Well yes, the system didn't work nearly as well if you were going or travelling from farther out. That's yet another data point to indicate that it's as much about political will as it is about environment.
I think this is an interesting idea, though I suspect "on net the status quo is worse environmentally" is a hard question to answer w/o the aforementioned in-depth reviews (at least to an extent; obviously the current system has problems).
I don't really see how any of this (aside from the brief mention of commuting again) has any bearing on the question of whether it's better for the environment.
How far are you traveling? It's very very very unlikely that what you are doing is actually good for the environment, unless you are making a trash run only every few months.
It's a bad thing if you wanted to minimise environmental impact (and space requirement is a part of that) or maximise transport security. You are free to make any tradeoff you want, but in this case the environment has to suffer the consequences of your choice. Externalising costs doesn't make them go away.
I'm not convinced that this is necessarily true for environmental policy. Imagine, for example, how much people would care about their waste footprint if they had to keep all the trash that would otherwise go into an ocean.
Once we have no idea anymore where the power in our cars comes from, and no visible pollution in the street that we know is caused by cars, won't the search for a better power source slow down a lot?
It's both good because it creates opportunity and provides opportunity to a new class of traveler but it's bad because it expands the number of people who can travel and thus negatively impact the environment.
Not much different from wanting to eliminate poverty from the world, however, we know full well a middle class person had greater impact on the environment. They consume more goods and waste more.
It's neither good or bad but something we must keep in mind as we can't wish the consequences away.
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