This is where I think you have a skewed picture of reality.
In North America 20% of people live in rural areas.
As much as I wish that was "vast majority" it isn't.
Your simple view of public transit doesn't line up with the realities in North America. I wish it did, but it doesn't. And unfortunately your uninformed arguments are the fuel actual opponents of public transit use to justify their position.
It doesn't help the cause to spread uninformed arguments
You're suggesting that teams and EVs solve the same problems. But they don't.
EVs replace ICE vehicles. Public transit replace cars in areas that are dense enough to make them viable.
The reason public transit isn't everywhere because they are expensive to build and maintain.
Yes build them, but suggesting that teams and trains are a replacement for EVs today is completely false and is only hurting your argument overall.
This money can be much much better spent. This doesn't really solve anything other then letting oil companies pretend they are doing something with very little oversight.
I guess if you don't include buses in public transit. And pretend that all people live within a 5km walk of existing public transit. You're right.
But otherwise you're just oversimplifiying the situation and vastily underestimating how much it actually costs to build a full team network through rural areas.
Roads don't really go away with public transit, they might need less maintenance overall, but they still need to exist in some form, and roads lasting 10% longer doesn't seem like a huge savings
Parking is mostly privately owned, so saving money on parking doesn't really make more money available to invest in public transit.
Which car infrastructure are you talking about in this case?
While public transit is great. It's a lot more expensive to setup, and even more expensive to make convenient if the city wasn't built with public transit in mind.
It's just not a medium term solution for most north american cities, I do desperately hope that cities will start investing more in public transit, and encourage more dense housing, but realistically that is a 30-80 year timeframe. And that's assuming 100s of municipal governments all get on board. The political lift here is also very large.
The reality right now in North America is, if you're heavily advocating against electric vehicles, all you're really doing is adding support to the oil and gas industry trying to stop the outright ban of ICE cars.
We need to do more public transit, and we need to stop using ICE vehicles.
The mining only happens once. The materials in batteries are infinitely recyclable.
Oil is single use and the impacts of mining it has caused sooooooo much damage, news agencies don't even bother covering it anymore.
Not really though.
If the grid is powered completely by coal, and the government has no plans to phase out said coal and the grid is going to stay all coal for the next 30 years. Then yes, in that case EVs aren't a great choice.
But like anything else and the "but the grid is currently not clean" arguments don't really hold water.
This takes time and a lot more money. It's something we should do in parallel, but even if we started this today, any EV sold in the next decade would be long off the road before sizable impactful progress had been made on 15min cities.
I'm not sure I agree there is a massive infrastructure need. The average American could keep their EV charged today with a standard 120v outlet.
I don't have numbers for how any car owners park their car overnight somewhere that has access to a 120v plug, but it would surprise me if it was less than 50%.
Batteries are fine today and I lay getting better, fast charging is nice to have, but definitely not needed.
This isn't about capturing carbon that has already been released though.