It's not remotely realistic to expect a sudden drastic change in infrastructure like that. While we should work toward such goals, statements like this are ignorant of the time and efforts necessary to affect such change.
I'm getting so sick of the anti-car crowd commenting this stuff on anything related to cars. Like yes, we know, public transportation is good and a great goal. But they're just so out of touch with reality most of the time.
Then personally build me a road fucker. It is like people only think public transport requires huge amounts of public investment and maintenance, but other forms of transport somehow magically require less than the most efficient option. Roads and cars just appear out of thin air...
I'd love to see you take a trash lumber pile or fence clippings to the landfill with a train. If I didn't own a truck I would have already needed to rent one twice this week
Damn, you really incensed a whole bunch of people who seem to like living in soulless, identical car-centric hells. What normal person thinks you expect "a sudden drastic change" from a silly comment like this?
How does that get me from my house to somewhere near my house? Or is this something I'm supposed to pay higher taxes for that won't service anything near me?
It doesn’t. Public transportation only really works in dense environments. The rub is that the default mode of development across the US has been suburban sprawl, which basically makes the “last mile” - from the bus/train route to your house / business / shops - impractical.
Best we can do given this state of affairs is build good transit and densify around the stops with infill development. Continuing the pattern of sprawl just makes every problem related to transportation harder - longer commutes, more traffic, higher amount of energy consumed to get from point A to point B.
Anyway, hope this battery tech works out because a lot of us are stuck with expensive personal vehicles as our only viable option given the way our cities are laid out.
Road networks can only work in dense environments. You think that building and maintaining expensive transit infrastructure can be done outside of large cities? Last mile transportation means that we couldn't build out roads to people's houses. Relying on car transport would require parking your car in the main city square and walking home from there. Not to mention that car transport is universally less efficient in energy to get from point A to point B.