Why Building Metros is Necessary for the Green Transition Away from Cars
There’s controversy in Germany over building U- and S-Bahn extensions, in which environmentalists argue against them on the grounds that people can just take trams and the environmental benefits of urban rail are not high. For example, the Ariadne project prefers push factors (green regulations and taxes) to pull factors (building better alternatives), BUND opposes U- and S-Bahn expansion, and a report endorsed by Green politicians argued based on shoddy analysis leading to retraction that the embodied carbon emissions of tunneling exceeded any savings, which it estimated at only 714 t-CO2 per underground km built. Against this, it’s important to sanity-check car and public transport ridership to arrive at more solid figures.
To start with, virtually everyone travels by car or by public transport. There’s a notable exception for cycling, but cycling is typically done at short ranges, and the metro expansions under discussion here (all outside the Ring) are beyond that range. In Berlin, the modal split for cycling peaks in the 1-3 km range and is small past 10 km. Beyond the scale of a neighborhood or maybe a college town, cars and mass transit are substitutes for each other.
Nor does public transport expansion lead to hypermobility, in which overall trips grow longer as people commute from farther away and car use doesn’t decline or only weakly declines. If anything, the ratio of substitution for passenger-km rather than trips is that a p-km by metro substitutes for more than one p-km by cars, because metro-oriented cities can be denser and allow for shorter commute trips. Berliners average 3.3 4.6-km trips per day, or 15 km/day; Germany-wide, it’s 35.5 km/day (see table 11 of MiD). If anything, the presence of a large city core also shortens the average car trip by reducing exurb-to-exurb driving at low density.
Nor does polycentricity solve the problem. Indeed, ridership in polycentric regions is weaker than in monocentric ones. MiD has data by state and Verkehrsverbund in Germany, with modal splits by trips (all trips, not just work trips) and passenger-km, the latter measure having far less in the way of cycling and walking. From this, we have the following table:
| Geography | Transit % (trips) | Car % (trips) | Transit % (p-km) | Car % (p-km) |
| Berlin | 27 | 24 | 47 | 40 |
| Brandenburg | 9 | 51 | 22 | 71 |
| Mecklenburg-Vorpommern | 7 | 52 | 14 | 80 |
| Saxony-Anhalt | 9 | 48 | 12 | 81 |
| Saxony | 11 | 56 | 16 | 77 |
| Thuringia | 9 | 55 | 16 | 79 |
| Hamburg | 22 | 29 | 43 | 47 |
| Bremen | 14 | 33 | 30 | 60 |
| Schleswig-Holstein | 8 | 56 | 14 | 79 |
| Lower Saxony | 8 | 53 | 15 | 77 |
| Nordrhein-Westfalen | 10 | 55 | 18 | 74 |
| Rheinland-Pfalz | 9 | 57 | 19 | 75 |
| Saarland | 10 | 65 | 15 | 79 |
| Hesse | 12 | 52 | 19 | 74 |
| Baden-Württemberg | 9 | 53 | 17 | 75 |
| Bavaria | 10 | 56 | 18 | 75 |
| Munich (city) | 25 | 29 | 39 | 51 |
| Frankfurt (city) | 24 | 29 | 38 | 52 |
| Stuttgart (city) | 23 | 36 | 33 | 60 |
| Munich (MVV) | 19 | 41 | 31 | 61 |
| Hamburg (HVV) | 16 | 33 | 29 | 63 |
| Hanover (Region) | 15 | 42 | 25 | 66 |
| Rhine-Main (RMV) | 13 | 49 | 22 | 71 |
| Rhine-Neckar (VRN) | 10 | 51 | 17 | 75 |
| Rhine-Ruhr (VRR) | 12 | 53 | 20 | 73 |
| Rhine-Sieg (VRS) | 12 | 49 | 22 | 70 |
Berlin is by all measures the most public transport-oriented and least car-oriented part of Germany. The source doesn’t explicitly break out VBB, but VBB comprises Berlin and Brandenburg, whose population ratio is 59:41, so we get a modal split by trips of 20% transit, 35% car; a similar computation for p-km is less certain since Brandenburgers, many of whom commute to Berlin, have longer trip lengths, but it’s likely Berlin and Brandenburg’s combined modal split is slightly better than those of MVV and HVV, both monocentric. Brandenburg, notably, has the highest modal split by p-km outside the city-states, owing to the Berlin commuters.
In contrast, the polycentric regions – Rhine-Neckar (Mannheim), Rhine-Ruhr (excluding Cologne), Rhine-Sieg (Cologne-Bonn), and to a large extent also Rhine-Main (Frankfurt) – all have weak modal splits. The cities themselves have healthy usage of public transport, judging by the data that’s available and by ridership on their Stadtbahn systems, but most of the Rhine-Ruhr’s population doesn’t live in Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Essen, Dortmund, or Wuppertal, and this population drives.
The upshot is that rail development that strengthens city center at the expense of suburban job clusters should be considered a positive development for transitioning from cars to public transport. Job clusters outside city center do not reduce commuting, but instead make commuting more auto-oriented.
This, in turn, creates serious estimation problems for the diversion rate, which is why environmental benefit-cost analyses underrate the effect of urban rail construction. An expansion of a north-south line like U8 would not just increase the residential connectivity of Märkisches Viertel but also, on the margins, increase the commercial connectivity of Alexanderplatz and other central stations served by the line. This, in turn, should induce additional ridership on lines nowhere near Märkisches Viertel, for example, east-west lines like U5 and U2. At the neighborhood level, the construction of the line would create a lot of induced trips and not have a high diversion rate from cars. But at the city level, little examples of diversion as more work and non-work destinations cluster in Mitte would multiply, never enough for an easy comparison, and yet enough that, as we see, more people would be living and working here without driving, where otherwise they’d be driving between two Kreise elsewhere in Germany.
Taken all together, the diversion rate at the level of trips should be considered 100%: at large enough scale, every trip by public transport is a trip not done by car, perhaps in the city, perhaps elsewhere in the country. Every p-km by public transport is multiple p-km not done by car, since dense cities allow for shorter trips without the traffic congestion problems caused by trying to fit high density and also a high modal split for driving.
With that in mind, a calculation of a first-order diversion rate is in order. A daily trip by rail is a daily trip not done by car. The average trip length in Germany by all modes is 12 km, but this is weighed down by short walking and biking trips; the average daily driving rate per car is 26 km (see table 21 of MiD) when the car is in use, and is 10,000 km/year per car. If we take 10,000 v-km to be the diversion rate per 3 public transport trips, we get that, at the emissions intensity of 2017, a daily public transport trip represents an annual emissions reduction of 0.43 t-CO2. The Märkisches Viertel extension of U8, estimated to get 25,000 trips/day, would reduce Germany-wide emissions by 10,000 t/year, which is nearly an order of magnitude more than the carbon critique of Berlin U-Bahn expansion got. At the current 670€/t cost used in German benefit-cost analyses this is around a 2% rate of return on cost purely from the carbon savings, never mind anything else – and usually green policy uses a low discount rate due to the long-term effects of greenhouse gas emissions, 1.4% in the Stern review.
Pedestrian Observations 
Push factors are basically not politically viable too.
Push factors are often just viable enough to get passed when you are in power. They are however often not viable in that they will make voters mad enough that your opposition will win on a “we will overturn that” platform, and in turn they will live up to their promise trying to get another term in office.
Sometimes push factors will work. When the thing you are harming is politically unpopular in general they can work. When the pain is very small you can sometimes get by with it – but it is questionable if this will accomplish your goals. When there is a good alternative push can work (this is the claim for Manhattan’s congestion pricing – for most there is a good alternative so they will quickly realize they don’t care). However these are all questionable things that can be dangerous to your political future to play with.
Yeah but that’s only below 60th street or something so you can park uptown and get the subway.
Plus the median voter probably drives to manhattan three times a year or something, so has to pay a fee of $50 but gets better traffic in exchange.
You can’t park uptown either. Unless by “uptown” you mean the hourly lot at their suburban train station.
You say that, but Europe has managed to stably maintain high gas and vehicle taxes, and Japan has managed to maintain high tolls and resisted mass subsidization of parking. And congestion pricing is slowly picking up momentum.
Sure maybe it’s better to prefer pull factors to push factors, but push factors can certainly succeed wildly.
I think the perception–and sort-of reality–of the infeasibility of pull factors in the U.S. is a big part of why push factors are even more difficult to implement here, politically speaking. That our urban fabric is both ill-suited to transit and our transit is typically sub-par mean that e.g., raising gas taxes feels purely punitive; transit/cycling as a viable alternative is just not even in the imagination of most people here.
There is the historical fact that heightened vehicle ownership costs in Europe and East Asia were often instituted when both regions were relatively poorer contributed to the realization that cars were disproportionately transport for the rich, and at this point it’s just status quo in these places. By contrast, in the long-time oil-wealthy regions of the world, cheap gas is just how things have always, and so the fight is to access it–to sate car ownership demands, rather than provide viable alternatives.
Don’t lost hope though – many areas have made transitions to much higher transit use over time. If you want a change next year, forget it. However the right investments today can slowly build with the right investment next year and the next until you eventually do have a transit city. The question should not be what can we do today to make next year better, but what can we do today that sets us on a path such that 20 years from now things are better.
This is why push factors fail: they are mostly things you can do today that will make a short change, but when they get changed in a few years ensure there is no lasting long term change. If you can find a push factor that is very popular of course you can cause a long term change with them. However finding one that is popular is hard – perhaps impossible.
The entire “prefer push factors to pull factors” mindset need to be abandoned, since the push factors stress the public and ultimately cause people get tired of environmental protection message and resist green policies even when the public recognoze they’re ultimately good
What if the cars displaced are electric cars?
That is an improvement, but trains are still better. Tire and brake dust pollution is still an issue. We have to generate the power to charge those cars – you want to think a lot more renewables (which in most places are a long way from being able to power everything in ideal conditions, much less storage/excess capacity to cover non-ideal conditions) – but the reality is it still is a lot of oil used either way (though more efficient than a ICE, still oil) Cars also force low density which in turn is a lot of other things environmentalists hate.
If nobody goes anywhere there isn’t any pollution. Everybody starves to death soon after but there won’t be any pollution.
Exactly. Trains are the best way to get large numbers of people around a city. The only question then becomes how do we get a large enough number of people in the city to make a train work. There are a tiny number of people who would be happy if they never had to leave their house, but most people want to get groceries (as opposed to delivery), go to church, see a ball game… Many people have a job that cannot be done from home.
Bulldozing the suburbs so they can walk to the train would cost too much.
If you have single family home zoning you allow a second or third home to be built on the plot. In time that will happen.
If the original house is too far away from the station to walk there the second one will be too. So will the one next door.
there are a lot of lots in a city. Some of them will be close to a station and so the second house will make sense. Some of them will even make sense for some investor to buy several lots and tear it all down for a larger apartment. Some of the houses won’t be close to a station, but are still close enough to a “important destination” that it can get good bus service and so people will walk to the bus that is on the way. (maybe in a few decades you build a metro on those as well)
There are a lot of houses that are not walking distance to a station/bus stop. Nearly all of them are close enough to bike though (the exceptions generally have horses), which is another place you can slowly make a difference over time, but if there isn’t good transit people will just drive.
If there are lots in a city why do you need to build more?
Cities are growing in population. The national and world population is expected to shrink in the future, but today things are growing and so we need more housing. That is all in the cities, for the near future rural areas are shrinking – people are moving out of them to big cities.
A lot in a cities doesn’t tell you anything about what is on it. There are parks that will never be built. There are houses that the owners won’t change anything. However there are also lots where the owner (which will change over the years) will be happy to build something more on it. Just building a few metros in most US cities (where downtowns are 50% parking) will allow a lot of lots to build something more without growing the cities.
In 1950, Detroit had 1.8 million population, tied with LA for fourth largest US city. It is now 670k population. Detroit spent $250 million on Proposal N — 8000 abandoned homes have been torn down (at the taxpayers expense). There are lots, roads, sewers, electricity, natural gas, streetlights, and water for 1 million people waiting to be used.
In 1950 Detroit had no reason to suspect that they wouldn’t continue to grow. Everyone has to make the best decision they can with the information they have. Sometimes they will be wrong, but you can get stuck in analysis paralysis if you don’t make decisions on incomplete information – the question is when do you know enough.
Meanwhile there are lots of cities – LA is still growing, they need to make decisions to get their future better. Maybe LA will start shrinking this year and in 70 years just have 600k people – who knows. (Today that seems impossible of course)
Are they? Usually the displacement is the average mix of cars (driven longer distance than the usual because of how commuting works).
As Adirondacker points out below, the average mix of cars will be nearly all electric (or at least plug in hybrid) soon. Arguing to reduce car use/increase transit use on the grounds of emissions will very shortly be an argument guaranteed to lose as people look at all the non-emitting car ms and think “Why should I give up the convenience, privacy and comfort of my car when it doesn’t cause emissions?”
From the American perspective…unfortunately, I think “soon” is not very soon, as much as I wish it wasn’t. I say this as a dual EV owner. The obstacles are significant and additive for the consumer (buying/leasing/financing a more expensive EV and its charger, and car insurance being proportional to the value of the car and its expected usage), the ratepayer (generation and distribution), and the taxpayer (taxes and tariffs). It can be done, obviously–I and many others have done it–but I paid through the nose, and not everyone has that choice available to them. Even the since-repealed Biden-era EV tax breaks only applied to certain domestic vehicles*, and the introduction of low-cost, high-quality Chinese EV marques like BYD and Denza has been prohibited by either punitively high tariffs or other adverse federal policy. And this was before a drug-fueled madman destroyed the primary American EV brand while pivoting to racist social media and vaporware-bahns.
Not all of us get to live in a country which has adequately priced the social cost of carbon. Instead we inadequately tax gasoline and diesel traction, and pay the costs later with climate change mitigation projects, expensive food, effects on health due to temperature extremes, disaster recovery, etc…
As for plug-in hybrid vehicles, the argument is poor. I was all about getting a Rav4 Prime the last time around. It took quite a bit of number-crunching (you have to boil it down to projected $/mi) to convince me otherwise. The battery range is about enough for a one-way commute for most Americans, and you’re dragging the engine, transmission, and fuel tank as deadweight the whole time. And most plug-in hybrids will not let you drain the battery all the way. Trust me, the economics don’t make sense with the price premium, and if you have access to charger, you might as well get the EV.
There’s also the indirect effects of building mass transit. By taking cars off the road, you’ve freed up roadways for pedestrians (who can observe 🙂 ), freight, buses, and bikes; you’ve reduced congestion and therefore idling time for the remaining gas and diesel vehicles; you’ve reduced local particulate pollution; and you’ve reduced noise.
In conclusion, for the US, I continue to believe metros are indeed necessary for the green transition.
* From a purely personal perspective: the vehicles that qualified for the tax breaks were not particularly appealing, except for the ones that were so absurdly expensive that the tax break probably wouldn’t have made a difference. (i.e. if you’re gonna spend $100k on a car, $8k off your taxes isn’t the dealbreaker)
You forgot the F.U.D. about how it’s going to melt the grid.
Agree, I think the transition in Europe is hard but will be much harder in the US.
Probably some sort of plugin serial hybrid with a 100 mile range like the BMW i3 would be a good fit for the US.
The US does have a big problem that pretty much every other country is going to migrate away from petrol/gas cars leaving them in a bit of a hole.
Hello Matthew,
May I both correct a few misconceptions here and provide some reinforcement.
– 110V is rarely used to charge EVs here. Home chargers are almost always on dedicated 240V 40A circuits, giving you a theoretical maximum of 9.8kW. This will charge most EVs to 90% in less than 8 hours, depending, of course, on what they were at when starting, and battery capacity.
– In my area (electrical codes vary by region), a 240V 40A circuit needs to be GFCI protected. If you were to charge an EV off one, my electrician advised that it would nuisance-trip the breaker repeatedly, and that a charger on the circuit with a J1772 or NACS port would be ideal. So indeed, a charger is pretty much required, and yes, they are expensive. (And: unless you’re an electrician, you should probably not install it yourself – also extra cost.) If you live in an apartment, you either need access to a charger at your home or close to your work, and you pay a premium for that power. Yet another obstacle to widespread EV adoption.
– American cars may be bigger, but EVs are generally not. For instance, one of mine is smaller than a Honda Civic. The exception is the pickup trucks (like the F-150 Lightning), which are rare. One bright spot. It is also true, however, that EVs sold in the US continue to command a price premium over gas cars of similar size and features.
– I’m not going to comment on the frequency of 1000-mile drives, but the additional stops thing isn’t really a problem. Firsthand experience – with an effective range of about 250 miles, you are going to need to stop anyway (restroom, food). With a little planning, you can stop at a place with a DC fast charger of at least 150kW, and you’ll be back up in 20-25 minutes. It’s not that bad. Enough time to stretch your legs.
– Completely agree with your last three points, but with some nuance: electricity cost varies by state and provider. My state is expensive. Others aren’t so much.
One more point: I learned all of this from being an EV owner. The “mental cost” of switching to an EV is not negligible. I have changed the way I think about driving completely. I am sure this switching cost deters some consumers.
In the movies. Normal people give up around 500, 600 miles. Early breakfast to late dinner sort of trip. That they rarely do. Perhaps once a year. And can be done by fast charging …when they are stopping anyway. Because all of us bring our bladders, bowels and stomachs with us. Other people would and do divide the 1,200 mile trip to Florida into three days of 400 miles a day.
Outdoor sockets have been required for decades. Almost all single family houses have one. Or more.
It was 110 volts when Thomas Edison was still alive. It was a 110/220 volt three wire system when he was still supervising the installations. It’s nominally 120 volt in the U.S. and Canada and 127 in Mexico. It is common for residential to have 120/240 volt service …ubiquitously. If there are very old two wire installations they are due for an upgrade for other reasons.
All 500 million of us, across North America use the same outlets and plugs. The “regular” one is 15 amps. If a load can be connected for more than a hour the circuit should be rated at 125 percent of the load. Which works out 12 amps. 1440 watts if you want to be strict about it. 15 kilowatts in an overnight charging session is a typical commute.
It depends on the local authority having jurisdiction. It would be unlikely for the circuits in the garage to be 15 amp. Very likely they are 20 amp which is 16 amps for the “125 percent” rule. Or 1920 watts. 20 kilowatts overnight is almost all commutes. It’s can be almost trivial to convert a 120 volt circuit to 240 volt. 3840 watts. 3.8 kW is even a selection in my charge time guesstimator. I decided that’s good enough because if some once in lifetime emergency occurs I can just fast charge. It seems people who write codes came to the same conclusion because current code is that each space in a garage should have a dedicated 20 amp circuit. And EVSE – the cable that plugs into the car – is cheaper.
It quite common for the laundry with it’s electric clothes dryer to be in the garage. There are solutions using the dryer’s circuit. That just plug in, no electrician required. It’s quite common for the service entrance and the main circuit breaker panel to be in the garage. Making a new installation cheaper. …. it’s not the problem naysayers make it out to be.
Volt times amp equals watts. 240 volts times 40 amps is 9,600 watts.
If the house doesn’t burn down first. The maximum 9,600 watts is for loads that will be connected for less than an hour. For loads that will be connected more than an hour – the continuous rating – the circuit capacity has to be 125 percent of the load. So it’s 32 amps 7,680 watts. If you want to charge at 40 amps/9,600 watts you need a 50 amp circuit.
The …device… you plug into the car is Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment. A sophisticated extension cord that connects the car to the supply circuit once they negotiate things. The charger, the whiz bangery that converts the AC to DC, is in the car.
They are expensive if you let the electrician bamboozle you. I ( and it seems code authorities ) decided that the chances of me arriving home with an almost empty battery when I’m leaving for a long trip in the morning were nil. And I could fast charge if an extraordinary emergency erupted. 16 amps on a 20 amp circuit is good enough. I can’t brag about how much the electrician bamboozled me for but that’s okay.
Yeah but if you go to a friend or family members house who doesn’t have an EV then you will be charging at 110V – and it will be really really slow. You might not even get it fully charged over a week if you do a reasonable number of trips out and about.
There’s a lot of ifs there, and not many EVs have a 250 mile range at motorway speeds (and you need buffer as well). Plus what happens if you need to stop early for some reason or replan your route because of an accident? Then it’s more difficult.
Why wouldn’t they fly if they are going to take that long?
Hi Matthew
The specifics of this particular aspect of the EV user story aren’t really important. My point was that this dimension of EV ownership isn’t the limiter or the issue you think it is. People figure things out. In fact, newer EVs’ onboard planning software are tailored to help you here. My overall point was that the limiting factor on EV adoption is cost, and that is a still significant obstacle in much of the country. Something that policymakers should work to solve.
Also, I got a couple of numbers wrong, I blame my brain being fried from a long day…240V x 50A for a max of 12kW. I checked my charging history and the most I tend to get is 11ish kW. It’s variable, but an overnight charge gets you to 90% with time to spare.
I hope this helped give you a more complete picture of EV ownership in the US.
Yeah but the market share is smaller than Europe. Once it starts getting up to 20-30% then they will presumably match the size of American vehicles in general.
Thomas Edison has been dead for almost a century. It’s 120 volts. Nominal. If they are going someplace without 240 volt charging , twice a year, they can fast charge. Twice. A year. Just like it’s not 2005 anymore, here in 2026, it’s not going to be 2005 in 2040 when the only new cars available are electric. And it will be much more likely there is 240 volt charging. And even if there isn’t they can fast charge someplace else.
Congratulations on having a 3 liter bladder. Most people have to stop more often than 250 miles.
YouTube is filled with people crossing the continent. Europe, North America or Australia. Comfortably because they don’t have 3 liter bladders. North Americans love to do it in the windswept empty places between the coasts. In the dead of winter. With the heat on.
Because the airline won’t let them check the car as baggage. there are lots of people who shuttle between the summer house and the winter house. And want the automobile in both places. And the spouse and the dogs, cats or both. I know couples who take two vehicles. Because driving between the two houses is cheaper than owning four cars.
And they definitionally impose stronger constraints on either labor or housing market choices (or both).
Assuming two workers in a household, they either have to commit to taking jobs in the same peripheral cluster (one which, definitionally, has fewer jobs/industries on offer than a denser central cluster), or they’re stuck living somewhere in the narrow geographic band that would place both peripheral clusters in a reasonable commuting distance.
And heaven help you if one member of the household needs to find a new job…
Unlike railfans, normal people understand that long distance commuting takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. They don’t apply for jobs far away from home. They take one closer to home.
If you’re lucky enough to have an abundance of job offers, you can choose one closer to home. For most people, it’s hard enough to get ONE job offer, and you’re not going to pass it up and risk homelessness or bankruptcy just because its on the other side of town.
People aren’t that stupid. They don’t get the job offer because they didn’t apply for the job. Because there are similar jobs closer to home. It’s the way it works for the vast majority of people who aren’t nuclear physicists married to symphony conductors.
I worked a minimum wage cashier job at Red Bull Stadium that, while it was only 6.5 miles away as the crow flies, took a 45 minute bus ride and then a 15 minute walk to get to. There are about 30 businesses within a 10 minute walk from my house which all have cashiers, but none of them were hiring at the time, and that was the only job offer I got. My father, a history teacher, one year had to work at a school on the Jersey Shore, 50 miles south from us. Obviously, there are many schools closer than this, and he applied to many jobs, but this was the only offer that he got. One of my parent’s friends is a therapist who lives in Hoboken and works on Long Island, and has to take an Uber to work every day because she doesn’t know how to drive. If she could have gotten a closer job, she would have. I don’t know what your occupation is, but if you’ve had the luxury to pick and choose between job offers every time that you looked for work, you’re pretty lucky.
I going to assume it is the stadium in Harrison. You want to claim there are no jobs in Downtown Newark, go right ahead. Or at the airport. Or in Jersey City. Um huh sure. Yep.
My father just got a job a few weeks ago that’s about 70 km (and about 2 hours of commute each way) away from where we live. This is a lot better than we were expecting; we thought it would be 115 km.
There are jobs in/near our city, technically. Lots of them, actively promoted, with tons of offers everywhere. They’re ~all in factories, minimum wage (at least to start with), and mostly physical work.
My father is 55 years old and has a university degree; minimum-wage physical-work factory jobs just weren’t a realistic option. Meanwhile the job offer 70 km away was actually in his field (still much lower level than he’s used to, but at least they pay a lot).
I’ve lived in metros of on 200k people, and metros of 4million people. There were plenty of jobs in both. If both of a couple are highly skilled in a rare niche they may only have one city that needs their talents. Most people are not in that specialized of a niche – a doctor can find a new job anywhere if needed. Even if you are in a specialized niche you probably are already working it before you get married and so you know as a couple where you are going to live – or you decide before you get married who compromises. (and this assumes a relationship where someone must move – I don’t have data but it appears to me like most couples meet in person in the city they already live in, and they are living in a place where they have job options)
A metro area of 200k people is very different from a neighborhood of 200k people in a metro area of 4 million. In the former, you are only competing with the 200k people in the area for each job in the area. In the latter, people will be applying to any job within about 1 hour’s commuting distance from their house. People who use only transit will likely be able to get around their neighborhood within one hour and get to city center in one hour but it will take longer to get to a different peripheral neighborhood, as circumferential trips are more likely to either be entirely bus trips or to require multiple transfers. People with cars can use highways to quickly move between peripheral neighborhoods so they will be able to apply to jobs over an entire half circle of the periphery. Therefore, for jobs in peripheral areas there will be much more car users in the pool of applicants than transit users, whereas jobs in city center are accessible by anybody, and thus the proportion of car and transit users who can apply to them will be equal to that among the general population.
@Sean Dennis Alama Cunneen The term you are looking for is “Marchetti’s constant” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant. Alon has written about this a couple times if you search this blog. People in in who are more than about half an hour (by whatever means they travel) from work will tend to move closer. Many take a job farther away and drive that far for a bit, but they generally will move in a few years (and there are not other factors – I know of many who work farther away because of some factor that makes it worth it for them – but the vast majority don’t have them and move).
When I was in that metro of 4 million I considered 3/4ths of it as not reasonably reachable – but it didn’t matter as everything I needed was on my side and so it was only a few times per year I traveled to other areas. There were likely 500k people who lived within my reasonable range (and someone near the center would find over a million)
In any case the solution to your issue is rapid transit, not just local. Any metro (even that metro of 250k) need a system of faster transit so that people can get farther in a reasonable amount of time. You don’t need to make the whole metro available to everyone, but the more you can the better. For most people one walmart/target is just as good as the next (some oppose one for reasons, and sometimes there is a price difference between locations), and there are 10 within a reasonable range, serve a couple good with transit (that are easy to serve) and people will choose to go to those if they use transit. People will consider transit options when looking for a potential place to live, and those that don’t (get it wrong) are likely to move.
>The upshot is that rail development that strengthens city center at the expense of suburban job clusters should be considered a positive development for transitioning from cars to public transport. Job clusters outside city center do not reduce commuting, but instead make commuting more auto-oriented.
It need to be hammered into everyone who talk about green that density=lower energy usage=greener, and no place in the US perform better than Manhattan for it. Noy any smaller cities who emphasize being distributed and local
Greens being motivated by (pardon) solarpunk aesthetics is often not great, yes. At its best, it looked like “those poor souls living in crowded tenements will all get tuberculosis, let’s build some Garden Cities”, and was a massive success due to commuter railways. But beyond FAR ~4, density looks suspect to them, and so they feel the need to make excuses to justify it, ranging from “mass timber!” (meh, whatever) to “vertical forests!” (oh no). I wonder if they could be bought off with some late-19th c. style architecture and a plenty of small but proper parks?
Likewise, a successful metro usually looks industrial (postsoviet, or the it-looks-like-they-put-in-a-forest-of-shoring-because-it-was-about-to-collapse New York subway) or indeed cyberpunk (East Asian).
Manhattan looks like it looks because it’s population peaked in 1910. When the Model T was just coming onto the market. Those conditions don’t exist anymore.
The closure of Germany’s nuclear plants, supported by the Greens, added an estimated 35 billion towns of CO2 per year into the atmosphere as nuclear energy was largely replaced by the burning of additional fossil fuels. The social cost of the switch has been estimated at $12 billion per year. 70% of the cost was attributed to an estimated 11000 annual excess deaths because of air pollution associated with the burning of fossil fuels. This estimate doesn’t include the death toll of Putin’s war financed in part by Germany’s thirst for Russian natural gas. The German Greens ought to tell us how many km of tramways will need to be built in order to compensate for this balance sheet.
Contrary to the popular image, it isn’t the Green Party that glows pro-nuclear, but the Light Blue Party.
What was the Greens’ purported rationale for the closures?
Did they suffer at the polls as a result of this outcome?
Closing nuclear plants was the Greens raison d’etre. They opposed it because they saw it as risky, with a potential for long term pollution and saw it as a stepping stone for the development of nuclear bombs. They preferred small projects with local input. After decades on the margins, they were part of the SPD/Green coalition that decided on the progressive closure in 2000. Closure was accelerated after the 2011 Fukushima meltdown this time under a conservative government.
It is often acknowledged as a mistake nowadays. As for the political price, there are multiple explanations for the pro-nuclear light blue AFD rise and I don’t know enough to weigh them all.
Thank you for your response.
Are you in France? If you are, I know that France generates a lot of its electricity from nuclear plants – was there ever a similar backlash?
In the US, the primary obstacles are cost, schedule, permitting, and local opposition. Vox did an article some time back (2017-ish) and compared the US nuclear industry to France and South Korea, and if I recall correctly, the conclusion was that the US is bad at nuclear because it doesn’t build enough nuclear (i.e. it is unwilling to pay the initial cost to go up the learning curve)
France built multiple nuclear plants of standard design at a moderate cost and without significant protests in the 1970’s. They have safely generated most of the electrical needs for decades. The surplus is often exported to Germany and the UK (the cables run through the tunnel).
Large and improved plants are in order. Because EDF, the national electrical company, appears unable to deliver them on time and on budget, smaller reactors are nowadays considered. EDF is also extending the life of the existing plants.
@dralaindumas, I think we have three grid connections to France and over the past year have got an average of 2.7GW through them.
It’s not the 1970s anymore. It’s not the 2010s anymore either. Nuclear is too expensive.
New nuclear may be too expensive now (especially given how much the price of solar power has plunged) but is the same true of France’s existing nuclear fleet?
French nuclear plants are aging but are still competitive. Most years, France is the world’s largest exporter of electricity. 2025 net exports were a record 92 TWh. Main buyers are in Germany, UK, Italy and Switzerland.
French nuclear plants are aging but are still competitive. Most years, France is the world’s largest exporter of electricity. 2025 net exports were a record 92 TWh. Main buyers are in Germany, UK, Italy and Switzerland.
That’s great to hear. I wish the French luck in maintaining and hopefully expanding the role of nuclear power alongside the increasing use of renewables.
I can’t buy French electricity and people in France can’t buy cheap North American natural gas. I pay slightly more for electricity to keep an existing nuclear plant running because it’s OPERATING costs are higher than newly constructed natural gas. Once we have enough alternatives the nuclear plant will be closing down because it costs too much to OPERATE.
The prices for renewables are global. If the renewables are going to be cheaper here they will be cheaper there, where ever the there is, too. The hydro is usually a byproduct of something else like flood control and/or irrigation, that will continue to make sense. Otherwise the wind, solar and batteries are cheapest.
If the AfD (and other far-right parties in Europe) are supporting nuclear power, is it because of nuclear’s technical merits or is it because they see it (like fracking) as an “own the libs” technology?
Support for nuclear energy is not the best way to “own the libs” when the president of the European Commission herself declared that the EU move away from nuclear was a strategic mistake.
Furthermore, building anything take years given Germany’s bureaucratic bottlenecks. Shutting down something is easier. AfD could target the windmills as they have promised, or any social program they despise.
This is at most half right. Indeed the German Greens pushed for an agreement with industry to shut down nuclear and planned to replace it with renewables. A few years later the conservatives won the election and over the following 16 years without the Greens in government renewables were slowed down and imports of Russian gas doubled. That was indeed a big mistake, but not the Greens’.
You’re probably aware that France had massive problems with its nuclear plants in 2022 because of maintenance, emergencies (corrosion) and a lack of cooling (low river levels), at times forcing more than half the reactors offline. That year Germany exported more net power to France than the reverse direction last year. Sure, that was an extreme situation but one whose likelihood is increasing.
Nuclear power only seems cheap because plants are built with massive government subsidies and they don’t pay for insurance nor for nuclear waste disposal (still an unsolved problem). Also, all the old plants have long been written off. New nuclear is 2-3x as expensive as renewables.
There is norhing wrong with wind energy per se but let’s be honest : It is the one being subsidized. In Germany, subsidies totaling about 500 billion euros over 20 years came through the Renewable Source Energy Act. In France, they come through the CSPE, a tax of about 3 cents/KwH on electricity usage bringing some 5 billions a year.
Is wind really more expensive – https://www.gov.uk/government/news/record-breaking-auction-for-offshore-wind-secured-to-take-back-control-of-britains-energy?
Yes.
At today’s record low auction prices for offshore wind power (90.91 Pounds = 104.47 Euros/Mega Watt-hour), wind power is less expensive than gas powered electricity. It is still significantly more expensive than nuclear one (average French export price in 2025 was 58.5 Euros/MWh).
I am not sure the export prices are that meaningful.
As you can’t easily turn nuclear power off half the time we are doing you a favour buying your nuclear energy that you want to produce the whole time but can’t use domestically.
Now don’t get me wrong the inter-connectors are a great idea – and they mean we have more low carbon electricity in the UK, but they also very much benefit France in particular.
France’s 2025 average export price of 58.5 Euros/MWh was remarkably similar to the long term contracts currently discussed for the 2029-2032 period (between 54 and 60 Euros/MWh). These are the prices efficient producers like EdF expect to turn a small profit. Times where France, like her neighbors, face negative electricity prices and EdF is happy to export at a discount, are compensated by periods where its structurally power deficient neighbors from the UK to Italy buy at high spot prices.
France is a crossroad in Europe’s electrical network. It is a large exporter (101.3 TWh in 2025) but also a significant importer (11.2 TWh). It is said that only 2% of these imports were for domestic consumption. The bulk represented trading opportunities to take advantage of differential spot prices in France’s neighbors.
It depends on where you live and who is doing the pricing. The price of electricity drops to “free” in Texas, certain of the day. It’s unclear if that is just for the electricity or the electricity and delivery charges. They aren’t getting it from nuclear reactors. Or even gas fired plants. And I don’t care because just like I can’t buy French electricity and the French can’t buy cheap North American natural gas none of us live in Texas.
By 2050 the last of the internal combustion engine cars to roll of the production lines will be limping to the scrapyards. If not towed. Partly because it will become increasingly difficult to find a retailer selling fuel in the 2040s. It’s not 2005 any more. Purportedly half of the new cars, in the EU, sold in 2025 were electric. They don’t have tailpipe emissions. Fretting about carbon emissions is becoming… quaint.
Electric cars don’t solve congestion problems or parking problems.
It’s only roughly 20% in the EU – https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/11/25/the-electric-transition-which-eu-country-is-buying-the-most-evs and a little higher in the UK – https://www.zapmap.com/ev-stats/ev-market
It may have been “more than 50 percent have a battery”. The batteries won’t continue to get cheaper forever. They are cheap enough now that the car costs the same amount as a internal combustion car. If they are the same price why would anyone want a smelly noisy high maintenance internal combustion car?
Indeed, 60% had a battery but only 17% were EVs. We shouldn’t count hybrids, as many are never charged in practice and, therefore, more polluting than pure combustion engines. (Worst of both worlds.)
I still think you’re right that the combustion engine will disappear sooner rather than later.
Hybrids pollute less. They go farther on the same amount of fuel. Or less fuel per mile or kilometer.
Our Volkwagen diesel got 40 miles per gallon. The Toyota Hybrid that replaced it gets 60. A 50 percent increase in range is a 33 percent decrease in pollution ( per mile or km ). It plugs in. If all we are doing is making short trips the mileage guesstimater gives up at 200 mile per gallon equivalent.
Zurich also has no appetite for a metro, but for a rather different reason. The people turned it down in a referendum half a century ago (1973), after a decade of declining population. This has traumatized the authorities so deeply that they still take it as gospel. They’d rather look for counter-arguments than try again.
The arguments they found against a metro are basically that Zurich is too poor to afford one (🤣) and anyway it doesn’t need it because the mix of S-Bahn, trams and buses is good enough, so they’d rather expand those. It seems they operate with inflated cost estimates, dramatize the difficulty posed by the hilly terrain and ignore the attractive trade-off between stop-density and speed that a metro offers.
… plus automated vehicles, lowering operating cost (extremely high wages) and alleviating the driver shortage Zurich has experienced and which will only get worse.
The argument in the referendum was that city growth was bad; the Club for Rome was cited. It wasn’t an argument from cost effectiveness – the S-Bahn was only built after the U-Bahn was rejected.
(I deleted the wrongly-placed comments as requested.)
@Alon: Nitpick: You might be discounting cycling a little too quickly. It has strong mode share also for 3–5 km trips (26%) and remains significant up to 10 km (19%), making it relevant across the 1–10km range—slightly over half of all trips. This share could certainly be increased with better cycling infrastructure, which in Berlin is one of the worst in the country.
… plus automated vehicles, lowering operating cost (extremely high wages) and alleviating the driver shortage Zurich has experienced and which will only get worse.