Romania offers as much as €11,500 to people buying an electric vehicle.
Imagine if up to €11,500 per person could go to funding public transportation.
I like cars. They’re useful, and EVs are probably the future. But directly subsidizing EVs seems somewhat wasteful. Makes as much sense to me as a tax break for buying a new iPhone.
It probably depends on the geography of the location, though? In cities, obviously investing in public transport over EVs makes more sense environmentally speaking.
But in rural areas, the equations might come out differently. You need a certain number of people using a bus to make it viable, since having a bunch of empty buses driving around is pretty shit for the environment, but at the same time, if that means running a bus so irregularly that people have to set aside most of the day to travel for a simple errand, then no one’s going to use public transport.
I live in a rural village where the majority of the public services are in a nearby town. If I need to go to the post office or the doctor, I have to go to the neighbouring town. I can be there and back in a car in less than an hour. The same journey takes 4-5 hours by bus, a combination of the route it takes through all the villages in the area and the fact that they run very irregularly.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I think more public transport would be good. I’d love it if public transport here was like it is in a big city like London, and if you miss one bus the next one will be along in 5-7 minutes. I would definitely use it if doing so didn’t mean half my day was gone. But I can definitely see how running a bus every 5-7 minutes here, when there might be no passengers at all on some of them, would be massively more wasteful than cars that are only used when they’re needed.
It might almost be worth calculating which would be the most cost effective: subsidising EVs, funding public transport, or just giving the village a post office and doctor. I’m a huge fan of the concept of 15-minute cities, because they work for many rural areas. Obviously there’s a cut-off point: it’s hard to justify a school, a post office, a doctor, a dentist, etc for a hamlet with 5 houses in it, but there’s many villages in the 1000-5000 population range that just need their own public services.
This is exactly the problem autonomous fleet of public vehicles are supposed to fix, if self-driving technology ever get good enough to work without supervision.
I’m not convinced that self-driving technology will ever be that good. An easier option in the short term might be neighbourhood car-sharing programs, where instead of signing up for a general car-share that’s open to anyone who’s signed up for membership, it’s restricted to the local neighbourhood. The idea is that whoever owns the car knows their own neighbours are the only ones using it, which makes it a bit more accountable and predictable than services like Zipcar (and these would actually be the ideal schemes to subsidise EVs for, because it benefits the whole neighbourhood, not just one family.)
There’s a few such schemes running in the UK already. It’s kind of reliant on being able to find enough neighbours willing to sign up for it, and actually being able to trust your neighbours, though. I love the idea of it, but secure, affordable housing that allows people to actually stay in one place for the long-term would help so much with creating the sense of community needed to make the schemes work.
That’s like 3 years of completely free public transport in Germany. Including all trains, metro etc.
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Europe sells 10 times more electric cars today than it did just six years ago, according to the International Energy Agency, but its fleet is cleaning up too slowly to meet its climate goals.
Governments across the continent are struggling with the price-tag of electric vehicles, which can cost several thousand euros more upfront than comparable ones that burn fossil fuels.
The EU’s move to cleaner cars is part of its promise to cut planet-heating pollution 65% from 1990 levels by the end of the decade, and hit net zero by 2045.
Because most alternatives to cars took time and money to build, the full switch to electric vehicles was “the most critical issue” for reducing emissions in the next decade, he said.
“It’s not sustainable to put out subsidies as high as we did in the past,” said Hochfeld, “and it’s also not socially fair because everyone in Germany – every taxpayer – pays for this transition, even if they don’t have a car.”
To boost uptake of electric cars, the quantity of different policies mattered as well as the quality, said Gracia Brückmann, an energy researcher at the University of Berne.
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