The Overhead Wire Daily | January 18th, 2024

A new analysis shared by the Seattle environmental group Coltura and featured in the New York Times found that 10% of drivers go over 40,000 miles per year, but make up 1/3rd of gasoline use for the United States. In some states it’s seen as an imperative that these folks switch to electric vehicles as they have an outsized influence on climate emissions, so they are looking for ways to incentivize a transition based on miles driven. These folks are often in the trades driving from job to job or live on the periphery of a region.

But it also gets to a larger idea about local and non-local trips that friend of the newsletter Dan Sturges has been thinking about for a while and wrote up in his recent book Near to Far. Only 2% of trips are over 50 miles while 71% of trips are within an 8 mile radius. In the Coltura study, 21 million Americans make up 35% of gas usage because they drive larger than needed vehicles around and live further from destinations. Dan argues, as does a former Ferrari designer, that the vehicles themselves could change to fit the needs of people and destination distance. We also see evidence that larger vehicles and larger batteries are slowing the transition to electric because they make cars cost so much too. Perhaps our incentives need to be better targeted, like towards the longer distance drivers, but also towards switching to local sized electric vehicle types.

There’s a lot of path dependence, not only in how we design our vehicles, but our neighborhoods that could be changed to be more climate and energy efficient. Architects that designed a neighborhood in Arvada Colorado for example found that just changing the orientation of houses in a subdivision based on sun direction can save 30% in energy costs. Imagine if they were dense as well.

This idea of smaller vehicles for shorter trips might be the other side of the coin to incentivizing long distance based drivers to switch vehicles to electric. Just like the 15 minute city idea is the flip side of how we build neighborhoods now. There are many potential solutions for the problems we face from a climate and transportation standpoint, perhaps all we need is to flip our prior orientations ever so slightly.

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