Electric Mobility in the City: Benefits, Limits and What to Electrify

Electric mobility is the replacement of combustion engines with electric motors in cars, buses, motorcycles, bicycles and trucks, and it has become the main bet of governments and manufacturers for decarbonising urban transport, responsible for about a quarter of cities' emissions. The figures show its speed: according to the International Energy Agency, nearly fourteen million electric cars were sold worldwide in 2023, Norway passed 80 percent electric registrations and the European Union banned the sale of new combustion cars from 2035. Two authors help to situate that transition: Peter Newman, who has studied automobile dependence since 1989, and Donald Shoup, whose work on parking explains where the space of the electric car is decided.

Conditional benefits: emissions, noise and the source of electricity

The benefits are real but conditional. An electric car emits no exhaust gases, cuts noise and, over its life, produces fewer emissions than a petrol car even counting battery manufacture; the size of the saving, however, depends on the electricity that charges it. Newman has insisted that electrification only keeps its promise when paired with renewable energy, and has studied how distributed solar and electric vehicles can be integrated into city grids. On coal, the electric car barely improves on combustion; on sun and wind, it far surpasses it.

Peter Newman: electrify public transport before the car

Newman supplies the main warning. His work with Jeffrey Kenworthy on automobile dependence showed that the problem of the car is not only fuel but space, congestion, crashes and the sprawling urban form it produces, and none of those problems disappears by changing the engine. He therefore argues that the priority of electric mobility should be public transport, buses, trams and the trackless trams he has promoted, and electric bikes and motorcycles, which electrify many more trips per kilowatt hour and per euro. A traffic jam of electric cars is still a traffic jam.

Donald Shoup: charging is decided in the parking space

Shoup locates the dispute in parking. Every car spends 95 percent of its time parked, and charging infrastructure is decided in parking spaces: who has them, whether they are public or private, and at what price. His analysis shows that free or mandated parking subsidises the car and discourages alternatives, and that on-street charging can repeat that error if it reserves public space cheaply for private vehicles. His proposal is to charge parking its real value and spend the revenue in the neighbourhood, a principle he applies equally to charging: charge at home and at work, and on the street only for a fee.

Infrastructure and equity challenges: charging network, price and batteries

The challenges of the transition concern infrastructure and equity. The public charging network grows unevenly, concentrated in wealthy areas, while those living in flats without garages cannot charge at home. The price of electric cars, though falling, still excludes low incomes, and purchase subsidies have benefited the best-off households. Batteries depend on lithium, cobalt and nickel extracted under contested environmental and labour conditions. And electrifying the whole fleet would require a generation and grid capacity that cities must plan years in advance.

The lesson of Newman and Shoup is that electric mobility is necessary and not sufficient. Decarbonising urban transport requires changing the engine and, above all, reducing car kilometres: electrifying buses and bikes first, charging with renewables, pricing the space the car occupies and designing cities where most trips do not need one. With that hierarchy, the electric car is a piece of the solution; without it, it is a cleaner way of reproducing the same problem.