Electric cars are not the future: Electric bikes are.

• Author: Griffin, Elle

When we started working from home we stopped using our cars and for a brief moment, the clouds parted. We saw a world in which the air we breathe became cleaner and we clung, for a moment, to the hope of a smog-free future. Maybe that could be our future, we thought, if we changed all our gas-powered cars out for electric ones.

Indeed, as carbon emissions plummeted by up to 30 percent worldwide, stock in electric vehicle manufacturers soared by up to 616 percent--the inverse correlation implying a sort of aspirational environmentalism: The idea that electrification could save us from our gas-powered woes.

But that reasoning assumes--incorrectly, as it turns out--that the fuel powering our vehicles is the delineating factor separating a dystopian future from a Utopian one. That polluted, congested, and unhealthy cities are caused by the way we are powering our cars, when in fact the vehicles themselves might be the real source of our distress.

MORE VEHICLES = WORSE PUBLIC HEALTH

Carbon--the thing everyone wants to talk about when we talk about vehicle emissions--is only part of the problem. More pertinent to the concerns for our lungs is something known as particulate matter (or PM2.5). This debris is the sort kicked up by cars, suspended in the air by smokestacks, and--in the case of inversion--held at face level for months on end.

Electric vehicles (EVs), though they produce 15 times less carbon than gasoline cars, only produce two times less particulate matter--and that is a problem for our health and wellbeing. When inhaled, particulate matter contributes to premature death from heart disease, heart attacks, and lung disease to say nothing of asthma and other respiratory ailments.

"Electric vehicles still present a lot of the same impacts that cars do," says Nick Norris, city planning director for Salt Lake City. "They still create tire and brake dust, they still require maintenance of our streets, they still take up space, and they're a relatively inefficient way of moving people around given the space they take up."

Indeed, electric-powered cars pose many of the ill-effects gas-powered ones do--and not just to our air. According to a study published in BMC Public Health, car owners in the United States get less than half the amount of moderate to vigorous physical activity non-car-owners get each day--and the more access residents have to privately owned cars, the less physical activity they get.

In other words: the more reliance we have on our cars, the less reliance we have on our own two feet--and that's true whether we drive a Chevy or a Tesla. Decreased levels of physical activity result in a deficit when it comes to our public health--with 31.7 percent of US citizens getting less than 150 minutes of exercise each week, increasing their risk of death (by all causes) by 20-30 percent.

Though privately-owned...