Quote:
Originally Posted by Azure
If you want to change the culture around owning a car, there needs to be ways for people to to move from point A to point B easier than jumping in their car to do so.
Are we doing enough with inner city transit? Outer city transit? Transit within higher population areas? Seems to me that there is always bickering going on when it comes to that.
It just annoys me that people like to bicker about over consumption, when a single family, or thousands of single families can't really make much of a difference even if they make the supposed changes that we think are needed.
I love to bang on the construction material drum, because concrete contributes up to 8% of yearly worldwide C02 emissions. For the most part it gets ignored because it isn't a 'sexy' problem to solve.
The other thing is removal of C02 from the atmosphere through proper forest management, water management and simply planting more trees. We all know that all those things are not looked after properly either, and again, these are not issues a single family, person or even thousands of individual families can change. It needs to be done on a big scale.
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This was kind of my point. Using taxes on corporations just pushes the cost on to consumers. This does not change consumption since the vast middle and upper class are still so dependent on energy. their only option is to pay more money and save less for retirement.
It's easy enough for people with means to say, well just move closer to your work and catch transit, but our cities are not designed for that. Zoning has assured that there is a massive separations between where people live and where they work. There is very little housing available in high density work areas, and those that are there, are typically owned by foreign investors and charge rent that is unaffordable for most. Don't even think about buying. And course, a lot of residential areas close to industrial areas are complete dumps with high crime that you still can't afford. Commuting is really their only option.
Public transit is a joke. It mainly just moves people into the main retail/commercial areas where they can indulge their consumerism. For most people, it takes several hours to use public transit to get to work, which is terrible for finding family time, becoming an entrepreneur, and just enjoying life.
Despite those attempts, people still need to drive. As for creating an incentive for people to buy new electric car, it might surprise some people the average debt load the average Canadian carries. And you want them to buy a new car!?
Design out cities better... bottom line. I left the Vancouver area for 15 years and moved back 3 years ago and see the population explosion out in Maple Ridge. All mostly low-density residential, almost no commercial areas, and no industrial areas. That didn't exactly help anything.
People should live closer to where they work, but no one who actually works can afford to. Trickle down carbon taxes to those people, and you essentially end up removing them from the work force completely since it becomes easier to go on welfare than pay the costs.
I starts at the municipal level for zoning and building more high density residential. Get rid of foreign buyers whose only goal is to increase housing costs.