This sort of speculative analysis is pretty useless. The process of bringing products like this to market is where the actual industrial manufacturing process is proven and improved, and meanwhile the assumptions they made about the raw material are continually changing as industry marches on.
There's a role for this sort of napkin-level environmental accounting, but it's a limited one. The toolkit is most applicable for products which actually exist, as products.
Please note this is an ieee.org article, targeted at electrical/electronic engineers, talking, in part, about peer reviewed research [1], which you're calling napkin math. There's lots of money and focus going into lithium-sulphur batteries, because they are promising, and any engineer that works with batteries is keeping an eye on them.
Talking about the possible future, and shortfalls of the current state, isn't useless, it's the foundation of engineering. And, it's fun.
It's "IEEE Access".[1] That's the low end of IEEE publications. Costs US $1,995 to publish an article. There's some minimal peer review, plus they run the content through a plagiarism checking program. This is two notches down from Proceedings of the IEEE.
Sure, but calling it "napkin math" is disingenuous. If there's a specific problem with the math presented, they should point it out, rather than slandering the authors.
Every time something is defended like this, it's usually bullshit. There's just something about appealing to the authority of the thing and being outraged that one would consider that authority nonsense. Most often happens to bullshit. Usually accompanied with adjectives "problematic", "disingenuous", or "no evidence that". Strong markers of nonsense.
Yes. Various companies have been trying to make lithium-sulfur batteries for decades, without much success. The latest company trying is Lyten.[1]
Supposedly they started up a battery production line in San Jose in 2023.
Or at least they issued a press release about doing so. Can you order sample batteries from their web site? No. Is there pricing info? No.
Lyten uses graphene sheets, which may not be cost effective.
Toyota and CASIP (a battery consortium in China) are investing heavily in solid-state lithium-ion batteries. That's likely to be working sooner. And, of course, lithium-iron phosphate batteries are taking over the low end.
It will probably be a good thing when batteries capable of thermal runaway disappear from the market.
As someone who buys, sells, installs, and operates enormous volumes of battery assets, I disagree.
No one I know who is in battery tech for a living is writing off sulfur batteries as napkin-math-interesting only. I’m curious to know who you work with that believes otherwise in industry so assertively.
I've worked at a battery-analytics company which given your background you might have heard of, this involved hosting the Bay Area battery research community on a monthly basis. I'm not dismissing lithium sulfur as a viable technology. I'm saying that trying to calculate the environmental impact of a technology like that before it has sizable production and several rounds of process improvement is napkin-scribbling. Useful in some ways, but it's premature to draw conclusions from it. That's all.
Fair enough. Indeed my only point was that lithium-sulfur has production potential, as does solid-state, etc. and that’s where the industry interest originates.
Here's the thing about engineering. It does not need to be perfect. Good enough is good enough until something better arrives. Li-ion is good enough until solid state and other battery chemistry is ready for prime time. That time is very soon, but still a few years away. Li-ion is good enough until then.
I have heard the term “nominative determinism” for that phenomenon. New Scientist magazine used to frequently publish examples found by them or submitted by readers.
When most people refer to lithium-ion batteries, they're often thinking of chemistries other than LiFePO4, like NMC (Nickel Manganese Cobalt) or NCA (Nickel Cobalt Aluminum), which have higher energy density.
There might be other interests, political ideals, economic principles, availability of/access to ressources that might tilt the actual decision making beyond "getting the thing done". Even at additional costs, long before its prime time, channeling research and development budgets in certain directions.
After all the latter part is an important motivation for publishing broader articles and certain studies early.
Surely they mean per kwh of capacity, since they really can’t mean 31kg of carbon per kwh discharged (which would make batteries 60x worse than natural gas)
> lithium-ion cell … 30.9 kilograms of emitted carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour generated
This still suggests that you don’t breakeven on carbon until 60 full charge-discharge cycles
A battery lasts 1000-3000+ cycles. That takes the emissions of a car down to 6-2% of an equivalent ICE for the life of that battery. Most cars fall apart before the battery reaches that point so recycling of the cells will likely occur but still that is a monumental saving if you can charge that car from clean power.
All of those emissions can be replaced with electrical replacements, from the machines that extract and move the material to the processing and making the batteries. So as electrical vehicles take over that number will drop to nothing. There are already replacements for a lot of the big machinery that extracts from mines that can run all the time in the US and other places in the world.
It will obviously take an amount of CO2 emissions to transition but the emissions aren't intrinsic to the process but rather the power we are using to make it happen.
A common complaint about Solar panels is they take quite a bit of power to make, which is true but if you also look at any of the solar manufacturing plants around the world they are not surprisingly getting their power from their own solar panels as well. When we study the emissions of these things we need to think more about what can not be easily replaced yet, like steel manufacture.
Oil also has similar externalities in emissions too from all the extraction and moving of barrels of it around the globe, its one of the largest industries in the world for emissions.
Still, if recharged once a day, that's 3 to 10 years, what's completely in line with the time durability. The time degradation will just bias the lifetime into the short end of that interval.
If you have an electric car, and don't use it often, then your numbers will be worse. But if you use it weekly (what is normal for lightly used cars), you need about an year and half to reach the OP's number and become better than the next best alternative.
A charge cycle is one full cycling of capacity, such as 0% to 100% once, 30% to 80% twice, or 70% to 80% ten times.
I'd be surprised if there are any EV drivers consistently doing a charge cycle every day, outside of commercial vehicles where the battery size was picked to not be any bigger than its daily route.
It's not that simple. Going from 100% to 0% is far more damaging to the battery than going from 80% to 70%. This is why most EVs are so conservative with their battery usage, they're trying to avoid needing replacement batteries before the rest of the car has fallen apart.
Right, just generalizing on how charge cycles are counted, but I'd probably file regular 0-100s into grandparent comment's "(when used outside of extremes)"
The average American drives around 13500 miles per year[1], so supposing a car with 250 mile range that's 54 charge cycles, just about one charge cycle per week. The vast majority of that will mostly be with under 20% of a cycle per day, plus a handful of outlier days every year with longer trips.
1000 cycles at 54 cycles per year would be 18.5 years, and 3000 cycles would be 55.5 years. I'm no expert on lithium ion battery aging, but that sounds like it's well into the range where age is more of a problem than cycle count for an average driver.
My newest car is 20 years old. I refuse to spend what a new car costs when a car costing 10% of that does the job. I don't know what I will do for cars when the battery craps out after 10 years.
More and more I think the whole EV concept is a way to make cars that don't last as long but cost just as much if not more, so that automakers can extract more money from their customers
> I don't know what I will do for cars when the battery craps out after 10 years.
Not really how batteries tend to degrade.
Consider how your cellphone battery degrades. It's not that you one day wake up with a phone that doesn't charge at all, instead the charge simply doesn't last as long.
When people talk about the cycle life of batteries, they are talking about the time it takes for battery capacity to go from 100% to 70%. This is also taken from a generally super pessimistic viewpoint (Charging from 0% to 100% == 1 cycle). Pessimistic because lithium ion batteries are somewhat damaged at very low and very high charges.
If you get an EV, keep the charge percentage between 40 and 80 (which is usually more than enough for daily use) the battery can last a LOT longer. And that's just talking about NMC batteries.
LFP lithium batteries have ~5 to 10x the cyclelife of NMC batteries.
I'm currently driving a 2018 tesla model 3 with 120,000 miles. It's got 95% it's original battery capacity. The actual maintenance I've done has been nothing compared to what I've had to do with ICE vehicles. Basically just new tires and windshield wiper fluid.
> More and more I think the whole EV concept is a way to make cars that don't last as long but cost just as much if not more, so that automakers can extract more money from their customers
EVs may have a higher upfront cost, but they aren't making automakers more money. The opposite is true.
Now, if I'm cynical, I believe the place automakers will try and shorten the life of EVs is with the software, not the hardware. I've no clue how much longer my EV will get OTA updates.
My previous car made it to 18 and I'm hoping to keep its replacement alive as long as possible to see what the track record of car companies looks like for lifespan of their electric cars.
It's not just the battery, they're increasingly turning into smartphone-like gadgets. And performance on that type of device never seems to get better as it stretches toward the end of its supported life. Even in the best case automakers are saying things like "we'll give it 15 years of android updates." On the one hand, that's not long enough, and on the other at that 15 year mark I half expect the car will take 30 minutes to launch the maps app because "technically gave you an update" doesn't mean "gave any shits about the user experience on 15 year old hardware."
If anything, the battery is the part where there's a possibility of a 3rd party replacement/refurbishment market improving things. Not so easy to replace an EV's infotainment system as it was to swap a single DIN tape deck out for a bluetooth radio.
The slow maps app won't matter much when the built-in modem is stuck on 4G or 5G which is being "turned down" in favor of allocating 8G etc., or even before that when it turns out that it depends on some deprecated cloud API and refuses to degrade gracefully.
Sometimes I think of my first new car from 1997, which had a tape deck in the dash and an optional CD-changer in the trunk. I was happy to find an aftermarket adapter that converted the CD-changer cabling into an iPod adapter in the following decade. And of course such iPod integrations are all obsolete now.
Sometimes I wonder if even Car Play or Android Auto will be just as anachronistic. Imagine if there had been popular Blackberry integrations in the heyday of that product line...
It gets even stranger when you think about how some EV companies are pushing autonomous driving so hard. Will the AI driving system be able to run on 20 year old hardware? Or will they have to cut people off and say "oops, the feature you already bought wasn't really possible on your hardware after all, only new cars will get the update." Tesla isn't the only example here, but it is the most egregious.
Meanwhile GM is pulling CarPlay from their EVs to make sure when your car gets older and the software is a huge heap of shit, you can't use the car's screen for maps from your 15-years-newer smartphone (or whatever smart-gizmo we're using in 15 years). Want better maps? Buy a new car!
I have to hope people will turn around from that and buy their next car from someone other than GM.
The manufacturers certainly list it as part of the expected life. Lipo batteries for example are guaranteed for 6000 cycles at which point they will have 80% of their rated capacity and a minimum of 10 years. So they are fairly certain one of those two criteria is going to lead to the battery no longer meeting >80% capacity.
But that is the other thing about them only lasting 6k cycles or 10 years, its not like the battery is expected to be dead just lacking a fifth of its capacity. What is happening with batteries out of old EVs today is either cell scavenging and remade into new batteries or just racking the whole battery into grid storage. Per KWH they pretty cheap once they are that degraded but still quite usable in other applications.
This is depressing. I had never really considered chronological age when looking at batteries.
The longevity is really important for the ultimate economic viability and I’ve been tracking that to decide when to pull the trigger on a home battery.
A 6000 or 10 year cycle rating means functionally 10 years for a solar deployment because you are only cycling the batteries 1x per day. I was hoping you could get 20 years out of such a system (thus halving the cost). Bummer.
Unless you live in California, and use a "time of day" meter [for kWH offsetting], there are few reasons you would need at-home battery storage (other than power outages... get a gasoline generator, instead!). Direct-tie inverters utilize "the electric grid" as your battery/capacitor... unless you are off the grid.
Also, there is a glaring safety defect that violates UL, contained within every Tesla Powerwall 2... so don't get one of those.
I don't know if ProllyInfamous is correct about electric vehicle batteries degrading more from age than from cycling, but it is an effect that shows up in batteries. The terms to describe the effects are "cycle life" and "calendar life." Increasing calendar age can degrade batteries that just sit there without deliberate charge or discharge processes. An example would be an old package of Duracell batteries, never used, that sat in the closet for decades and lost power before they ever went into a remote control. Those batteries reached the end of their calendar life.
Also note that this affects battery chemistries other than lithium as well. My (lead-acid) car battery is currently dead. The battery itself is 7 years old. The previous battery died at 8 years old. The service tech at the last replacement said that's pretty typical, and (ICE) car batteries are usually slated to be replaced at the 8-year mark.
They say that is a "cradle-to-gate" analysis, which means it covers the cost from gathering resources through manufacturing up to the point it leaves the factory.
Consider an EV with a 75 kWh battery pack. Using their numbers that would be 2318 kg of CO₂ to make that battery. If the battery lasts 1000 full cycles that would be 75000 kWh of energy produced.
Amortizing that 2300 kg of CO₂ over that gives 0.0303 kg CO₂/kWh discharged.
A typical EV gets about 4 miles per kWh, so that's about 0.0076 kg of CO₂/mile driven.
A gallon of gasoline releases 8.8 kg of CO₂ when burned. Given an ICE car that gets 40 miles/gallon that's 0.22 kg CO₂/mile.
That's 29x as much CO₂ per mile as the EV.
Instead of amortizing, and assuming clean electricity, the EV costs 2318 kg CO₂ upfront for its equivalent of a gas tank but has 0 CO₂ operating cost. The ICE has negligible CO₂ cost for its gas tank up front, but costs 0.22 kg CO₂/mile operating cost.
Breakeven for the EV vs the ICE is at 10300 miles. For the average American that's about 9 months worth of driving.
PS: I took a look at non-clean electricity. Electricity from coal or petroleum burning power plants is about 1 kg CO₂/kWh. An EV gets about 4 miles/kWh so that's about 0.25 kg CO₂/mi if you charge your EV with 100% coal or petroleum based electricity. Slightly worse than a 40 mpg ICE car.
The US average is around 0.4 kg CO₂/kWh electricity, which would give 0.11 kg CO₂/mi to operate an EV. That's about 2x the cost of the 40 mpg ICE.
Note that the above is ignoring the CO₂ costs of producing the gasoline. Brief Googling suggests that is somewhere from 1.5-3 kg CO₂/gallon from well to gas pump, which would raise the cost of buring a gallon of gas from 10.3-11.8 kg CO₂/gallon, or by 17-34%.
That would make the EV slightly better than the ICE when powered from coal or petroleum plant electricity, and 2.3-2.7x better when powered by average US electricty, and 34-39x better when powered by clean electricity.
Why do these sorts of studies always measure the cradle-to-grave CO2 output of EVs to only the CO2 released per gallon of gas in the ICE?
Very rarely do you see the studies that include factors like CO2 released in extracting, shipping, and refining the oil in the first place. The CO2 released when fighting wars in foreign countries to insure access to said oil. The CO2 released in making the ICE car in the first place and all of those supply chain issues like people always bring up with EVs and renewable power systems.
In part because crude oil is used for many different things so it’s not as clear exactly what the gasoline specific emissions numbers are. Roughly speaking 50% is a good estimate, but it varies quite a bit based on your assumptions.
Similarly the gasoline lifecycle + ICE engine, gas tank, and transmission should be compared to the battery + electric motors + electricity not just the battery vs gasoline.
I imagine the ICE and EV body is relatively similar. The extra metals found in an ICE engine probably aren't that much greater, considering all the extra support/casing requiring for the batteries/weight.
Thanks for this detailed computation. I think the increase from 2.5x better (current US electric) to 35x better (clean electric) illustrates the value of providing daytime charging infrastructure that utilizes solar.
Almost certainly. A more thorough comparison would need to take that into account. It would also want to consider electricity generation because not every place has 100% clean electricity.
But if all one is trying to determine is whether 30.3 kg/kWh cradle-to-gate cost of batteries is enough to bring EV cars up to anywhere near the CO₂ cost of ICE cars for a typical use case the ICE car uses way more without taking making the gas costs into account so there is no need to go farther.
I've updated the original to include a look at the case of non-clean electricity and to consider the CO₂ cost of producing gasoline.
Absolutely -- both in terms of the energy cost of refining and in direct emissions from the process. Extracting crude oil, transporting it to the refinery, and transporting the resulting gasoline to the gas station all have substantial carbon costs associated with them as well.
Which is what? About 25 000 km? Doesn't sound unreasonable. Ive seen studies suggesting it might be an extra order of magnitude.
If you assume battery capacity as a limiting factor, EV don't even break even compared to hybrids.
Cars, all cars, are terrible. I say this as a car guy who doesn't give a rats butt about GW. The externality of cars are far more damaging than CO2 emissions.
The paper[1] ignores cycle life, and assumes that a 1 kWh LiS battery will last equivalently to a 1 kWh NMC battery. That's a big oversight, as the frequency that batteries will need to be replaced is a major factor in their environmental impact. Currently cycle life is an issue for LiS, as well as commercialization in general. Ignoring those, it's not surprising that LiS comes out ahead. Honestly, why not include batteries that are even more experimental, like lithium-air?
The paper also references that "batteries should reach a specific energy of 550 Wh/kg in order to ensure a driving range of 500 km." Someone should tell Lucid that the Air doesn't count. It has a range between 650 km and 825 km, depending on battery options.
Sodium ion is the 200 mile city car for 2+ billion people. Should be half the cost of an ice drivetrain and no limits on materials. Sodium Ion should scale up to $40/kwhr, and cell-to-pack shouldn't be much worse. $100/kwhr pack level is supposed to be price parity with ICE.
And if they can, sodium sulfur will do everything but aviation.
The cook thing with batteries is you can seamlessly mix different cells in the same pack to handle daily driving (reuse a section of the pack they is particularly durable to cycles like LFP) and others for longer range.
And that's fine. More battery variants that can be used in various applications is fine.
Most important factors will be energy density, cost (per kWh of storage) and environmental impact. It doesn't have to be ideal for EVs, that's just one of many use cases.
I was expecting this to be about thermal performance rather than climate impact. The fact that you have to dump energy to heat LiIon batteries for safe charging or use in cooler weather is nuts to me. How's 0°C performance of Lithium-Sulphur?
I'm pretty enthusiastic about LithiumIronPhosphate prismatics in cooler regions even if they're a little more heavy.
I look forward to have more choice in battery chemistry when buying a new car. Depending if you live in warm or cold weather and if you do mostly short or longer trips, you should be able to choose what battery is best for you. But at this point Lithium-ion is still just the cheapest option due to economy of scale.
Whenever you see a cell chemistry with metallic lithium in the anode, watch out! They tried that 50 years ago, the result was unexpected dendrite growth after many years, causing cell short-circuit, fire, and loss of life and property.
Bona fide new cell chemistry ready to go in and displace the existing leaders could easily be another 50 years away! We have not had a new real leader in cell chemistry emerge since lithium ion emerged 50 years ago, just basically incremental improvement. It's like saying the car might not be the best bet for a vehicle that you can drive. Sure, a flying car would be better, if it existed.
I have no idea what you're trying to say or if you're being sarcastic. There are multiple battery chemistries including lithium iron phosphate (7x cycle lifetime), lithium titanate (50x cycle life or more) and sodium ion (potentially cheaper) that are all on the market to buy right now, not to mention lithium polymer batteries and all the refinements and variations out there.
Sodium Batteries now exist and are available in the market and BYD already has cars based on them. The energy density is quite a bit lower so the cars are more like 250KM range but they can be charged very quickly (3C) and the available cycles are more like LIPO around 6000. They are also considerably cheaper, about 1/4 of that of Li ion.
I suspect Sodium batteries will be big in the home and grid storage battery market once we have inverters that support the high Voltage range they operate in. I don't think we will see them much in phones and laptops with half the capacity in the same weight and size but where that doesn't matter they are a much cheaper solution.
Chemically it appears that sodium batteries should be better. However the devil is in the details and so far the details of sodium batteries have not been worked out. Maybe we will in the future, maybe we won't - I cannot guess. Today sodium batteries are not ready.
Wouldn't a flywheel big enough to power a car be such a giant gyroscope that it would affect your ability to turn? A flywheel under the hood that has all the energy needed to move my car hundreds of miles stored as kinetic energy sounds like it would vaporize me in a crash.
Wouldn't having two flywheels spinning on opposite directions cancel out the gyroscopic effect?
There were some flywheel buses in Switzerland that used flywheels. They charged a bit at every bus stop so they had enough energy to make it to the next stop. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus
As for affecting the ability to turn, that would only be the case if the flywheel was vertical. If it was horizontal, it wouldn't affect turning at all.
It seems an impractical solution for a car, and better used as a massive and immobile mechanism where you can trade out a lot of that velocity for mass, and where your housing isn't actively fighting the storage the whole time. I would love for someone to do the math on how much kinetic energy you'd need to store in a wheel that can fit in the engine compartment to allow a 2 ton vehicle to go 200 miles in stop and go traffic.
Not all energy storage solutions can work in every problem. We won't be using hydroelectric for cars either.
I've wondered in the past if a giant flywheel the size of, say, a building and filled with a heavy material like concrete could store enough energy to make a difference in intra-day grid loads.
Flywheels as the primary powerplant will never find its way into vehicles because there is no way to brake them in the few milliseconds before they become rotational bombs in a crash.
Why are these studies always factor in the carbon impact of production when they are looking at technologies that are at least a decade away from mass market adoption? Is there any reason to assume that production/mining won't be electrified and produce zero emissions?
>Is there any reason to assume that production/mining won't be electrified and produce zero emissions?
Mining is done with huge vehicles that are hard to electrify due to energy-density limits of batteries and hydrogen, and also operate in a remote low-infrastructure area where there are a bunch of big vehicles moving around and ripping up the ground all over the place, making it expensive and difficult to run any direct powerlines or such.
And of course, hypothetical future improvements can't be compared to a baseline of zero - they have to be compared to a baseline of no more than the alternative, the alternative here being hypothetical future ICE cars. For instance, suppose that tomorrow they invent a magic petrol-producing machine that sucks out CO2 from the air and turns it into fuel, for free - that would reduce the emissions of mining dramatically, but it would also make ICE cars near-zero net emissions. So hypothetical future improvements could be negative simply due to ICE cars improving faster. Note that I say "could" as in "it's possible", not that it's necessarily likely - ICE cars have received far more R&D money than EVs, due to having dominated the market for the last century, so they're way further ahead on the learning curve.
> Mining is done with huge vehicles that are hard to electrify ..
Mining is done with huge vehicles that have had electric drive trains for decades - Haul Paks (100+ tonne trucks) have electric motors driven by onboard diesel engines, shovel loaders that move from face to face and fill Haul Paks are mostly stationary and are powered by fat electric cables that pressurize on board hydraulics.
Fully electric Haul Paks already exist in small numbers and are increasing in number, hydrogen powered Haul Paks are still in test (last time I checked).
> and also operate in a remote low-infrastructure area where there are a bunch of big vehicles moving around and ripping up the ground all over the place, making it expensive and difficult to run any direct powerlines or such.
Iron ore ares such as the Pilbara ship almost a billion tonne per annum of ore and move more than a billion tonnes of material per year; they factor building power stations adjacent to minesites into costs and have started buying entire adjacent cattle stations in order to build out solar farms for direct power and hydrogen creation.
Mining processing plants are mostly electric, and have been so for 50+ years - crushers, screens, ship loaders, conveyors, etc all run from local power stations. The power stations are the key to "greening" mineral resource extraction - these are already scoped to be replaced by solar farms and generated hydrogen for overnight 24/7/365 operations.
The Infinity Train project is current building (and still hiring) electric trains to recover power from transporting than near billion tonnes from 600m above sea level inland to the coastal ports.
You can chase up Rio Tinto and Fortescue Metals on these projects.
Instead of tracking the carbon impact of manufacturing, they should track the energy input. Or just track the overall cost. As you said, it is hard to calculate manufacturing cost, and it depends on the energy source for factory.
Then can assign cost to the carbon emitted or saved, and then compare that to the overall cost.
How do cost and energy usage play into this though? Let's say mining, refining and all industrial processes are electrified or using green hydrogen one day, electricity is really cheap, what does it matter how much costs are when everything in carbon neutral?
The study is about the potential environmental impact that these in-the-lab battery technologies would have if they were scaled up to industrial scale in the future.
I think it's very good to ask this question: which is the most environmentally friendly battery?
However, I also hope that we ask the question, how can we make our society better such that we have to drive less and use less energy? Because what would be even more friendly than a lithium-sulphur battery is no battery at all.
Let's not forget that with all this optimizing within our existing lifestyles, we should also try and make our lifestyles different so that we don't need any cars at all...(I know, not possible on a massive scale immediately, but over time...)
> However, I also hope that we ask the question, how can we make our society better such that we have to drive less and use less energy? Because what would be even more friendly than a lithium-sulphur battery is no battery at all.
Depending on where you live, forces such as fear, uncertainty, misanthropy have lead to the exact opposite.
We live in insane times where in parts of settlements at peace you can't even WALK to where you need.
Yeah, I still remember that when I was in Texas, there were people that stayed in a hotel very close to the HQ of our company - it was just on the other side of a big road (few lanes) - but as Europeans think, they assumed there is a pedestrian crossing, but there was none, there was no sidewalk, nothing.
The only way to get to the other side of the road was using a vehicle - there were few hired shuttles that were driving people from hotel to work and back, quite insane.
A week before I was in SF and public transport there was decent, but the vehicles were like from 1950s in comparison what I'm used to use in my country, e.g. if I wanted the bus to stop I had to pull a wire (yes, a wire!) to notify the busdriver that he/she should stop on the next bus stop.
That's just one of the issues, and the quality of the bus was no where near the current ones we had in Europe.
On the other hand the bus drivers were very friendly and open.
I take the bus into my local (INCREDIBLY WEALTHY) downtown out of principle, and I have yet to see a bus where less than half of the seats are ripped and torn and maybe duct taped. The city bus drivers are usually pretty chill, though! The systemic under-funding and under-utilization are certainly not their fault.
Hate to play the one-up game but this is too crazy not to share. I was doing consulting at Travelocity/SABER, which was in the no man's land between Dallas and Fort Worth. The company put me up in the Marriott on the other side of the highway from their campus. Not only were there no sidewalks for the short distance, there were rough rocks covering the shoulder like you'd find along a seawall, so you couldn't even trudge through the weeds and mud to get over to the campus if you were determined to do so. On the good side of things, Google Street View shows that they are now installing sidewalks, but I have to wonder who decided back then that the rocks were a good idea in the first place? It's a rural area, relatively speaking, and unlikely to have been done for anti-camping reasons. At least two decades of people had to take shuttle buses between the hotel and campus regardless of their desire to walk.
I remember visiting AMD in Austin for a XenSummit in pre-smartphone and pre-Uber days and staying at a hotel that advertised itself as "just around the corner from AMD". About half an hour before my meeting there I asked the hotel staff for walking directions, and they said "it is only about 3 miles on the highway". I didn't have a car and got stubborn, so I walked, which was one of the craziest experiences of my life, as it involved running across freeway ramps busy with morning traffic and navigating by the randomly cached state of Google Maps on my laptop.
Hardly the kind of thing I was expecting in SF. Same for BART, looks like something straight out of the 70s. Or those huge concrete slabs cut with saws, used for sidewalks. In Europe they generally use asphalt.
American infrastructure generally lacks... panache, style, IMHO.
I think the answer to this is the same as what leads to terrible things like internet-connected microwaves. Techification for the sake of it because we can, not because it's a good idea.
It's a push button. We've "technified" our homes with light switches 150 years ago. The roof hasn't fallen down, I'm fairly sure a lowly bus can handle buttons.
> if I wanted the bus to stop I had to pull a wire (yes, a wire!) to notify the busdriver that he/she should stop on the next bus stop. That's just one of the issues,
How else do you signal the bus driver to stop? And why is this an issue?
The NYC MTA years ago used these rubber push strips held in an extruded aluminum profile. They were all over the interior next to each window and ran along the edges of the ceiling for standing passengers. They were frequently broken, cut or pulled from their bases by bored school children. This lead to the button circuit being stuck closed preventing more presses from triggering the bell and annunciator lamp at the front of the bus to notify the driver. People would then miss their stops and start yelling or walk to the driver to ask them to stop. The pull cords are old school but insanely easy to fix and maintain.
Not just the UK. The US really is an outlier. Pedestrian infrastructure is better almost everywhere else. Certainly in every country I have visited from Canada to China and a dozen others in between.
We couldn't afford a car when I was younger so we had to subsist on Translink and Skytrain, and those systems were roughly on par with Muni and VTA. Outside of the Vancouver core, pedestrian infrastructure was weak to nonexistent in suburbs like Richmond, Surrey, South Vancouver, etc or towns/cities like Nanaimo or Abbotsford.
> The cultural hostility towards pedestrians is wild.
This is one of the major factors I appreciate about the places I've lived in California; for the US it's an exceptionally good environment for pedestrians and cyclists.
Still not great by any means. But whenever I visit friends/fam back in IL where I grew up, I'm teleported back to that cultural hostility in a big way. It doesn't end there though, even as a driver there's rampant aggressive hostility/road-rage behavior to contend with.
It feels like the entire region is full of people fighting for scraps on the streets, just without getting out of their cars. Pedestrians/cyclists are basically just bystander casualties to the mess without infrastructure to isolate them from it.
Many parts of California are very bike hostile.
From personal expirence it's way worse then Portland or Seattle.
A lot of it is cultural though, there in the bay area many drivers dislike bikes and blame them for traffic, etc.
Why not to use a bicycle? I've spent a summer in Fairbanks, AK and it was totally fine to navigate anywhere around the city and suburbs by bike. Almost no bike lanes there, of course.
Friends have lost friends cycling on mixed-mode roads. Drivers don't expect to see cyclists, and the normal traffic speeds involved leave little room for the kind of error that even benevolent humans make all the time, to speak nothing of the many hostile drivers.
I would love to cycle. I love bicycling, and am glad it was an option for you! But I don't believe it's viable where I am without significant structural changes.
Cycling on 45mph+ roads (really stroads, or in-town highways) with no separated bike lanes or sidewalk is pretty dangerous. This kind of road is kind of the normal in most American suburban towns or even bigger cities outside the actual downtown area.
Yes, that is true. Suburbia and cars make it cheaper for people to live in the short-term, but it then leads to even more dependence on mass industry that they are slaving away to keep afloat, while their hard-earned money is taken away in part by taxes to provide subsidies to hide the true unsustainability of it all.
Suburbia done well can be great. Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature.
Suburbia can still have mixed use areas. We had a shopping center in our development for all the basic needs. We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing.
As much as the implementation usually leaves much to be desired, soviet-style microdistricts with a few apartment blocks, a park and playground, and a handful of local shops is a pretty decent option. Put a few of these around a primary school and a shopping mall and you have a really decent suburban area where everything you might need is in a 10 min walking distance, and kids can be left alone in that microcosm until they leave for high school.
Western individualism doesn't really play with that collectivist setup though, everyone needs their own private building, their own private micro park, etc.
I don’t want to point any fingers at western culture on the whole, and the idea of individualism. At this point it feels more like fragmentation. Community pools were really popular in the States some decades ago, and then when segregation ended you start seeing a lot of pools in backyards, and white flight to the suburbs. Even in today’s less racist society we just plain hate our neighbors. Their decorations, messy lawn, or loud baby. It is almost as if we forgot how to live with others.
Soviet-style micro-districs aren't that great. Its just modernist ideas done cheaply.
Soviet-style certainly is better then US style suberbia but its not actually good compared to real urbanism.
What you actually want is not a bunch of identical blocks spaced far apart. You want proper streets with connected blocks with commercial in the lower floors to frame a real urban feeling. That has many advantages. You can still provide real public parks and open spaces in such a structure (see Oslo for example).
There is a reason tons of tourist go to places that are beautiful urbanism and almost nobody goes even to the best Soviet microdistrics to look at them. And nicer building wouldn't change that.
> Western individualism doesn't really play with that collectivist setup though, everyone needs their own private building, their own private micro park, etc.
And yet somehow the capitalist west has built amazing cities and towns for 100s of years.
And places like the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark are very much on the forefront of modern example of these things.
Dude. A huge percentage of the US is ZONED for single family homes. If those are SOOO attractive, why don't they remove that zoning and let competition win out?
There's SOOO much legislation in the US that freezes everything in place (when zoning doesn't cut it they just add 100 rules like minimum parking and achieve the same thing) and then someone like you points to the result and says: "see, everyone wants it".
The US basically has 2 types of housing, overwhelmingly: single family homes and residential skyscrapers. The stuff in the middle is low digit percentages.
> Suburbia done well can be great. Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature.
Which you can answer that cities done well can also be great.
Noise, crime and no access to nature is not a common denominator of cities. While my city is noisy, mostly due to the overuse of vehicles, I am 15 minutes by foot / 5 minutes by bicycle from the nature[1] and crime is not a something of concern here.
If you want an example of a city that does well in all 3 areas I think Utrecht is a good example.
> Suburbia can still have mixed use areas. We had a shopping center in our development for all the basic needs. We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing.
Also, isn't that getting close to the definition of a small town...which is itself kind of a small city?
> Also, isn't that getting close to the definition of a small town...which is itself kind of a small city?
Kind of? A large master-planned community might have thousands of homes and its own commercial district. They've always reminded me a bit of historic small towns.
Along that main street you had mix buildings where people lived and did their business out of. There was no separation between living and commercial.
Farmers lived further out, not directly connected to the city.
From there cities cities grow incrementally up and incrementally out. At some point they stop. Brainerd now has the same amount of people as they did 70 years ago. Other cities, like New York sustained that phase much longer.
> Suburbia done well can be great. Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature.
That such a hilarious understanding of 'nature' and 'cities'. I live in a city and I can be in nature very quickly.
In fact, the sprawling nature of suberbia is what destroys the most amount of nature and makes it harder for everybody to access nature.
> Suburbia can still have mixed use areas.
The term 'Suberbia' talkes specifically about US style subburbs and just based on facts, 99% of it simple doesn't allow commercial usage.
Sometimes you have commercial zones next to the R1 zones, but usually the ratio is very small and the distance to the commercial zone is very far for the majority of people. Thus commercial areas are often reached mostly by car.
Mixed use zoning is almost nowhere to be found in most of the US.
The term 'Suberbia' refers to that.
> We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing.
Then it isn't really what is called 'subberbia' at all. Subburbs can be done well, but not subberbia.
And in most places in the US where there is a massive lack of alternative housing options with a vanishingly small part of the total land area allowing anything but low-density residential zoning.
So yes, subburbs can be done well, but if its done well its not called 'subburbia' anymore. And the amount of places where it was done well is incredibly small.
> That such a hilarious understanding of 'nature' and 'cities'. I live in a city and I can be in nature very quickly.
Which city? It's always helpful to look at google maps to see if people are using terms in a different way.
A city by definition is surrounded by suburb (sub-urbe) and neither is forest, so if you live in the city you need to get to the suburbs and the cross the suburbs before you can get to a forest (or desert/etc).
I'm sure there's some city somewhere where the highrise apartment building transition immediately to forest, but I'm not sure where. Not common, for sure.
> So yes, subburbs can be done well, but if its done well its not called 'subburbia' anymore.
This is a circular claim. So if a suburb works well it's not a suburb?
Its just a very American views. I know its crazy to think but not every city in the world is surrounded by endless suburban sprawl.
And if you have a good train connection, you can go out of a city very fast an efficiently.
Zürich, you have forest 1.6km from the downtown train station. Or 9min with public transport to an even larger forest.
To small? Ok, lets look at Berlin. From main train-station, you have a gigantic park only a few minutes away. If that isn't nature enough for you, its a 7.5km distance to a forest outside of the city.
Amsterdam, less then 5km to be in the surrounding country side.
Vienna, 4km to country side, 7km to a nature reserve.
I have not been in any European city where going into to country side isn't trivially easy. Even my 80+ year old grandmother who lived in the cities former industrial area would go for daywalks in nature.
> This is a circular claim. So if a suburb works well it's not a suburb?
No its not 'suberbia'. 'Suberbia' has a particular definition.
This video gives some perspective of what I am talking about:$
> Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature.
Good Christ, I lived for years in small towns in the most rural area of the UK without a car! Your towns aren't built for walkers and public transport and that sucks, but there's no need to project that to everywhere else!
It's not even true in the United States. In the Boston area, there are still plenty of those "strong towns" the bloggists go on about. I live in one. My car gets used to go to Home Depot, to drive to visit my parents four hours away, and if I need to go to my doctor who's just a little too far off the beaten path to drive to. The rest of the time, I walk, and I'm within a mile of a commuter rail station to get to Boston proper.
Of course, we have not here decided that Government Is The Problem, so we tend to wield it a little better. A number of my neighbors want to change that, being as afraid as they are of "Transit-Oriented Development" (you can guess what that means), but hey--democracy isn't free, we need to push that nonsense back.
>Your towns aren't built for walkers and public transport and that sucks, but there's no need to project that to everywhere else!
And I'd say you're grossly mischaracterizing the US. Every small town I've lived in has ample sidewalks, crosswalks, and is easily walkable. Where my children go to school I can walk from one end of town to the other without ever having to risk life and limb. Heck a few of the sidewalks extend a mile out into the country just in anticipation of the city eventually growing. The town I grew up in was the same. The entire US isn't small-town Texas.
> Good Christ, I lived for years in small towns in the most rural area of the UK without a car!
The UK is smaller than the US state of Oregon, which is the 9th largest state in terms of area.
There is literally nowhere in the UK that counts as "rural" by US standards. The UK has a population density of 277/km^2, while the United States as a whole has only 35/km^2. The comparison is much worse if you look at western/northern states like North Dakota (4/km^2) or Alaska (0.5/km^2). Even California (widely considered a very crowded state) has only 250/km^2, still considerably less than the UK. In fact, there are only 4 states of 50 which have a greater population density than the UK.
The old saying that Americans consider a hundred years a long time, while the British consider a hundred miles a long distance seems to be accurate even in the long term.
An American website by ownership - the actual users are pretty international. And anyway, the county I lived in was about 100 people per square mile, it about 184th in that list. Around the same as Alabama.
Suburbia is not cheap at all, not even in the short run.
The reality is that it is very expensive and heavily, heavily subsidized. US style Suberbia is a result of the US government massive policies in encouraging suburbia style housing and highway building during the New Deal and then in the Post-WW2 boom, plus of course the Red-Lining and destruction of city centers.
These places never ever pay for themselves. You can look at the data gathered by 'Strong Towns' and 'Urban3'.
In fact the poorer parts of the city/state and of course the town center are subsidizing the richer suberbia. Its a fucking travisty of epic proportion.
Suberbia is expensive to set up initially, needs massive infrastructure backing to be viable and is horrible energy inefficient.
> Suburbia is not cheap at all, not even in the short run.
Cheap for who, though?
As an individual I can't change society but I can choose where to live. So if rent in the city is 4K for 1 bedroom and in the suburb it's 2K for 3 bedrooms, suburb is cheaper.
I enjoy my car but I think the same way we have the ADA for public buildings, there should be some level of walkable areas nearly everywhere. I’m currently frustrated in my new location that there are random sidewalks that aren’t connected to each other and I have to walk on the street with traffic for a few hundred meters at a time.
I think I agree with you on a fundamental level, but there must be solutions to this problem where the answer is "everyone should live in a city" (or a relatively urban environment) I would go to any lengths not to live in a city again.
I don't think everyone should live in a city. I HATE cities with an absolute passion. But it would be nice to have more local, self-reliant solutions in smaller towns and rural areas that require less driving, too. I'm thinking more along the lines of small, local economies rather than packing everyone in a city.
I have the impression that too many people think about actual examples (like: I hate New York - or insert your hated city name here) rather than the idea of a city.
I have lived in a couple of large European cities and each was very different from each other, so I can't draw a "generic conclusion".
Cities can become what people imagine they would like - which sometimes is wrong/sometimes is right (in the sense: sometimes they imagine they would like X but when they have it they are more unhappy, other times they are more happy). But we should talk more about what we like and wish rather than where we want to be or not (city/country-side).
Hard partial disagree. More energy used for the right purposes lifts us up. Wasting energy on things that makes us more miserable, like traffic jams and avoidable commute, does not lift us up.
Energy use is not in itself creating any value. It's a cost for value creation. More energy available can allow us to make more value, sure.
Obviously that's not meant to be a serious scenario. But it's illustrative.
I don't see the problem of lifting everyone up while using less energy. We just gotta be smart about the solutions we make, rather than just brute-forcing it by using lots of energy.
Like: I prefer to bike to work. That makes my life better. I also prefer living in a walkable/bikeable town. If I'm forced to drive a car the energy associated getting to work will be very high. If I can use an e-bike it's a tiny fraction, and I get to exercise without wasting time in a gym.
More energy means more distractions away from the natural world. It means less disposable prodcuts.
Renewable energy isn't really renewable. Wind energy still requires oil and mining, and dams disrupt river ecosystems. Nuclear produces toxic waste that lasts for hundreds of thousands of years.
Our society has gotten into an incredible mess with more energy usage (e.g. climate change).
It's not clear modernity is making us any happier than our hunter gatherer ancestors. Of course, people everywhere tend defer to what they're familiar with, so it will be a tough argument to make with this crowd.
What are you comparing. A hunter-gather who is starving because there is not enough food would be happier in modern days where nearly everybody has enough food. Likewise a hunter-gather who is in pain for something that is easily treatable.
However when things are going well for the hunter-gather they did have a lot of leisure time and so they could well be happier overall even though the lows were worse.
That doesn't make sense. A hunter-gatherer would have to trade their entire lifestyle for the modern world. And it isn't clear to me that the relief he or she would feel would be worth the entire destruction of their way of life. In fact, I believe it would not be, especially for the many more than aren't hungry or in pain.
Personally, I would trade the lows if I could live in a world where most technology did not exist (that would mean in particular, I could drink from any stream or relax without hearing an ICE.) And no, that does not mean going off into the woods now, where the experience would be vastly different, being surrounded by advanced society.
You might ignore other aspects of life. A good part of the children dying before reaching 10 years old (and not only). People not knowing why things happen and worrying is a vengeful god or spirit, or living in fear of the village shaman.
Not sure why you say going to the woods now is not an option. There are enough people choosing to do similar things (ex: Amish style of people). Nowadays we have more options in terms of life style than at any point in history (not without some tradeoffs, but still). You have to make a choice and make your peace with it, don't think it's productive wishing you would not have the options...
When you are not hungry or in pain it is easy to say you would make that trade.
There are places in the world where you can get away. there are still hunter-gather tribes around, and some of them would welcome outsiders to join. (some will kill you on sight) You can also buy land in middle of nowhere Alaska (or Montana) where effectively there is no civilization in anywhere close. I'm not sure what country you live in, but odds are there are options where you can just disappear for civilization if you really wanted. While you can get to civilization from the above if you want, it wouldn't be hard to avoid it.
"However, I also hope that we ask the question, how can we make our society better such that we have to drive less and use less energy?"
By radically lowering speed limits [1] and slowly rebuilding our infrastructure to reflect that. It will take a long time, it took 100 years to build infrastructure that assumed a person could cross 15 miles of suburbia in as many minutes.
[1] I do mean radical; cars shouldnt be able to go faster than 30 mph. For folks with a need for speed (myself incld.), perhaps will exempt motorbikes
You’ve got to be living in a city and unaware of the vast swaths of space between rural places in the US. I have to make 12 hour drives on occasion with my family in tow and you’d make my trip 30 hours.
I live in suburban USA, and I don't appreciate those who would flash impose transportations "solutions" solutions on us. City folk love to impose costs on others.
Thats why I insist that this is a 100+ year project. Our current infrastructure is built around 80mph cars (I drive 90!) and it will take forever to build sustainable infrastructure.
I drive far; my folks and I get together once a month and they live 300 miles away. My in laws live 600 miles away and we see them relatively often, again by car.
I hate flying (Im tall and ppl smell), so I drive a lot. In fact I love driving, and I will never not own at least one car.
But lets be frank. I live 300 miles from my parents because cars enabled me to do so. Fast transportation has radically lowered the cost of living away from family, lowered the cost of not investing in our communal areas.
Besides, I make exceptions for motorcycles: no speed limit for them :)
Around the time when self-driving carriages were first introduced, some states had laws requiring that a person with a red flag must walk in front of any motorized vehicle. But only in cities, a reasonable compromise.
> I do mean radical; cars shouldnt be able to go faster than 30 mph
You might just ban them at that point. Why waste ANY resources on a car? We could return to horse drawn carriages, they are biological and therefore more environmentally friendly [1]
> Horse poo covering streets is not particularly friendly to the environment.
Most people did not own horses, especially not in cities.
They were generally limited to farmers, businesses (to draw carts/carriages), and the rich (Gilded Age).
For most of history most humans walked to their destination on a day-to-day basis. This changed slightly with the invention of rail roads and later bicycles. The automobile didn't go mainstream until roughly the 1920s:
Design things 'properly' and neither cars, nor horse-drawn carriages, are needed by people for most of their daily tasks. This is evidence by the fact that humans lived like that for centuries just fine.
Not that I want to ban cars, but I’d have to imagine that horse feces is better for the environment than motor oil and other fluids that leak from a car.
Feces (including horse) spread disease. Motor oil leaking is mostly leaking on places where nothing grows anyway because all the traffic compacts the earth and so plants cannot grow (Deer in woods make trails where plants cannot grow, this isn't about cars at all) . As such I give the win to the leaking fluids for the local environment.
Cars generally are burning fossil fuels and putting more CO2 into the air. A horse is burning plants and so are net zero CO2 (assuming you don't use fuels to make the hay!) So for the earth horses are better.
Both cars and horses can kill people if they hit them. Car drives generally pay some attention, and horses generally will not run over people. However there are failures where both can kill. I don't know how to find statistic to tell which is worse in practice though.
A horse is a rich man's toy. Generally in the horse days humans walked, even the rich would walk most of the time - you can walk just as far and fast as a horse in a day. The horse was used to pull carts or carry heavy loads (though most people fail to realize just how much a human can carry and give the horse too much credit here). While a car is the common person's way to get around even when they could walk. Thus for human's the horse is a win because you exercise (though I'd really want to add a bicycle to this analysis)
I generally agree with your reply, minus the first part. Yes, oil drops on the road where aren’t growing food, but we cannot ignore the fact that rain sweeps oil away into waterways which is awful for local wildlife. Feces washing into the waterways isn’t ideal, but I’d wager it’s better for the fish than oil.
Depends on the amount of each. One liter of oil is less friendly than one dung, but average car leaks much less oil than a horse produces dung. Several tons of dung in one place is not that good, look at big animal farm runoff. Cars were hailed as solution for horse dung problem.
I absolutely agree! I think we should lower speed limits not just for cars, but for life in general: economic systems and the internet should have speed limits. And I'm being serious. Ivan Illich talks about this in his book [1] and I tend to agree with most of it after a lot of thought.
I've never read too much of him (no time, I have many of his books), but his argument that cars, on average, have an effective speed of 5 kph blew my mind.
That flipped my understanding of cars.
The irony is that he was a far left hippie who flirted with getting defrocked and I am supposed to be a "far right" conservative (whatever that means).
Have you read E.F. Schumacher? "Small is beautiful" is right your alley.
In the midwest there is so much space/land in the suburbs you could run parallel bike/golf-cart lanes - probably speed limit them to 25 MPH. If you had protected pathways for small electric transport I would imagine people would get on board.
Oddly many of the neighbors seem to already have golf carts in their garages ... I guess to tool around the neighborhood? (Christ, can't you even walk to the pickleball court, ha ha?)
I am excited how we the human race and use increasing amounts of energy to drive new innovation. The more energy we consume the more innovation will happen.
I am ok with those that want to live on a self-sustaining homestead but its not for me.
There's a truth to this but this reductionist naive approach to progress is also extremely dangerous. We have to be able to keep two thoughts in our head. More is good but we must exist in a balance with nature or we will destroy ourselves.
To grow beyond current limitations we must first acknowledge them on a fundamental level.
The problem is that your desire for more technological innovation direclty drives the destruction of land and the environment that other people could potentially use to live more sustainably.
It is not just a matter of land, but of poisoning the land and also allowing other species to live on it. Clearly, based on the massively increased extinction rates due to us, we have not been very nice to other species. And we have no right to continue destructive mining and agricultural practices to feed your continued desire for growth.
Perhaps its clear to you but I think the vast majority of the globe would generally disagree. A balance is required and I don't think believe the way forward is for your calls but rather improved technology that maintains that balance.
Another day on HN, another article that boils down to "Don't buy an EV now! Wait! Better things might be coming at some unknown point the future".
i.e. Keep spending money where you always have, because otherwise interests that currently make hundreds of billions a year will only make tens of billions a year.
EVs in general are not the best for the environment. Would rather have precious resources powering our grid rather than powering wasteful cars that pollute in other ways beyond “tail pipe emissions” (ie, tire wear particles, brake dust, “e-waste” when car becomes obsolete by manufacturer, further dependency on car centric transportation which displaces where people live with car storage)
Rebuilding our cities and societies around alternative transport is a much bigger ask than replacing polluting cars with much less polluting cars. Also, that level of change is close to impossible due to the level of pushback it would receive from all corners of society. It's certainly something to work towards, but you can't let it block you from taking the short term and more practical wins.
There's a role for this sort of napkin-level environmental accounting, but it's a limited one. The toolkit is most applicable for products which actually exist, as products.