this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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Where I live (NL, EU) there are several charging stations (+20 spots) within a 10 mile radius. Every neighborhood has like 5-10 parking spots with a charger. Around 10-15% of the residential housing have their own high-power charging outlet. Office buildings have around the same percentage (10-15%) of their parking lot converted to charging parking spots. Even parking lots in cities come with that same percentage of charging stations these days.
Next to that around 30% of all housing is equipped with solar panels. New office buildings and factories all have giant solar arrays on their roofs. No exceptions.
In the EU the biggest problem is not willingness or effort. The biggest problem is reality. You can't connect that all to a power grid designed in the 60s. Energy infrastructure is hard, big and slow to build. Our grid is full. We are building like mad men but it just isn't realisable in a short time. Especially since all of the EU is building a new grid at the same time.. Building (nuclear) power plants, wind mills, conversion stations, high power grid cables all takes a lot of time.
But, mobility in the EU is starting to become too expensive for the median income. Here a litre of ron95 gasoline is around 2 euros. The purchase of new cars are taxed to insanity here in NL. Around 50% of the price is tax. A new electric vehicle with acceptable range is somewhere around 50-60k (ionic, ev5/6)
Electric vehicles had all sorts of tax exemptions. That's changing. Soon they're also taxes to the fullest.
Alas, everyone who doesn't have a job which provides a car does what I do: drive that old piece of garbage till it really falls apart.
And I think that are the 2 main reasons for the laxer rules on ice vehicles. Reality regarding the needed infrastructure and cost to the public. Everything has become so much more expensive the last 4 years.
You didn't even mention bicycles once!
Bikes aren't for everyone. I personally don't like them (and I'm Dutch, lol). I'd much rather see great public transport.
In my experience living in Hilversum (between Amsterdam and Utrecht) they're great for covering that last "last mile" between a person's home and mass public transport like the train and often do the same on the other side (between train and work place).
Given the massive (massive, MASSIVE) bicycle parking areas near the larger train stations, I would say that at least when it comes to trains the infrastructure is designed purposefully so that people can live further way from train stations and still get to the station quickly without requiring a car, since if they do require a car, in my experience, not just in The Netherlands, people often end up just taking the car all the way to their destination and skip the train altogether.
However, I can see how such a design that assumes bicycles are used like that, would be problematic for people who don't use bicycles like that, since it will have fewer buses feeding the train station than if bicyles weren't expected to cover most of those flows.
I my experience - having lived there and elsewhere in Europe - The Netherlands is invariably at the upper end of these things, even if the Dutch complain it's still not good enough (I would even say the country's "well above average" condition is probably because of that).
You should see the status of things in my native, car obcessed country of Portugal: all talkie-talkie yet a complete total disgrace for the rest. As for Renewables, the regulatory and legal framework has been designed to reward a few politically well connected companies (corruption over here is widespread, mainly at the higher levels and paid with the usual non-executive board memberships for "friendly" politicians and such), so personal solar generation is incredibly rare in this, one of the sunniest countries in Europe, because if you feed excess power to the grid you get at best 1/4 of what you pay for consuming it from the grid, and almost all of Renewables are big installations that no individual could ever have and hence are owned mainly by said politically well connected companies: hydrodams and large wind generators.
It doesn't help that most people's Ecological awareness is such a complete total joke that even for those who believe themselves as ecologically-minded ends at the point were they're faced with, say, walking to take their kids to a school less than 1km away instead of going by car.
For all its problems (no country is perfect), The Netherlands if comparativelly a frigging paradise in this and a number of other domains.
This tracks. Whenever I visit Portuguese relatives I'm always surprised by how quickly they default to the car. Once, it was literally to just take us to a train station that we could see with our eyes from where we were staying.
Weren't a bunch of politicians caught in a scandal there recently about deals with fossil fuel companies?
It's one of those things that "everybody does it" so only those who have lived elsewhere were the car culture is different tend to notice it.
As for politicians, just 2 days ago the Prime Minister resigned because he's offically a suspect in some shenennigans involving "green hydrogen" (plus licensing for lithium mines and a massive data center project) which also caught somebody he has described as his "best friend" in the past, a senior member of the PM's office (who is an ex-junior minister that lost his post in a smaller scandal involving an energy company a few years ago) and another minister.
Things haven't been this entertaining over here in ages.
And that is exactly the reason, why HVO100 diesel and Blue95 need to happen NOW and not in 20 years.
Maybe society doesn't need to have cars at all?
The Netherlands is very bad at public transport though. Some villages only have 1 bus per hour and only during rush hour, nothing during the rest of the day. This way we'll never get away from cars.
On the other hand you have good public transit