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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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While I see the emotional appeal, I don't think that EVs are the future on any significant level. Most people only use their cars for routine trips between home, work, and a few popular places for shopping and entertainment. Two of the four are completely centralized and the other two are generally focused into notable clusters. This creates nothing but choke points for cars, and commute time data shows just how bad it is.
Toronto had an average commute time of 84 minutes of 2019. One way. I use transit between bus, subway, streetcar, then walk, and still manage under an hour despite going halfway across the city to work, with 5-10 minute wait times between each transfer. That time doubles the moment I had to use a shuttle bus because that has to go through one of the massive choke points in Toronto.
What we need is greater capacity, more extensive, more reliable, and more comfortable transit solutions so we can just stop making it take 10 minutes to go 3 blocks during rush hour. So people can go even long distances quickly and comfortably when their jobs require it.
EV charging points are important, but only in strategically placed locations like on highway rest stops, as if you still insist on using an EV for commuting, you can just charge at home overnight as 99% of drivers would use less than 10% of their car's charge a day. It's only for vacations that fast charging stations would actually be used.
Also we need to properly promote remote work. Commutes suck especially bad when you're doing a job you know you could be doing from home instead of wasting 20% of the day just getting to the office.
That's a rather large-city-dweller-centric view of what people use their cars for. Public transport certainly can and should be part of the solution, but it's often impractical in lower-density areas.
Let's see here, the last few times I took a car out of town . . . Well, we could have gotten the six boxes of books shipped, I suppose, but it would have cost more than just going and fetching them from 120km away. Family funeral on short notice—no option other than doing the ~400km-each-way drive. Medical emergency (mine)—400km-each-way drive again, since it wasn't a life-threatening condition that would have caused them to find an ambulance right away, just something that could have blinded me in one eye. None of those things were recreational, and most of them weren't really optional, either.
Some trips out of town are important, and you don't always have the luxury of waiting for public long-distance transit that runs only a couple of times a week, or enough notice to prepare your vehicle in advance. We need private vehicles, and the infrastructure to keep them on the road. EVs may not be the future in Toronto so much, but Toronto is only one small part of the country.
The parents of the youtuber Technology Connections life on a farm, yet they own an EV, and apparently they never use charging stations as the range on a second hand one is more than good enough for regular trips despite going to an entire city over.
Modern EVs have a range starting at 400km nowadays, and I did say that highway rest stops should have charging stations. No matter how quickly you need to get somewhere, it can't be so desperate that you can't afford a half hour stop every three or four hours. And if it is, it sounds like something you probably shouldn't be driving yourself for and instead be calling for an ambulance or helicopter.
In the end, my argument is that all this shit about not having enough fast charging stations is going about things backwards. Charging stations shouldn't be concentrated in cities, but instead along the highway, as EV range is great enough that daily transit doesn't require charging along the way, or even at the destination.
Bc has quite a few charging stations, all along the highways straight out of town too
https://pluginbc.ca/charging/finding-stations/