Tag Archives: #ItsForOurOwnGood

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Once again, the left want to restrict our choices It's all for our own good, right?

I have said it many times before: today’s left are pro-choice on exactly one thing, prenatal infanticide. In everything else, they want the government to take control of your lives. William Teach noted that the Biden Administration are trying to shut down existing coal-fired electricity generation plants through emissions regulations which would force them out of business. The Democrats tried to force every American to take an experimental and long-term untested ‘vaccine’ against COVID-19, punishing those who refused with loss of their jobs. They have put in regulations designed to ban the sales of new gasoline-or-diesel-powered trucks and automobiles by 2035, even as the Administration threaten to shut down the coal-fired generation plants, even though 16.2% of our electricity is produced from burning coal. I’m not quite sure how the math works out in trying to push plug-in electric vehicles and concomitantly reducing our electric generating capacity.

Not only do they want to force people into plug-in electric vehicles, the government also wants to regulate the choices we have in those vehicles:

As cars and trucks get bigger and taller, lawmakers look to protect pedestrians

by Joel Rose | Friday, August 23, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

RUCKERSVILLE, Va. — In a cavernous white room full of bright lights, video cameras and microphones, a driverless cart hurtles at 37 miles per hour into the side of a large SUV.

Researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety have crash-tested thousands of cars and trucks like this one over the past three decades at their facility in central Virginia.

But a few years ago, they noticed that those vehicles were getting bigger and heavier. So they decided to make the cart that crashes into them larger, too.

“It was meant to represent a small pickup or a midsize SUV, and those vehicles have gotten heavier and heavier over time,” says Becky Mueller, a senior research engineer at IIHS. “So it’s 500 kilograms more weight because that’s what the vehicle fleet now reflects.”

Americans’ cars and trucks are getting bigger and taller, while roadway fatalities have also climbed sharply over the past decade.

Why have cars and trucks gotten bigger and taller? Because those are the vehicles that the car-buying public have chosen to buy. American automobile manufacturers have moved to produce the vehicles that their customers want to buy. Article continues below the fold, because it contains an embedded video. Continue reading →

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Credentialed media are finally starting to see the problems with plug-in electric vehicles Of course, they solve that problem by not letting the plebeians have cars!

I’ve been saying this for a long time now: plug-in electric vehicles will be a nightmare for people without a garage or dedicated parking space. Now the credentialed media are noticing as well:

Extension cords across sidewalks: Charging an electric vehicle in Philly is a challenge

Electric vehicle owners without dedicated parking spaces stretch wires, and the limits of legal codes, to keep their EVs charged.

by Andrew Maykuth | Thursday, October 13, 2022

Anthony Wong and Robert Berkowitz waited several years for a back-ordered Tesla, the popular electric vehicle brand. By the time the new car was delivered in 2018, Philadelphia had canceled its controversial program to set aside curbside parking spots for EVs. That left the Bella Vista residents with few options for charging their new Tesla at home.

Like many urban EV owners without off-street parking, Wong and Berkowitz improvised. They’re retired and say they have more time to charge the Tesla’s battery at public charging stations at such destinations as stores or casinos.

“If we drove the car every day for work, then we might need to charge overnight to keep the car going,” Wong said.

But sometimes they need to charge their car at home. Their solution: Run a cable out the second-floor window of their rowhouse to their car parked in the street. They prop the cable atop a street sign to allow pedestrians to pass underneath. “It’s not really that noticeable, and it’s not in somebody’s way,” Wong said.

While it is, perhaps, not in anybody’s way, it’s also not legal, though nobody has been enforcing that law.

Philadelphia had a short-lived program which allowed electric vehicle owners to get a reserved EV parking space in front of their homes, but neighbors quickly complained that this was an undeserved perquisite for EV owners, the vast majority of whom were financially well off. The Inquirer reported that only 68 of these spaces were created before the program was canceled. And here’s the clincher:

After the city abandoned its EV parking program, a task force recommended that the city encourage the use of mass transit and the buildout of public charging stations rather than use its scarce resources to support private electric vehicles.

“In the grand scheme of sustainable transportation priorities, personal vehicles are still kind of low in the hierarchy in terms of what we want to be encouraging people to do,” said Christine Knapp, the city’s former sustainability director. “I don’t think anyone’s vision of a truly sustainable city 30 years from now is that we have the same number of cars on the road as we do now, but they’re running on electricity instead of gas.”

Philadelphia Badlands. Photo via Philadelphia Inquirer Click to enlarge.

Our Betters, you see, don’t want the peons to have their own vehicles, but to be packed on Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority buses and trains, to SEPTA stations filled with litter and used needles, drug addicts getting high, homeless people sheltering there, and a rising crime rate. We have previously noted the Allegheny Avenue SEPTA station in Kensington, with its open-air drug markets, which the city and Philadelphia Police are simply ignoring.

Christine Knapp, I would guess, doesn’t live in the Philadelphia Badlands, so notorious that it was once actually a part of Google Maps, though later removed, removed for telling a politically incorrect truth. She probably doesn’t have to take the SEPTA 30th Street Station, not near Kensington, but Drexel University.

Philadelphia is a rowhouse city, filled with working-class neighborhoods built a hundred years ago, with little in the way of parking. The Patricians have it a bit better than the plebeians, with parking garages for Center City high rise condos, and single-family homes with private driveways and garages in Chestnut Hill. They’ll have their dedicated parking spaces with protected charging stations, so they can advocate electric cars.

The rest of the people? Too bad, so sad, must suck to be them!