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Electric and hybrid electric vehicles are in the fast lane to wider adoption, according to a new study by University of Michigan researchers.
The researchers analyzed the present status of electric vehicles in the U.S., their life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions, and progress toward lifting barriers to broader acceptance. The study is a literature and technical review that synthesizes and analyzes recent findings from many sources.
"We feel that within the next decade, electric vehicles are positioned to be more suitable for most drivers to use on a daily basis," said Brandon Schoettle, project manager at the U-M Transportation Research Institute. "That's due to recent improvements such as longer driving ranges, faster recharging times and lower vehicle prices."
[...] Schoettle and colleague Michael Sivak, a research professor at UMTRI, found that sales of plug-in electric vehicles in the U.S. have increased by more than 700 percent since 2011.
[...] Other key findings include:
- Availability: The number of individual electric vehicle models that consumers can choose from has increased rapidly, nearly doubling from 13 in model year 2016 to 23 in 2017. Recent price trends make plug-in hybrid vehicles more affordable and more similar in price to the average internal combustion engine vehicle.
- Charging infrastructure: The number of public charging stations has grown rapidly since 2010, with approximately 16,000 now available across the U.S., supplying approximately 35,000 individual connections (for comparison, there are roughly 112,000 gas stations).
- Driving range: The driving distance between charges of battery electric vehicles continues to improve. The range of all electric vehicles has increased to an average of 110 miles. Several studies the researchers cite estimate that a range of 120 miles can cover 99 percent of household vehicle trips.
- Fuel prices Compared to gasoline, electricity prices have been low and stable over the past decade or more, and they're projected to remain that way over the next several decades.
Getting Americans to give up their cars for public transportation may be a tough sell, but if the study is right getting them to switch to electric cars won't be.
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday June 24 2017, @10:17AM (11 children)
It's not a tough sell, it's a non-starter. Public transportation in non-heavily-urban areas simply isn't feasible and the vast majority of the US is not heavily urban.
Even in heavily urban areas we are not nearly as densely packed as Europe. Take Oklahoma City. It covers roughly the same area as London but with less than a tenth of the population. Which is all to say you'd have to have quite a lot more people in most of our cities to make significant public transportation viable.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Saturday June 24 2017, @10:53AM (5 children)
Urbanization is increasing worldwide:
https://www.populationeducation.org/content/population-cities-impacts-increased-urbanization [populationeducation.org]
Specific to the United States:
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/2010_census/cb12-50.html [census.gov]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
The Urban Population as a Percentage of the Total Population (U.S.)
Just for shits, here's the %s for the State of Oklahoma:
Can Oklahoma City quintuple its population density? Maybe. But it will require planning and more vertical growth. Maybe an arcology or two. None of which is necessary when you can expand horizontally with ease and your current population is just over half a million.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by choose another one on Saturday June 24 2017, @11:25AM (1 child)
Urbanization is increasing, but it won't be dense urbanization in the US, because there is plenty of space. It is dense urbanization that makes public transport feasible.
The only caveat I might add to the OPs post is that it is density which makes _mass_ public transport feasible - trains (above or below ground), buses, trams etc. There are other possible public transport solutions that don't rely on having 20+ people wanting to travel between the same endpoints at the same time - whether the future is Uber, Johnny Cabs or whatever I don't know, but I do think once our cars start doing the driving themselves there will be significantly less incentive for private individual ownership.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday June 24 2017, @12:51PM
I agree in that the difference will decline somewhat since no one has to pay for a human driver any more in the non-private case. But there's still going to be a big difference between having your own transportation available when you need it and more expensive transportation available when it gets around to arriving at your departure point. That'll work for some situations and not for others. It'll be interesting to see if the situations it will work for will be good enough improvements to increase US urban density over time.
Car rentals for which you don't have to pay a driver are so expensive that I have already paid for a used car I purchased in 2015 (seven significant one-way interstate trips plus a year and a half of ownership). As a result, I doubt that the automatic car market is going to be cheap compared to ownership.
(Score: 2) by KGIII on Saturday June 24 2017, @05:34PM (2 children)
For the curious, I'd suggest looking up what "urban" is defined as. Fairly small towns are classified as urban and the numbers were revised prior to the 2000 census. They introduced "Urban Clusters." I know, 'cause I had to deal with this. I modeled traffic and there are different standards for rural and urban thoroughfares.
It takes only 2500 people to be considered urban. Clusters make this more likely.
Source:
Census info. [census.gov]
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Saturday June 24 2017, @06:39PM (1 child)
That is roughly three units [of Alstom Coradia 'Nordic']� (two units can be made into a set) of commuter trains (incl standing passengers)
So - that means that according to the US gov't if two commuter trains stop for long enough for people to fall asleep and have a coffe it is an urban area :)�
(Just found that number hilariously low)
(Score: 2) by KGIII on Saturday June 24 2017, @07:11PM
Probably only if they live on the trains and the trains remain stationary? Though, I guess if you crammed 'em onto one train and they lived there, that might qualify.
The whole "urban" thing is a way of lying with statistics. Well, it's "honest" but disingenuous. People immediately think of cities when you say urban, that's simply not true. The little podunk town, without even a fire station and maybe one store and post office, is considered urban.
The number is slightly higher if you have a residential institution - I think it's 3500. So, you can have a prison with 2000 inmates and a supporting town of 1500, and that's considered urban.
(I modeled traffic. This is why I know these silly bits of trivia.)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nuke on Saturday June 24 2017, @12:20PM (4 children)
That's American thinking. You think of passenger trains as only for urban transit systems. In the UK and Europe generally, the long distance passenger business is thriving. I live near Newport in Wales and I would not dream of travelling to London (150 miles) by car, even less by plane, unless I had some specific bulky item to carry. I go by train.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Unixnut on Saturday June 24 2017, @01:01PM (2 children)
> I live near Newport in Wales and I would not dream of travelling to London (150 miles) by car, even less by plane, unless I had some specific bulky item to carry. I go by train.
If the public transport is going where you want to go directly, that is great! However if it doesn't, then it is a right PITA.
So if you are going to London and back, it is usually good, because most of the lines that were not ripped up were the most "profitable" ones, meaning commuter links going to/from London. So e.g. you want to go from London to Oxford and back again, the train is there, however going from Oxford to Bedford or Cambridge is impossible, because they ripped the line up years ago. Only recently have they started a coach service between them, and it is nowhere near as good an alternative.
Public transport is still too expensive, because most people already own a car, so that is a sunk cost for them. There is also the issue of time and convenience, if there is a direct line, trains are ok. However if you need to switch train lines a few times (like I did once to get to Norfolk) it will take you 2-3 times a long, and cost a lot more than just driving there. And if you want to take a train from Oxford to Cambridge, you have to take the train into London, then the London underground, then a train out again to Cambridge, more than twice the distance and cost involved.
Also, driving is a far nicer experience than public transport. So nice, that despite some UK councils putting a huge effort over the last 20+ years into degrading the driving experience as much as they can, people still prefer driving to public transport.
Saying that, my generation ("Millennials" as they call them) might be the tipping point. Most London people my age don't have cars, because the expense and hassle is just too much, indeed those 5-10 years younger than me didn't even bother getting a license.
Sure, all the ones I know hate public transport as well, but urban density in London is reaching a point where you can shove people like battery hens into tower blocks, and then most of what they need to exist is within walking or cycling distance. The replacement for the car for them was not public transport, but the bicycle.
(Score: 3, Informative) by theluggage on Saturday June 24 2017, @08:22PM (1 child)
Yes, but (a) London does have a pretty extensive public transport system which is "good" and "efficient" (read the qualification carefully:) by the standards of UK public transport. Also (b) the nastiness of public transport has found its equal in the nastiness of trying to drive around the more central parts of London - let alone park. The latter is the only reason I get the train when I'm going to London, despite it costing several times as much as making the journey, faster (if you time it door-to-door), by car.
I prefer to use public transport where possible, and for carefully cherry-picked trips it works well, but its sometimes just expensive massochism.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday June 25 2017, @11:05AM
> Yes, but (a) London does have a pretty extensive public transport system which is "good" and "efficient" (read the qualification carefully:) by the standards of UK public transport.
> Also (b) the nastiness of public transport has found its equal in the nastiness of trying to drive around the more central parts of London - let alone park.
Yeah, but that has been reached by making the alternatives worse, rather than making public transport more desirable. I have an issue with degrading alternatives rather than improving other things, because it is a cycle of degradation rather than improvement. Things are getting steadily worse and worse, as standards tolerated by people gets lower and lower.
> The latter is the only reason I get the train when I'm going to London, despite it costing several times as much as making the journey, faster (if you time it door-to-door), by car.
Don't get me wrong, I never drive in London unless I absolutely have to (if I drive for pleasure, usually that is really late at night/early in the morning, when it is relatively empty). I only use the car for getting the hell out of London (for my sanity) and driving around the UK, and the once a year when I have to drive to the Garage for the MOT (which once took around 3 hours to cover 4.2 miles, could have walked there 3 times over).
However the fact that despite the government trying to make it as uncomfortable, expensive and difficult to drive a car in London, I still see the roads completely clogged every single day (even weekends when people go shopping). People would rather put up with the delays, the cost, the parking nightmare, the awful speed bumps, the stupidly low speed limits, and the hours wasted in traffic, rather than take public transport.
It is like watching a war of attrition I swear.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday June 24 2017, @07:37PM
You didn't pay attention to the size of our cities vs. population. You cannot realistically walk across even a fairly small town of 30K people once you get there. Nor can you take a bus or subway because there are not enough people going the same way at regular intervals to make one profitable. This holds true up to our largest cities with very few exceptions.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.