Your windshield perspective is showing. The reason people in cars don't notice bike traffic is because a bike is small and unobtrusive and silent. Fifty cars in the same place is an epic disaster but fifty bikes in the same place is not a problem.
Take for example this data in London, which was produced in response to a question from a member of the public having essentially the same bias as your statement "nobody uses this bike lane." In London some bike lanes have slightly increased travel times by car but cycling has increased more than 50%. The bike lane is five times more efficient at moving people than is the carriageway.
That's a good point. If you use a custom allocator with your vector then you can be sure of the alignment, although the compiler will pretend to be unaware of it. All that stuff I want for string goes for vector, too.
I really, really don't want cross-platform SIMD in C++. The reason I write asm is I know how the machine works and exactly what I want the machine to do. It's already hard enough to get what you want from the compiler and trying to make it cross-platform is guaranteed to make it even harder. If you don't believe me try opening an audio device or a serial port from Java, which purports to contain cross-platform libraries for these devices but in fact makes it totally impossible to use them.
As for std::string I never find myself using boost for any reason so I'm curious what the indispensable boost feature is for strings. The only thing I want from std::string is the ability to resize it without initializing allocated space, the ability to construct a string from an existing data pointer, and the ability to release the data pointer from an existing string (basically the union of a string a unique_ptr).
Yeah but EVs make up a far smaller proportion of miles driven than they do the fleet by units. For obvious reasons: many EVs are short-range vehicles and the people who buy them are self-selecting as people who are both environmentally conscious and able to live with the range problems. People with long commutes who can't afford a Tesla are obligated to burn gas.
Not sure your math checks out. EVs are < 1% of fleet and < 2% of sales in the USA. As you say, cars last 10-20 years and this number is rapidly getting longer. Vehicles older than 16 years are the most-rapidly-growing segment of the US vehicle fleet. The average age of US light passenger vehicles hit 12 years in 2016. In 2020 there will still be 80 million cars on the road that were built 1995 or earlier, none of which were electric or even hybrids. Virtually all of the cars sold this year will still be on the road in 2030, and 98% of them will be combustion powered.