That's inevitable. As is the inevitable required investment in public transport, at affordable prices, capable of servicing the journeys that people (and the economy) need.
Oh.
You can't have this shit and 'personal choice/responsibility'. you need a strong, strategic, well funded, social structure.
Where did we land on the state funding half my steak dinner?
And my Waggamammas squid balls?
Your first point just doesn't work practically. It's the kind of answer that does get given when the question is asked in the media. There are no parking lots to speak of around where I live and there is one petrol station close enough to get to without needing a vehicle to get there.
On the second point, I think this is basically my massive backward change to lifestyle or Armageddon argument. I don't use the car much at all for local trips. Even for longer journeys I mostly try and use trains, but boy is it hard work with strikes, engineering works and general overcrowding to get anywhere easily.
The question was how people without driveways are supposed to own personal electric vehicles. The answer is that they aren't. Personal transportation is wildly inefficient for the vast majority of people - we dedicate vast amounts of public and private space to storing overly large, overly complex machines that most of us use for incredibly tiny proportions of our time. That you don't consider the necessary alternative to be ready for service doesn't make that any less true.
It's a shame that the vanguard of personal transportation technology is apparently in the hands of a lunatic man child, because in the right hands we could be shaping it in such a way as to actually drive the kind of innovation we need.
It will work. When people don't have cars because they can't charge them, either market alternatives will appear or you'll move to where they are. Again, you're not going to (or at least shouldn't) get the luxury of making absolutely no changes to your lifestyle, because the issue is much greater than just the wrong kind of fuel. There are too many personal vehicles in existence that are clogging up the streets of cities serving absolutely no purpose except personal convenience at the expense of society's, and there are more and more people. It isn't the 1950s any more and it's not viable for everyone to have their own car any more.
Yes, that's entirely the point. You're going to have to change your lifestyle. We all are. The very fact that you don't use the car much at all for local trips is exactly why it shouldn't be sitting outside your house for days on end serving no purpose other than to get in everyone else's way and make everyone else's life a little less convenient. The good news is that you're already ahead of the many people who do unnecessarily use their cars locally, it will be far less of a lifestyle change for you to have to jump on a tube or a bus for half an hour to get to the storage facility where you keep it when you do need to go further. Or more likely, sell it and join a car share club which will deliver a vehicle to your door when you need it.
There will be market driven solutions to the problem, but we are all going to have to change our lifestyles. Part of that will mean voting for politicians who will make those tough decisions, because legislation drives markets.
Battery EV's are part of the problem. Not part of the solution. They necessitate large, heavy, vehicles, with service operation problems (range, continuous operation, load carrying, limitations) along with vehicle lifetime and recycle/refurbish problems. There will be a hydrogen infrastucture needed for construction/farm vehicles, as well as haulage and public service transport. These sectors are already turning to hydrogen, not battery. The inefficiencies in hydrogen production (the japanese are brining in a nuclear programme that generates hydrogen cheaply without a hydrochemical or electrolysis process...and electrolysis can work with cheap nuclear or renewable power at remote service stations) are solvable. Hydrogen can be cleanly burned, instead of gas for domestic and industrial processes. The efficiencies of fuel cell technology are ahead of battery development considered on a pro rata investment measure. Fuel cell vehicles can produce viable small personal transport, all the way up to the largest of commercial vehicles. Hydrogen can be cleanly burned, as well as for producing electricity through chemical cell processes.
The only limiting factor is the high level of influence of the petrochemical sector, holding back alternative energy production, through the mechanism of corruption. In the fifties the UK population was promised almost limitless free electricity through a burgeoning nuclear programme. That would never have done. Not enough people holding the levers would get paid that way.
We still wont all have personal transport, but we absolutely need investment in viable public transport or the arse will fall out of the worlds economy. And the arse will fall out of the world itself otherwise.
I own an EV and I love it. I'll never return to a dirty, polluting machine filled with an explosive liquid, that needs servicing every 18 months just to stay on the road. I agree that hydrogen might be the future, and will be happy to look at such vehicles when they become available. But the days of the ICE are numbered.
I agree with Russ that we all need to change our attitudes to transport. My preference would be for public transport to be so good that I don't need to own a vehicle at all. But where I live, public transport is woefully inadequate and car ownership is virtually a necessity. Yet there's no grand plan to invest in public transport, nor to make it more affordable. There's no grand plan to improve the national grid infrastructure such that electric vehicle options are available to city dwellers. Instead we have Rishi knee jerking in response to the ULEZ by-election because he thinks there may be votes in rolling back the few small positive proposals that his own party made only a couple of years ago. It's shoddy. Pathetic.
I love this attempt to paint it as a knee jerk response to possible vote accrual.
They know that they are toast, and they are taking as many of the suitcases full of cash that they can, while they can. That's it. The one thing you can't help but admire in this project is how effectively it's reamed out the supine british public.
Really? You think the Tories have given up on the next election? I don't think so at all, and neither do most of the media, including Chris Mason who broke the story for the BBC. It's an odd way to 'cash in' before they go. The car manufacturers are up in arms about the u-turn, as their business strategies have been based on the 2030 pledge. That's one sector that won't be handing out well paid non-exec posts to any departing politicians.
Far more likely that they think this is a vote winner among the many who say the proposals are 'too much too fast'.
Car manufacturers are not the petrochemical industry. One has a lot more untethered cash for loading unseen into suitcases.
If a political project can do all this to it's people, and win a truly democratic election, there's something awfully wrong with those people.
There wont be that much left once they are done...apart from generations of problems. They've had their fussy, as my nan used to say.
I don't think that's how it works at all. Rishi is already wealthy beyond most of our dreams. You really think he would prefer a suitcase of cash from the oil companies to the prestige of winning a general election and remaining prime minister? Not a chance. He also leads a party whose MPs would no doubt prefer a seat and a wage to a theoretical dodgy pay-off. There will be plenty of pressure from below for the government to put up a decent fight at the next election. This announcement is part of that strategy.
It’s an effort to appease/appeal to their core voters and the red wall.
He’ll need to throw in a few EOTHO days if he wants my red wall vote tho.
He should do it on Mondays because:
a) Mondays are always quiet for restaurants
b) If you eat out on Monday you'll think "sod it, another good week gone", and eat out more that week than you may have done.
Don't go to restaurants on Mondays, it's usually the head chef's day off and you'll get subpar food.
I think he's given up on the election .... But is trying to make it as narrow a defeat as possible.
