In 2012, there were 13 million bicycles sold in the US. If kids bikes are included, the number was 18.7 million. By comparison, the total number of electric vehicles sold was less than 52,000. In fact, there are more bikes than cars (of all kinds) sold in the US.
I point this out, because some states have an obsession with promoting EV sales:
In an effort to spur lackluster sales of electric cars, California, New York and six other states said on Thursday that they would work jointly to adopt a range of measures, including encouraging more charging stations and changing building codes, to make it easier to own an electric car.
The goal, they said, was to achieve sales of at least 3.3 million vehicles that did not have any emissions by 2025.
The states, which represent more than a quarter of the national car market, said they would seek to develop charging stations that all took the same form of payment, simplify rules for installing chargers and set building codes and other regulations to require the stations at workplaces, multifamily residences and at other places.
They said they would also promote hydrogen fueling stations.
Not saying EV’s are necessarily a bad thing. But people already own zero-polluting vehicles: bicycles. States should prioritize bike infrastructure over hydrogen infrastructure.
Bikes are not nonpolluting. How do you think the organic arugula and mung beans cyclists eat for fuel gets to the market? They get there by diesel power and then pedaling releases even more carbon.
If I count how much extra I eat to run my bicycle 15,000 km per year I’m sure it pollutes like a small car.
You’re right that bicycles are not “non-polluting”. But reasonable estimates are that they get somewhere between 100-500 mpg equivalent. The wide range is largely due to what kind of diet you eat. And that is before you consider any of the space usage, public health benefits, cost savings, etc. etc. benefits. It really is more efficient to move 30 lbs. of metal than 3000.
You’re wrong on three counts:
1. I grow my own beans.
2. Try comparing a fit/high metabolism cyclist’s food intake with an obese driver, one who overeats. Or someone who is a poor judge of portion size, who wastes half of every meal. You’ll find the difference in food, by pound, is minuscule.
3. OK, so suppose 1 & 2 don’t apply. For every 10 or 100 lbs of extra food a cyclist eats to fuel their journey (transported from the next town or the next state), there’s 1 or 10 lbs of gasoline (transported from the other side of the world) saved. Prorating the cost of transport by weight and distance, you’re probably in the same ball park.
Thank you for this excellent post. The false promise of EVs allow people to continue to believe the fantasy that they can address climate change without significantly altering their lifestyle. Just buy a new car, problem solved. I would only note a couple other salient points about a shift to EVs. First, has anyone calculated the amount of electricity, most of which is still fossil-fuel based, required to power literally hundreds of millions of EVs? Since more than 90% of the energy required to move an automobile moves the mass of the automobile itself, not the passenger, any automobile-based transportation system wastes most of its energy on moving millions of individual 2,000-lb metal boxes, not people. In a low-carbon, low-energy future, this is an incredible waste of energy. Second, one must calculate the carbon footprint of the raw material extraction, manufacturing, transportation of the finished product to market, and ultimate disposal of these metal boxes to begin to measure the true carbon cost of motor vehicles. Finally, a shift to EVs does nothing to address a myriad of other social problems caused by the automobile: the tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of serious injuries annually, the immense direct and indirect economic costs associated with building and maintaining an automobile infrastructure, the blighting of neighborhoods from a freeway and parking lot-based urban architecture, or the epidemic of obesity from a sedentary lifestyle, just to name a few. I’m glad to see a discussion that strips away the facade of techno-utopian fantasy represented by the uncritical promotion of EVs.
“said they would seek to develop charging stations that all took the same form of payment”
Oh great, my state government is going to try to reinvent the Visa card.
Also @Owen, those numbers are available, and the extra energy burned by biking (especially for transport) still leaves it as the most efficent form of transporation. IIRC its lower energy per mile than walking (maybe depending on how hard you ride).
Electric cars get the equivalent, on a dollar basis, of 120 mpg. Even if powered entirely by coal (which they generally aren’t; high-adoption states have lots of solar and hydro), they’re more carbon-efficient than gasoline cars.
Hydrogen, on the other hand, is a joke.
But here’s some systemic failure for you to think about, Drunk Engineer.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with building out a network of electric car chargers. But the majority of chargers which have been built so far are *too slow* — they are 240V 30 amp or less, which charges a Tesla Model S (most of the other cars are equally efficient) at 21.6 miles of driving per hour of charging. At home I can charge at 28.8 miles per hour of charging on a socket which any electrician can install.
As far as I can tell, all of these state-funded electric car charger plans plan to put in more *extremely slow* electric car chargers. As a result, the chargers will be slower than charging at home and people will avoid using them. Pure waste!
Tesla is building very fast chargers (for its customers only). Nissan is building very fast chargers (for its customers, mostly). There is also one Canadian company installing public chargers which are actually faster than typical circuits available at homes: Sun Country Highway, who is using a “patronize restaurant or hotel, get free charging” business model which doesn’t require any metering.
Apart from that, “car charging” in the US has been piles of money spent on slow-charging stations all over the country — with really complex payment systems attached, which makes the slow-charging stations cost thousands of dollars to install. Waste. And this appears to be what the various state governments are planning to spend their money on, when they’re not burning it on ludicrous hydrogen nonsense.
So, Owen, if you drive a car, you don’t have to eat?