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« Last post by stone on Today at 03:13:10 pm »
I'm sincere in thinking we need free public transport. I was very impressed with how that works in Yosemite NP USA of all places. It's car-culture central in California, but in Yosemite people leave their cars and use the free busses. Because they are used by everyone, they are full and very frequent, so you never need to wait. Think of how much car traffic there is through eg the Peak District. If that was on busses, we could have busses with the frequency of London tube trains, so no waiting really, so they would be convenient.
It is extremely hard to convert all cars in the world to electric. Mining the raw materials is desperately hard. Just look at how hard it is proving to open the lithium mine in Serbia as an example (among many). Probably all battery manufacturing capacity is needed for builders vans etc. Decarbonising transport in time depends on a switch from cars to public transport, cycles and less transport.
Railways are already only 50% funded by fares and yet are too expensive for all but the most well off. Seems to me that is less fair than having them completely free for all along with busses. It will be hard to ramp up capacity enough. But all decarbonising options are very hard/unfeasible.
It is a mistake to think of this from a "decarbonise by 2050" perspective. What really matters is how much carbon gets emitted in total before decarbonisation is achieved. Getting people switching out of cars immediately is so much better than a solution some time in the future after a load of CO2 has been emitted.
Regarding being authoritarian, I'm actually arguing for something that I hope would lead people to voluntarily not bother buying a car because they now have a good alternative. That would free up all the resources currently devoted to making all of those cars etc. I see that as much better than eg what was attempted in France, taxing car travel without providing an alternative. That provoked the Yellow Vest stuff.
Regarding inflation etc -yes I do think it is worth having a labour shortage that means hand-car-washes and perhaps even Deliveroo etc become a thing of the past. The Attlee government in the 1950s did dramatic stuff starting from extremely difficult circumstances. They resorted to rationing (eg not allowing second cars etc). I don't think it would need to be as difficult as that.
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