America's long term EV plan is dead. We have no choice but to go big on Micromobility
It’s put up or shut up time. For decades now the scientific revelation that cars are slowly killing the planet has been addressed with the “vape plan” — keep the addiction but try to move to slightly less destructive electronic options!
But now that Trump and the Republicans plan to strangle EVs entirely and flood the world with fossil fuels as much as possible, there is simply no other option. Blue states must refuse to play the car game at all. This is the wake up call.
This may sound like hyperbole or an impossible ask to some. How can we possibly transform our entire transportation system? Easier than you might think, actually. Every road gets repaved in 10 years or so. In cities this happens even faster. That means that every year we repave a signifigant fraction of our streets. Simply put them back down in a different configuration. Deprioritize and eliminate space for cars, including parked ones, and replace it with space for micromobility and pedestrians, with proper protected infrastructure. Develop templates to do this fast, instead of designing each one by hand.
Conviently, people already want to do this. Micromobility like bikes, ebikes, and scooters already outsell electic cars 2:1 — and that’s with virtually no infrastructure dedicated to them and many people considering them dangerous due to all the cars.