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How is the fastest route not the least carbon footprint?
Efficiency drops sharply at high speed.
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I get that you're being flippant, but I did have a coworker who calculated the carbon footprint of his commute for various modes of transport, including walking. He came to the conclusion that, given the average amount of CO2 produced per calorie consumed, riding an e-bike was actually the lowest-impact way.
I have read that cyclists who only eat beef generate more CO2 per mile than a hybrid car, though that presumably that ignores all the carbon cost of building cars and car infrastructure. Bikes are still better in pretty much every way. https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/are-meat-eating-cyc...
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A carbon tax. If addressing climate change relies on people changing habits against their selfish interests, then we are doomed. The externality should be internalised with a carbon tax. It's the simple, most obvious solution and it will cause selfish interest and ethical choices to align when it comes to carbon emission.
I prefer a "green credit" to a "carbon tax". A tax will always be passed on to the consumer, even if the govt taxes Ford, it will just make the car more expensive. Using game theory, a question could be "how do we get Ford to make more electric cars, improve efficiency of electric car production, and incentivize them to advertise electric cars?" My take is that businesses drive change, not consumers. On the whole, co…
Consumers will see that EVs are cheaper (post-tax) and will switch to EVs as a consequence.
You can make the tax revenue neutral.
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Electric vehicle and trains don't use gas
Yeah, they just use coal somewhere you don't see it.
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> they are actively getting in the way of why I would use their product No they aren't. They're being completely transparent about this and giving you the option to keep the old behavior with a one-time settings change. So what's the problem exactly?
To literally answer your rhetorical question: dark patterns. Not that I think the behavior is wrong - choosing the more energy efficent of two comparable manuevers just makes sense in general. But "Changes to default behavior to change consumer outcomes." are literally dark patterns and rhetorically likened to mind control whenever they want to cast a company or industry as a villain.
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A carbon tax. If addressing climate change relies on people changing habits against their selfish interests, then we are doomed. The externality should be internalised with a carbon tax. It's the simple, most obvious solution and it will cause selfish interest and ethical choices to align when it comes to carbon emission.
I prefer a "green credit" to a "carbon tax". A tax will always be passed on to the consumer, even if the govt taxes Ford, it will just make the car more expensive. Using game theory, a question could be "how do we get Ford to make more electric cars, improve efficiency of electric car production, and incentivize them to advertise electric cars?" My take is that businesses drive change, not consumers. On the whole, co…
So they'll default to showing directions for biking, walking, and transit?
A pet peeve of mine is that google maps doesn't show most transit routes on the map. There is a transit layer you can enable, but it only shows metro and light rail, not buses, brt, trams, ferries, etc.
The important paragraph that most people probably care about: Soon, Google Maps will default to the route with the lowest carbon footprint when it has approximately the same ETA as the fastest route. In cases where the eco-friendly route could significantly increase your ETA, we’ll let you compare the relative CO2 impact between routes so you can choose. Always want the fastest route? That’s OK too — simply adjust yo…
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This is a great example of why I figured Google Maps for navigation. I don't use Maps to express my environmental values, I use it to get from A to B the fastest way. If they default to something else, they are actively getting in the way of why I would use their product. I have no interest in activist software.
>>I don't use Maps to express my environmental values Actually, you do. Your environmental values happen to be efficiency (Km/hour) trumps efficiency (Km/gram of CO2). You wish the software to continue to express only your environmental values. It is an activist stance nonetheless.
Do something much more likely to be useful: implement a reasonable, even revenue-neutral carbon tax and stop with this non-sense.