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xkcd #2948: Electric vs Gas (xkcd.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/xkcd

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Alt text:

An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that's the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.

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[–] hswolf 17 points 6 months ago (4 children)

That's the problem, only switching the transportation method isn't enough, there's a whole infrastructure behind that needs to be built.

In most city centers you can kinda refurbish pre-existing systems, but in suburbs you need to build from scratch, and the distances are way bigger which imposes another challenge.

Don't get me wrong, im all for it, but we need to acknowledge these problems first.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

Are you sure that the rules here allow reasonable comments like this?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Suburbs are intentionally designed to not be walkable.

To get to the neighbor behind my house, without cutting anybody's yard, I have to walk about a mile. We aren't far. His daughters play with my sons through our shared fence.

And that's a modest example. Plenty of cul de sacs that are "close" to the main street, as a crow flies but a lot further if you're an East Asian Chinchilla Monkey running as fast as you can.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Love it or hate it, they aren't intentionally designed not to be walkable, they're intentionally designed to discourage traffic from driving through them.

The reason communities like yours and the one behind your house aren't connected is to reduce the amount of cars driving down your block. To make it safer for your kids to play outside.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

The reason communities like yours and the one behind your house aren't connected is to reduce the amount of cars driving down your block.

Which is ironic because it has the opposite effect by forcing every resident to get around via car

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Correct. It can be done though. Getting stores and stuff into suburbs would help already, assuming we're talking us style ones.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Yeah, unfortunately the Levitt-town style of suburbs (which are all that's allowed to be built nowadays) are largely incompatible with public transport. We need to fix zoning laws to allow pre-war style suburbs to be built again to make public transport feasible. And all of this will take awhile to fix