Originally Posted by
Sunfish
43 inches, my arse is wider than Britain which is a tiny country. Furthermore our cities and suburbs have been modeled on American ideas which are predicated on cheap private transport.
Translation: We drive 10+ km to Woolies, Coles or Aldi. There is no full service "village shop" within 500m walking distance. We do not have the population density outside the peoples republics of Balmain or Northcote to fund European style public transport. We cannot afford the recharger networks for EV and neither can the rest of the undeveloped world, even if we had the double capacity grid to power it.
We are not constructed of tiny well integrated cities.
You are just another of the impractical dreamers with no grasp of logistics.
Yes, we do need to move towards EV, but in a deliberate well planned operation over 50+ years.
How about you start with local delivery trucks within say 20 km of city centre? See how easy that is. Strangely enough, the mining industry may be all EV befere cities.
What you say is just not true, everywhere I have lived in Australia I have been no further than 1km from a store such as Coles/Woolies/Aldi/IGA, every one has been easily walking distance. I've never needed anything more than a small hatchback for shopping, not sure what justifies a Ford Ranger for picking up bread. If I look at my street of mostly older Australians who have retired, No one drives a compact, large sedans are the smallest cars, with three owning Dual cabs and don't even work anymore or transport anything bigger than a suitcase. I own the smallest car which probably travels the most distance out of anyone in the street.
I assume you live in Melbourne, A city that had a huge chunk of it's rail network dismantled in the 80s, and then reserved land used for development, governance failures. Massive spends on freeways with until recently almost nothing to rebuild the rail and bus network, again governance failures. No rail to the airport when it was built with the intention of a rail link in the 1970s, again governance failure. The bus system is token at best, the subsidy system for it is a joke, they subsidise a 15 minute interval bus to run from Frankston to the Airport in an arc via Dandenong, a 5 hour trip for $3, but can't get a 15 minute interval bus service to the next suburb to provide links to the trains in the outer suburbs. The stations have enough parking for 1 train carriage with 6, 6 carriage services per hour at most, there's no park and ride system. These are all government failures that should have been fixed years ago, yet stagnate.
Now repeat the above in every city in Australia.
Victoria still burns BROWN COAL for base load, its basically rotten wood, if you've ever held brown coal you would see how bad the stuff is. A nuclear powerplant could easily provide cheap and reliable base load to several cities, meaning all the electric transport in that city becomes a lot greener.
A simple and significant start would be to provide electric school buses for all government schools within the school zone, enough to actually service the local area and get the mums off the roads in en-masse SUV rushes.
I use the UK as an example, why, because they have changed in the last 20 years, most of which in the last 10 years. They went from nearly 50% reliance on coal for energy to 0%. That was not a gradual or stepped change, they did it in a few short years.
2. Purchase Maths _
(a) Initial cost of vehicles?
(b) recycling of vehicles?
(c) Road user charges? Victoria already has them. Did you think you would have free abundant power forever? Think again.
(d) The big one: Finding and mining the huge quantities of the various elements required including copper, Lithium and rare earths.
A Ranger or Hilux only costs a few grand short of a Tesla or other Electric models, price is obviously not the issue in Australia, it is a choice. I want my mini monster truck, that's it.
One thing I do find funny is that the Dual Cabs have truck style chassis and suspension, made for loads, not necessarily for off-roading, and more truck style suspension. Most don't have good roll qualities, so you are seeing more and more of them upside down in various fail pictures. As opposed to if you got a older style Land Cruiser or Pajeros which were tailored to offroad performance and some ride quality. The poor road handling means they are more tiring on long journeys both from directional control and the limp porposing they do when ever they hit a small undulation.