Electric cars won’t eradicate gridlocks and air pollution, but carbon footprints could be cut by favoring pedestrians, cyclists and mass transit. This way it will be posible to turn towards sustainable mobility.
Each day cars are more fuel efficient, their tailpipe emissions have been reduced by more than 95%. Nonetheless, there are still cities such as London and Paris that are fighting against smog and pollution. Would it be an adequate measure to move to all-electric cars?
Although electric vehicles are more efficient, not producing any tailpipe emissions does not mean zero carbon emission for using the car. Nowadays, the 50% of electricity generated in the UK and 65% of electricity of the US comes from fossil fuels, which means that using these cars is not completely carbon emission free.
The need to achieve sustainable mobility goes way beyond than changing from a car using fuel to an electric one. It is about urban mobility architecture.
We are still allocating too much urban space for roads: in London almost 24% of urban land is used for roads and supporting infrastructure and in the US this increases to 40%. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cities must allocate a minimum of 9 square meters of green space per resident and most of the time this is not respected.
Adding roads and highways only encourages more people to use private vehicles, thus, moving to cleaner cars is not the solution. Cities need to cut the amount of cars and this can be achieved by favoring pedestrians, cyclists and mass transit, or shared mobility. If we build cities for people, for example, by making easier the connections between different transport modes, people will switch routes and modes.
The question of the beginning of the text could be answered by saying that moving to electric cars is a positive point, but it is not enough.
ZICLA and sustainable mobility.
Since 2005, we have been working to turn the waste generated by cities and their activities into new materials for industry and new products for cities themselves. We design and develop recycling projects so that recoverable waste – waste which, although it has interesting potential for recovery, goes to landfills because of the lack of recycling – they can certainly be transformed into new materials.
We design, develop, and manufacture recycled products for cities. Our urban plants for cycle lanes and our Zebra® and Zipper® bike lane separators, are recycled, recyclable, reusable, competitive quality products, manufactured with post-consumption and post-industrial plastic waste. All of them help to promote safe urban cycling. Our Vectorial® system platforms, designed to improve urban accessibility in general and accessibility to bus stops in particular, are also manufactured with post-consumption and post-industrial plastic waste.
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