What Can a Technologist Do About Climate Change? (2015)

Frustrating that the author parrots the wishful thinking "But once the grid cleans up, not only will electric cars be cleaner than gas cars, they may be more efficient than mass transit." while later admitting "Reducing the need for personal transportation via urban design. Among other reasons, this is important to counter the likely tendency of autonomous cars to increase urban sprawl, which has been strongly correlated with emissions."

The two are strongly linked. Mass transit is necessary because when you have a highly dense city (i.e. when you fight against urban sprawl) you need a higher throughput mode of transit than roads could ever provide. Good luck moving literally 9 million people per day as the Tokyo subway does with a system of automatic electric cars. In this lens of thinking, the solution we need is innovating more efficient mass transit.

The other approach is to increase density but in a distributed manner, a system of "small towns" if you will. Dense small towns are charming and, more importantly, can be walkable so that neither mass transit nor cars are needed for the average citizens' day-to-day. The issue with this approach is that modern civilization is currently demanding the opposite - despite internet technology, we are becoming more centralized in fewer megacities. Find a way to somehow make companies prefer remote work and we might reverse this trend.

Why not both?