Aaron Gordon – 20.4.22
During a tour of Rivian’s factory earlier this month, the electric vehicle maker’s CEO RJ Scaringe told reporters that he is very worried about battery shortages, as recounted by the Wall Street Journal. “Put very simply, all the world’s cell production combined represents well under 10 percent of what we will need in 10 years,” the WSJ quotes him as saying. “Meaning, 90 percent to 95 percent of the supply chain does not exist.”
Scaringe is hardly the first to raise this particular alarm bell—here are some other articles from the last six months about the same issue—and recent concerns about nickel supplies, a key ingredient in electric batteries, have only intensified the issue. None of this is especially surprising, though. EV batteries require a lot of raw materials, we barely made any of them 10 years ago, and now every car company wants to make a lot of them every year. 

A few weeks ago, the Daily Mail ran a lengthy feature exploring how “eco-crazy councils turned our streets into Gridlock Britain”. It begins with a heartrending and in no way manipulative story about how the traffic jams in the north London borough of Islington are upsetting a disabled 13-year-old boy.

@BrentToderian Apr 20, 2022
THREAD: I’m going to try this thread to clearly state my perspective on electric vehicles, car dependency and better cities, to those who frequently ask me, including media, elected leaders and many others. Here goes. Please share if you think it helps. #EVS
To be clear, despite the complexities, problems & grey areas that make electric vehicles much more complicated than the “silver bullets” many claim them to be, I DO support the replacement of ICE vehicles with EVs. It will take longer and be more complicated than boosters think.

Annie Dare – 21 Apr 202221 Apr 2022
In 1989, the Conservative British government announced a $19bn plan ($43bn in today’s money) to build and overhaul more than 4,345km (2,700 miles) of major inter-urban roads, motorways and bypasses. It declared the infrastructure project the United Kingdom’s largest roads programme “since the Romans”.
But much of the plan, whose aim was to underpin economic growth by relieving congestion – traffic on British roads had increased by 35 percent since 1980 – also smashed through some of the UK’s most pristine nature — ancient woodlands, water meadows, historic valleys and downs or grass-covered hills — places treasured by locals and protected for their biodiversity or beauty.
Opposition to the loss of these pockets of nature was fierce, and from 1992, when building on the first road began, until 1996, portions of the UK convulsed with determined and flamboyant acts of resistance. A new type of protest was born.

Parking spaces serve the needs of a wide range of users, including residents, workers, shoppers, visitors, delivery drivers, taxis, and private hire passengers. However, they also reduce space for pavements, cycle lanes, and other social and environmental features such as benches or microparks. Car owners may pay for the privilege of parking – in the form of short-stay parking spaces and residential parking permits – but are they paying a fair price?
There are a number of ways that this question can be approached. Often-quoted international examples have focused on the costs of building and operating multi-storey parking structures, the added costs of providing parking in new buildings, and the potential reduction in available space for more affordable housing or other amenities. 21 Other investigations have focused on quantifying the environmental costs arising from increased parking provision. 22 However, there is little empirical evidence from London and the UK on the matter. To answer this question in a London context, this chapter considers a number of alternative approaches to pricing an on-street residential parking space.

Nell Frizzell 17 April 2022
As I think I have mentioned here before, I am a virgin who can’t drive. Well, okay. That’s not quite true. I have had driving lessons, for about two months when I was 17. Only, my driving instructor’s dad took over for a couple of weeks, during which time he asked my mum out, she said a horrified no and things got so awkward that I simply never had another lesson. (He asked her if she’d like to “go for a drive” which, for a driving instructor, has always struck me as an amazingly unimaginative date idea. Like a plumber asking a prospective partner if they’d like to come and watch them fit a boiler one evening.)

@BrentToderian Apr 22
Here’s the blunt reality — reasonably-sized electric vehicles need to be the future of cars, but they can’t be the future of urban mobility. Fewer cars. Less driving. More inviting mobility options. Better communities and cities. These are the 4 pillars of the REAL solution.

Aaron Gordon 22.04.22
Most U.S. residents live in a household with at least one car. But millions of U.S. residents do not. In this series, How I Live Car-Free, Motherboard speaks to some of the people living car-free, either by choice or by necessity, in places without robust public transportation options like New York City and parts of Washington, D.C., and Boston.
In this edition, Motherboard speaks with Kerri Provost, a 42-year-old lifelong Connecticutian who works for a nonprofit and writes the Car-Free Diaries for RealHartford.org. She lives in the Frog Hollow neighborhood of Hartford, and has been car-free since 2017. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.