It is now more than a decade since I approached the Vienna city government with what I considered a rather modest proposal.
Restrict electric vehicles—especially buses and heavy trucks—from areas immediately surrounding schools, hospitals, retirement homes, childcare facilities, and other places where society concentrates those least capable of escaping danger on their own. Keep them out of tunnels. Keep them out of underground parking structures. Keep them away from locations where a major battery fire could compromise the integrity of the surrounding infrastructure.
In short, treat them with the same respect one would extend to any technology that introduces a unique and difficult-to-manage hazard.
As you can imagine, this suggestion was received with approximately the same warmth one might reserve for a man arriving at a dinner party carrying a fresh case of smallpox and a suspicious cough.
I was laughed out of the room.
Not politely dismissed. Not debated. Not challenged on the merits.
Laughed at.
Which, incidentally, was exactly what I expected.
The purpose was never to win the argument on that day. The purpose was to be on record. To make sure that when the conversation eventually arrived—dragged kicking and screaming into public view by reality itself—it could not be claimed that nobody had raised the concern beforehand.
Because there is one inconvenient characteristic of battery fires that enthusiasts have always preferred not to dwell upon.
Unlike conventional fuel fires, lithium battery fires are not simple affairs.
They burn extraordinarily hot.
They can reignite.
They release highly toxic substances.
And once thermal runaway takes hold, extinguishing the event becomes less an act of firefighting and more an exercise in damage control while waiting for chemistry to finish expressing its opinion.
Reality does not negotiate with marketing brochures.
Imagine an electric bus parked beneath the windows of a densely populated apartment block.
Imagine the vehicle entering thermal runaway.
What happens to the residents?
What happens to the façade?
What happens to the ventilation systems?
What happens to the people trapped several floors above while toxic smoke pours upward through the urban canyon?
And when the flames are finally extinguished—or more accurately, exhausted—what remains?
How long before residents can safely return?
Days?
Weeks?
Months?
Never?
These are not ideological questions.
They are practical ones.
Now imagine a different scenario.
A mother pushing a stroller along a crowded street.
Children walking home from school.
An elderly man moving with the speed that old age permits.
A battery failure does not politely schedule itself around human convenience. It does not consult pedestrian traffic. It does not wait for emergency services to arrive.
When such events occur, they occur suddenly.
The timeline between normal operation and serious emergency can be alarmingly short.
Yet for years any discussion of these risks was treated as heresy.
Not because the risks did not exist.
But because they interfered with the narrative.
And narratives, once elevated to the status of civic religion, become strangely resistant to common sense.
The vulnerable are always invoked when policies are promoted.
Children.
The elderly.
The sick.
The disabled.
Entire campaigns are built upon protecting them.
Curiously, those same vulnerable populations often disappear from the conversation when discussing technologies that carry fashionable political branding.
Then caution becomes backwardness.
Questions become disloyalty.
Risk assessment becomes ideological sabotage.
The rules change.
They always do.
My position remains what it was more than ten years ago.
The first duty of a city is not to advertise virtue.
It is to protect its citizens.
Especially those least able to protect themselves.
If a technology introduces hazards that are difficult to manage, difficult to contain, and potentially catastrophic in densely populated environments, then society has every right to restrict where and how that technology is deployed.
That is not extremism.
That is prudence.
A quality increasingly rare in an age intoxicated by slogans.
The laws of chemistry do not care what is fashionable.
Neither do fires.