Not as much as they hope it will.
Electric or not, we need less cars in cities, not more. Rather than making the next generation of mildly more sustainable but just as dangerous and space inefficient road congestants, we should be thinking harder about how best to meet people’s mobility needs in more safe, sustainable, and effective ways.
People need options not more car dependency.
Those resources are better used to build up public transportation, (e-)bike shares, sidewalks, and the accompanying infrastructure to go with it all, with seamless handoffs between modes.
Electric cars are here to save the auto industry, not the planet.
Electric cars are here to save the auto industry, not the planet.
This is an interesting bowling I haven’t heard before.
Totally agree that for areas with any population density we need good, regular and frequent mass transit.
I also believe that areas without good density, we need to convert to pockets of density to enable funding for transit. Also, hoarding ornamental land in North America is a dead old throwback to frontier days and we need to remediate those out to more shared or natural or aggro space.
We’ve spent too many years enabling this land hoarding by changing natural and aggro space to fucking mcmansion estates and that shit has to stop.
Not just mass transit, we need to make cities walkable and pedestrian friendly. No more stroads. No more big box stores with ginormous parking lots. No more “outdoor” malls. It’s just extremely inefficient use of land.
No, because public transit is the future. I mean, EVs are fine and will have their place but we need better mass transit.
I’m hoping for electric ferries and cargo ships one day.
We already have some electric (hybrid) ferries in BC. I think its 2 with an order for 4 total?
Once shore power is installed on both ends of the routes (its going to take years for whatever reason) they’ll then run 100% electric all the time.
Buses can be electric too ya know (and stuff like construction equipment). The money right now is in personal evs, but the manufacturing volume and rnd is pretty cross compatible
There’s this one crazy electric construction vehicle that never needs to be charged, it generates all its own power. Some huge rock mover, drives up mountain with empty load and gets to the top near empty battery wise. Then fills up with tons of whatever it’s hauling, and then uses regen breaking to fill the battery on the way down.
Rinse repeat.
I just wonder about cost to produce batteries, lack of recycling, and the cost of a car accident with a battery powered vehicle involved. For that, I am so far uncertain of its sustainability.
Hydrogen.
EV busses, boats, and other vehicles will still need batteries. and in the end the batteries can be sold elsewhere.
Canada had a wonderful mass transit system when the vast majority of the population lived rurally. But the urbanization movement saw people move to where the high density allowed one to walk everywhere, so there wasn’t much need for the mass transit anymore and eventually it was shut down.
Cars have driven cities to become woefully less dense than they used to be, which is why you see value in a return of mass transit. When you have rural problems (life being too far away to walk to), you need rural solutions. But isn’t the even better solution to get the idea of cities being wannabe rural areas out of our heads completely and start densifying again?
Pay off for who, exactly?
It will definitely pay off for the billionaires who own the car companies.
Id like more funding for infrastructure for Ebikes/Escooters
Infrastructure and regulation. Too many death traps being imported that do not meet CSA standards.
Maybe, but probably not as much as investing in infrastructure that lowers the 15,000 km the average Canadian drives a year.
So, internet service? That’s has proven to be the most effective tool in seeing people drive a lot less. Driving to and from work is the bulk of those 15,000 kms and a good internet connection allows around 40% of the workforce to work from home, as seen during the COVID period. We are investing quite heavily in that.
In fact, we’re investing so heavily in improved internet service that many farms in Canada now have two fibre runs as the government determined one was not enough!
If employees work from home middle managers loose their reason to exist. And seeing as middle management gets to decide on the question work-from-home…
Are these subsidies or tax breaks? I can never be sure tbh
There’s no significant difference between the two.
Tax breaks remove potential future tax revenue, but aren’t spending tax revenue acquired from another source.
Yea, there’s no significant difference - tax breaks spend revenue from a future source.
But with a tax break in an emerging business, that revenue wouldn’t otherwise exist because the company wouldn’t have opened operations here when it could take advantage of egregious US subsidies instead.
You’re falling into something akin to the broken window fallacy. Economic resources aren’t created or destroyed by incentives, they are shifted. If that tax break didn’t exist those loans, employees, potential capital etc… would be doing something else. Tax breaks need to be extremely precisely honed to avoid lowering future income.
Economic growth doesn’t happen on its own. The Canadian economy isn’t some entity that magically sees growth without investment.
So demand isn’t somehow linked with supply?
It can make a big difference in who can use them. An income tax break, for example, is only useful to those who have income to tax. While a subsidy can fund a venture that does not yet have income.
I meant in this context where it’s established companies that have the means to build the factories they’re planning to build.
