t try and use them to for every trip in a dense city and plenty of people can get by without owning a car at all. We need to eliminate all emissions, not just city emissions, and we needed to do so ten years ago.

Yes north america needs more common, frequent, and reliable mass transit and the fact that the richest country in the world’s mass transit is in such a state is a national disgrace, but that is not opposed to the quick elimination of oil burning cars but rather should be done in parallel to them.

America specifically doesn’t want to build sane infrastructure, we’ve gone too deep on car culture over the last century+. Going out of the way to build self-driving cars rather than running more rail (or even bus, or trolley) is a solution hunting for a problem that shouldn’t exist. Especially given how much car prices have sharply increased in the last decade. Nobody will be able to afford personal transport, people will continue to use older cars for longer periods of time, or get into insane mortgage-sized car loans.

…but we want our “independence” and “freedom” dammit! … /s

Even so, the status quo changes with EVs. You see it with dealerships/shops charging more for simple repairs, manufacturers trying to go to subscription models for basic car features.

So much of the US is car-based:

• Regular maintenance at a shop to pay for parts and fluids
• The oil industry living at its current large size (it will still need to exist even if we were all EV, until every other product that uses it switches to something else)
• Refueling at gas stations that can upsell you on impulse-buy food, drink, smoke, booze
• Gas station price wars to spur pointless driving around, pointless media attention (which causes further driving around of media vehicles), pointless arguments and chaos
• Supply chains generating every part, widget, and accessory, with the assumption there will be frequent replacement
• Training for mechanics and techs on servicing all these convoluted chemical powered mechanical systems
• Emissions testing and regulation used by municipalities as a money grab
• The engineers paid to design these machines
• Tax on fuel and other car consumables
• The aftermarket accessory market selling upgrade gizmos to customize, trick out, make louder, make more powerful, make coal-rolling
• Even parts theft like catalytic converter theft rings

Yes. Easy patch.

I mean, public transport is a fucking ton of money to start up, and anywhere outside an urban center it is not just a loss but almost a total loss due to distances.

I remember being in a meeting in grad school to discuss the school bus system as part of the student review of finances. We had a bus route that went to another town a good distance away, and it was nearly always empty or with like 2 people on it, so they basically said once the grant money is gone we will shut down this route. We can’t afford to put good money into something expensive and isn’t getting used.

I realize there is a lot about car culture feeding that, but it remains a massive obstacle. Switching from existing structures like parking etc to public transport? How? How fast? What do we do with that space? Who pays for it? I’m frustrated by the system but we can’t just start from a blank slate, we have to work with it.