So my brother-in-law Rick cornered me at my daughter’s soccer game last weekend, super excited to tell me about his new Tesla Model Y. Rick’s the kind of guy who still thinks recycling is “liberal propaganda” but apparently spending sixty grand on a car that plugs into the wall makes him an environmentalist now. He kept going on about how he’s “saving the planet” while I’m standing there thinking about how his giant electric SUV probably weighs more than our entire minivan.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m glad Rick’s driving something that doesn’t burn gas. His previous truck got about twelve miles per gallon and rolled coal when he accelerated, so this is definitely progress. But listening to him talk, you’d think he’d solved climate change single-handedly by buying a different type of car. And that’s kind of the problem I keep running into when people talk about green transportation. We’ve gotten so fixated on making cars electric that we’ve stopped asking whether we need quite so many cars in the first place.
I mean, I get it. I drive a car too. We live in the suburbs, my wife works twenty minutes away, the kids have activities scattered across town. Our whole infrastructure is built around everyone having a car, so of course that’s how we think about transportation. But after spending the last few years really digging into this stuff – partly for the blog, partly because I’m genuinely curious about what transportation might look like when my kids are adults – I’ve started to think we’re solving the wrong problem.
Last year I had to go to a conference in Portland, Oregon, for work. Healthcare IT stuff, pretty boring, but Portland turned out to be fascinating from a transportation perspective. My hotel was about three miles from the convention center, and instead of calling an Uber every day like I normally would, I decided to try their bike share system. These weren’t just regular bikes – they had electric cargo bikes that could carry a laptop bag, conference materials, even groceries I picked up on the way back.
The first day I was honestly nervous about biking in city traffic. Charlotte is not bike-friendly, and the few times I’ve tried to bike anywhere here, I’ve felt like I was taking my life in my hands. But Portland had these protected bike lanes that were actually separated from car traffic, not just painted lines that drivers ignore. I could cruise along at fifteen miles per hour without breaking a sweat thanks to the electric motor, and I got to the conference faster than I would have in a car because I didn’t have to deal with parking or traffic.
What really struck me was how much stuff you could carry on these cargo bikes. They had this front compartment that could hold maybe 150 pounds of gear. I saw people using them for grocery shopping, picking up kids from school, even small deliveries for businesses. One morning I watched a guy load what looked like a week’s worth of groceries into one of these bikes and pedal away like it was nothing. Back home, that same shopping trip would require my minivan.
The thing is, most of our car trips are pretty short. I looked it up after I got back from Portland, and the average car trip in the US is less than six miles, usually with just the driver and maybe some cargo. That’s exactly the kind of trip these electric bikes excel at, but we don’t have the infrastructure for them here. No protected bike lanes, no secure bike parking, definitely no cultural acceptance of using a bike for “serious” transportation.
I started paying more attention to transportation alternatives after that Portland trip. When I had to go to a conference in Washington DC a few months later, I took the train instead of flying. I’d never taken Amtrak for a work trip before – seemed slower and more complicated than just flying down for the day. But the train from Charlotte to DC was actually pretty pleasant. I could work on my laptop, didn’t have to deal with security lines or cramped airplane seats, and arrived right in the middle of the city instead of at some airport an hour outside town.
The carbon footprint difference was huge too. I looked it up afterward, and the train trip generated about 20 pounds of CO2 compared to nearly 400 pounds for a round-trip flight. Plus I could actually get work done during the journey instead of losing that time to airport procedures and being crammed into a middle seat next to someone who apparently hadn’t discovered deodorant yet.
That got me thinking about why we don’t have better train service here. I mean, Charlotte to DC is about 350 miles – perfect distance for high-speed rail if we had it. In other countries, that would be a three-hour train ride, faster than flying when you account for all the airport hassle. But here, the train takes eight hours because it’s running on century-old tracks shared with freight trains, so you’re constantly stopping to let cargo trains pass.
My wife thinks I’m getting a little obsessed with transportation alternatives, and she’s probably right. But I keep seeing examples of things that work better than our car-centric system, and they’re not even that exotic. I was reading about cargo bike delivery services in New York that are faster than trucks for local deliveries because they don’t get stuck in traffic. There are autonomous shuttle buses being tested in various cities that could provide frequent service in areas where regular bus routes aren’t economical to run.
The kids are actually pretty interested in this stuff. My seven-year-old thinks the cargo bikes are “awesome” and keeps asking when we can get one. My five-year-old wants to know why our city doesn’t have trains like the ones he’s seen in videos from Japan and Europe. Good questions, honestly. Why don’t we?
Part of the problem is that we’ve built everything around cars for so long that changing feels impossible. Our zoning laws require huge parking lots for every business. Our neighborhoods are spread out in ways that make walking or biking impractical. Our public transit is underfunded and infrequent because everyone’s supposed to have a car anyway. It’s a circular problem – we need cars because everything is built for cars, so we keep building everything for cars.
But I’ve seen places where they’ve started breaking that cycle. When I was in Copenhagen for a work thing last year, I couldn’t believe how many people were biking everywhere, even in November when it was cold and drizzly. Whole families on cargo bikes, business people in suits pedaling to meetings, elderly folks on electric bikes. The infrastructure was incredible – bike lanes that were physically separated from traffic, bike traffic lights, covered bike parking at train stations.
The crazy thing is, Copenhagen wasn’t always like this. I talked to a local guy who told me that in the 1970s, Copenhagen was just as car-dominated as American cities. The bike infrastructure was built deliberately over decades, along with policies that made car ownership expensive and biking convenient. Now something like 40% of all trips in the city are by bike, even in winter.
I’m not saying Charlotte is going to turn into Copenhagen overnight, or that everyone in the suburbs should start commuting by cargo bike. But we could do so much better than we’re doing now. We could have dedicated bus lanes so public transit doesn’t get stuck in the same traffic as cars. We could allow mixed-use development near transit stops so people could walk to more of their daily needs. We could build protected bike lanes connecting neighborhoods to schools and shopping areas.
The autonomous vehicle stuff is interesting too, though I’m honestly skeptical about some of the hype. I got to ride in one of those self-driving shuttle pilots when I was in Las Vegas for a conference earlier this year. It was… fine. Went about ten miles per hour, stopped for everything, definitely not ready to replace regular cars anytime soon. But for specific routes – like airport shuttles or connections between transit stations – I could see how they might work once the technology improves.
What I found more compelling was the idea of shared autonomous vehicles. Instead of everyone owning their own car that sits parked 95% of the time, you could have a fleet of shared vehicles that people summon when needed. Especially if they’re electric and autonomous, they could be much cheaper per trip than car ownership, and you’d need way fewer of them overall since they’d be in constant use instead of just sitting in parking lots.
The freight side is fascinating too. I learned about these electric cargo bikes that some companies are using for local deliveries. In dense urban areas, they’re actually faster than delivery trucks because they don’t get stuck in traffic and can park anywhere. Plus they don’t contribute to air pollution or noise in neighborhoods. Some cities are setting up “micro-hubs” where big trucks deliver packages to a central location, then cargo bikes handle the last mile to individual addresses.
For longer distances, I keep reading about these plans for hyperloop systems that could move people between cities at airline speeds but with much lower energy use. Sounds like science fiction, but there are actual test tracks being built. Whether it’ll ever be economical is another question, but at least people are thinking beyond just “cars but electric.”
The biggest obstacle isn’t technology – most of this stuff already exists and works in various places around the world. The obstacle is our policies and infrastructure that assume everyone will always drive everywhere. Changing that requires political will, which is hard when people are used to the current system and can’t imagine alternatives.
But I think it’s starting to change, slowly. My kids’ generation is going to inherit whatever transportation system we build now, and they’re going to live with climate change in ways my generation won’t. They deserve better options than just sitting in traffic in electric cars instead of gas cars. They deserve a transportation system that’s efficient, clean, and doesn’t require everyone to own a two-ton machine that sits unused most of the time.
Rick’s Tesla is a step in the right direction, I guess. At least he’s not burning fossil fuels directly anymore. But I think the real future of green transportation is going to be more diverse and interesting than just swapping one type of car for another. It’s going to involve bikes and trains and buses and maybe even some technologies that don’t exist yet, all working together to move people and goods more efficiently than our current car-dependent system.
Now I just have to figure out how to explain that to Rick without getting into another argument about whether climate change is real. Maybe I’ll just invite him to try one of those cargo bikes next time he visits. Hard to argue with something once you’ve experienced how well it works.
