ELECTRIC AVENUE

Re “The ugly downsides of Canada’s costly obsession with electric vehicles” (Report on Business, May 20): In North America, we have urban sprawl, cheap gasoline, big cars and manufacturers happy to make money from them.

One can debate whether a high-speed rail link between Montreal and Toronto is better than $12-billion in subsidies to Volkswagen. Perhaps both efficient public transport and electric vehicles are needed.

However, there should be no question about the dire need to get rid of internal combustion engines and drastically decrease dependence on fossil fuels.

■ Jagjit Khosla Ottawa

Didn’t the pandemic make us stop and imagine a different future?

The production of electric vehicles necessitates more mining, pillaging and destruction of the Earth. We don’t need more cars, more highways, more congestion.

There should be a radical reimagining of transportation: a transition to high-speed rail, bus systems and subways that move people efficiently, comfortably and cheaply, from place to place, city to city and coast to coast to coast. The pandemic gave us time to think. Let us change the trajectory of a car-dominated world and build one that will sustain us for generations to come.

■ Theresa Mathers London, Ont.

Electric vehicles are no magic bullet. Extraction of oil and gas would be replaced by extraction of rare minerals from regions like sub-Saharan Africa, where lax environmental standards make resources easily exploitable by mining companies. Cars, parking lots and highways would continue to crowd and make ugly our cities and countryside, making the planet less livable.

If public transit is designed right, people would use it. We should get past small-mindedness and business-as-usual thinking and put our money into transit, instead of paying huge subsidies to build more cars.

Otherwise, what will cure us of our motor-vehicle addiction? The end of the world, I guess.

■ Colleen Alstad Victoria