What about transit? Why do Americans always have to drive. We need real alternatives to cars.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
125 points (89.3% liked)
Technology
74296 readers
4374 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The suburban sprawl makes building transit a lot harder but to fix that we need to increase density but then it’s hard to increase density when you need space for cars because you have no usable transit
Most suburbs have plenty of density to support transit as proved in other countries that provide good transit to their areas of similar density. However most suburbs have such bad transit you can't use it for anything and to people start believing the idea that it is impossible to get them good transit and so they won't agree to get it.
The American style suburbs where you have just single family homes and the closest stores are 5 miles away?
Most suburbs a store is not that far. you will often drive more than that for a store you like but something is closer.
american suburb covers a lot of variation. If you have a horse as some of the least dense support that is different from ones where you get a postage stamp lot. Streetcar suburbs designed before cars are ess dense than the new developments they are putting is around me today.
Chicken and egg situation, Americans drive because that’s how their cities and suburbs are laid out (excluding NYC, for the most part).
They don’t rely on alternatives because they are slow, inconvenient or non-existent; alternatives can’t be built up as the costs can’t be justified based on existing patronage levels.
Plenty of US cities are built like NY, on grids, as circles, etc. The problem is that everything is far away.
It’s not so much about being built on a grid, but rather being built with a particularly high population density in mind - and further supported by a robust public transit network.
No, the problem is the network matters. When you can't get anywhere on transit you don't use it and in turn won't help improve it. I've many times looked at the transit options available to me and found I was unable to get my errand done on transit so I was forced to drive. One place I lived I checked and transit could do the job so I sold my car (but my wife still had hers because there were still many things we couldn't do on transit)
transit
"We mean electric cars, you commie! The next time you talk about that thing, you are going out that window."
\s
People can't afford a new car, let alone an EV, let alone a carport or car hole.
This is just tone deaf poor blaming.
Stupid article. You don't need 240 V , you can charge with a regular wall plug. For a lot of usage patterns this is more than enough.
You can make it work on 120V, it just uses ~20-30% more energy due to the overhead of running all the vehicle systems for so much longer while charging.
I think that number is a bit off. Yes, there is overhead when charging a car to run its battery management system, heat losses in the wiring, etc. But it's not 20-30% of the ~kilowatt of power you'd run through level 1. A quick search says that 20% loss is at the higher end for level 1 (probably 15% on the lower end) but even level 2 has about a 10% loss.
The bigger issue is that level 1 just doesn't have nearly as much power as level 2. Most cars charge at level 1 at 8-16 amps. Most level 2 setups charge at a few times that, plus the voltage is doubled so the total power ends up being about 10x as much. But that's not to say everyone needs that power either. Honestly, for the average driver it's quite easy to make level 1 work.
load more comments
(3 replies)
It ain’t the junk in the garage, it’s the $80k and the spyware
Yup. Find me a car that respects my privacy and won't advertise to me and I'm in.
Edit to add: and no fuucking subscriptions to enable things the car can already do but disabled in software.
load more comments
(10 replies)
As opposed to what your comment implies, the drivetrain (EV or ICE) has nothing to do with cars spying on you. You should not blame the technology itself because shady car companies spying on your internet connected car. Most of them are well known ICE car brands that do the spying (GM, Volkswagen for instance)
Yes, most new ICE cars are Internet connected now, not just EVs.
Blame those greedy corporations, not the technology.
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(15 replies)
How about talking to the landlords who refuse to install EV chargers? Or maybe talk to manufacturers who won't sell a basic EV that isn't overpriced?
This is just "Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong!" again.
load more comments
(15 replies)
If you need to top off with 200 - 300 miles of range every night, you commute sucks giant donkey balls.
Money and options are hurting my adaption rate
view more: next ›