Wow, we can finally make a meaningful dent in emissions, not to mention pollution. In North America, the trucks are the primary mode of goods transportation, and they, not cars, contribute the bulk of transportation emissions.
The numbers missing in those statistics is how many cars versus how many trucks?
For example, it's more impactful to swap out 1 million trucks driving 12 hours a day than 10 million cars each being driven for less than an hour. Same as for buses, they're on the road all day long doing multiple trips.
most of these passengers are also just carrying a single person. The car industry has won the culture war and convinced everyone it's normal and sane for every individual to have a car and use it all the time instead of investing in our public transportation infrastructure
We're about to have rail strikes in the UK. I asked a taxi driver in London whether he gets more trips/surge, and he said it gets more than negated by the added traffic.
And that really brought home how a public transport infrastructure also massively benefits drivers. Cities without it (I'm thinking of LA specifically) are gridlocked.
Light duty covers most of the 10-20' UPS/Fedex/whatever trucks for last mile urban delivery which is far less efficient than delivery to a warehouse. Without more data on fuel consumption by gross weight, it's impossible to separate industrial delivery from personal travel/commuting.
You're probably right because the max GVW on a single axle is 20,000 lbs but my source is the USDOT sticker on the license plates of several Fedex and UPS trucks that deliver to my suburban address and my parents' exurban address.
Because as we all know, _building more trucks_ will lead to the old trucks just magically disappearing, and not just have twice as many trucks on the road now. And as we all know, the building of that truck definitely doesn't emit a truckload of pollution, making batteries is a process that doesn't destroy the environment to mine the metals it needs, 50% of the electricity in the US doesn't come from fossil fuels, and Tesla doesn't make all of its money by selling carbon credits to other car makers, leading to the exact same amount of pollution anyways.
The way you make a dent in emissions is by increasing public transit for the public side of things, and making more freight trains so that your trucks only need to drive 50 miles, not 2000.
