Why can't people just buy electric cars, replacing most of the existing fleet in, say, ten years, and then continue as now?
Building a new light rail system is pretty expensive and relies on either a newly constructed development that borders the newly constructed rail system (as was the case in the 1930s in the eastern U.S.), or relies on a long-term change to the housing setup. In the latter case, you build a rail line through an existing suburb, change the zoning rules, and then in about 50 years the housing will have shifted to be closer to the rail line. This sort of time scale might not be useful in the current situation.
What needs to happen, I think, is, first, a considerable rework of the electricity distribution system so we can get enough electricity from West Texas and Eastern Colorado moved over to where the people live. Then, second, we need to convince our planning agencies to allow mixed development.
A shining example of how not to plan a new community is exemplified by the proposed Banning Lewis Ranch development, east of Colorado Springs. This is a huge old cattle ranch that has been purchased by a developer and is currently planned to be yet another typical suburb. It's an excellent candidate for a correctly-planned city, because there is literally nothing out there right now at all. Not even dirt roads, just 21000 acres of open space.
http://www.banninglewisranch.com/the-ranch/location-map/main-village-interactive-maps/
Ok, we need to get the story straight. If renewable energy sources can provide electricity at a cost that is only slightly higher than what we pay now for cheap fossil supplied oil, and if most people have commutes that are within the range of electric car technology, then what sort of retrofitting is needed?
Because peak oil is not the only reason suburbs need to be retrofitted, just the more urgent one ? Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Among other factors, there's one mentioned in the Yglesias posts : elderly population is booming, and driving might not be best for all of them - giving them an option beyond the retirement home could be an idea.
There's the workability of large scale cities : the cars may be electric or gas, but Los Angeles can't grow much more anyway. You can't build enough roads to satisfy an ever increasing traffic.
Also, the land use of suburbia is non-negligible, and one day may need to be used to actually feed people... Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
And, further, its possible to structure the settlement system so that the same density does not involve as many miles of individual transport.
Of course, the above argument only looks at one dimension of the transition ... it does not involve the ongoing transition we are going to see to a larger share of the population living in more densely populated urban cores, nor what should be done in terms of newly established developments (though with pervasive opportunities for effective infill redevelopment, the pressure for newly established developments is reduced) ... but you increase the average density by increasing the density of existing settlement wherever it lies on the distribution. Utsukushikereba sore de ii
I don't think there's a public transport problem here.
But establishing a regulatory system that mandates that everyone in a suburb lives on 1/4 acre of land that owned, also established consequences in terms of higher drive time (and progressively growing, because sprawl development is a dynamic system that grows traffic) and lower disposable income.
So if some people prefer shorter drive times and higher disposable income, and there is a trade-off between 100% suburban sprawl development and 80% suburban sprawl development where the latter offers the option of shorter drive times and higher disposable income ... why not offer people the choice? Utsukushikereba sore de ii
Re: Retrofit Suburbia Redux (none / 0) Ok, we need to get the story straight. If renewable energy sources can provide electricity at a cost that is only slightly higher than what we pay now for cheap fossil supplied oil, and if most people have commutes that are within the range of electric car technology, then what sort of retrofitting is needed?
Understand that "continuing as we are now" is driving progressively longer distances per person per year, on average.
There are renewable energy sources that can provide electricity at a cost that is only slightly higher than what we pay now for cheap fossil supplied fuel. But there is not an unlimited amount of that electricity ... the flip side of indefinitely renewable is a given amount to harvest per year.
And if we devote all of the newly harvested renewable power to increased power consumption, then it is not available to replace increasingly expensive fossil fuels ... both increasingly expensive in terms of marginal production and User costs, and increasingly expensive in terms of recognizing ongoing negative externalities.
OTOH, especially in low gas tax countries where there have been the heaviest sprawl subsidies like the US and Australia, a program of completely replacing existing suburbia, tearing it all down and building new on a different model, presumes an abundance of natural resources.
Retrofitting suburbia is reorganizing space in suburbia so that suburban houses are moved closer to their own local central place, as farms in this part of the US that were settled before the days of the railroads were each relatively close to their own little hamlet, by seeding those local central places into the suburbs.
Obviously its going to work better with a heavy dose of bribe than with efforts at across the board mandates. Here, the leverage is provided by the fact that projects like trolley buses, tram/trains, light rail, Aerobus, are more capital intensive and have much more of their costs centralized into the operating concern, so that they are "expensive" to start-up even where they are cheaper overall than the current transport system.
That means that if Federal subsidies comes at the cost of requiring zoning amendments within 1/4 mile (400m) of designated transport stops and within 1/2 mile (800m) of designated major transport stops, there are going to be some takers for that money. From there, its a demonstration effect ... areas with higher public transport corridor usage have higher locally retained incomes and therefore strong local employment multipliers than areas with higher public/private car usage. Providing a way for developers to make more money in a rising fuel cost environment than the current system of mandating and subsidizing sprawl ensures the spread of the system nationwide. Utsukushikereba sore de ii
They can't.
The US is not putting up enough solar panels and windmills--I mean, it's not even close--to power the existing electrical infrastructure, let alone adding millions of electric cars.
Indeed, if the cost of oil-heating exceeds the cost of electric space-heaters, we are looking forward to the Northeast grid going down this winter. (I know the Midwest is separate from the NE grid,) but everywhere has the same deep problem: Under privatization nobody wants to be responsible for transmission lines, and transmission capacity has not kept up with generation and usage.
Electrical cars are certainly more efficient than internal combustion vehicles. But that is relative. In an absolute sense, they are not an efficient way to move people at all.
