Questions, We Have Questions about Cars

The Biden administration recently announced a goal for 2030 that 50% of new vehicles sold in the US will be electric vehicles. The automaker R&D and design departments better get crackin’ because we have questions:

None of the currently available electric passenger cars have a range of more than about 400 miles per charge. Drivers won’t usually drive until the batteries are dead, so that means the effective range is 400 miles minus your comfort zone on when to stop to recharge. And when you do stop to charge your Tesla (or whatever), it may take up to an hour or more at one of Tesla’s Superchargers. Of course, that also depends on whether you can plan your route around the available network of chargers. Our last road trip involved two consecutive days of driving over 700 miles, so does this mean our elected servants want to preclude family vacations and trips to see relatives who live beyond that 400 mile range? Or just make them so difficult as to be impractical? And what if you want to go camping in the boonies, away from charging networks?

Electric cars aside (at least until the designers solve the questions of range and recharge), consider for a moment how safety standards require putting our children into a succession of car seats from the time they are infants until they reach a certain size and age. Then they switch to what amounts to an engineered booster seat for maybe another year or more, until they have finally grown large enough for an adult safety belt. Consumer Reports and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend that kids use booster seats until they are at least 4 feet 9 inches tall and 8 to 12 years old. So, how many passenger cars have enough room for a father, mother, and two child seats? What about three child seats? Or even four seats? Unless you have the money for a minivan or a medium to large SUV, the safety regulations seem to work against having more than one or two children. Safety is certainly a good thing, but do policy makers know or care that they are working against “large” families?

Last but not least, while we are asking questions about cars, our local planners want to try cutting one of our city’s major streets from four lanes to two lanes. They say this will make space for bike lanes, but much of the street already has bike lanes. For the part of the street that is too congested for bike lanes, riders can find safe bike routes that parallel the street only two or three blocks over (I know because I used to take those routes when I biked to work). So what is the reason to narrow the thoroughfare? Maybe to get us out of our cars and into something like Uber? But Uber drives cars, too. Maybe to force us onto a bus? But the buses do not run often enough or cover enough locations for that to be practical. (By the way, I rode a bus for years to get to graduate school, and was surprised to discover things called bus schedules. Why surprised? Because I never saw a bus run on schedule, so I did not know real schedules existed. Who knew?) Back to the planner questions. Maybe they simply want us to walk? That would be good for our health and the shoe industry, but also time-consuming. All of this leaves us wondering if the impact of narrowing the street is a bug or a feature in the eyes of the planners.

OK, enough rambling questions for now. Suggestion: on this as well as so many other current events, it is always a good time to make your views known in the marketplace, in your elected representative’s mail, and at the ballot box.