I recently walked over several overpasses over busy highways in a suburban area of Minneapolis. As I walked towards and over one of the overpasses, I could hear how much noisier the highway was when I was within a block of the highway.
As I stood on the highway overpass and looked down at all the cars going by underneath, and listened to the highway noise, it suddenly occurred to me that ten years from now highways will be much quieter because of electric cars, which don’t make noise.
In urban and suburban areas, transportation and city planners spend a lot of money building barriers, whether large fencing or rows of trees, that protect nearby residents from the noise and air pollution of highways. LIving near a highway increases your risk of asthma and other respiratory illnesses because of the air pollution caused by vehicle emissions. Also, living in housing very close to a highway is noisy — especially at peak rush hour times.
But as the United States converts from gas powered cars to electric gars, the noise and air pollution from highways should decrease. Walking across a highway overpass will be much less noisy.
The noise and pollution in residential areas is just one more reason to accelerate our move to electric cars. I know there are many difficulties involved with the transition from petroleum fuel powered cars to electric powered cars. It can take a while for car manufacturers to shift production away from fuel powered cars to electric cars. Electric cars cost more than fuel powered cars. For instance, the only way I could afford an electric car would be to buy a used electric vehicle. But because of innovations in the electric car industry twenty years ago, there are now used electric or hybrid vehicles that I could buy.
I am not an expert on the many different kinds of incentives that the federal government has offered to car manufacturers and car buyers to switch to hybrid or electric vehicles. But these incentives make a difference. It would be especially helpful if the federal government could offer incentives for low income car buyers to buy hybrid or all electric vehicles.