I'm totally sympathetic to the end goal, I would just like to see a realistic approach and the GGP's call for an outright ban on vehicles in the present is not supportable.
The biggest problem I have with various 'green' parties is that for the most part their solutions are bordering on the militant and do not take in to account the various complications that will need to be dealt with in order to implement the final vision.
I cycle a lot, wear out a couple of bike tires in a year. I also drive a lot, live in a small town outside of Amsterdam. So I think I see the world from both sides and a life-long interest in green technology (windmills, solar) as well as electric vehicles has given me a pretty good ground level of knowledge about all this stuff.
There is one part of me that would very much like to see this car-free city of the future come to pass in my lifetime, I'd probably move there in a heartbeat if it were done properly. But if it were done improperly I highly doubt it would fly and it would likely end up being undone and that would cause a setback we can not afford.
So better to think really hard about how to make this work, prepare plans that are properly wrought through in such a way that they work for everybody and in ways that do not accidentally kill the thing they are aiming for.
Keep in mind that cars were not thrown into cities without reason, and that at the time they were invented the bicycles were already there as well. The car mostly displaced the horse because it was cleaner.
The time when things went wrong is roughly the 1960's (for Europe at least) when suddenly a car was within reach of everybody that wanted one and the cities were ill prepared to deal with that. By the 1970's the disaster was already complete and traffic became a mess. It's been downhill from there so we definitely will need to make changes.
In my experience to date it takes roughly as long to get out of a problematic situation as it takes to get into it. Any major changes on time-scales of less than a few years will lead to trouble, a realistic transition plan would probably run for a decade or more.
> ...and the cities were ill prepared to deal with that.
For all the faults around Europe with traffic, I think they did far better adapting to cars than the UK. Mainly by preserving some of the alternatives better.
The Netherlands has infinitely more sensibly integrated public transport, and provision for cycles than we will probably ever have. At least that's my perspective as an occasional visitor.
Postwar rebuilding here gave us internal combustion as the answer to all, leading to much, now regretted, removal of rail lines and trams. Not forgetting the many people-hostile choices like cutting communities in two (e.g. Mancunian Way) and giving residents a motorway right above the house (Birmingham, M6). Trying to undo those choices always comes with a bill in the £bns for the shortest length or rail or tram.
> provision for cycles than we will probably ever have.
I'd recommend a brief history of cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands. It was actually quite poor here, too. i.e., it wasn't culture naturally shaping a cyclist-first traffic regime throughout Dutch history, it were conscious policy decisions to uproot a car-friendly traffic regime and make a decades-long effort for change. The Dutch system sucked in the 50s and 60s and it changed its policies in the 70s, which took off only in the 80s.
I understand you and I have to say that there are more than only a few things politicians like to say that are absolutely not possible if you can calculate and know how to look up things in Google. The whole German "Energiewende" and electrical car thing is impossible to do. It's just a wishful dream.
What is absolutely possible is to ban cars from certain areas for certain times. And the thing is, VW and the other car manufacturers are the guys at fault. I'm pretty sure they will have to pay a big price for their downplay of the scandal.
VW just closed one of their highest quarters ever, the Diesel scandal seems to have not affected the brand much. This is not what I expected but consumers apparently care less than what you might think.
Politicians will say whatever they want to get people to vote for them regardless of whether or not their plans are actually realistic.
The electrical car is doable as a complete replacement, but not overnight. It will need a lot of work and time before this can be a reality, but step-by-step we might get there.
How many Tesla PowerWalls would you need to have Munich's power covered for one week? I'm really to lazy to translate it, so I just paste it from my email:
Laut Google hat ein 4 Personen Haushalt im Jahr einen Stromverbrauch von 4.000 kWh.
Ich rechne einfach mal mit 50 Wochen im Jahr, an denen so ein Tesla-Speicher verwendet wird. Dann benoetigt die Familie im Mittel 80 kWh pro Woche (Winter ist dabei schon nicht dabei). Bei 13.5 kWh, die so eine Tesla PowerWall speichern kann, braucht diese Familie also 6 Stück davon, um eine Woche von jeder Energiezufuhr abgeschnitten sein zu können.
Jetzt hat Muenchen aktuell ca 1 430 000 Einwohner. Man braucht als ca 2145000 von diesen Tesla Walls und dann ist vermutlich der Erdvorrat an Metallen, die man darin verwenden kann, aufgebraucht. ;-)
I wish we could replace them. I don't see it yet. I doubt it will be possible in the next 20 years.
The diesel scandal is the following: people like to drive big cars like SUVs. A car in the 90s weighed maybe 500kg. Now a new SUV weighs 3t. To drive this, you have to have a diesel engine. A diesel engine can be relatively environmental friendly if you add enough AdBlue. But AdBlue isn't cheap and the AdBlue tank takes up space in the car. So VW, Bosch, and the other German car manufacturers switched of the AdBlue as soon as the car detects it's not in a testing setup.
We were more environmental friendly in the 90s only because our cars didn't weigh as much.
So, can we replace fossil fuels in energy generators?
A lot of countries like Brazil build new nuclear reactors to generate energy. The problem is, the waste is going no where. Maybe it's possible to send the waste to the backside of the moon, but the risk of an exploding rocket seems too high for me.
Solar energy does generate only energy when the sun is shining. That's maybe 12h a day and it depends a lot on the location on earth surface. The problem of storage and transportation of energy isn't solved yet.
Wind energy is massively changing. It can generate a lot of energy in a short time period and the next week there isn't even a breeze. It's hard to switch power plants on and off as fast as the wind is changing.
I was thinking, there should be Tesla Power Walls or similar technology next to decentralized wind and solar energy generators. But I really doubt it is possible to switch of all fossil energy.
It's not optional to switch, and soon. The next 20 years will be too long. (Some niche cases can take longer to switch, of course, and that's fine.) If it's not possible we have the options of either using less or suffering massive problems in the medium-term future, which will cost a lot more.
I'm not sure what to do about this. Lobbying and investing in renewable research might not be enough.. but is there anything else really?
That depends strongly on your family situation and your job. For a single individual working in the city or a family with all their extended family nearby you could easily get away without a car.
But not everybody is that lucky and plenty of professions will require you to be in places where public transportation is not an option. An interesting reversal of intentions is happening between the cities of Almere and Amsterdam. Almere and Amsterdam are connected very well through public transport and many people will take the train into Amsterdam each day from Almere. The Amsterdam public transport system is reasonably good and services most of the areas with corporate activity. The fact that Almere has a large and skilled professional population caused some clever business people to move their operation to Almere. Initially those companies were staffed with people living almost exclusively in Almere itself. But now people from Amsterdam have started to commute to Almere in the morning causing a substantial amount of traffic the other way because the Almere industrial areas are not as well serviced with public transport as they probably should have been.
The best combination for such transportation that I've found is to take a small folding bike along on the train, this gets you within a few km of where you need to go and then it is an easy bike ride. But this option is not open to everybody, and it almost closed for me too due to a self inflicted bike accident.
Amsterdam is just about ideal for cycling, Copenhagen is the other EU city that really gets this right and Helsinki gets a lot of credit from me for being almost there. But the majority of EU cities have a very long way to go to make the bicycle the best form of transportation and even in Amsterdam bicycling is anything but safe (mostly due to scooters and taxis).
Amsterdam could probably get away now with closing off the center for traffic completely, say from Munt to central station and east to the Cruqius mill and west to Haarlemmer poort. They would have to build some more underground parking though because that would lose the main new parking garage at Oosterdok.
It's an interesting read but really does not answer at all. Don't see how having all extended family nearby is a factor. Rentals? Getting picked up by the family too remote from a public transport hub? You don't need a car as much as you think you do.
I'm totally sympathetic to the end goal, I would just like to see a realistic approach and the GGP's call for an outright ban on vehicles in the present is not supportable.
The biggest problem I have with various 'green' parties is that for the most part their solutions are bordering on the militant and do not take in to account the various complications that will need to be dealt with in order to implement the final vision.
I cycle a lot, wear out a couple of bike tires in a year. I also drive a lot, live in a small town outside of Amsterdam. So I think I see the world from both sides and a life-long interest in green technology (windmills, solar) as well as electric vehicles has given me a pretty good ground level of knowledge about all this stuff.
There is one part of me that would very much like to see this car-free city of the future come to pass in my lifetime, I'd probably move there in a heartbeat if it were done properly. But if it were done improperly I highly doubt it would fly and it would likely end up being undone and that would cause a setback we can not afford.
So better to think really hard about how to make this work, prepare plans that are properly wrought through in such a way that they work for everybody and in ways that do not accidentally kill the thing they are aiming for.
Keep in mind that cars were not thrown into cities without reason, and that at the time they were invented the bicycles were already there as well. The car mostly displaced the horse because it was cleaner.
The time when things went wrong is roughly the 1960's (for Europe at least) when suddenly a car was within reach of everybody that wanted one and the cities were ill prepared to deal with that. By the 1970's the disaster was already complete and traffic became a mess. It's been downhill from there so we definitely will need to make changes.
In my experience to date it takes roughly as long to get out of a problematic situation as it takes to get into it. Any major changes on time-scales of less than a few years will lead to trouble, a realistic transition plan would probably run for a decade or more.