• I’m gonna post this link to a former comment of mine, since this subject comes up a lot. Neither EVs nor public transit is a magic bullet.

    The efficiency of public transit depends on ridership; nowhere in the world does it actually achieve 100% occupancy for more than a few minutes at a time, and nothing is more wasteful than a train running a circuit with only one passenger. At least by my calculations, it would take an average occupancy rate increase of 1.6x (for electric light rail) to 2.4x (for electric busses) over pre-pandemic levels for US public transit to reach parity with EVs, both in terms of electricity per passenger mile and tons of raw material per capita (such as steel, aluminum, copper, glass, and plastic). We’d need higher occupancy than the trains in Europe and the busses in Taiwan. Whether or not that’s geographically possible in North America is an open question.

    Ebikes are great, no question there, but thanks to parasitic drain in cheap chargers, they use 1/3rd the energy a typical EV does (kWh per passenger-mile, adjusted for occupancy but not speed), when they should use only 1/10th. That’s a problem I expect to see solved in the next year or so, but it’s a great reminder that nothing runs on magic.

    As I say in the linked comment, public transit has critical advantages in the fields of urbanism and human-centric city design. I like trains and busses, and I vote for them every chance I get, it just bothers me when people conflate these advantages with environmental impact.