You can do both! Better trains and more EVs replacing gas cars can be done simultaneously!
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You forget the most important aspect of policy: it can't cost a single dime, and everyone must lie about that. Read the first sentence of the article:
"When California neighborhoods increased their number of zero-emissions vehicles"
Obviously neighborhoods/cities/states didn't increase anything. It was just rich people living there buying fancy cars. Of course, this needs to be described as a great accomplishment of local government.
And nowhere in the article is the obvious solution even suggested: advancing electric car technology so they're cheaper than ICE cars. And I don't mean charging extra tax while cutting public transport to make sure poor people don't go anywhere anymore, I mean fixing the technology so everyone has transport, for less money.
California government has a great claim to advancing the state of the art in EVs (and hybrids and just ICE before that).
Some people credit Tesla with kick starting the EV revolution. Californian governance kick started Tesla.
Their EV efforts go back to the ZEV mandate in 1990.
> obvious solution
Shouldn't the obvious solution be based on observable reality? Which is that there is no technology in sight that will make EVs cheaper to build than ICEs. Otherwise you are praying for a miracle, and that's not a sound policy.
Technological advance can be modeled like anything else. Everything about plug-in EVs is cheaper than ICE cars, except the battery. So you can model exactly what you need to get the same as you're currently seeing with solar panels. You can calculate at exactly what point they'll take over aviation and so on.
I mean, this isn't even a very hard thing to model.
> I mean, this isn't even a very hard thing to model.
Could you please explain in more detail what exactly do you want to model here? Above, you mentioned "advancing electric car technology so they're cheaper than ICE cars". Now as we both know the issue is with the battery, do you just want cars with battery so small that the car is cheaper than an ICE but nobody wants it? Because there is no need to model that, it has been tried and failed.
If you mean modeling battery technology that's not yet available in EVs, good luck with that. There are better batteries available than in mass-market vehicles, but they are not cheaper; cheaper technologies are not as good. Sure, in 10 years the batteries will be much better overall, but we don't really have the luxury of waiting until the technology gets perfect and then scaling that, do we.