You know what would save more lives? better public transit. Electric cars don't solve for car accidents and pedestrian strikes.
Yes, this is a bit of a non-sequitur, but electric cars continue to feel like an incremental improvement at best; as someone else mentioned - we're exchanging where the carbon production happens unless we dramatically reduce our fossil fuel usage for power generation. And that doesn't solve the accessibility and affordability problems of car-based transit.
That's fine, admirable even! But EVs have other problems: mining lithium and other metals for batteries is still terrible for the environment, and other battery technologies are not yet promising enough to replace them. Not to mention that electric cars are still cars, so we still have tire and brake dust, etc. Less than before, of course, but they still exist.
Public transit has problems too. It's often more difficult for people with disabilities and/or children.
Also, we'll have to tear down the majority of the houses in the US, and build new ones in an arrangement that allows for bus lines to have sufficient passenger density to be less polluting than cars.
EVs are better than ICE cars for the environment and public health in every way possible. Also, there's an incremental path forward that we can take right now.
I wish there was better public transit in the US. Heck; I wish California would just mandate minimum density for new development near transit stations, and also auto-approve any compliant permit applications for housing in those areas (bypassing local zoning reviews, etc, etc.)
Sadly, that won't happen while the current generation of politicians is around.
Around here, they're mostly focusing on blocking construction, narrowing roads and cutting transit options. I think they're doing it to further prop up housing costs in wealthy neighborhoods.
Public transit is far more able to support disabled people than private transit - public transit is coupled with dense space. Every train and bus I've been on in this century supports wheelchairs.
The isolated, think of the children who have no adults to teach them how to ride public transit.
Meanwhile, in Atlanta, private school children ride our trains every day, often with no adults, to Woodward academy. Public school children do too, but they're not wearing identifying jackets.
Or Japan, or much of Europe (especially, Spain, Germany, Amsterdam, Austria) where students rides busses, trams, and trains every day.
Most of these locations are also known better for physically disabled or elderly.
I think those problems should be solved and battery technologies further developed, and broad adoption would increase the incentive to invest in tackling those issues.
No matter how well developed public transit may or may not become across the nation, we're still going to need private transit.
Public transit only makes sense in urban areas.
Urban areas tend to have high rates of crime.
This is one of the driving factors behind the popularity of personal transportation and suburban schools.
My county wanted to put in trams. You know the things that require non-alterable tracks? It was $14m per mile.
We have buses. Why couldn't people just use the buses? Because they're filled with trash and crime. So instead of just enforcing the law and imprisoning criminals, the county was courting spending hundreds of millions for a tram system. And the non-enforcement would have turned the trams into the same state the buses were in within a few years.
It's also that. (Edited to be clearer.) In this case, the false economy [1] is in progress towards decarbonization. You can do a lot of busywork towards expanding public transit, which feels good in the short term, but it's easier to kill and more politically volatile. In the same time, you could have banked saved emissions through EVs.
Yes, this is a bit of a non-sequitur, but electric cars continue to feel like an incremental improvement at best; as someone else mentioned - we're exchanging where the carbon production happens unless we dramatically reduce our fossil fuel usage for power generation. And that doesn't solve the accessibility and affordability problems of car-based transit.