Pirate's Cove

First they said everyone had to move out of their fossil fueled vehicles into EVs. Then they immediately said EVs were bad, so, Everyone Else should have to take public transportation. And now

To fight climate change, micromobility is a better option than overpriced transit projects

Thoughtful transit advocates have cautioned about the escalating costs of creating new urban and commuter rail systems in the United States. But the work of the Transit Costs Project and others raises a question that they have been reluctant to answer: have costs now reached the point at which it is time to put down the shovels and find other ways to provide climate-friendly mobility? With the rising popularity of micromobility solutions such as e-bikes and e-scooters, the answer to this question, in many cases, should be yes.

When considering whether an infrastructure project makes sense, it is necessary to consider both costs and benefits. For transit, benefits roughly correspond to the number of riders a project is likely to serve, but to the extent we see transit as a climate solution, we might also wish to consider the number of car trips new infrastructure replaces.

Wait, hold on a second: are they saying that government funding of public transportation projects is out of control and they waste enormous amounts of money? Weird

New York and Northern California are the epicenters of project cost escalation, but they have radically different transit usage. The San Francisco Bay Area has almost as many people as New York City, but far smaller transit ridership. While the MTA New York City Transit carried 2.3 billion passengers in 2022, Bay Area transit agencies collectively transported about one-tenth that number of riders.

Well, in fairness, the NYC subway system was implemented when the city was essentially young, and is a wonderful system (excluding lots of riders). They have a robust bus system. Not so much in SF, which is weird, since the city is jammed full of Leftists who believe in global boiling. California is also the state that is trying to build a fast train system, which exploded from $8 billion to over $120 billion, and barely anything has been built yet.

Critics argue that electric cars are not an environmental panacea because their production is resource intensive, they occupy a lot of space, and some of their components are difficult to recycle. Transit proponents would prefer to dissuade travelers from owning cars or SUVs entirely by improving the density of bus and rail networks and increasing the frequency of service.

Improving micromobility is another way to reduce car trips and encourage some to go car-free. And, since light e-bikes and e-scooters use less electricity than electric cars, they reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the extent that local power is generated from fossil fuels, in all or in part.

An individual running an errand on an e-scooter uses less resources and less space than one running that same errand in Tesla’s Cybertruck. And the e-scooter user can bring his or her ride onto a bus or train, making it a convenient first- and last-mile solution. Or, for those that prefer to rent, e-scooter and e-bike docking stations at transit stations also facilitate completing a trip without a car or taxi.

That might work well in a dense city like NYC, well, when the batteries aren’t starting fires, but, not so much in most places if you need to go anywhere. What the Warmists really want is people not being able to go very far.