the key urban planning tradeoffs:
—everybody wants to live a 15 to 30-minute commute away from a ton of great jobs
—everybody wants a big home
—everybody wants a fast private climate-controlled vehicle (at least sometimes)

it is physically impossible to meet all of these desires

the 'walking city' has hard size limitations & becomes very crowded (eg the old LES of NYC)
the 'walking + transit city' is scalable to just about an arbitrarily large size with sufficient state capacity (see: Tokyo & other East Asian cities)

the 'car city', American-style, is very resource-intensive, and cars require lots of space so it fails to function above a few million people, leading to anti-growth/anti-apartment sentiments (see: Los Angeles)

what's very interesting about 'electric vehicles' in the broad sense is that they don't have the scale/packaging requirements of ICE-powered vehicles (ICEs are large & expensive & high-maintenance & require a transmission so vehicles are large to support any possible use case)

but anything from an e-scooter to a Tesla Cybertruck or battery bus works the same way: a blob of 18650 batteries, a motor controller, and an electric motor — so there's no economic reason they need to be as large as ICE vehicles are

so small electric vehicles can easily slot into 'transit cities' and provide many of the same benefits as cars in terms of higher-speed personal mobility, without the negative tradeoffs of making a walkable urban form physically impossible that ICE-powered car cities have

big electric vehicles like a Tesla Cybertruck have most of the same negatives as big ICE powered vehicles in terms of urban planning tradeoffs except that they have fewer point emissions (which is still a very bad tradeoff, causing eg @bdhowald's asthma)

the main downside of small electric vehicles is that there is no infrastructure to use them in many places, so they end up either unpleasantly crowded into pedestrian spaces or the particular domain of thrillseeking men who tolerate the risk of operating them near cars

this thread inspired by thinking about @Noahpinion's recent columns on energy storage & its impacts on cities (which, of course, will bounce back into economics through the macroeconomic effects of agglomeration) https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/techno-optimism-for-the-2020s

taking a nice leisurely bike ride in the park is a great time to let twitter wars bounce around your brain without the distraction of Infinite Scroll & solidify into some sort of synthesis