[HN Gopher] 280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil f...
___________________________________________________________________
280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than
electric cars
Author : rglullis
Score : 582 points
Date : 2023-11-17 15:02 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| thelastgallon wrote:
| We don't need a 4000 lb vehicle to move a ~200 lb person.
|
| In order of efficiency:
|
| (1) Walk
|
| (2) Unicycle, roller skate, scooter (no battery, very little
| material)
|
| (2) Bike
|
| (3) Electric bike (and all forms of newfangled electric:
| escooters, segways)
|
| (4) Electric motorbike or scooter
|
| (5) Mass transit (can be public/private) transportation: Electric
| trains
|
| (6) Mass transit (can be public/private) transportation: Electric
| buses
|
| (7) Zipline
|
| (8) Carpools on BEV
|
| (9) Carpools on PHEV
|
| (10) BEV
|
| We can stop buying gas cars. Pollution kills 10 million EVERY
| year[1]. For context, the cumulative COVID deaths over 3 years
| are ~6.5 million. And fossil fuels are subsidized (Trillions of
| dollars per year). For 2022, this is $7 trillion[2]. Why are we
| subsidizing fuels that are proven to cause all kinds of diseases
| (nearly everything except STIs).
|
| [1] Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Why Do We
| Accept That as Normal?:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...
|
| [2] Why Are Governments Still Subsidizing Fossil Fuels?
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-16/climat...
|
| [3] https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-
| fuel...
| Shatnerz wrote:
| How are you defining efficiency here? Is walking really more
| efficient than cycling? I would put walking as the least
| efficient manual powered methods mentioned.
|
| Aside: I used to unicycle to work, and I have to say that it
| was both fantastic and much faster than walking while on a
| 27.5" wheel.
| supermatt wrote:
| Yup, IIRC in terms of kJ/km cycling is ~4x more efficient
| than walking (on flat surface). I guess they must be talking
| about the energy used in production, etc.
| baxuz wrote:
| It's closer to 6x.
| nordsieck wrote:
| I mean, the number will really depend on how fast people
| are biking. Over 20mph, efficiency starts to really take
| a hit. Unless you use some sort of crazy shell.
| c22 wrote:
| Bicycles are like 98% in terms of distance/effort so even
| when you factor in the manufacture/materials it seems like
| it's pretty hard to improve on.
|
| When you account for calorie transport it's possible the
| e-bike comes out on top, especially if charged from a local
| renewable electricity source.
|
| []: https://pedalchile.com/blog/cycling-vs-walking
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| at a micro level that's probably true, but from a public
| policy perspective, I'm willing to bet that regular bikes
| effect to increase fitness probably saves more carbon in
| the long run (healthcare is pretty calorie intensive).
| renewiltord wrote:
| From a public policy perspective, we've had bikes for
| eons and usage has always been minuscule and now we have
| ebikes and usage has jumped. So that particular
| experiment has already been run.
| bluGill wrote:
| Most ebikes you have to pedal to make them go. Some just
| push the throttle, but most are motor assist but if you
| don't pedal you don't go. As such most ebikes give the
| same fitness benefit but let you go faster (read
| farther). My ebike almost forces me to work harder than
| the regular bike as because it is heavy it feels like it
| doesn't coast as nice as the regular bike, and so I'm
| pedaling more. (part of this is probably I'm going faster
| and so wind resistance is lowing me down more - but to me
| it feels like I have to work harder to make the ebike
| work, in return I go farther on it)
| herbstein wrote:
| > As such most ebikes give the same fitness benefit but
| let you go faster
|
| This is simply not true. A pedal-assist bike will go
| faster with the same amount of W put into the pedals,
| yes. But will people put in the same amount of W if 60 %
| will get you to your "target speed"? I doubt it. And then
| you get less health benefits for the same distance
| traveled.
|
| On my 8 kilometer commute I average 150 W. Not because I
| use it as exercise. That's just where I find my
| comfortable level of output. Every time I've ridden on
| ebikes I've put in much, much less effort. I'd be
| surprised if I put in even a third of the energy. That's
| great if you just need a mode of transport. Bikes are
| practical, efficient, and planning for them improves
| cities. Even ignoring the potential health benefits. But
| claiming that a pedalassist bike gives the same fitness
| benefits just doesn't pass the smell test.
| bluGill wrote:
| I can only state for myself that I'm putting more effort
| in (since I can feel the bike slow down more when I
| don't). Plus the ebike allows trips that because of
| distance I wouldn't use the regular bike for.
| erostrate wrote:
| What does a salmon have in common with a man on a bicycle?
|
| They are both Pareto-efficient. Here's a chart of cost of
| transport (calories/gram/km) vs weight (kg) comparing a
| salmon vs a bicycle vs a jet fighter etc:
| https://www.bike.nyc/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/04/efficiency-g...
| mungoman2 wrote:
| Fun! But how to read the Y axis? Why does it start from 1
| twice?
| theamk wrote:
| it's a logarithimic scale [0]
|
| Those go 0.1, 0.2, 0.4, .. 1, 2, 4, ... 10, 20, 40...
|
| I am guessing they printed "0.1" as ".1", and because
| it's a really bad scan the ".1" and "1" look identical.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_scale
| kachnuv_ocasek wrote:
| I think it starts at .1 at the bottom, but the scan
| quality makes it difficult to discern the decimal.
| abeppu wrote:
| When is that measuring the salmon? Surely, calories per
| gram per kilometer is very high if you're swimming upstream
| and low when you're going downstream, right? Is this when
| they're in the ocean phase?
| Sharlin wrote:
| Walking is probably the most efficient from a (public) health
| viewpoint. Given that the major problem in the West is lack
| of physical activity and excess calorie input.
| bootwoot wrote:
| Which is to say, the least efficient
| tullatulla wrote:
| Well you don't need a bike for walking, so that's gotta count
| for something (if efficiency is defined as total energy spent
| per distance)
| gmuslera wrote:
| There is another dimension to add: how far do you really
| "need" to go and how frequently. And why it is so? Remote
| working vs commuting, local/nearby enough shopping vs long
| distance for supermarkets, going yourself vs (maybe electric)
| delivery.
|
| If everything around you is built with base assumption that
| you must have a car, then the optimization was done by
| someone else with a different definition of efficiency.
| supertrope wrote:
| Yes. This is the difference between mobility and access.
| You can watch a movie by driving to Blockbuster in a SUV
| and physically picking up an optical disc. Or in an EV. You
| could bike there. Or get it mailed. If you watch on Netflix
| you access the commodity without any transportation at all.
| bluGill wrote:
| Life is a compromise. I'd love to own 100 square miles of
| land, with my front door on New Yorks Time's square. That
| isn't physically possible, but it is what I want in the
| ideal world. (I don't live near New York so I don't know if
| times square is really where in New York I'd want to live,
| but it is an iconic place that at least gives the sense of
| what I mean - you could pick downtown of most large
| cities). Cars enable more people to have both the benefit
| of rural life while also getting the benefits of the city.
|
| This isn't unique to cars - trains could give the same, but
| we already have a road network.
| ackfoobar wrote:
| > That isn't physically possible, but it is what I want
| in the ideal world.
|
| I think the same can be said (to a lesser degree maybe)
| about cars, which are very space inefficient. With enough
| sprawl and a certain density, e.g. in Toronto, it's just
| gonna be traffic for every one.
| bluGill wrote:
| Not exactly. Sprawl means you can't reasonably reach the
| entire city, but low density sprawl and cars mean you can
| reach enough of a city to consider it all the advantages
| of a city. Toronto loses out because they have a dense
| city center, downtowns have to be torn down for the
| sprawl model to work - people who get a new job may have
| to move elsewhere in the city since the new job isn't
| close to the old (unlike when all jobs were downtown)
| However since you are still "close" you can visit old
| friends and family on weekends - it will be a long drive
| but you don't make that trip often so it is reasonable.
|
| Cars don't enable many people to own 100 square miles -
| but I can get pretty close if I settle for 5 acres in an
| exurb. Many find that a single family house gives them
| close enough (they get a small garden - most likely grass
| they mow weekly - which is all they really want). But
| again it is a compromise. If we had science fiction
| technology (terraform Mars and Venus; teleporters) that
| 100 square miles might be reasonable.
| ackfoobar wrote:
| I did not make my point clear, and that's my bad.
|
| Torotno exists, so of course car dependency is somewhat
| feasible in real life. The impossible part is travelling
| in the sprawl with relatively short time, as limited by
| the road's speed limit. The real limiting factor most of
| the time is traffic, because of the space inefficiency of
| cars.
|
| I made this point because I seem to recall a city
| simulation game despawn cars (literally physically
| impossible) to make car dependent designs "work".
|
| ---
|
| > you can reach enough of a city to consider it all the
| advantages of a city
|
| With enough people driving downtown you lose most of the
| advantages, and it makes the lives of those who didn't
| choose this lifestyle worse.
| LUmBULtERA wrote:
| Is taking an ebike really that efficient if its going to be
| stolen? I kid.. because I have one. But I take 3 locks with me
| when I need to leave it unattended...
| ryukafalz wrote:
| I do worry about this some, but I also have my bikes insured
| including an e-cargo bike. Cheaper than most car insurance.
| Still would be a pain in the ass if my bike got stolen
| though.
| em500 wrote:
| In the Netherlands many insurance companies have stopped
| offering insurance for ebikes and electric cargo bikes,
| because the chance of theft is too high (approaching 90% in
| Amsterdam on certain types according the insurance
| companies).
| pyrophane wrote:
| I wonder how this ranking might change if we also took into
| account the energy required to produce the extra calories that
| humans need to consume in order to get around via these modes
| of transportation.
|
| Like, you'd probably expend a lot of calories traveling 10
| miles by unicycle, and over time maybe that would be more
| significant than the materials difference compared to cycling?
|
| Of course, it depends a lot on the diet of the human in
| question.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| Most humans on earth already eat way more than what they
| need. Exercising might actually make them eat less in the
| long run, because they'll lose weight and not eat so much
| anymore.
| dgacmu wrote:
| There's a secondary cost savings in reduced health care costs
| from the extra exercise. (May not apply in all countries, but
| does for the US/Europe).
| agent281 wrote:
| At least part of what keeps people from switching to more eco-
| friendly transportation is the protection arms race: people buy
| bigger cars because they are safer for their occupants. This
| leads to more injuries because bigger cars do more damage.
| Which means people are more concerned about injuries and buy
| bigger cars.
|
| This is one area where I am concerned about the impacts of
| electric vehicles. They weigh a lot more than ICE cars and
| might cause more significant injuries for pedestrians. There
| probably ought to be some sort of tax or fee on vehicles that
| scales by weight. However, that would favor ICE vehicles over
| EVs so it may not be popular among the people who might
| otherwise be interested in such things.
| pcl wrote:
| IANA automotive engineer, but I would assume that injuries
| from car-vs-pedestrian collisions are mostly due to impact
| velocity, and not due to momentum.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if the higher-mass electric vehicles
| are more dangerous to other cars when involved in car-vs-car
| collisions, though.
| bluGill wrote:
| Smaller cars are more likely to throw you up and over -
| still dangerous, but not as dangerous as a direct inelastic
| hit. Smaller cars have better visibility of pedestrians and
| so are more likely to see and thus avoid pedestrians.
|
| If you take a direct hit with even a tiny car at faster
| than 30mph you are dead. However smaller cars make it
| somewhat less likely you take that direct hit.
| pcl wrote:
| Yeah -- but when I hear people talking about how EVs are
| heavier, I assume that people are making a like-for-like
| model comparison.
|
| In a similar body size, EVs tend to weigh more, due to
| all the extra battery.
| ashton314 wrote:
| I would be delighted to ride a zip line to work
| baryphonic wrote:
| Energy efficiency is not the only variable that matters.
| Walking to my grocery store would take almost two hours each
| way. Biking would take 30 minutes each direction. Driving is 14
| minutes each way, and is the only feasible way I can get
| groceries when I have my kids in tow (which sometimes is a
| necessity).
| stetrain wrote:
| Of course. If in the big picture we want fewer people to need
| to take a car for each trip, it would be a good idea to have
| towns and cities where grocery stores and houses are closer
| together.
|
| And of course not everyone wants to live in such a place, but
| plenty of people would. And in the US this is fairly rare
| compared to many other parts of the world.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Who wouldn't want to live close to the grocery store? Here
| in Dublin I live in a house with gardens front and back,
| 5km from the center of the city, with a grassy park in
| front of my house (football field size), yet I can walk to
| 4 different supermarkets. The furthest is about 15m walk,
| the nearest is 10m. And I've got a few small convenience
| shops even closer (like, under 5m walk). This is what I
| call "perfect", and I don't understand why someone wouldn't
| want this.
|
| Unfortunately they stopped building communities like this
| in the 1950s, but they sprawl for miles around Dublin, and
| I consider myself lucky to be able to live here.
|
| I've visited cities in the Midwest of the US and found them
| to be like hell. Can't walk anywhere.
| stetrain wrote:
| Oh I would definitely prefer it. I think a lot of people
| would. So many Americans haven't lived that life though
| that it can be hard to imagine.
| dublinben wrote:
| How inefficient is it that your grocery store is 5 miles
| away? Everyone should have a grocery store within a 5 minute
| walk of where they live.
| smt88 wrote:
| A very tiny number of people in the US live a 5 min walk
| from a grocery store.
|
| Many people live within 5 miles of one, but usually in
| denser areas where 5 miles could easily take 30-60 min of
| travel.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Right, but in denser areas it's kind of crazy that more
| people aren't within 1-2 miles of a grocery store.
| smt88 wrote:
| In my city, everyone I know lives within 1 mile of a
| grocery store, but they drive anyway. Many have kids and
| their groceries take up a lot of space, and they don't
| have the leisure time to spend on walking anyway.
| dublinben wrote:
| >A very tiny number of people in the US live a 5 min walk
| from a grocery store.
|
| That's exactly the problem. There needs to be more
| housing built near grocery stores, and more grocery
| stores built where the housing is, instead of 5 miles
| away.
| michpoch wrote:
| So how does it work? How do you e.g. get your fresh bread
| in the morning? Are there some local community bakieries
| instead?
| smt88 wrote:
| Americans almost never buy fresh bread. We buy packaged
| bread with preservatives that lasts about a week (much
| longer if frozen or refrigerated).
|
| Most of us don't go to the grocery store more than once
| or twice a week. When we do, it's often a big purchase
| that you can't carry back in your hands or on a small
| bike. You'd need something with more cargo space.
| greendave wrote:
| A small fraction of Americans shop daily for food. For
| the majority, it's a weekly (or even less frequent)
| occurrence.
|
| And no, fresh bread is not really a thing, outside of a
| few urbanish settings. A healthy proportion of bakeries
| don't even sell bread - only pastries, cakes, etc.
| pastage wrote:
| 8km is about 20-35 minutes on a bike depending on
| infrastructure, I am sure it is zero minutes in many
| places due to lack of infrastructure. It is extremely
| cheap to build, and fast, look at Paris it is rapidly
| becoming a more bicycle friendly city, it is still
| carmagedon though.
| bluGill wrote:
| When I grew up we went to a grocery store 5 miles away,
| even though the closest was only 2 blocks. Once in a while
| we walked to the close store, but it was so much more
| expensive than the farther away one that we just about paid
| for the entire cost of the car just on the grocery savings.
|
| I can't control the prices of the local store, and so it is
| efficient to have the ability to choose other stores and
| thus force them to compete on price.
| foobarian wrote:
| It also helps if it's not raining, and when there are no
| slippery surface conditions.
| michpoch wrote:
| Of course, many people forget that there are folks living in
| villages / remote areas like you.
| adrianN wrote:
| I'd never even consider living anywhere where it'd take me 15
| minutes to the grocery store no matter what mode of
| transport. How long is your commute? I have like ten grocery
| stores in fifteen minute cycling distance, the closest is two
| minutes away.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| tbf I prefer to measure human loss in QALYs in case a disease
| mostly kills old people. It's impossible to measure perfectly
| but it's not worse than "A death". We all die in the end.
| aftbit wrote:
| Certainly in the Bay it's pretty easy to get by with no car at
| all - just rent or borrow one if you want to take a trip to
| Tahoe every once in a while. If you go deeper into the country
| though, there are many places where car ownership is nearly
| mandatory, especially for people who can't WFH.
|
| EVs are pretty close to being able to replace ICE cars around
| here, but still can't match the range, cost, or longevity of an
| ICE vehicle. I could do 80%+ of my miles in an EV, but once or
| twice a year, we take a 1000 mile road trip that would be
| considerably more painful in an EV. If we're only going to own
| one car, it still needs to be ICE.
|
| That said, I do own two cars. One of them is a 2001 Ford truck
| that is on its last legs. It's not very environmentally
| friendly to run, but given that I put so few miles on it per
| year, it's probably better than causing a new car to be
| produced, regardless of its technology.
|
| Would I still be able to run a 2023 EV in 2044? Will the
| batteries last that long, with any sort of usable range?
| woodruffw wrote:
| > If you go deeper into the country though, there are many
| places where car ownership is nearly mandatory, especially
| for people who can't WFH.
|
| This is true, but it's also worth noting that it's true
| because small and medium-sized cities systematically
| dismantled their public transportation systems between the
| 1920s and 1960s, replacing them with infrequent bus services.
|
| One of the things I do when trying to understand how so many
| of our smaller cities became car hells is to Google "$CITY
| streetcars 20th century." We had the infrastructure and chose
| to remove it.
| aftbit wrote:
| Yes, my city is one of those. Sadly it leads to a death
| spiral. The bus sucks, so nobody rides it, so the bus gets
| no money, so they cut routes, so the bus sucks more, so
| fewer people ride it.......
| shortcake27 wrote:
| > but once or twice a year, we take a 1000 mile road trip
| that would be considerably more painful in an EV. If we're
| only going to own one car, it still needs to be ICE.
|
| You could just rent a car for those two trips like you
| suggested yourself in your first paragraph ;). Optimise for
| the most common scenario, not the least common one.
|
| > Would I still be able to run a 2023 EV in 2044? Will the
| batteries last that long, with any sort of usable range?
|
| Replacing the battery pack on an EV once every 15 years is
| certainly cheaper than all the maintenance that goes into an
| ICE in the same timeframe. Hopefully we can start recycling
| batteries properly before the current generation of EVs is up
| for battery replacements.
| bluGill wrote:
| The cost to rent a car for a week is getting close to the
| cost of just owning a car. (very much it depends, if you
| only own new cars renting is cheaper, but most people own
| older cars which are much cheaper). Plus when you rent they
| worry about little scratches and such which limits what you
| can do on vacation.
| shortcake27 wrote:
| I'm not sure what math you're on, usually the metric is
| 1-2 months to match ownership.
|
| I recently hired a small car for PS20 a day. Not a
| special deal, that's just the price. A week would make
| that PS140. An old car would cost almost twice that in
| taxes. Then you have maintenance, insurance, MOT, and
| devaluation.
| bluGill wrote:
| If you can use a small car. I have a family, so I need a
| larger car (minivan, but typically they give me a large
| SUV). $100/day. A used minivan amortized over years is
| pretty cheap.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Yeah probably. Every EV comes with an 8+ year battery
| warranty, and it seems pretty rare to actually use it. No one
| I know has.
|
| From anecdotes I've seen online, the only people who
| experience serious serious range degradation are atypical
| users (eg a taxi with 500k miles that exclusively uses fast
| charging) or owners of cars that don't have any thermal
| management for the battery (e.g. Nissan Leaf).
| henry_viii wrote:
| > a 4000 lb vehicle
|
| Amateur numbers.
|
| The F-150 Lightning is 6,500 lb (2,950 kg) and the Rivian
| trucks (R1T, R1S) are 7,000 lb (3,175 kg). The electric F-150
| is 35% heavier than the ICE model.
|
| Meanwhile:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37726539
| schaefer wrote:
| not to get us too far off track, but unicycling is WAY less
| efficient than walking.
|
| For those that have never tried it: it's like trying to go for
| a jog while maintaining a three-quarters-squat posture.
| ackfoobar wrote:
| Many aspects to the word "efficiency".
|
| Space efficiency - how wide it takes to reach a certain
| throughput - train wins
|
| Time efficiency - how much time it takes to get from point A to
| point B - barring traffic, car wins
|
| Energy efficiency - how much energy it takes - bike wins
|
| Your argument is just as strong without the subjective ranking
| of efficiency.
| soperj wrote:
| Majority of my time commuting the bike wins every time,
| mostly because I'm commuting at the same time as everyone
| else.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Good for you. Doesn't describe everyone else.
| q1w2 wrote:
| Not an option any more when you need to start dropping kids
| off at school first - not to mention the weather and
| safety.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > (5) Mass transit (can be public/private) transportation:
| Electric trains
|
| This depends quite a lot on ridership. E.g. a typical MAX train
| in Portland, filled at perhaps 10% capacity aside from a few
| narrow time periods in the morning and evening, loses out on
| efficiency to a Honda Civic with four people. Trains are
| _heavy_ even when they are empty.
| slothtrop wrote:
| > We don't need
|
| Let me stop you right there. We "don't need" most of the
| possessions you currently own, including the one you're using
| to browse HN. We don't live for mere subsistence.
|
| People can decide for themselves what they want to give up to
| reduce their carbon footprint, and that doesn't necessarily
| have to be their vehicle.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| If you're defining efficiency as energy required to travel a
| distance, then an electric bike that doesn't require effort
| from the rider is going to be way more efficient than walking
| or cycling.
|
| That was one of the exercises I had when studying - calculate
| the energy intensity of various modes of transport. It turns
| out that if you calculate the whole energy requirements to get
| the extra food into someone's mouth that they'll want if they
| are walking or biking, then it's not much different to the
| amount of energy that would be used by just driving a car.
| Making food is energy-intensive, and the conversion efficiency
| into mechanical output by a working person is very low. In
| contrast, an electric motor and a battery can both be made
| extremely efficient.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Would you show your work? I am curious and a little bit
| skeptical.
|
| A gallon of gasoline has about 31,000 kcal. In the US, a
| typical sedan gets about 30 miles per gallon.
|
| Walking a mile at 150lb bodyweight burns about 100 kcal.
| (This is non linear though: walking longer distances will
| burn less per mile on average)
|
| If we assume linearity, to walk an extra 30 miles in a day
| you'd need 3000 more kcal of food. What is the energy cost of
| growing and transporting 3000 kcal of food? Does it exceed
| 31,000 kcal?
| johnea wrote:
| I'm not really sure where in the US people live that makes them
| think transportation can be replaced by a bike.
|
| I live in San Diego, the climate is great, but there is no way a
| person can travel any farther than their neighborhood on a bike.
|
| The main impediment at this point is the outrageous price of EVs
| in the US.
|
| In China cheap EVs are readily available, trade policies are
| preventing their import into the US.
|
| Bikes, "e" or otherwise are a great way to get around the
| neighborhood, but most people are not able to restrict their
| travel to a 10 mile radius. And weather as well as traffic safety
| are serious mitigations of bike transport.
| chucksta wrote:
| You are forgetting about the other coast. A 10 mile Radius will
| get you almost anywhere you want to go in a NE metro
| count wrote:
| To be fair, San Diego seems like it was designed specifically
| to be hostile to non-car travel, especially around the valleys
| and passes between the hills.
|
| Downtown/GasLamp are totally viable with just an e-bike (and
| probably over into Coronado), bus as soon as you have to leave
| that area, I'd agree, non-viable.
|
| I haven't worked or lived in any other city quite that brutally
| bad for bikes though?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| San diego coastal neighborhoods are fine. I saw a lot of
| bikes and cargo ebikes going to the ralphs in pacific beach.
| The whole greater mission bay area seems pretty idyllic from
| a biking perspective tbh.
| allemagne wrote:
| A core, dense walkable and expensive area (where a bike might
| be viable) surrounded by miles and miles of cheaper suburban
| sprawl (where it's not) is how every major American city is
| structured. I live next to commuter rail in a mid-sized city
| that I try to take advantage of, but if the option of a car
| was completely taken off the table for me it would make so
| much of my life more difficult by at least an order of
| magnitude.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I bought an ebike about 2 years ago and it's been awesome. I
| started by using it mostly for grocery runs (in-neighborhood)
| and other small errands. But soon I was using it in an inter-
| neighborhood way, using dedicated bike infrastructure and
| bikelanes to range further out across the city and to commute
| for the limited days I go to the office.
|
| It's not a silver bullet for all the trips I might take in my
| car but it's getting pretty damn close... and this is in rainy
| seattle.
|
| Certainly where I grew up on the kitsap peninsula it would be
| less useful unless I had lived closer to the 'downtown' of my
| small town/rural complex. All of us kids, of course, had bikes
| and we'd use them to make trips to friends houses or whatever
| within probably a mile or two radius, but the grocery store /
| retail core was more on the order of 10m away .. more doable
| with an ebike for sure, but hard to justify to 'pop down to the
| grocery store for a forgotten item'.
| adrianN wrote:
| You can ride a bike for short trips and take a car for long
| trips or when you don't like the weather and you still reduce
| your demand for oil.
| RowanH wrote:
| Well the article did start off talking on a world stage....
|
| Every town and city across the planet is be different, some
| more amenable, some less so. We have ebikes and it replaces
| over summer some car trips, it's not a wholesale replacement
| for cars and (I personally) think they shouldn't be touted as
| that - that's fighting a loosing battle!
|
| In the town I'm in ~55'000 people, there's a big uptake of
| ebikes particularly summer it's just mad. E.g. going to the
| market, or a cafe, or pub... so I would hazard a guess that the
| replacement journeys in summer time drop traffic 5%, maybe 10%.
|
| I've lived in Toronto which probably fairly similar to a number
| of US cities and that would have been amazing to get around on
| ebike (outside of winter time).
| drunner wrote:
| And that is a long standing failure in urban planning in the
| US. Cities that don't support walking/biking/public transit
| stupid, but just accepted as the norm here.
|
| The whole I-10 thing in LA right now cracks me up. Like they
| are begging people "please take the bus/train, don't drive",
| because 1 road closed. Imagine if the bus/train was already
| preferred because the infrastructure was so much better.
| Imagine if all the haste/special orders they used to fix the
| road, they consistently used that to build/expand public
| transit and walking/biking instead.
|
| The damage is so deep that it feels irreversible at this point,
| like the US will be doomed to cars and traffic forever. If it
| took NL like 30-50 years starting in the 70s to reverse course,
| were looking at a century+ here if we were to start now, which
| were not.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> The damage is so deep that it feels irreversible at this
| point, like the US will be doomed to cars and traffic
| forever._
|
| There's lots of energy to change things, but you need to find
| the right city. It will still take 50 years to even approach
| the level of Amsterdam, but here in Boston I live car-free
| and the bike infrastructure is getting better every year.
| Right now the problem is density: solving the car problem
| ultimately means building dense housing.
| nurple wrote:
| Or perhaps it means building less-dense light commercial?
|
| I'm not a big fan of the perspective that our only solution
| to the current housing issues are to package humans in
| quarters whose main selling point over chicken coops is
| that your feces don't fall on the heads of your downstairs
| neighbors.
| wtp1saac wrote:
| the idea that there is either the zero-density of single
| family homes, versus giant apartments that are
| skyscrapers with thin ceilings and walls, is a false
| choice due to the US's bad urban planning.
|
| there are a lot of density options between everywhere USA
| and Manhattan - row homes for example - that would give a
| pleasant middle ground and still massively improve
| density and walkability
| kibwen wrote:
| This is needlessly hyperbolic. You don't need to cram
| humans into a SimCity arcology to achieve sustainable
| levels of density. Hell, you don't even need skyscrapers,
| which are foolishly inefficient in any case. 3- to
| 6-story mixed-use development is all it takes (when I say
| "build housing" I'm only referring to the most pressing
| crisis, not suggesting that housing should be zoned
| separately).
| allemagne wrote:
| Now that the US made that choice, more density and more
| walkability has to necessarily come at the expense of
| drivers. Some of whom can handle it and some of whom who
| largely can't afford to restructure their lives around super
| dense and super expensive urban cores.
| shmel wrote:
| Many places in Europe are very bike-friendly. I used to commute
| 10km one way daily in pre-WFH time, it was very enjoyable
| except maybe 1-2 cold months.
| tayo42 wrote:
| If you didn't have to commute to work, how often do you really
| need to leave your neighborhood though?
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| I guess you have to start by defining neighborhood. I
| consider the half a square mile area of houses that I walk my
| dog in to be my neighborhood. By that definition I leave my
| neighborhood probably 10 times a day.
| wtp1saac wrote:
| I also live in San Diego, and have gone between Pacific Beach,
| La Jolla, Clairemont, Mission Valley, Downtown, and even as far
| as La Mesa or National City via e-bike (sometimes also using
| the trolley / light rail).
|
| Is it convenient? No. Is it outright impossible? Absolutely
| not.
|
| Work can, should, and is being done by the city to improve bike
| safety, and that's a crucial factor that should be supported
| more. e-bikes are surprisingly capable at navigating the
| clusterfuck of US urban planning, however, so I suspect with
| effort we can massively improve and make this more viable.
| (This also includes densifying neighborhoods so you don't have
| to cross the city for something you need).
| wtp1saac wrote:
| also, Pacific Beach, La Jolla, UTC, Downtown/Gaslamp,
| Hillcrest/North Park are all pretty dense neighborhoods - so
| I suspect despite our major flaws, we have the capability to
| improve car alternatives pretty well. Much better than a lot
| of places with zero dense areas.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Plenty of places in the Northeast are potentially great for
| this. I live in a suburb of Philly, there's a train station
| into Philly a mile away, a major shopping center also about a
| mile away, a downtown area with lots of shops and restaurants,
| and two neighboring towns with similar downtowns. The schools
| are within easy walking or biking distance. The infrastructure
| is pretty hostile but the distances are perfectly reasonable
| for cycling.
| tofflos wrote:
| "So what's the best solution? You might think switching to an
| electric vehicle is the natural step. In fact, for short trips,
| an electric bike or moped might be better for you - and for the
| planet."
|
| Also in fact, electric bikes and mopeds are electric vehicles.
| landemva wrote:
| > electric bikes and mopeds are electric vehicles.
|
| At USA federal level, which applies to federal lands and
| federal funding like 'rec paths' on municipal lands, ebikes are
| bicycles. They are not vehicles and not motorcycles.
|
| https://usbr.gov/recreation/publications/ebikes.pdf
|
| A vehicle requires significantly different licensing, and
| typically registration + insurance policy + driver licensing.
| What location are you in that classifies an ebike as a vehicle?
| ben0x539 wrote:
| A bicycle is a vehicle in plain language, I don't think they
| were making a point about the, uh, legal term of art.
|
| I was confused by your link, it seems to be saying ebikes
| aren't bicycles and are in fact a form of vehicle?
|
| > Why aren't e-bikes considered to be traditional bikes and
| already allowed on Reclamation lands?
|
| > In accordance with 43 CFR 420.5(a), e-bikes are currently
| considered as Off-Road Vehicles
| landemva wrote:
| Like BlueTemplar wrote, it becomes confusing. That is why
| 'vehicle' caught my attention, and it may be worthwhile to
| not use 'ebike' and 'vehicle' as the same.
|
| Driving an actual vehicle on a rec path will likely be a
| big problem for anyone who is not engaged in approved rec
| path maintenance. Riding an ebike on a rec path may be
| encouraged.
|
| Maybe IRS tax code considers an ebike a vehicle for some
| deduction?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| That they have a very weird definition of what a <<vehicle>>
| is, is part of the problem :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Eliminating the daily commute for those who have jobs where in
| person presence isn't essential beats all other forms of
| transportation. But activists, cities, and greenwash companies
| have all shown their true face, each for their own reasons of
| self-interest.
| uoaei wrote:
| I'd like to see the numbers in the full accounting, ie, how
| much carbon cost is added with Slack calls and the like.
| Somehow I think (analog) biking to the office wins over fully
| remote especially if you have video on for more than one hour
| per day.
| kibwen wrote:
| This is part of it, but people still need to leave their house
| sometime, and the best solution is one where people can survive
| without needing to own a car at all, which is nearly impossible
| in most of the US. We sold our nation's soul to cars, and now
| we're fighting to get it back.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Yet the commute is a full ten trips a week you can eliminate.
| People aren't running errands 10x a week. The clear roads and
| clear skies early in the pandemic showed us what this would
| look like if more people worked remotely.
| kibwen wrote:
| Note that I'm not against remote work, rather I'm all for
| it. But programmers like us here on HN are prone to tunnel
| vision on this topic: most people cannot bring their work
| home. Nurses, lab techs, construction workers, factory
| workers, plumbers, electricians, all these people still
| need to commute, and so we need to design our cities
| accordingly.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Programmers aren't the only people who have work
| compatible with working remotely. My post explicitly was
| restricted to those whose jobs can be done remotely and
| laments that there are other forces at play that
| interfere with this ability. Most of those force like to
| bath themselves in greenwash. There's no need for any
| improvement to work for 100% of humanity for it to be an
| improvement. Stopping the good because it's not the
| perfect just stops anything good from happening.
| s0rce wrote:
| I bike to work and don't mind my commute. I have to be in the
| office but even if I don't have in person (lab) work that day I
| still come in since the rest of the team is here. As long as
| you don't have a terrible office culture (I haven't had this
| experience in my career) or a long car commute its not so bad.
| I have done a longer car commute and it sucks.
| rglullis wrote:
| I take you don't have kids to take to school and you get all
| your groceries delivered to your door by someone on an e-bike?
| coldtea wrote:
| The groceries can be delivered by car or van efficiently, as
| the same delivery person can also serve other people along
| the way (as opposed to everybody going to get their groceries
| with their car indepedently and polluting 10x).
|
| Or you know, have supermarkets and grocery stores in walking
| distance.
|
| As for the kids, there is such a thing as a school bus...
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| I take it you didn't bother to read the words commute and
| job, which implies travel to a workplace to conduct work.
| While you can combine a commute with a trip to buy groceries,
| if it happens to be on the way, and drop off/pick up kids at
| school, if it is on the way and the schedule works out that
| way, for most that's simply not reality. Note that my post
| said nothing about giving up one's vehicles, it only
| mentioned commuting trips for work. Don't add things to
| comments that aren't there.
| rglullis wrote:
| My point is that "remote work" is orthogonal to car
| dependency, so why are you bringing this up?
|
| I am all for remote work, but even if I had to be commuting
| to work, I'd be doing by taking the bike, bus or train like
| I've done my entire life.
| ttrmw wrote:
| taking kids to school is actually the reason we just caved
| and bought a cargo bike, which we're gonna add e-assist to.
|
| For a great many people in urban centres, the school run is
| the most egregiously frustrating car journey and the one most
| attractive to eliminate
| k_dumez wrote:
| "In the United States, a staggering 60% of all car trips cover
| less than 10km."
|
| Being lucky enough to live in a walkable city (NYC) this is
| insane to me. The world is so car-brained.
| rglullis wrote:
| _North America_ is so car-brained.
| bigfudge wrote:
| I think it's actually just anglo countries. The UK is batshit
| about cars as well, and I don't think the Aussies are much
| better.
| giobox wrote:
| This is seemingly changing in UK - younger generations
| increasingly don't own a private vehicle, due to a whole
| host of factors including the fact there simply isn't
| nearly as many affordable cars on the UK market as there
| was say 20 years ago, as well as the cost of
| fuel/insurance. It will be interesting to see if trends
| reverse once cheap EVs inevitably become a thing over the
| next decade - even entry level EVs are generally
| significantly more expensive than entry level gas cars used
| to be in the UK for the time being.
|
| > https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a81dd5340
| f0b...
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| By what metric? The UK doesn't stand out in this list - htt
| ps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle..
| . - it's below most of its peer nations.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| For all the chatter on HN, Europeans in general drive quite
| a lot. It's fascinating to hear people rail against cars
| here, and then step back out into meatspace. I just chuckle
| at the contrast between the dreamers on Reddit/HN and folks
| in the real world.
| odiroot wrote:
| Not only. UK is not far behind.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Sure, history made it so. From the automobile, to oil, to
| interstates, North America is it.
|
| https://www.army.mil/article/198095/dwight_d_eisenhower_and_.
| ..
|
| >> President Eisenhower is widely regarded as the catalyst
| for the IHS. His motivations for a highway network stemmed
| from three events: his assignment as a military observer to
| the First Transcontinental Motor Convoy, his experience in
| World War II where he observed the efficiencies of the German
| autobahn, and the Soviet Union's 1953 detonation of the
| hydrogen bomb, which instigated a fear that insufficient
| roads would keep Americans from being able to escape a
| nuclear disaster.
| hackernewds wrote:
| walking 10km? in most US cities that is neither viable nor safe
| anymore
| the_snooze wrote:
| It can include mass transit too. For a practical example,
| 10km covers all of Washington DC proper if you start at the
| center, nearly all of which is walkable/bikeable/transit-
| able.
| tekla wrote:
| Rural areas too. I made the mistake of walking down to the
| store when I lived in rural Colorado. A Truck almost turned
| me into a paste when it blindly took a turn.
| camgunz wrote:
| Well that's the point I think. In practically all of the US
| you can't even take a sidewalk where you want to go. It gets
| even worse if you want things like walk signals or to avoid
| huge intersections, or even mass transit at all.
| paddy_m wrote:
| Not only that, our built environment is uninviting to walk
| in because it's built for cars. When have you ever walked
| by a parking lot and said "Oh my god, that parking lot was
| amazing, I want to spend time around it"? Yet we require by
| law parking lots to be built everywhere in America. We have
| legally compelled property owners to build something ugly.
|
| Thanksgiving is coming up. Black Friday is the busiest
| shopping day of the year. Drive around, notice how on the
| busiest shopping day of the year, most commercial parking
| lots still aren't full.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Thanksgiving is coming up. Black Friday is the busiest
| shopping day of the year. Drive around, notice how on the
| busiest shopping day of the year, most commercial parking
| lots still aren't full.
|
| Sounds heavenly. But in reality, my wife (who actually
| _likes_ going out on Black Friday, I don 't know _why_ )
| will be circling the lot waiting for a spot, any spot,
| even at the outer edge. It's nuts.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| "Practically all of the US" includes nowhere I've lived,
| and I've moved around a fair amount. Some places are worse
| than others, but sidewalks are very much a thing more often
| than not.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Once I got a car, I became pretty unwilling to walk anywhere.
| Grocery store is 3 blocks from my house. I haven't walked in
| years. I would micro mobility though if there were a safe way
| to store the scooter.
| vikramkr wrote:
| Uhh, 10 kilometers is a LOT. I would not walk 6.2 miles for
| groceries. Or to work. Or to most things frankly
| p_j_w wrote:
| The suggestion here is not that you walk these distances,
| it's that you bike or scoot them.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Lol neither dutch bike that long. Bikes are good for 5-7kms,
| >10 is already a stretch and ppl use bike+train combo or just
| straight up bus/tram
| bluGill wrote:
| On an ebike that distance is reasonable. On a regular bike
| it is possible, but not reasonable. I have a 7 mile trip to
| work, I have used a regular bike for it, but it takes too
| long and so I wouldn't do it often. On my ebike it is a
| reasonable trip to work, my truck isn't that much faster
| (and is much harder to drive)
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Trip is reasonable but for most ppl imo it's still a
| stretch. At this point, if good tram/bus alternative
| exists, ppl will prefer it bc of convenience
| bborud wrote:
| From where I live to where I work is 8km. That takes
| somewhere between 19 and 23 minutes. 23 minutes on the days
| when there was more than 3-4cm how snow on the road. I
| occasionally take the scenic route to work. About 14km and
| a little more than half an hour.
|
| I do this every day. Regardless of weather. It saves me a
| lot of time for the simple reason that this both represents
| a mild workout and getting myself to work.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| My bike commute to work is almost exactly 10km. It's great,
| and often faster than driving would be.
| k_dumez wrote:
| Sorry, to clarify using "walkable" as a word to encompass
| good public-transportation as well. I can walk to the subway,
| and get somewhere 6.2 miles away easily then walk to my final
| destination (something I do frequently).
| rychco wrote:
| I was recently in Europe & came back to the United States with
| a renewed sense of hatred for cars, single-family zoning, & our
| awful public transport. Cars especially continue to steal our
| space, time, health, sense of community, & money.
|
| In Bern (Switzerland), for example, there's trams/streetcars
| for short trips in the most populated parts of the city;
| there's (ice? electric?) motorbuses for trips around the rest
| of the city; and trains/rolling stock for trips to other
| cities/countries in Europe. All of these methods are timely,
| clean, & affordable. The sense of freedom this provides is so
| incredibly liberating. The sense of community from all these
| shared spaces wonderful, and also entirely absent from the
| average North American lifestyle. The quality of life is
| genuinely incomparable.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Have you observed how quiet is Basel? I was always shocked
| when compared to another similar eu city where i live
| kibwen wrote:
| Would anyone here like to recommend (or disrecommend) any e-bike
| models?
| s0rce wrote:
| An easy bet is buying from a good existing bike company like
| Specialized. High end ebikes from Gazelle and Riese and Muller
| are also good. Avoid low end generic and drop shipped Chinese
| imports unless you really have no budget but you might have
| issues and you won't have support for repairs.
| Filligree wrote:
| Riese & Mueller are great if you can afford them.
|
| You pay through the nose, but they're not really built like
| bicycles. You should be comparing to mopeds (or cars!), not
| muscle-powered two-wheelers. Do make sure to get the high-speed
| model, though; there's not a lot of use for the strengthened
| components if you're limited to regular bicycling speeds.
| mapmap wrote:
| Does one need a motorcycle helmet when exceeding bicycle
| speeds?
| simmanian wrote:
| that depends on local laws. depending on where you live, it
| may be illegal to ride high speed ebikes in the first
| place.
| kibwen wrote:
| Beyond a certain speed, full-face helmets become a
| practical matter rather than merely a safety or legal
| matter. Can't hear with the wind rushing in your ears,
| can't see with the wind in your eyes.
| david-gpu wrote:
| _> Can 't hear with the wind rushing in your ears_.
|
| Some cyclists use a product called Cat-Ears. It's just
| some synthetic fur that attaches to the helmet straps
| akin to having some sick sideburns. It works great.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Converted my own with a mid drive bafang kit off of amazon,
| there are plenty of guides out there and while its not the
| easiest of bike maintenance jobs it's also not that hard.
|
| The other option I considered was buying an urban arrow, yuba,
| tern or "harry vs larry" bakfiets style bike.
|
| If you're looking for a car replacement the electric Bakfiets
| style is absolutely amazing for carrying cargo or even a
| person. (I pick my wife up in it sometimes)
| simmanian wrote:
| If you're in US, REI has a 40% sale for their gen 1.1 and 1.2
| bikes. Great entry level ebikes with proper range.
| dylan604 wrote:
| a 40% REI discount means it's only 20% higher than other
| places. I love REI, but they are not known for having cheap
| prices. Just trying to re-align the expectations of 40%
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| Cheap and cheerful: Priority Current.
|
| Longer-term: Specialized Globe Haul. I feel the same way about
| it as I do my pickup truck - it can go anywhere, do anything,
| and seems incredibly happy to either cruise around town or eat
| shit for hours. I absolutely adore it and cannot recommend it
| enough. It also has a big dealer network, something you don't
| get with the DTC boys
| dylan604 wrote:
| I have a Rad Wagon 4, and I love it. It is my only mode of
| transportation, other than my two feet. It's big and heavy, but
| I don't care. I've also picked up a couple of their attachments
| like the basket on the front, and the rack and insulated pack
| on the back. Even with that rack, I still have room for an old
| school 2x milk crate in the back. Parking/securing it can be a
| bit of a challenge as most places around me don't have a bike
| rike, and the bike itself is a bit larger than most racks are
| designed. That just means I have to get creative, and it's not
| really an issue. The amount of stuff I can carry is amazing,
| and its large motor makes carrying it all a breeze.
|
| Edit: also, if you do anything at night, I highly recommend the
| upgraded headlight. Unfortunately, it's not compatible with the
| front rack, but I have an idea how to hack something together
| to be able to have both at the same time.
| joshcanhelp wrote:
| We've had a Tern GSD for a few years (1500 miles, bought at
| 400) and absolutely love it.
| mbil wrote:
| I have a RadCity 4 with fenders and a basket. It's much heavier
| than a regular bike. But it's quite fun to ride and can hit
| 25mph. My city is rather flat and has passable bike
| infrastructure.
|
| I haven't used it all that much simply because I enjoy walking
| and usually do that. But for certain travel scenarios it's
| awesome. I upgraded from a 20 minute car ride across town to a
| 30 minute e-bike ride.
| Glide wrote:
| I would honestly look for Belt Drive versions of most of these
| recommendations as there is one less maintenance thing to worry
| about.
| MontgomeryPy wrote:
| Anyone know when the new Honda eMTB ebike will be available in
| US market?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| For the budget end: I have a Rad Runner, and it is great. I've
| ridden super high end e-mountain bikes, and, yes, they are
| better but not $5k better. I happily use my Rad bike to run
| errands covering 20-30 km, no problem. For the price, I'm not
| sure that you could do better.
| bluGill wrote:
| Go to your local bike shop. Buy what they sell.
|
| There are other good ebikes, but if you don't already know them
| you also don't know how to service them and so they won't last
| long.
| logankeenan wrote:
| I sold my car more than a year ago now and I've been using an
| E-bike as a replacement. I work from home so I didn't really need
| a car that often and can coordinate with my wife when I need to
| use the family vehicle. It hasn't been too bad and we can always
| rely on Uber if something comes down to it. We live close to
| stores and it's more convenient to use the bike than a car when
| we need to go get a few things. For instance, I can park right
| next to the entrance of all the stores.
|
| I think he bikes can be a great replacement for a car for certain
| scenarios and city layout. I live in the Des Moines, Iowa
| Metropolitan area where we have a large bike trail infrastructure
| that I can use to get around the metropolitan area
| davidw wrote:
| I do almost all the grocery shopping for our family of 4 with a
| Rad Runner Plus with a large basket and bag.
|
| I love that bike. Even as someone pretty comfortable getting
| around on a 'regular' bike, having that extra power just makes it
| a really easy choice for more trips compared to the car. If it's
| hot out, it is so much nicer to hop on the bike and get an
| instant breeze compared to a hot stuffy car. If it's cold out, I
| can really layer up and not worry about sweating because I
| overdressed. I just use the motor more.
|
| Edit: I'll add that like many things in life, it doesn't have to
| be all or nothing. We still have an automobile that we use, but
| the bike has replaced a lot of car trips. For some people a bike
| might not replace as many. Some might be able to ditch the car
| entirely. But it all helps!
| nravic wrote:
| what kind of pannier bags do you use to haul groceries? All the
| ones I've used have been too small for my purposes.
| davidw wrote:
| The bike in question has a front basket with a bag designed
| to fit it:
|
| https://www.radpowerbikes.com/products/large-basket
|
| https://www.radpowerbikes.com/products/large-basket-roll-
| top...
|
| So I don't have panniers. I might get some in the future to
| have a bit of extra capacity.
| bronson wrote:
| Not OP but I have essentially the same bike (Packa) with kid
| bars on the back. I throw a big Home Depot plastic storage
| crate into the bars, then 4 bags of groceries go into the
| crate. 6+ if you stack and bungee them. Plus another bag in
| the front basket.
|
| If the kids want to go to the store then the crate goes on
| the bike trailer.
| Maximus9000 wrote:
| > big Home Depot plastic storage crate into the bars
|
| Nice! That's such a simple solution. Thanks for the tip.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I don't have a cargo bike, but you can fit a surprising
| amount of crap in a milk crate strapped to a bike rack.
| Especially if you have a pannier on the side (they even make
| some grocery tote bag style panniers)
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| Not OP, but I use Arkel RT-60. They are huge and strong. I've
| been able to haul two 24-cases of beer, plus half a dozen
| mixers.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Used to do groceries with a regular bike and two ortlieb
| panniers (you can leave the top open to use their full
| capacity)
|
| For extra space a front "Porteur style" rack is nice (you can
| carry a pizza or takeout), or a rear rack with a set of lower
| mounting rails allows carrying stuff ontop of your rack
| without interfering as much with the panniers.
|
| nice front racks: https://www.passandstowracks.com
|
| nice front and back racks: https://www.tubus.com/en/products/
|
| some people also really like the topeak rail system, which
| has for example a little wheely cart you can pull around the
| store with you, the "Topeak TrolleyTote"
|
| Over the summer I bought a used (not electric) bakfiets on
| craigslist (and only recently did a mid-drive electric
| conversion) it's been really great for doing more with a bike
| because it doesn't take as much "how am I going to carry this
| home" planning. I've picked up groceries, dog food, filing
| cabinets, my wife, my dog, friends, lumber, tools, etc. It's
| quite an amazing bike format.
| waveBidder wrote:
| ortlieb has some super sturdy ones, I grocery shop for 2 with
| this pair on a road bike. https://www.ortlieb.com/en_us/back-
| roller-city+F5003
| foxyv wrote:
| When we got our E-bike we had to get a trickle charger for our
| car because the battery would go flat from the battery's
| internal current.
| r00fus wrote:
| My biggest frustration with bikes here in the US is the lack of
| security in high traffic areas.
|
| The fact that law enforcement doesn't seem to care about stolen
| bikes is a huge hurdle in my desire to bike to the store, leave
| alone paying thousands for a decent e-bike that I'd be even
| more worried about.
|
| I say this as an avid cyclist.
| nicoburns wrote:
| You should be able to get bike insurance. I pay PS7/month to
| insure mine, which is lot cheaper than car insurance!
| jordanbeiber wrote:
| Bike will get stolen anyway which is really annoying no
| matter the insurance. Not saying bike isn't preferred to
| car, it's just something I always consider.
|
| I've got a bike AND a car, I still take the car on certain
| trips where the bike would make more sense logistically
| because it feels like 50/50 it'll get stolen.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Damn. If it's really 50/50 then that is bad!
| umanwizard wrote:
| It's not, OP was wildly exaggerating.
| jordanbeiber wrote:
| I can emphasize "feels", but if you've ever parked a
| moderately expensive bike in a dense city center for a
| few hours you know the feeling. Especially if you've had
| a few stolen. If not the bike, the saddle. If not the
| saddle a wheel. If not the wheel the battery. Etc etc.
| It's all really annoying trying to get home not matter
| the insurance.
|
| I had two strollers stolen from my backyard while at home
| last year... it's kinda crazy over here!
| jdironman wrote:
| Sounds like a secure storage infrastructure problem.
| jordanbeiber wrote:
| In a way it is (and also a humanity problem).
|
| It would be great if a bunch of car parkings could be
| converted to secure bike storage spots.
| goalonetwo wrote:
| depends what does 50/50 refers to?
|
| If it is the probability of having it stolen after one
| year I would say it is pretty accurate in big metros like
| San Francisco or Denver.
| flatline wrote:
| My coparent had her bike stolen. It was parked at her
| work - a government building. In front of the security
| office with a window facing the bike racks, and security
| cameras on them.
|
| The cameras were not operational, the police did nothing
| but take the report.
|
| I have had two very securely locked bikes stolen in years
| past. They were left in what turned out to be a
| vulnerable place for long periods of time. Depending on
| your habits it is a matter of when, not if. If you only
| take the bike to select locations for short periods or
| keep it out of sight, this does not apply to you.
| umanwizard wrote:
| None of this implies that you have a 50% chance of your
| bike being stolen every time you take it out.
| smugma wrote:
| I live in SF and have two bikes (a road bike and a bike
| with a kid seat on the back), an eBike, and a car. I do
| lots of trips on my bike. When I am in a rush or need to
| go a bit farther or hillier than I feel comfortable on my
| bike, I often end up checking out an eBike. The fact that
| it's one-way is convenient but I also value that I don't
| have to worry about my bike getting stolen. The
| convenience and risk reduction is worth the few bucks to
| rent.
|
| I almost never use my eBike. I prefer getting the
| exercise and the theft factor dissuades me from using it
| as a mode of transportation.
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| this is the way, by far my absolute favorite thing to see
| when visiting a city is a solid bike share program. they
| should be absolutely everywhere and heavily subsidized.
| Mexico City's version of this has been my favorite so
| far. the way you can get virtually anywhere in the city
| through a combo of Metro, bus, and bike all using the
| same card is excellent. It solves so many issues and uses
| the power of crowd funding to make it all work!
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Some people "feel" like the chance of an accident driving
| a car is very high even when it isn't. If you "feel" like
| theft is very likely when it isn't, that is your problem.
| And I've had several bike stolen over the years (include
| being mugged with my bike) and it's taught me to take
| appropriate precautions to the point I feel fairly safe.
| jordanbeiber wrote:
| > And I've had several bike stolen over the years
| (include being mugged with my bike)
|
| So, let me get this straight - it's quite likely a bike
| gets stolen and this experience, as shared with me, has
| led you to take precautions.
|
| My precaution being not taking the bike some times and to
| some places.
|
| How many times have you have a car stolen over that same
| time period?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| This is much less common in the US. So much so, that I have
| never heard of bike only general theft insurance. Here is
| the top hit for "US bike insurance"
| https://velosurance.com/road-bike-insurance/. In this case
| theft coverage is only extended to "secure locations".
| superb_dev wrote:
| Also if you don't have bike insurance and your E-bike gets
| stolen, you may be able to claim it on your renters
| insurance
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yes, however at 34kg/75lbs it isn't generally going anywhere
| once the wheels are locked. Won't survive a dedicated team
| with a truck though.
| taylodl wrote:
| Also the complete lack of infrastructure to park and lock
| your bike. Sounds great - take your bike to the grocery
| store. Wonderful! Where are you going to park it? Where are
| you going to lock it? The problem is even worse with e-bikes
| since they're so much more valuable. A regular, recreational
| bicycle is less likely to be stolen but an e-bike? It's going
| to be gone!
| andrepd wrote:
| And the complete lack of infrastructure to actually cycle?
| I moved to a city with lots of great biking infrastructure,
| I would shudder to even think of biking in the average
| Carville, USA.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Wife and I did our shopping on a Vespa for last few years
| before it got stolen this summer. We really enjoyed scootin
| around the city and were going to many more events since
| parking became a nonissue.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| We do the same with our Urban Arrow. It's easier (and faster)
| than driving.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| >If it's hot out, it is so much nicer to hop on the bike and
| get an instant breeze compared to a hot stuffy car.
|
| I feel like this indicates you do not live in a very hot &
| humid place.
|
| That sounds wonderful, to be sure, but in Houston summer a 1.5
| mile trip to the grocery store on any kind of ebike would
| definitely require a change of clothes & a shower once done.
| davidw wrote:
| I feel this indicates you do not understand how an eBike
| functions.
|
| You can get on one and simply turn the throttle or set the
| pedal assist to the max, and _poof_ instant breeze with no
| effort. It is cooler than just standing there.
|
| I lived in northern Italy for a while so I get 'hot and
| humid' although I'm sure it's another level in Houston.
| abeppu wrote:
| Houston isn't _consistently_ in this territory, but it is
| worth a reminder that if the ambient temperature is above
| body temp and the air is humid enough, then a breeze makes
| you hotter faster.
| davidw wrote:
| Well that goes back to my point that you do not need to
| use a bike all day every day for everything. A few years
| back, here it snowed like two feet in a day. I did not,
| in fact, ride bikes that day!
| svnt wrote:
| Yeah, you don't get it. You can't even be outside or you
| will need a shower -- no exertion is required.
| davidw wrote:
| I've ridden my normal bike in weather where it was around
| 95F and humid as heck in northern Italy. That is
| certainly a sweaty endeavor, but an eBike with the assist
| cranked up is like... negative exertion. You can get a
| breeze without working much or at all.
| conductr wrote:
| I don't think you truly understand Houston-like climates. A
| 10 meter walk to the mailbox often causes you to break into
| sweat. Another concern is it can and often does have random
| showers; often quite heavy and difficult to plan for.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I absolutely do. You, otoh, have never been to Houston in
| the summer, apparently.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| My grocery store is a 7m ride along a regional bike trail,
| fully protected both ways. It beats a car any day, and it's
| actually faster because the bike trail basically bee-lines to
| the store.
|
| It's awesome. One of those lame things you get excited about as
| an adult.
|
| My vacuum cleaner works really well and I can ride my bike to
| the grocery store. I've truly made it.
| stavros wrote:
| > If it's cold out, I can really layer up and not worry about
| sweating because I overdressed
|
| I envy people with good heat regulation. I love my cycle, but
| if I start cycling in freezing weather, I can either dress up
| for the start of the right, or the rest of it. If I wear a warm
| jacket, I have to take it off five minutes later and be riding
| in a t-shirt in freezing weather, otherwise I'll get extremely
| sweaty. If I go out in a t-shirt, I'll shiver for the first
| five minutes.
|
| The summer is hell, I can't go anywhere without being drenched
| in sweat.
| uoaei wrote:
| It's good that the batteries are many times smaller than electric
| cars and trucks. I still have a problem with the accounting being
| focused on what the consumer directly experiences rather than the
| full lifecycle of the vehicle (manufacturing, logistics of
| vehicle and spare parts, and disposal) but I don't think it
| changes the conclusions much except maybe a minor edit to the
| ranking by kilometer-people per ton of CO2e emitted when compared
| to other forms of transportation.
|
| I did the math on my 2000s Jeep and I would need to drive it for
| about 20,000 miles (5 years of usage in my case) in order just to
| emit the same as the production of a single Model S battery, not
| including building the rest of the car and bringing it to the
| consumer. I think we could do a lot better to emphasize buying
| used cars/bikes/everything especially if we reorient the
| accounting to reflect the emissions that consumers are typically
| insulated from. Frontloading our emissions kind of defeats the
| purpose of Nordhaus-style climate economics accounting...
| cogman10 wrote:
| 20k miles in 5 years of ownership? That's well below average
| mileage (13k miles for 1 year is average).
|
| But further, if you want to talk about lifecycle, then why not
| consider a used Model S (or other ev) with 20k miles? It's not
| like EVs suddenly explode and need to be junked after 20k
| miles. The CO2 payoff period for an EV is around 25k miles,
| after that every mile driven on an EV ends up being less
| emissions wise than a regular ICE. Add to this the fact that
| EVs have extended lifetimes compared to ICE. 300 or 500k miles
| is more than possible with today's EVs.
| uoaei wrote:
| > That's well below average mileage
|
| Hence the emphasis here and in other comments about finding
| ways to use cars less. I diverted an entire vehicle from the
| dump rather than buying new and requiring additional CO2
| emissions in that production process. It suits my lifestyle
| well. I could have bought a used EV but this car was free to
| me (after cost of spare parts) and I learned a lot about how
| to work on cars getting it up and running again. Plus
| sometimes I'll need to tow stuff.
|
| Regarding payoff: My research says 5-8 years on average (12k
| miles per year) after accounting for production and emissions
| (generation for EV, gas for ICE), so I'm curious to know
| where you get your data.
|
| > 300 or 500k miles is more than possible with today's EVs.
|
| I'd like to see empirical studies on this but I suspect the
| sample size of EVs with that kind of mileage is too small at
| this point.
|
| It's well known that EV batteries degrade faster than
| expected, aside from early year Prius hybrid and later Leaf
| batteries which seem to be holding up well for some reason.
| So even if the car lasts, you may have replaced the battery
| multiple times already.
|
| None of this even accounts for microplastic production from
| tire and road wear, which goes as the fourth power of the
| vehicle mass. EVs obviously on the losing side of that vs
| bicycles, ebikes, even small ICEs.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > Regarding payoff: My research says 5-8 years on average
| (12k miles per year) after accounting for production and
| emissions (generation for EV, gas for ICE), so I'm curious
| to know where you get your data.
|
| https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac7cfc
|
| This is actually really common data. I'm curious to know
| where you got yours.
|
| > I'd like to see empirical studies on this but I suspect
| the sample size of EVs with that kind of mileage is too
| small at this point.
|
| https://electrek.co/2019/12/14/8-lessons-about-ev-battery-
| he...
|
| > It's well known that EV batteries degrade faster than
| expected, aside from early year Prius hybrid and later Leaf
| batteries which seem to be holding up well for some reason.
| So even if the car lasts, you may have replaced the battery
| multiple times already.
|
| Well known by who? Leaf batteries degraded fast because
| they had no active cooling mechanism. That changed in 2016,
| which is why later Leaf batteries have held up well. Any EV
| car you buy today that was manufactured in the last 7 years
| has active cooling. Leaf was one of the last to adopt it.
|
| Anecdotally, I drive a 2018 model 3 with 120k miles on it.
| The battery has degraded by 5% (310 miles to 296).
|
| > None of this even accounts for microplastic production
| from tire and road wear, which goes as the fourth power of
| the vehicle mass. EVs obviously on the losing side of that
| vs bicycles, ebikes, even small ICEs.
|
| Agree. But I'm not sure that microplastic production is
| something to really be concerned with. Unless we are
| talking about transitioning to more public transport, it's
| a secondary issue vs CO2 production.
| uoaei wrote:
| > https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac
| 7cfc
|
| Very interesting!! Especially Fig. 5. Thanks for the
| link.
|
| Summary:
|
| * ICE vs battery crossover at 18k-24k miles (1.5-2.0
| years avg usage) and Hybrid vs battery crossover approx
| 36k-48k miles (3-4 years avg usage). Reducing car usage
| obviously extends those timelines.
|
| * ICE with 12k-18k miles is equal to battery with 0
| miles, Hybrid with 18k-24k miles is equal to battery with
| 0 miles.
|
| Temperature and energy generation sources affect the
| calculations quite a bit by region regarding engine and
| battery efficiency and cleanliness of generation sources.
|
| Appreciate your inputs, updating my priors.
| cogman10 wrote:
| No problem.
|
| It's also important to be aware that this is a snapshot
| in time. (2022 to be precise). What was true then won't
| be tomorrow due to an evolving battery landscape and grid
| energy mix.
|
| We don't for example, see a lot of batteries made from
| recycled material today because the demand for batteries
| vastly outstrips the amount of recyclable material we
| have. That won't be true until both the market starts to
| saturate with batteries and the current crop of batteries
| starts to hit EOL (probably 10 maybe even 20 years).
|
| I'm actually really impressed with where recycling is
| today, they are WAY further along than I expected. (
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xrarUWVRQ )
| kragen wrote:
| if this is what passes for 'academic rigour, journalistic flair'
|
| > _Their batteries make them heavier than a traditional car, and
| draw heavily on the extraction of rare earth elements_
|
| i think your academy is a diploma mill
|
| quoting https://www.sneci.com/blog/are-rare-earths-an-issue-in-
| the-p... which actually does have something resembling academic
| rigor
|
| > _15 years ago, the first hybrid vehicles, notably the Toyota
| Prius and the Honda, were equipped with NiMH (Nickel Metal
| Hydride) batteries whose negative electrode (anode) was made of a
| lanthanum-pentanickel alloy (LaNi5)._
|
| > _These batteries in the first generation of hybrid vehicles
| contained about ten kilos of lanthanum, which is a rare earth._
|
| > _However, today this battery technology has been replaced by
| the family of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries with much higher
| performance._
|
| > _While some Toyota hybrids sold in Europe are still equipped
| with NiMH batteries, the vast majority of hybrid and electric
| vehicles today are equipped with Li-ion batteries... which do not
| contain rare earths._
|
| > _Of course, they contain lithium, cobalt and nickel, but as
| mentioned above, these metals are not rare earths and do not pose
| the same problems._
|
| most of the rest of the article explains why rare earths are a
| red herring and the historical background on why people were
| concerned about them 15 years ago
|
| > _In short, rare earths are not rare at all, the world's
| reserves are large, well distributed in the 5 continents and no
| shortage is to be feared for a long time._
| cogman10 wrote:
| Yup, lots of anti-battery stuff is propaganda pretending like
| we still drive around with NiCd batteries.
|
| Even the weight argument is wrong! A model Y weighs up to 4,555
| lbs. A Ford edge weighs up to 4520 lbs.
|
| As it turns out, ICE are really super heavy. Strip that out and
| have a steadily increasing battery density as we've seen over
| the years and it really won't be long before EVs are in fact
| lighter than ICE counterparts (and certainly lighter than
| hybrids).
|
| These articles are all written with anecdotes from 2000.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| The weight thing is absolutely real. You can't just compare
| two completely different cars! Equivalent models usually gain
| a few hundred pounds in the EV version.
| cogman10 wrote:
| The ford edge is the same class of car as a Tesla model y.
| They are, in fact, the same dimensions (off by and inch or
| two). I chose it specifically because it's an equivalent
| model.
|
| If you want to complain, you should be pointing out the
| fact that I used the model y, which is (currently) best in
| class for EV weight. That's primarily due to Tesla's use of
| the battery as a structural component.
|
| Equivalent cars from the same companies are often gaining
| hundreds of pounds (or more) because they are using the
| same platform as their ICE counterparts rather than using a
| more obvious skateboard design. The older ford focus being
| one of the worst examples of this.
| jxcl wrote:
| It's worth noting that Cobalt is now the problem element for
| BEVs [1], though there is a lot of work that is being done and
| has been done to reduce the amount of cobalt in Lithium Ion
| batteries.
|
| [1]: https://apnews.com/article/congo-mining-human-
| rights-73b3edc...
| crawdog wrote:
| This is an area that government subsidies could really influence
| change in urban planning and cutting oil demand. If there was a
| similar subsidy on bikes as there are on electric cars, I would
| expect the push back against bike infrastructure would become
| less. Right now in the Bay Area through poor design and aging
| infrastructure there is push back on bike lanes. An example is
| the Richmond bridge, which has a protected bike lane taking a 3rd
| lane of traffic that could see a larger number of riders if more
| ebikes become used. Likewise for the Bay Bridge, whose bike lane
| is a ghost town in the mornings when commute traffic is worst.
| This would be less of a problem if the lane went entirely to the
| city.
| burkaman wrote:
| There are subsidies in a handful of cities and states in the US
| (https://ridereview.com/incentives/country/united-states), and
| there are bills for a federal subsidy with a decent amount of
| support in the House (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-
| congress/house-bill/1685) and Senate
| (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/881).
|
| Also, shoutout to Vienna which has the coolest program I've
| heard of: businesses get subsidies for cargo e-bikes, and in
| return they loan them out to citizens for free. So if you've
| got a bunch of stuff to haul, you can borrow a cargo bike for
| free and use their incredibly good bike network to move your
| stuff. English summary:
| https://smartcity.wien.gv.at/en/approach/smart-city-made-
| sim....
| beembeem wrote:
| It's a drop in the bucket and mostly symbolic, but my state
| recently passed one:
| https://wabikes.org/index.php/2023/04/26/electric-bike-
| rebat...
| uoaei wrote:
| Small point: you can't get across the Bay on a bike on the Bay
| bridge. You can only get from Emeryville to Yerba Buena Island.
| No passage from Yerba Buena Island to SF. We're hoping this
| changes sometime in the next decade but no one's holding their
| breath.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Your second example doesn't make much sense because you can't
| actually get across to SF via bike, the bike section ends at
| Treasure Island.
| simmanian wrote:
| I bought an ebike to complement my aging 2007 Toyota instead of
| replacing it outright with another car. I use the bike for most
| light use cases within the 10 mile radius and still lean into
| using my car when needed. Here are my takes on ebikes.
|
| Pros:
|
| - Ebikes help people punch above their weight class, allowing
| them to bike farther and faster
|
| - Going uphill is much easier
|
| - Ebikes encourage people to be more adventurous and discover
| local scenic routes
|
| Cons:
|
| - Good ebikes cost as much as my 2007 toyota
|
| - If you drive a hub motor and you get a flat (and you will
| eventually), it's harder to fix it up
|
| - They tend to be rather heavy (harder to drive without
| assistance), and lighter ones cost a lot of $$$
|
| - I am worried my bike may get stolen a little more
|
| For those interested in getting an entry level ebike and living
| in US, I recommend REI's gen 1.1 and 1.2 ebikes. They're 40%
| off(!) right now, which seems to be a rare discount for ebikes.
| sgu999 wrote:
| > - Good ebikes cost as much as my 2007 toyota
|
| Car manufacturers are operating on razor thin margins and
| intend to recoup some of it elsewhere... or at least I've been
| told.
|
| I agree that the price of ebikes really doesn't seem to match
| their value. They are in the same price range as electric
| mopeds, which have a much bigger battery, need more material to
| build and have to abide by more regulations.
|
| Is it because the target is a rather young white-collar worker
| who live close enough to their office and is thus richer?
| simmanian wrote:
| My initial thought after reading this comment is, it probably
| requires a lot more "tech" and design work to allow bikers to
| have that seamless biking experience while giving them the
| desired boost. I remember seeing a lot of discussions around
| how certain motors "feel" on ebike forums.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Link (to REI gen 1.2 ebike): rei.com/product/190640/co-op-
| cycles-generation-e12-electric-bike
|
| How fast'll this lil'baby go, for a fat 250lb'er like me?
| DanTheManPR wrote:
| It's a class 1, so it will assist up to 20mph. I typically
| cruise at around 15mph on my own (I'm in a similar weight
| class as a rider). For getting around my town, trips are not
| much longer than my car.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| >assist up to 20mph (I'm in a similar [250lb] weight class
| as a rider)
|
| So, how does it do on the occassional hills of a
| Chattanooga (e.g.)?
|
| I'm about to visit my local store, which has one in stock,
| available today.
| simmanian wrote:
| Not sure how things are in Chattanooga, but you will
| still have to exert yourself to climb hills, just way
| less than before. Also, REI lets you test drive these for
| free, so I would definitely try it out before buying!
| loeg wrote:
| 350W motor, so you'll hit that 20mph limiter on the
| flats, but maybe won't sustain that up hill. It's better
| than a 250W motor, but not by a huge margin.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > a fat 250lb'er
|
| Honestly, I'd worry more about that seat. Bike seats can
| pinch nerves even if you're not a big guy, and if you are,
| you probably want to be careful with a narrow seat like that.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Yeah I have a nice leather Brooks ready to do... nice fat
| rearseat for my fat as.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Good plan! The first time I rode my old bike after some
| years of neglect and a few extra pounds, I was quite
| alarmed when I got off the bike and found that some parts
| of me had fallen asleep. I have a new respect for making
| sure the seat is a good fit.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > They tend to be rather heavy
|
| That's my problem - I need an e-bike because my knee is
| shattered but there's nowhere to store one safely outside and
| we live on the 3rd floor. Even my previous 10kg normal bike
| (with working knees!) was a faff getting up the stairs. A
| 20-25kg e-bike is an absolute no-no.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Not sure if it's an option for you, but some people in my
| complex put little sheds in their parking spots that can fit
| a bike
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Alas, parking spots are a) only assigned when you have a
| car (gotta love UK bureaucracy!) and b) hugely wait-listed
| around here. There are garages and little locker things
| but, again, hugely wait-listed. Some estates around here
| have installed those green corrugated metal bike mini-sheds
| but, annoyingly, the people in charge around here seem to
| hate the idea.
| underbluewaters wrote:
| I feel lucky every single day that I can take a 10 minute e-bike
| ride into the office. I say lucky because I know it's not
| available to everyone, but it's so good for my mental health to
| get outside every morning and afternoon. That experience can't be
| replicated with a Tesla no matter how affordable they might
| become.
| radium3d wrote:
| Yeah, e-bikes are great for good weather and living within 5
| miles of your office. Tesla's are great for the rest and they
| do have windows at least for those of us who have to commute.
| And at least the 132MPGe of a model 3 is better than a gas
| powered motorcycle.
| paddy_m wrote:
| Oulu Finland would challenge your perception about good
| weather riding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
| radium3d wrote:
| Haha fun, hey I snowboard for entire days so I do know that
| snow clothing is fantastic now, so I believe it. But still
| doesn't solve for the distance problem in our area. A lot
| of people commute a very long way and not everyone can work
| 5, or even 20 miles from their home with cost of living so
| high sadly. EV cars are fantastic for them.
| uneekname wrote:
| Honest question, is an EV really less expensive than
| living closer to work for most people? I live in a city
| where rent is fairly high, and I'm fortunate enough to
| afford a comfortable apartment with a roommate. To buy an
| EV though (if I wanted one...), would be completely out
| of my budget.
|
| If the math works out for some people, they should do
| what's best for them. But I don't really think that is
| the case most of the time. Living in a modest apartment
| and using your bike is almost always less expensive.
| radium3d wrote:
| Depends on budget I'm sure, but the prices are lowering
| fast. You can buy a used 2020 Model 3 from Tesla.com for
| $28,700 with 34,219 miles, including a 10k + 1 year
| extended general warranty, and the 5 yr + 100k mile
| battery + motor warranty. New 2023 is $36,650 minus $7500
| and minus state incentives, so $29150 or less before tax.
|
| Another option, a 2019 eGolf is $17,000 with 120 mile
| range used with 36900 miles and still has some warranty
| remaining on battery + drive train.
|
| I think those are comparable to gas alternatives. If you
| factor in gas savings, the monthly payment starts to work
| out for a ton of long commuters. Then, once you pay off
| the loan it's insane how much you save. I pay $116/mo for
| insurance and $350/yr on reg for my 2019 model 3 now that
| I've been driving for the last 4.5 years. If you have to
| charge at superchargers it's less savings, but if you can
| charge in a garage or at home it's about $30-40/mo to
| charge vs $160-200 /mo I was paying in gas.
|
| Moving closer to the city can cost $500+/mo more than
| living farther outside the city for a similar sqft place.
| Plus you get cleaner air, quieter environment away from
| the main city. Some people don't like city living.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Are you serious? It's like hundreds of thousands more for
| every "zone" you get closer to the center of London.
| Surely in your city everyone would just live slap bang in
| the center if the price difference was less than that if
| an EV? Wow.
|
| In London a basic 3 or 4 bed house on the outskirts will
| be perhaps PS700-1,000,000. Same thing half way in will
| be PS1.5-2mil, anything within a short walk or bike ride
| of any central office will be PS3 or PS4 million at least
| (assuming you can even find anything "normal" in terms of
| housing). An entry-level Tesla is PS40k, and a "good"
| non-FAANG SWE salary might be PS75-100k.
|
| Sure you can get a smaller apartment in central London
| for less, but then the same apartment in central London
| will still be 3x 4x 5x the equivalent on the outskirts.
|
| Either way there is no parking in central London anyway
| so driving to work is not viable.
| uneekname wrote:
| Well, alright so the cost of living in central London is
| astronomical. But as you say,
|
| > there is no parking in central London anyway so driving
| to work is not viable.
|
| By "closer to work", I didn't mean you need to buy the
| house closest to the center of London. I meant you can
| rent (or buy, if you have the capital) a flat near public
| transit, or bicycle-friendly infrastructure. Of course
| these options vary significantly, but even in my car-
| infested U.S. city there are decent options.
|
| Also, I don't think it's honest to compare the sticker
| price of a car vs. a house. If you are in the market to
| buy a house, good for you. But my argument is more along
| these lines: put the monthly $$$ you would put into a
| car, into your rent instead. Get the best place you can,
| and you'll likely be happier than if you lived deep in a
| suburb. Of course not everyone will agree with this, but
| I don't think it's entirely unreasonable.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Have you ever tried to rip up a family and move them to a
| new house as often as we switch employment?
|
| Definitely put some thought into where you live, but it's
| always a compromise and for a lot of us it's unavoidable
| that it'll be 15-20 miles of commute.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Take Netherlands: look how bad weather they have, almost
| constant wind&rain and still ppl bike a lot. They also have
| trains for longer distance. Typically a dutch will have 2
| bikes: bike from home to train station&leave it there, take
| train, take second bike from train destination to the work
| and reverse. It's about what you want to optimize: sprawl&car
| industry or the opposite
| bborud wrote:
| ebikes work in pretty much any kind of weather provided you
| have a proper bicycle, proper tyres and know how to dress.
| None of the gear has to be expensive. It just has to be
| suitable.
| holoduke wrote:
| Me in the Netherlands use an e bike for almost everything. Even
| bike with 3 kids to school, groceries etc. Love it. But i also
| have a big SUV. I could not live without it. Holidays, visiting
| friends, picking up large stuff. So i still fill 60 liters of
| fuel every week.
| josefresco wrote:
| What's soured me on electric scooters and bikes is the complete
| lack of repair infrastructure. My electric scooter was not cheap
| and when it broke (out of warranty) my local bike shop wouldn't
| touch it.
| Glide wrote:
| Completely agree and it's worse with electric unicycles.
| bluGill wrote:
| Which is why you buy from the local bike shop of the brand they
| sell.
|
| My local bike shop will work on my ebike even though they
| didn't sell it, but it is a big brand that other bike shops in
| town sell so they see it enough and it is standard enough they
| can work on it. (I was given it for free, otherwise I'd have
| bought from the local bike shop). Bike shops will never work on
| the junk you buy at a big box store - the quality means it
| isn't worth it.
| dpflan wrote:
| Yeah, makes sense: way easier to get a bike than a car (price,
| storage, insurance, etc). And in a society built for cars,
| personal-power isn't enough to make up the distances between
| locations that have been created all relatively-sized to a car's
| mobility (much faster than a human).
| odiroot wrote:
| It doesn't even have to be electric. Even motor scooters are much
| less demanding on fuel.
| frognumber wrote:
| Death and pain.
|
| That's what e-bikes and mopeds bring to my city. The
| infrastructures is designed for pedestrians, cars, and mass
| transit. Bicycles are being retrofitted. It's completely NOT
| designed for dozens of oddball vehicles which are coming up. The
| people riding them aren't as competent as cyclists (which isn't a
| very high bar) and cause unsafe situations all the time.
|
| That's my city. Yours might be different. I've been to cities
| where these worked great, and loved them. Here, they're pure evil
| and a menace.
|
| TL;DR: This needs planning, infrastructure changes, and
| regulation. With that, this might be the solution. Without that,
| a lot of cities will be in trouble.
| david-gpu wrote:
| _> Death and pain. That 's what e-bikes and mopeds bring to my
| city._
|
| Could you kindly share how many people have died at the hands
| of these dangerous e-bikes and mopeds? And how many have died
| due to crashes with cars?
|
| In my city cars drivers kill and injure people
| disproportionately, according to the official stats that are
| published every year [0].
|
| [0] https://www.york.ca/media/76976/download
| bluescrn wrote:
| Meanwhile, the UK government seem to be cracking down on them
| (lots of people are using bikes above the legal power limit), and
| seem absolutely determined never to legalise e-scooters.
| djaychela wrote:
| As a cyclist, motorcyclist and driver, I have to say that the
| use of high powered ebike (surron, cake etc) on the road is
| pretty high where I live (Bournemouth), and I'm not keen on it.
| They are taken where normal bikes would go but tear up the
| ground like an MX bike would do, leaving damage that will take
| a year to grow back.
|
| They have replaced the MX bike as the illegal transport of
| choice for obvious reasons. They are great, but shouldn't be on
| the road (unless properly registered), and the problem is that
| a lot of people lump them in with pedal-assist ebike (which I
| also ride) which is really negative PR for what is good
| sustainable transport.
|
| Having influential mtb riders like Sam Pilgrim hooning around
| on one in some videos doesn't help..
| bluescrn wrote:
| Ideally they'd make the S-Pedelec class of bikes (up to
| 28mph) much easier to own and operate legally.
|
| The requirement for insurance and a helmet seems fine, but
| putting a full-size car number plate on an e-bike looks
| ludicrous (they need some sort of ID, but designed for
| bikes), and an annual MOT seems an unnecessary burden for
| what's still mostly a bicycle.
| camgunz wrote:
| I've said it before and I'll say it again: building the future
| around cars of any kind is completely unsustainable. We cannot
| reproduce the rates of rich world car ownership in the developing
| world without mass catastrophe (raw materials/labor needed for
| construction and maintenance, raw materials/labor/space needed
| for roads and parking lots, literal tons of waste--batteries,
| tires, steel, plastic, foam--, energy needed--most cars are
| driven by a single driver, pollution generated by all of this--
| e.g. mining byproducts and tire burn off).
|
| To be completely explicit:
|
| - If we're serious about meeting the 2030 "halve our emissions"
| and 2050 "zero our emissions" goals, EVs will not get there.
| Banning gas/diesel cars gets there. The only way that's even
| remotely possible is to heavily subsidize EVs (probably honestly
| just providing free swaps) and start making it way way more
| easier to get by w/o a car.
|
| - The only problem that self-driving cars will ever solve is
| where to put VC money in a zero interest rate world. We've had
| freight trains and mass transit for centuries.
|
| I get that whole economies are built around producing/maintaining
| cars and related infra, but it was wildly disastrous. We're well
| into sunk cost fallacy territory here, like, on a species level.
| enqk wrote:
| This has to include some thoughts on how to get vehicles to
| drastically lower their weights...
| dublinben wrote:
| An e-bike weighs orders of magnitude less than an electric
| car.
| camgunz wrote:
| I really just don't think there's any benefit to trying to
| fix cars (I keep thinking "stop trying to make fetch/cars
| happen" from Mean Girls haha). My strong opinion is the way
| you fix the weight problem in EVs isn't to hope for better
| battery efficiency or w/e, it's to replace it w/ an ebike and
| a raincoat.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| I largely agree, but it would still be a good problem to
| solve because it would make electric buses and the cars
| that can't be replaced lighter.
| xnx wrote:
| Buses and trains are extremely heavy
| enqk wrote:
| per passenger? trains also have less friction
| xnx wrote:
| This is exactly the right type of thinking and questions
| to be asking. We should be looking at cost (dollar and/or
| carbon) per unit of useful work (e.g. passenger-mile). On
| those terms commuter busses and trains often aren't a
| clear improvement over cars because of how often buses
| and trains are running at less than 25% capacity.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| > probably honestly just providing free swaps
|
| There has to be a way to do the subsidizing thing that doesn't
| pay people who have a car to continue having a car, over people
| who haven't had a car and/or will stop having one...
| camgunz wrote:
| I like this point, my mind immediately goes to "swap your ICE
| for an EV or an e-bike and $20k". I honestly think that deal
| is so good you'd see car theft spike. Maybe that's fine?
| We're in wild times haha.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| Admittedly I drove a pretty worthless car, but when I moved
| to a denser city and stopped driving, something like "swap
| your car for a lifetime public transportation pass" would
| have been really, really tempting, too.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Some cities introducing low emissions zones have done
| exactly this for poorer residents with older ICE cars. They
| get cash bonuses plus mass transit passes, vouchers for car
| shares etc..
|
| Annex 1 of this document lists and links to various things
| that are in place in various cities around the world:
|
| https://cleancitiescampaign.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2023/02/W...
| lnsru wrote:
| I don't think, that we're getting back to the tech level of
| 1960s in Soviet Union. There were cars for important people and
| government. The rest lived in the big buildings around
| factories.
| willio58 wrote:
| Fully agreed. And while everything you said is super important
| and true, one piece that really makes me pumped about this
| movement to ditch cars is more around quality of life.
|
| If you have to get in a car and drive to a parking lot
| somewhere to get groceries, commute to work, go out with
| friends, get healthcare, etc. You will obviously live a less
| healthy life both physically but also mentally because of it.
| Walking is exercise, it's something we were all evolved to do
| and it keeps us healthy physically and mentally. It also
| encourages community when everyone isn't surrounded by a metal
| and plastic multi-ton machine. I recently moved to a walkable
| part of my city and it's actually amazing how much it's
| benefited my life. I say hi to neighbors and people who walk
| routes like I do, I get fresh air since not every street is
| filled to the brim with cars, but honestly one of the best
| effects is silence. Cars our LOUD. Even electric cars
| unfortunately, it really has little to do with the sound of the
| engine at speeds like 30mph, it's more about wind and tire
| noise. Meanwhile, people walking, biking, or on scooters are
| silent and it's brought me a lot of peace.
| uneekname wrote:
| I totally agree about the noise and health benefits, but to
| me it's more a matter of respect and safety. In the U.S., we
| see too many pedestrians die each year. Our roads are built
| for cars only, with everything else as an afterthought. When
| I cross the street, drivers act like it's my responsibility
| to stay out of their way.
|
| If some people need to use cars for mobility or business
| reasons, that is fine with me. But they need to have the
| utmost respect for me as a pedestrian/bicyclist. And the way
| to accomplish that is to make streets that force cars to slow
| down and watch out. If we make our cities safe for walking
| and biking, more people will do so!
| willio58 wrote:
| > If some people need to use cars for mobility or business
| reasons, that is fine with me.
|
| Definitely. For stuff like that, emergency services,
| delivery, trash collection, etc. larger vehicles on streets
| are totally fine and I think most would agree.
|
| I don't even necessarily think we should ban all cars, but
| we should definitely stop incentivizing them by heavily
| subsidizing car infrastructure with city budgets funded by
| taxpayers. I think if we stop the incentives that were
| heavily lobbied for by car companies we'll find the _true_
| most efficient ways to build cities which will most likely
| be heavily geared toward walkability and bike-ability,
| public transport, etc.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| On another HN thread it was discussed that because road
| wear and tire wear and hence micro plastics, scale to the
| fourth with vehicle weight, a few large delivery vehicles
| are far worse than many lighter ones. It is better for us
| all to use the lightest vehicle we can to go get
| groceries and take our garbage to the recycling facility
| (or landfill) than to have trahs trucks, delivery trucks,
| or busses move us about. Trains or other steel wheeled
| things are the best.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| At the same time larger vehicles generally have a better
| engine size to capacity ratio, so if you don't want to
| pillage the earth for raw earths, lithium, cobalt etc.
| then large vehicles are still good.
| teemur wrote:
| > road wear and tire wear and hence micro plastics, scale
| to the fourth with _vehicle weight_ ,
|
| (Emphasis mine) Do you have a source for this? I do not
| see how this specific claim could be true, and I am not
| sure how exactly that needs to be modified to make it
| true.
|
| I mean, if you take a vehicle that weights one ton and
| double the number of wheels, that specific claim says
| that the road/tire wear would not change, as the vehicle
| weight stays the same. Further, doubling the wheels can't
| easily be distinguished from splitting the load to two
| vehicles with half the weight, which should reduce wear &
| tear of each vehicle to one sixteenth, totaling to one
| eighth. So there is kind of a contradiction.
|
| And as a sanity check, a passenger car weights ~10^3 kg.
| A large truck weights ~10^4. So a truck would wear the
| road something like as much as 10 000 passenger cars.
| That's a bit hard to believe.
|
| So the actual law might be something like tear & wear
| scales to the fourth of the weight on a single wheel. But
| even that leaves something to hope, as I think you need
| to assume similar wheels. So maybe the actual law has
| something to do with pressure on the road?
| galangalalgol wrote:
| The original fourth power law relates to axle loads,
| which as you point out is not the same as what I said. So
| we should get rivian to add a lot more wheels on those
| amazon trucks. But even if they put as many on as they
| could fit, the capacity and load is so much higher than
| what each person getting a delivery would use, you are
| still in the hole vs a normal ev not to mention a trike
| just big enough to pop over to the warehouse at the train
| station to pick up your packages.
|
| Edit: forgot to paste link
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
| mdgrech23 wrote:
| worth visiting an old city like Rome. I was shocked by
| how walkable it was. It was maybe the second night we
| were there, we causally strolled around after dinner and
| just happenstance managed to walk by all the major
| attractions. That's no mistake but honestly when you
| experience it's so magical. To create a tech analogy I
| remember the days before Google when search when would
| have 20 buttons and could take regex and what not. Most
| people had no idea how to use it and even pros questioned
| if they were correctly searching so to speak than Google
| came along and just gave us a box. All that complexity
| hidden away from us. That was kind of how I felt about
| Rome. Just wander, you'll get to where you want to go.
| stefs wrote:
| i've never been in rome but i visited trieste - a very
| walkable city - a few weeks ago and i was shocked how
| cars were clogging up everything there. not necessarily
| cars driving, but parked cars. maybe trieste is a bit
| special because big parts of it are on a steep hill so
| it's not that well suited for cycling but none the less,
| i was very disappointed. not a pleasure with kids. i
| asked an italian friend about it and his answer was:
| "welcome to italy".
|
| so, walkable - yes, maybe. but cities that get rid of
| cars are still on a completely different level when it
| comes to quality.
| jonasdegendt wrote:
| I've been to a good amount of Italian cities and would
| agree it's the same mess of cars all over the place, like
| anywhere else. I also went to Rome for the first time
| half a year ago and it wasn't the mess of cars and Vespas
| I imagined it was going to be, so hey, perhaps Rome is
| the anomaly.
| vel0city wrote:
| > I was shocked by how walkable it was.
|
| I don't see why it would be shocking. It was a city for
| nearly 3,000 years before cars arrived.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| A lot of that can be solved by law too. I know a lot of
| Americans would see this as an infringement of their
| freedoms but it's quite common in other countries to place
| the order of responsibility to the most vulnerable to least
| vulnerable. What I mean by this is that cyclists need to
| give way to pedestrians, and cars need to give way to
| cyclists and pedestrians. I've never quite understood the
| logic behind jaywalking laws because it penalises the
| vulnerable rather than places greater responsibility on
| those who are least vulnerable.
| andrepd wrote:
| It's useless to build a straight road, 4 wide lanes, then
| stick a sign on the side going "pls no speederino". The
| roads and the streets themselves need to be designed so
| that they _do not allow_ unsafe use. Meaning any road
| /street shared by pedestrians needs to have narrow lanes,
| few lanes, sidewalks separated by e.g. a row of trees,
| speed bumps and raised crosswalks, bollards separating
| lanes, chicanes, etc.
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| In some Canadian cities, they build the residential streets
| with only one lane (there's still traffic in two
| directions), and it solves both the speed problem and helps
| with the density problem. I hated it at first, but once
| I've parked my car (probably to take the bus, no less),
| I've thought, gee this is nice.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| US pedestrians die at a higher rate than elsewhere but not
| because you have a lot more vehicle miles, it's down to the
| appalling quality of the roads (design construction, and
| maintenance), the shockingly casual attitude to drinking
| and driving, and the fact that so many US vehicles are
| pedestrian hostile.
|
| But all of those things seem to be an expression of the US
| majority way of thinking. That is what needs changing; if
| you don't pedestrians will still be run over by drunk
| drivers, etc.
| dv_dt wrote:
| This is such an interesting comment to me because it gets so
| much right on how to motivate ditching cars. If you were
| funding a campaign to eliminate cars to reduce carbon
| emissions I think you would meet with widespread resistance.
| If you promote an idea of a higher quality life that is
| possible w/o cars and explore that - in the end I think you'd
| end up removing many more cars than the first approach.
| Glide wrote:
| It's a positive vision of where society can go rather than
| having to sacrifice and buckle down.
|
| Do people not remember riding bikes as kids? Riding a bike
| is _still_ fun. It never stopped being fun. Now you can do
| that and get to work.
| jfim wrote:
| It was fun until I got hit by a car when biking back from
| work. Now I just drive to work due to the risk of injury
| from distracted drivers and getting doored in bike lanes.
|
| It's really unfortunate because I'd rather bike, but the
| infrastructure in the US even in relatively bike friendly
| cities here is dangerous.
| webdood90 wrote:
| if you're not already, you should advocate for the
| infrastructure in your city. these things do not happen
| on their own, we must push for the future we desire.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| That's so frustrating and I'm sorry.
|
| The USA is the richest country in the world, but our
| biking infrastructure is worse than third-world
| countries. Not only is the bike infrastrcute inadequate
| and with many gaps, but what does exist is frequently
| designed to mix with a mode of transportation that is
| actively hostile to biking.
|
| I hope you find a way to bike again. Biking alongside
| cars is so stressful and dangerous, but biking along a
| safe route is so enjoyable.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Riding a bike is not fun if you're doing it to commute -
| having to do it in all weathers, in traffic that feels
| unsafe, even if you don't feel like it and got poor sleep
| etc. It's really fundamentally not the same.
| Muromec wrote:
| Then don't commute in bad weather and in unsafe
| conditions. Working from home and improving road
| infrastructure is totally an option.
| ponector wrote:
| Work from home is an option only for some office folks.
|
| Would you be happy if your baker, barber, car mechanic
| will not commute to the workplace if it is raining?
| scatters wrote:
| I'd be happy if they have an easier and safer commute
| because everyone else is staying home.
| Muromec wrote:
| This kind of argument goes both ways. See --- having a
| car is also an option only for a minority of people, so
| please stop having it.
| david-gpu wrote:
| _>_ Driving a car _is not fun if you 're doing it to
| commute - having to do it in all weathers, in traffic
| that feels unsafe, even if you don't feel like it and got
| poor sleep etc. It's really fundamentally not the same_
|
| In a town that is minimally designed to facilitate the
| movement of people instead of cars there are multiple
| modes of transportation available to commuters, including
| but not limited to public transit for those days when you
| don't feel like walking or riding a bike.
| tomcar288 wrote:
| I spent almost an entire year e-biking to work 7 miles
| and back 7 miles. I can tell you, all the issues you
| mentioned are correct.
|
| I think, if we had dedicated bike lanes that were away
| from the main roads, at least we can address the safety
| issue. that would go a long way towards getting me back
| to commuting on an e-bike.
|
| One more big issue for bikes is the cost of it. I've
| commuted almost 1100 miles on my ebike and already have
| had 3 flat tires! That's a cost of about 10 cents a mile
| which means that the cost of flat tires is twice as much
| as all my other bike commuting costs (depreciation and
| repairs). So, we also need to address the nails and
| screws on the paths issue. i think that would be greatly
| solved with increased bicycle adoption.
| analog31 wrote:
| That's like 30 bucks per flat! But given your original
| tires will certainly wear out, start researching puncture
| resistant tires now. And a patch kit. ;-)
| nradov wrote:
| Most bikes come with the cheapest possible tires and
| inner tubes. If you're going to ride a lot then it's
| worth buying something more robust, even if they're a bit
| heavier. Continental Gatorskin tires are pretty good, and
| you can also get puncture resistant tubes with thicker
| walls and internal liquid sealant.
|
| It also helps to carry a CO2 inflator with a few
| cartridges. Much faster than a hand pump.
| sevensor wrote:
| I have thousands and thousands of miles on my bicycle
| tires. The cheap tires on my commuting bike kept wearing
| out, and I eventually switched to a high-quality
| replacement with a high latex content. I haven't had to
| replace the tires since, and the visible wear is minimal.
| I cannot recommend good tires strongly enough.
| aembleton wrote:
| Worth looking into solid tyres such as tannus tyres. I've
| had these for years and it means I don't need to worry
| about punctures.
| avhon1 wrote:
| Are you replacing the whole tire after every flat? In my
| experience, that's almost never necessary.
|
| One of my two bicycles is a secondhand Schwinn Loop, a
| cheap folding bike with 20" tires and an extremely
| rearward weight distribution. After riding ~1,600 miles
| on it, I just recently replaced the rear tire because it
| wore thin. I had gotten 5 or 6 flats on that tire. I was
| able to keep using it, and tube, by removing the
| nail/staple/glass and patching the tube. I still have the
| same tube under the new tire. The patches seem to be
| permanent fixes.
|
| (My other bike is a 700c hybrid bike from Bikes Direct,
| which I've put around 3,500 or 4,000 miles on. I've only
| gotten two flats, patched them both, and still haven't
| worn out the original tires.)
| actionablefiber wrote:
| > Riding a bike is not fun if you're doing it to commute
| - having to do it in all weathers, in traffic that feels
| unsafe, even if you don't feel like it and got poor sleep
| etc. It's really fundamentally not the same.
|
| With good infrastructure, like PBLs, cycletracks and
| dedicated trails, it really is that fun. DC is an
| extremely good place to bike commute and I do it in all
| weather.
|
| Anywho if you got poor sleep and decided to drive,
| everyone else is living at the mercy of your alertness.
| I'd rather you rode a bike.
| analog31 wrote:
| With the exception of unsafe conditions, riding in all
| weather is a blast. Though I don't know if I'd think so,
| if the weather included 100+ degree heat. And I'm
| fortunate to have terraformed my riding conditions
| through years of refining my route. I'm of the opinion
| that route choice is the #1 safety factor for cycling.
|
| Granted it's not for everybody, but the extremes and
| unpredictability are actually part of why I love the
| great outdoors.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Hmm, at this point I have to be in the office 4 days a
| week thanks to ratcheting up RTO, but my bike commute is
| the best thing about that, sitting around during the
| pandemic just made me lose muscle and feel down. In the
| PNW, snow and ice aren't usually a problem, so it's just
| lots of cold rain, but with decent gear that isn't really
| a problem.
| kyleee wrote:
| A bike ride is much more invigorating than driving the
| car. I feel much better after even a short bike ride. No
| similar benefit from driving a car.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| Riding a bicycle as a primary form of transportation
| isn't for everyone. But it _is_ for some people today. By
| building safer bicycle paths, cycling can work for more
| people tomorrow. And by advancing technologies and
| subsidies, e-bikes can open up cycling to more people
| still.
|
| Even if cycling is a thing that some people only do in
| pleasant weather, individuals and society benefit from
| more people cycling and less people driving cars.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Driving a car if you have not slept is not just a danger
| to you, but to many other people.
| CalRobert wrote:
| I do this with my kids and it's still pretty fun. Though
| admittedly it's nicer when the weather is good (just like
| driving).
| Fricken wrote:
| On an average day my bike commute is the best part of my
| day
| bboozzoo wrote:
| This is exactly what you wrote, a vision. The first major
| obstacle is our urge to lower the effort one needs to get
| through the day doing all the chores, groceries, work
| etc. If you tell someone that now they need to move their
| lazy ass, and ride a bike for a some for kilometers, a
| couple of times a week and then some more for the so
| called ,,greater good", I'd expect a lot of push back.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| I remember riding a bike to go places as a kid/teen. I
| used to ride a couple miles to a CD store, convenience
| store, etc all of the time. If I had been aloud to drive
| a car I would have said fuck this piece of shit bike and
| thrown it immediately in the dumpster for the convenience
| of a car.
| houseatrielah wrote:
| I think the root cause is further up the chain of
| casuality. People need cars because they live in the
| suburbs, they live in the suburbs because they have
| children, they want to raise children in more square
| footage than the urban housing stock offers.
|
| Notable exception being Tokyo
|
| Ironically, if you look NYC in the 1910s, kids used to play
| baseball in the street because it wasn't yet overrun by
| cars, suddenly not enough space for kids, so move to the
| suburbs, which means more and more cars...
| dv_dt wrote:
| Sure, but I'm not sure that's at the root either. Suburbs
| exist in part due to subsidy decisions on automotive
| infrastructure. And they're in a stress point in the
| return-to-office work remote debate now, because even
| with subsidies on highway infrastructure the commutes to
| get back to city centers are a major time waste.
| Offsetting 2-3 hours of family life with commute time is
| a major quality of life negative.
| zardo wrote:
| And suburbs are not built around public transit anymore,
| those old enough to have been have mostly shut it down.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
| willio58 wrote:
| I live on a street that used to have a streetcar line on
| it! Now it's just a stroad and traffic monstrosity but I
| sometimes daydream of hopping on the streetcar and going
| to meet up with friends downtown.
| mdgrech23 wrote:
| I'm in the suburbs but like you an older one and more
| densely packed. I'm maybe a mile from a major highway
| that goes to the city center. It's dead straight and
| major thoroughfare. If they dedicated one line to rail,
| none of that mixed BS, and had stops say every mile into
| the city my god it would be amazing.
| bluGill wrote:
| Are you sure it is more densely packed? Where I live the
| streetcar suburbs are slightly less dense than modern
| suburbs. In the 1950s lot sizes went up, but they have
| mostly come down again. (streetcar suburbs were built
| assuming you would get some food from your garden. 1950's
| suburbs were built by/for people who remembered the
| depression and wanted a large lot for a garden - or that
| is my theory.
| throwaheyy wrote:
| Streetcar suburbs are not 1950s suburbs, they are
| 1900s-1930s suburbs. 1950s suburbs are car suburbs.
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| "Notable exception being Tokyo"
|
| The fact that the japanese in general have no children at
| all makes this notable exception not be one at all.
| Humans are not meant to live on top of one another. To me
| the correlation between fertility and urbanization is a
| clear sign that living on the burbs is a plus for quality
| of life and the perpetuation of the human race. Cars are
| just a necessary tool for being a human in 2023.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Heavily disagree with that humans aren't meant to live on
| top of each other. We are a tribal species. We all slept
| together in caves, huddled under the same furs, building
| housing that expands to fit all our elderly and our young
| under the same roof. But we were also meant to roam, our
| toddlers literally run nonstop. We're not built to yield
| to concrete paths bearing metal beasts. The issue is that
| our children cannot play tag wherever they please out in
| the open, under the watchful eye of a community to make
| sure Bob doesn't pull Sally's pigtails again. The
| community cannot keep an eye out for SUVs whose
| sightlines seemed design to hit children.
| mdgrech23 wrote:
| Living in sky scrapers sucks and is not enjoyable. Same
| with living in suburbia. The sweet spot is densely packed
| urban areas that are built on the human scale.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| Different strokes for different folks. I enjoy living in
| suburbia very much and densely packed urban areas give me
| nightmares.
| houseatrielah wrote:
| How an Average Family in Tokyo Can Buy a New (detacted
| single-family) Home (for about $300k in Tokyo Proper)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w
|
| There's more urban dwelling options than just skyscraper.
|
| Low Japanese fertility appears to be a product of their
| work culture; you don't have time to go on dates if you
| leave the office at 10pm.
| anon291 wrote:
| People want suburbia because crime is often lower. Why
| won't we accept this reality. I don't understand why so
| called progressives don't just face this issue head on.
| Increasing incarceration rates makes cities safer. It's
| true that some small number of people will be jailed.
| It's also true that more people would move to cities.
|
| And before someone throws out some nonsense politics. I
| live in the inner city (less than a mile to downtown) in
| a west coast major city. I can count several neighbors on
| my block, people who've lived here decades, who are
| leaving due to crime / rampant drug use.
| mdgrech23 wrote:
| I'm in an east coast city. I've visited big west coast
| cities numerous times. I feel our problems are very
| different. You have policies that support the homeless
| and people with drug addictions so people facing those
| challenges flock to cities like yours from all over the
| country. The nations problems are then dumped on places
| like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. It's not fair
| and it's not right. We need better federal safety nets to
| prevent people from getting into these positions to begin
| with and if they do safety nets that allow them to stay
| in their hometown.
| topaz0 wrote:
| Incarceration rates in this country are sky-high compared
| to others with lower crime. Crime rates were decreasing
| well before incarceration boomed, too. The evidence is
| incredibly clear that incarceration is not an effective
| anti-crime measure, to anyone willing to look.
| anon291 wrote:
| Obviously lower incarceration correlates with lower
| crime. When crime is low you need to lock fewer people
| up.
|
| I would suggest people making this claim learn about the
| difference between correlation and causality.
|
| And then look at El Salvador. It is incredibly clear that
| increased incarceration lowers crime.
| mdgrech23 wrote:
| You're leaving how a key part, at least in America which
| is racism. Whites ran to the suburbs to escape particular
| groups and quite frankly still do albeit now it's more in
| the form of urban sprawl.
| lovepronmostly wrote:
| This is BS. People go to suburbs because they want a nice
| house, not because they are trying to run away from race.
| I grew up in a mix-race suburb. I loved my houses and my
| friends houses. We had great times on our cul-de-sac
| since it didn't allow through traffic it was safe to play
| in the street. We loved our backyard pool. We loved our
| garage that had a radial saw and a large tool desk. We
| loved our large 30x20ft family room where we had large
| slumber parties and large family parties. It requires
| zero racism to want a house in the suburbs.
| ahoy wrote:
| "suburbs" dont have to be the unwalkable disasters that
| we've made them. Brooklyn Heights was "america's first
| suburb." People moved there from Manhattan seeking
| everything you just mentioned.
| nradov wrote:
| Public school quality and levels of crime (or at least
| perception of crime) are also huge factors driving
| parents of small children out of dense cities and into
| suburbs. Somehow most city governments have been taken
| over by progressive idealogues who are intent on pushing
| their luxury beliefs regardless of the negative impact on
| education or middle-class quality of life. This is how we
| end up with schools run for the benefit of teacher's
| unions rather than students, fentanyl dealers in the
| neighborhood parks, homeless tents on the sidewalks, and
| organized shoplifting rings excused as reparations for
| the oppressed.
|
| If we want to give people the option of living without
| cars then let's start by fixing our cities.
| andrepd wrote:
| You've got it backwards. There are suburbs because car
| infrastructure subsidises many of the costs of that
| choice. Suburbs are a postwar, post-interstate
| phenomenon.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > I think the root cause is further up the chain of
| casuality. People need cars because they live in the
| suburbs, they live in the suburbs because they have
| children, they want to raise children in more square
| footage than the urban housing stock offers.
|
| Modern suburbs were created by central policy in many
| ways; the FHA wouldn't underwrite loans for properties
| with small lots or in mixed-use areas.
| j45 wrote:
| Too many cities have physically been designed around driving
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Have you seen pictures of Atlanta from 1930ies and now?
|
| There are _two_ major interstates cutting thought the city.
| TWO!
| smileysteve wrote:
| 3!
|
| And intentionally designed to destroy communities that
| were experiencing very high economic growth and an easy
| way to implement redlining and segregation.
| deegles wrote:
| I just drove by a new giant highway overpass being built in
| Texas and I was wondering to myself "how many houses could
| have been built with all the money and resources sunk into
| this?"
|
| All of Texas (30m) could live in a high density city the size
| of Tokyo. Which is huge, but not as huge as the rest of
| Texas.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| And for those handi-capable folks, what do _we_ do?
| willio58 wrote:
| For anyone with any type of handicap, we should definitely
| still build our world with them in mind. Building our world
| more around walking, micro-mobility, and public transit
| would surely help those who might be in wheelchairs,
| scooters, etc.
| mperham wrote:
| Building for pedestrians helps _everyone_.
|
| https://streets.mn/2023/07/19/if-we-want-a-shift-to-
| walking-...
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| And what happens when it is freezing or storming outside?
| Not everyone lives in LA.
|
| If you need proof that HN is a bubble, look no further than
| this thread.
| willio58 wrote:
| Is your point that all handicapped people need cars to
| get around in bad weather? I understand not everyone
| lives somewhere with good weather, but I'll point you to
| look at cities that get a ton of weather and still manage
| to have good transportation like Montreal, Toronto,
| Chicago, Tokyo, etc. and many handicapped people make
| great use of the transportation in those cities.
|
| Physical and mental ability exists in a spectrum for all
| of us. A small portion of people may physically need to
| be driven around in a vehicle. But a huge portion of
| those with disabilities are still fully able to get onto
| a lightrail, metro, etc. to get around.
| Mawr wrote:
| Well what _do_ you do when your only option is a car but
| you can 't drive?
|
| Cycling infra helps: https://youtu.be/xSGx3HSjKDo?t=42
|
| So does public transport:
| https://youtu.be/hK5r4dtFXGA?t=326,
| https://youtu.be/PgFVjCL21WI?t=178
|
| Quote from a stranger: "I am a disabled individual. I
| literally cannot operate a motor vehicle in a legal
| capacity. I cannot live in most US cities because of the
| lack of public transport and inability to walk places. I
| WANT THIS TO CHANGE. I am visually impaired, but I want
| this to change not only for me, but others like me whose
| disability would not hinder their life nearly as much if
| the cities they lived in were walkable cities. This would
| also benefit the mental and physical health of future
| generations, granting younger people the opportunity to see
| more of their home town in a safer environment."
| ars wrote:
| I loath walking more than any other activity. Your utopia
| sounds like hell of earth for me. I don't want any of those
| things you mentioned.
|
| I don't want to waste tons of time just getting places, I
| want to live in an area that is not so congested that traffic
| is a problem, I want space to live. I do NOT want to be near
| other people just to get somewhere, or worse live very close
| to others.
| willio58 wrote:
| I'm actually on board for this! If you want to live that
| way you should be able to. But, you should be held
| responsible for paying your share of the infrastructure
| required to support such living. As long as that is
| understood, I don't really think there's anything
| inherently bad with what you describe. But I doubt people
| who love living the suburban car-centric life would like to
| see their taxes for infrastructure double. Here's an
| infographic explaining those numbers
| https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-
| publ...
| ars wrote:
| Those costs aren't really all that high, and are easily
| outweighed by the dramatically lower costs in the
| suburbs. Everything is cheaper there, land, buildings,
| repairs, goods and services.
|
| Cities might look good in this narrow measure, but costs
| are higher and wages are higher, which means cities
| consume far more goods.
|
| Suburbs also tend to produce more thing in real (i.e. not
| monetary) terms. They have far more manufacturing, more
| farms, more backyard experimenters who go on to invent
| things.
|
| You can't learn, on your own, to be a mechanic in a city,
| in a suburb you can simply get an old car and mess with
| it. Same with tons of other fields, in a suburb you can
| just try it out, in a city you don't have room for that.
|
| Without suburbs cities would fall apart - but the cities
| don't really realize that. Cities have higher income so
| they suck in everything suburbs produce, but cities don't
| really produce anything of their own, it's all internal
| services.
| topaz0 wrote:
| I think you might be using a very narrow definition of
| "city". There are tons of small cities around the country
| where you can choose between a downtown apartment, a
| townhome in a development, separate small house on a half
| lot in a canopied neighborhood, or a big house with a
| half acre of land, all within easy biking distance of the
| city center. And even those 1000 sq ft houses on half
| lots can and do hold the old car that you want to be able
| to wrench on.
| oska wrote:
| > I loath walking more than any other activity
|
| This 'loathing' is going to severely impact your health in
| later years. Walking is a big part of keeping the body
| functioning well.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"Cars our LOUD. Even electric cars unfortunately"_
|
| While it might be true that there isn't a huge difference at
| highway speeds, EVs can make a massive difference to noise
| levels on city streets! When cars are crawling along in city
| traffic, engine noise dominates.
|
| As electric vehicles have started to become dominant on
| central London streets, this has been really noticeable.
| Sometimes I'll see queues of cars waiting at intersections
| but notice how remarkably quiet it is - because they're _all_
| EVs or hybrids! Other times, there'll be one or two old
| diesel taxis in the mix and it really stands out how noisy
| they are in comparison.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| How do we address the people who live in areas where the
| grocery store is not within walking/biking distance.
|
| Living car free in a city built for it can be bliss. But tons
| of people do not live in cities built for it. Do we rebuild
| those cities? Force them to move?
| Muromec wrote:
| I'm not a architect, but I suspect building a bakery in a
| place people want to buy bread is more energy-efficient
| compared to driving 5 miles (uphill both ways) for every
| bread-enjoyer in a personal cars.
| lovepronmostly wrote:
| This will go over like a lead brick in car infested suburbia.
|
| I love a carless life in Berlin, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Paris,
| London, Seoul, but a carless life in Santa Clarita
| California? Carless like in Silicon Valley? Not gonna happen.
| LA, maybe a few can get buy without a car but they'd need to
| add Tokyo level of trains (40+ lines with express trains)
| before I could function without a car in a city like LA. I
| have friends I can generally see in 40-60 minutes that with
| current public transportation would take 3hrs one way.
|
| I'm not saying we shouldn't start adding the public
| transportation back to LA. Of course we should. But it will
| be 100 years before it's anywhere close to where it needs to
| be for people to give up their cars.
|
| And for suburbia, you'd have to get everyone to sell their
| 2-3 car tract houses so you can rebuild the cities to be more
| dense, and get all the stores to give up their parking lots,
| It's just not going to happen. :(
| mattmaroon wrote:
| I think that that's not only incorrect, it's exactly what we
| are going to do and it will be fine.
|
| Also self-driving cars would help quite a bit if they actually
| work. It's only been just a place to park money because they
| don't yet. No technology is a solution to anything until it
| actually exists.
| thegrim22 wrote:
| Remember when 20 years ago if anybody had doubts with the way
| things were heading we were told "there's no war on cars you
| conspiracy theorist, nobody's going to come for your cars you
| conspiracy theorist"? After 20 years they've made enough
| progress shaping the narrative that they no longer need to lie
| and hide their agenda they can just put it in the open.
| estebank wrote:
| The thing that continues to happen is that people living in
| rural towns think that cities changing their mobility
| priorities to decenter cars is a personal affront.
|
| People asking to properly account for the negative
| externalities of car ownership can be construed as a war on
| cars through taxation, or as a removal of a subsidy. The only
| difference is framing.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| The thing that continues to happen is urban residents with
| limited understanding of the world outside their bubble
| think a future without cars is anything but a laughably
| naive fantasy driven by an entirely imaginary utopian
| ideal.
| estebank wrote:
| A future with significantly reduced car traffic _in
| cities_? It 's perfectly possible. Cars will never
| completely disappear, only someone that hasn't thought
| about the problem or that is building a straw man would
| say that.
|
| Car ownership in the US is ~90% (more than one per
| adult). In The Netherlands it is ~50%. They still have a
| car per family for longer trips, but they don't _need_
| them for _every_ trip, so they use them significantly
| less.
| TheGRS wrote:
| I would venture that if people actually tried living in a
| neighborhood that has ample foot traffic access they
| would love it. You don't need to be in the "city" proper,
| just a neighborhood with some corner store and a public
| park nearby. This is not a wild concept to implement at
| the city planning level at all.
| Avshalom wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_Unite
| d_S...
|
| That bubble is 80% of the country.
| TheGRS wrote:
| Hey that 20% is what they call "real America".
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| Getting around without a car is perfectly enjoyable if
| you live in the right neighborhood in the city.
|
| The war on cars is mostly about building more
| neighborhoods like that.
| epistasis wrote:
| Or even _legalizing_ a neighborhood like that.
|
| The reason we dont have walkable neighborhoods is that we
| outlaw them nearly everywhere. Trying to build one
| requires not only planning and getting the money but
| changing the law where you try to build it.
| concordDance wrote:
| A big factor is that the urban population is much larger
| and tends to vote for things that make sense in their
| context, but any laws would also apply outside it.
|
| So those in the countryside might be badly effected by a
| car ban imposed by urbanites.
|
| It's a similar effect to the way policies tend to get made
| that are good for the middle class but bad for the poor.
| epistasis wrote:
| This is exactly reversed, people in cities bend over
| backwards to adapt laws to work for people in rural
| areas, fund massive infrastructure efforts for rural
| areas, etc.
|
| Why do we have such good and extensive roads in rural
| areas with such tiny tax bases? Because cities pay for
| it. Telephone services, electricity, broadband... all
| these are hugely expensive and inefficient in rural areas
| and need to be funded by the productivity of cities,
| which we gladly do.
|
| Meanwhile rural areas have outsize weight in legislative
| bodies, and often make explicit laws banning cities from
| running in that they want to.
| concordDance wrote:
| I take it you're American? (Pretty much no one else days
| "we" to include anyone they're talking to)
| estebank wrote:
| >> Why do we have such good and extensive roads in rural
| areas with such tiny tax bases? Because cities pay for
| it.
|
| > I take it you're American? (Pretty much no one else
| days "we" to include anyone they're talking to)
|
| I can't think of any country (that _has_ a rural area)
| where the statement wouldn 't be true (although I _could_
| picture a counter example where the road infrastructure
| on specific rural areas is paid through export taxes and
| not city surplus, just none come immediately to mind).
| epistasis wrote:
| Well this is generally a US focused site, though if we
| are getting more input internationally here these days
| that would make me very happy.
| estebank wrote:
| That problem goes both ways and it is wrong headed
| whenever a single solution is imposed on the whole.
|
| I've seen for example NY politics around transportation,
| where people that live in the city predominantly use
| public transport, but any attempt at traffic calming or
| providing more space for people "at the expense of cars"
| is an uphill battle because people from surrounding areas
| predominantly drive into the city. The irony being that
| following a "park and ride" model would make the city
| more appealing, including for those that must drive.
|
| Having a bus coming every 5 to 10 minutes in some random
| place in Nebraska is never gonna happen, but not having
| that in a city like Seattle, San Francisco or even Los
| Angeles is ridiculous.
| slothtrop wrote:
| > The thing that continues to happen is that people living
| in rural towns think that cities changing their mobility
| priorities to decenter cars is a personal affront.
|
| Look at the context, OP at the top of the comment tree.
| They are explicit in asking for a ban, not merely making
| alternatives more attractive.
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| Remember _n_ years ago when people thought their lifestyles
| would have no consequences for the future of industrial
| civilisation? Anyway building more and good public transport
| so cars don 't have to be used nearly as much is an
| incredibly good thing.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Better yet, make it so I can just walk to the thing that I
| want to do
| bryan_w wrote:
| I remember 20 years ago when they would say,"They hate our
| way of life" and think it had to do with religion or
| something, but I've recently come to realize that they meant
| the sentiment that GGP poster is talking about.
| lepus wrote:
| If even discussing that some people may begin to prefer
| alternatives to cars in some situations is equivalent to a
| declaring war on cars, then I really underestimated how
| insecure the pro-car argument is.
| vbeeaz wrote:
| My man, the post explicitly says "Banning gas/diesel cars
| gets there".
| lepus wrote:
| But my man, there's a thing called an electric car and
| you said a "war on cars". Be more specific if you're
| actually saying there's a "war on GAS cars".
| vbeeaz wrote:
| Electric cars cost like double what a normal car costs,
| thus making sure only the wealthy can afford to drive
| one, while the plebs can get around in public
| transportation or whatever.
| lepus wrote:
| The average cost of a new gas powered car is about $48k
| in the United States and the average cost of a new
| electric car is about $53k. Neither is affordable but
| used Nissan Leafs are available in the sub $10k range.
| Anything else you forgot to mention?
| superkuh wrote:
| Not everyone lives in a perfect temperate coastal environment
| that doesn't get winter. And no, European winters are not
| really that cold and their use of bikes is not a good
| comparison. Especially since the distances involved are far
| smaller for them. Cars are vital in many regions.
| bluGill wrote:
| In North America, the farther north you go - and thus the
| colder the winters - the more people bike year round. It is a
| small minority for sure, but cold is not a problem on a bike
| as they prove. (I haven't got the guts to bike when it is
| -20, but that is something some do)
| avar wrote:
| Winters tend to be colder the further inland you go, e.g.
| daytime temperatures in Germany in the coldest parts of
| winter are typically lower than in Iceland.
| bluGill wrote:
| Minneapolis is an inland climate colder than Germany in
| winter, yet Minneapolis is (for the US) a place known for
| the number of people who bike year round.
| david-gpu wrote:
| I have lived in Toronto, Canada, for 15 years and never had a
| car. My family gets around all year by walking, public
| transit and cycling.
|
| Most people live in urban centers where it is perfectly
| possible to live without a car. And as car use decreases,
| public transit availability will increase, together with
| other forms of transportation that don't have the
| externalities of private motor vehicles.
| FredPret wrote:
| I did the same in Toronto.
|
| Then I bought a car.
|
| Night and day. Life became 10x easier. Suddenly Costco
| trips were possible. Weekend trips to cottage country.
| Visiting friends on the other side of town was a two-hour
| TTC (Toronto's public transit) ordeal; suddenly it became a
| 15-minute comfortable, safe, addict-free, warm car ride.
| david-gpu wrote:
| I have no doubt that driving a car would be very
| convenient, but how would that choice affect my
| neighbors? Because car traffic in the stroads around here
| make our homes noisy, our air polluted and our streets
| unsafe for children to play and be independent.
|
| It's inconceivable to me that my kids can't bike to
| school because of all the car traffic around it... caused
| by parents dropping off their kids to school. Cars
| increase the safety of the people inside them at the
| detriment of everybody else.
|
| We can thankfully begin to hear the death rattles of car-
| dependent urban planning and our cities will be much
| better once it's behind us.
| FredPret wrote:
| False dichotomy.
|
| Also, air pollution from cars & child pedestrian deaths
| has never been lower.
| david-gpu wrote:
| What false dichotomy?
|
| Cars, even EVs, are the main cause of small particulates
| in the air of our cities.
|
| Cars are the #1 cause of death of children, followed by
| drowning.
|
| Pedestrian deaths are actually on the rise for the past
| ten years or so in the US and Canada due to the
| increasing popularity of large SUVs and pickup trucks,
| which have poor visibility and blunt hoods.
|
| It's a disaster for those of us outside the car and the
| saddest part is that it's a problem that has been solved
| in most of the developed world.
| FredPret wrote:
| If you think cars are a disaster, and that Toronto is
| somehow more car-centric than "most of the developed
| world", I think you should hop on the next bus to Pearson
| and go see some of the developed and undeveloped world.
|
| I've lived on three continents, and Toronto is the
| safest, cleanest city I've ever been in. You could
| totally make living there without a car work (if not
| comfortably). There are like 2-3 cities on the entire
| continent where that is true. In Europe, there are more
| walkable cities, but you pay heavily for that directly
| and indirectly. Cars are a big economic boost.
| david-gpu wrote:
| I have lived in three countries as well, and Toronto is
| neither the safest or cleanest city where I have been. So
| much for personal anecdotes, then.
|
| You yourself admit that once you bought a car in Toronto
| _" Life became 10x easier"_, so which way is it?
|
| As for living there without a car, that's all I've ever
| done, so I'm quite familiar with the pros and cons. As I
| said earlier, I have no doubt that it would be convenient
| to live in Toronto with a car, it's just that I refuse to
| become part of the problem.
|
| Also, just because it is not as bad as the worst places
| we can think of doesn't mean it is any good. Just look at
| the number of children and women riding their bikes for
| daily errands, as it is a good rule of thumb for how
| cycling friendly a place really is.
|
| As for their economic consequences, car-centric suburbs
| are objectively a net drain to a city's coffers
| regardless of our personal opinion [0].
|
| [0]
| https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-
| growt...
| FredPret wrote:
| - The point of my anecdote is that Toronto is a wonderful
| place to live, with and without a car, and you're capable
| of describing _cars in Toronto_ as a "disaster" you need
| a sense of proportion.
|
| - Life without a car in Toronto is tolerable if you live
| downtown because it's a big, kind-of-dense city. Buying a
| car makes it much better.
|
| - Cars unlock a huge amount of economic activity -
| employees and customers can now reach many more
| businesses, and haul more stuff back and forth, much
| faster than walking/cycling/bussing. More people, more
| stuff, more quickly = bigger economy. This truth of this
| is obvious and is independent of how US municipalities
| fund their highway maintenance, whether people live in
| suburbs or not, or your personal opinion.
|
| Buy a car. I promise you'll love it.
| david-gpu wrote:
| _> Toronto is a wonderful place to live, with and without
| a car_
|
| _> Life without a car in Toronto is tolerable_
|
| _> Buying a car makes it much better / Life became 10x
| easier [with a car]_
|
| _> Buy a car. I promise you 'll love it_
|
| So, according to your experience, life in Toronto without
| a car is _" tolerable"_ and it becomes _" much better"_
| or _" 10x easier"_ with a car.
|
| If driving a car makes such a difference, isn't that all
| the evidence you need to argue that Toronto's car-
| dependent urban planning is, indeed, a disaster for
| everybody without a car?
|
| _> Cars unlock a huge amount of economic activity -
| employees and customers can now reach many more
| businesses, and haul more stuff back and forth, much
| faster than walking /cycling/bussing_
|
| That is only true in a car-dependent city where car
| traffic is facilitated at the expense of all other modes
| of transportation. This isn't theory, it is how it works
| in most of the developed world.
|
| In a city that is designed to facilitate the throughput
| of people rather than the flow of private motor vehicles,
| having a car or not doesn't make much of a difference
| because other alternatives are just as fast and
| convenient.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| People who think their will be this mass migration away
| from personal cars once buses, trains, and bike paths are
| everywhere are completely delusional.
| cedws wrote:
| People are selfish and DGAF. They will continue to buy the
| latest and biggest Range Rovers and Ford trucks (pedestrian
| death machines) to take their kids to school because they
| desperately need to signal how well off they are. Cars are a
| disgustingly polluting outlet for people to show off. IMO we
| should be banning big cars, possibly even legislating new cars
| are no bigger than a Japanese "Kei" car. Speed restrictions to
| go with it of course.
|
| We should also be putting effort into reducing traffic to
| reduce emissions. If a road needs to come to a halt every 2
| minutes for pedestrians, that adds up on a busy road. Building
| overpasses/underpasses in urban areas could improve traffic
| flow significantly.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| So we need to invent an alternative visible and expensive
| status symbol. Back to gold watches?
| reocha wrote:
| Gold plated rims for ebikes
| svnt wrote:
| Electric palanquins.
| FredPret wrote:
| I think we should be banning opinions that are forced on
| others, like the car-less utopia you want to foist on an
| unwilling public.
| cedws wrote:
| Didn't say anything about nobody being allowed cars.
| FredPret wrote:
| Totally, it's only the cars you don't like that are to be
| banned.
| cedws wrote:
| Explain to me why the average person needs a truck.
| FredPret wrote:
| Explain to me why you need an explanation.
| adrianN wrote:
| Let's also ban infrastructure that forces people to own
| cars to participate in society.
| tfrutuoso wrote:
| That's very elitist. Not everyone lives in large cities with
| whole mass transit systems or works the usual 9-5. Even in
| large urban areas it's tricky to get around past a certain
| time. I remember working unexpected shifts and later staring at
| closed metro stations, having to walk in the rain to get home.
| No thanks. Also, some people like cars. Deal with it, i'm not
| ditching for an e-bike or whatever. An electric motorcycle
| actually sounds nice though, if not for the battery weight.
| estebank wrote:
| You've identified a problem: public transport in some places
| sucks. But then veered away from the obvious solution: invest
| in it to make it not suck.
| zzzeek wrote:
| throwing money at urban problems does not necessarily have
| a great track record, and NYCTA has had lots of issues with
| corruption when they do have money to spend. Id be pretty
| skeptical that giving them a lot of money would mean you
| can hop on a train in 5 minutes at 2 am, it wouldnt even be
| cost effective to run that many trains at odd hours. Cars
| are terrific for this use case, however.
|
| NYC cops have like a billion dollar budget and while they
| are great at protecting businesses in wealthy areas they
| are not very popular in lower income areas as they are both
| blase and overly brutal at the same time, their huge budget
| not having helped that aspect very much.
| estebank wrote:
| Somehow the argument against more money for
| infrastructure is never levied against freeway
| expansions.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Haha, but it is though:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds-v2-qyCc8
|
| "Throwing Good Money After Bad Car Infrastructure -
| Wonderland Road" - on the road widening project of
| Wonderland Road in Toronto.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| It is in urbanist circles; it's not by mass media and by
| the elected officials who can actually do something about
| it.
| reocha wrote:
| Cops and public transport are two completely different
| things.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| throwing money at the NYC subway seems to have a
| generally great track record (albeit one featuring less
| efficiency than throwing money at other global subway
| systems). NYC could not function without it.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The 7 line extension cost over $3 billion dollars in 2023
| terms to build 1.5 miles of track from Times Sq to Hudson
| Yards and build one new station there. I defy anyone to
| conclude this represented good value.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The NYC transit system costs $20BN/year to operate,
| serves a population of almost 9M people and pre pandemic
| had nearly 10 million passenger trips a day; currently
| 5M.
|
| Montana spends $1BN/year on roadways and receives another
| $3BN/year in federal funding and serves a population of
| 1M people.
|
| The NYC subways system moves five times the population of
| Montana every day and costs half as much per capita.
|
| Do go on about how subways are a waste of money.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Subways are not a waste of money: throwing money at the
| NYC subway system under the current set of parameters is
| a waste of money.
|
| P.S. you're also comparing apples and oranges; you're
| only looking at the MTA operating budget; not the
| operating + capital budget which the Montana numbers
| represent.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| NYC is one of the safest places in the US...
|
| and even with fairly poor mass transit system - it's
| still is incredibly good by American standards.
|
| I moved from NYC an hour north, to be more isolated than
| the "impersonal big cities". I barely know any of my
| neighbors - because there are no sidewalks and everyone
| is forced to drive for anything.
|
| Car dependence kills people, kills communities and
| reduces your QoL.
| zzzeek wrote:
| You should move back to the city, then. I moved out
| because I had enough of the crowds and awful mass transit
| and I'm good with it. The NYC cops were absolutely awful
| for us as well.
| hot_gril wrote:
| NYC mass transit is poor? I've never lived there, but
| during my extended visits, it seemed like I could get
| anywhere in a reasonable amount of time.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Public transit does not work in a place like Montana or
| Wyoming. Sorry. Too large, too sparsely populated.
|
| Same reason it won't work for most of Texas either. It's
| fine in Dallas or Austin, parts of Fort Worth... it doesn't
| scale to Lubbock or New Braunfels.
|
| A lot of people have no interest in living in your concrete
| jungle... myself included.
| Muromec wrote:
| I though you are talking about a village with 200
| residents, so I had to look it up and oops, it's quarter
| million city? You gotta be kidding.
| ponector wrote:
| Yes, that is funny to read. European cities with
| population less than 100k could have public transport and
| bicycle infrastructure while much bigger American city
| could not.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are American cities of less than 100k people that
| have public transport and bicycle infrastructure. However
| nobody knows about them.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| No one is asking you to live there or not have a vehicle.
|
| What makes it a problem is the financially unsustainable
| suburban sprawl(single family zoning laws or covenants
| with the same effect) and people's expectations of car
| owners being catered to primarily.
|
| I mean... why else would high density cities like Atlanta
| and DFW have massive X+Y lane interstates cut through the
| city? In so many places in the US it's straight up
| impossible to walk 1000ft.
| moojd wrote:
| > No one is asking you to live there or not have a
| vehicle.
|
| Several of the most upvoted comments in this very thread
| are advocating banning vehicles.
| estebank wrote:
| > urban areas, defined as densely developed residential,
| commercial, and other nonresidential areas, now account
| for 80.0% of the U.S. population
|
| > (as of 2018) 31% of the U.S. population lives in urban
| core counties
|
| Improving public transportation in cities, makes those
| cities better for those who live and/or work in them. In
| downtown SF I counted the number of people in cars backed
| up in a single city block. The traffic looked miserable.
| It was ~30 people, less than a single bus' ridership that
| passed by. The only way reducing the supremacy of cars in
| cities affects people who don't live in "concrete
| jungles" is that they either have to pay for the
| externalities of their chosen transportation mode when
| they visit cities, or "park and ride" from the periphery
| into the the city proper.
|
| No one wants someone in a Montana ranch to take the bus.
| That's either a misunderstanding or a purposeful straw
| man.
| FredPret wrote:
| Yes but the bus in SF isn't a place where the people in
| those cars would like to be. For anyone who has ever been
| on a bus, and who has the money to never get on a bus
| again, buses are a non-starter.
| estebank wrote:
| > For anyone who has ever been on a bus, and who has the
| money to never get on a bus again, buses are a non-
| starter.
|
| Feel free to elaborate, because that's not a universal
| position.
| FredPret wrote:
| You ever been on a bus with a raving lunatic?
|
| Wiled away the hours as the bus chugs along circuitously
| to a point that is not quite at your destination?
|
| Tried to carry heavy shopping on a bus?
|
| Walked to a bus stop through bad weather?
|
| Taken one mode of transport that was delayed, making you
| miss the next leg?
|
| Waited forever for a bus that never comes?
|
| Public transport sucks balls. In the world's densest,
| biggest cities, you can make it kind-of-tolerable by
| throwing a ton of tax money at it, but it will never hold
| a candle to the most basic of cars / bikes / mopeds.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| There's a world of difference between having to use a car
| every day of the week to do literally anything (as the
| case with multiple suburban areas) and using it for it's
| intended purpose of hauling things.
|
| Having a lunatic on the bus is hardly an excuse to force
| everyone to use cars and the systematic destruction of
| walkable human scale neighborhoods.
|
| But sure. Let's abolish all public transit just because
| sometimes there are lunatics. US had a raving lunatic as
| a president, we definitely should abolish US.
| bluGill wrote:
| None of those problems you name are inherent in a bus
| though. Those are common problems with buses, but they
| don't have to be. A bus should not "chugs along
| circuitously to a point that is not quite at your
| destination" - design a better network. A bus should stop
| so close to where you shop that it is easier than carting
| that stuff to your car. A bus stop should not be so far
| away that bad weather is a problem. You should never miss
| your next leg because the next leg bus is never long in
| coming. The bus should always come.
|
| The only part of your list that your transit agency
| shouldn't solve are the raving lunatic. This is easy to
| solve though as there are not many raving lunatics in the
| world and so the number of not lunatics riding great
| transit means they are rare (and there are plenty of
| others to help deal with them when they get on).
|
| Running great transit costs a lot more $$$ than most
| transit agencies get though, so they make the best of
| what money they have. (not really - most waste a lot of
| money on things that do not make for great transit, but
| even if they spent everything perfect they don't have
| anywhere near enough money to run great transit)
| FredPret wrote:
| These problems are inherent in buses.
|
| Buses will always be open to the entire public. If "the
| public" includes raving lunatics, then they will find
| their way onto the buses.
|
| To build a better network, you need to either throw a
| vast amount of money at it, or have a super-dense city.
| The public transit in London & NYC is merely OK. In other
| cities, it will always be prohibitively expensive.
|
| And to say that "the bus should always come" is not
| exactly an argument in favour of transit. We all know the
| damn bus _should_ come. But sometimes, it just doesn 't.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > And to say that "the bus should always come" is not
| exactly an argument in favour of transit. We all know the
| damn bus should come. But sometimes, it just doesn't.
|
| A big reason that the bus doesn't come is that it's
| gotten stuck in traffic. As in, behind cars. Give the
| buses their own space so they don't get stuck behind cars
| and they can be a whole lot more reliable.
|
| Of course, since we've handed over essentially all our
| street space to cars already, doing so involves taking
| some space away from them, and drivers will scream about
| that.
| hot_gril wrote:
| SF has bus-only lanes everywhere. The bus is still very
| slow, even if you don't have to wait, because of all the
| extra stops. I'm looking at visiting parts of western
| Europe where supposedly public transit is good, but
| actually it's far slower than driving. The only way
| driving ever ends up being less convenient is if there's
| constrained parking. It's just very hard to beat a car
| that can go directly from point A to B.
|
| What also beats mass transit is walking, if a city is
| laid out such that you don't usually need to walk very
| far.
| estebank wrote:
| > SF has bus-only lanes everywhere.
|
| I wouldn't say everywhere, but wherever they were
| introduced they reduced travel time significantly, and
| traffic in those corridors didn't get any worse. The 38AX
| became redundant after the Geary bus lane because the 38R
| is just as fast.
|
| > The only way driving ever ends up being less convenient
| is if there's constrained parking. It's just very hard to
| beat a car that can go directly from point A to B.
|
| Or if everyone else also decides to drive. Traffic
| continues to get worse until alternative ways to travel
| become faster. If there are no alternative ways to
| travel, traffic becomes worse and worse without bounds
| beyond human patience. Paradoxically it also means that
| improving transit travel times also improves driving
| times.
|
| > What also beats mass transit is walking, if a city is
| laid out such that you don't usually need to walk very
| far.
|
| There Venn diagram of people that want walkable cities
| and better transit might as well be a circle.
| hot_gril wrote:
| > Paradoxically it also means that improving transit
| travel times also improves driving times.
|
| This is part of what I'm saying. If mass transit is
| improved, more people use it, so driving is still faster.
|
| > There Venn diagram of people that want walkable cities
| and better transit might as well be a circle.
|
| Walkable city works well with public transit along longer
| and simpler routes, like between cities or cross-town
| express. I'm not interested in public transit that stops
| every 2 blocks.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > The only way driving ever ends up being less convenient
| is if there's constrained parking.
|
| And in cities there should be constrained parking,
| because parking takes up valuable space that could be
| used for lots of other things. If you have abundant
| parking, it's probably not a very walkable city, because
| the parking itself is dead space that pushes everything
| else farther apart.
| bluGill wrote:
| If the bus gets stuck in traffic that means there is
| enough demand to run a subway (often as an elevated
| train). A bus is the easy solution to routes where there
| isn't much traffic and there isn't as many people who
| want to ride. (you don't need many people on a bus to pay
| for it)
| hot_gril wrote:
| I'm pretty convinced that if they expanded or reduced the
| roads in SF or other dense cities, the traffic would be
| the same. The traffic reaches an equilibrium with the
| alternatives. I used to ride BART from Berkeley to SF
| every day, and it was consistently slower than the
| driving route despite being a straight shot.
|
| About the externalities, you already pay a lot to cross
| the more popular bridges into SF by car, you probably pay
| for parking, gasoline is taxed heavily, and the police
| don't really protect your car from break-ins. Yet some
| people want to drive for one reason or another.
|
| Disclaimer: Everything above based on pre-2020 SF cause I
| left for good.
| bluGill wrote:
| Public transit would work in a lot more places than you
| give it credit for. Sure Wyoming isn't dense enough, but
| that is because nobody lives there. If your town has
| 10,000 or more people public transit could work and would
| be cheaper than cars. However it requires a large
| investment to make it work. (the town of 10,000 can't
| work alone - it needs all the other towns in an hour
| drive to also have transit and a network of transit
| between them)
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > Public transit does not work in a place like Montana or
| Wyoming. Sorry. Too large, too sparsely populated.
|
| And individual car ownership only works in those places
| because of the massive federal welfare they receive in
| the form of multi-billion-dollar federal highway grants.
|
| The federal government spends over $1800 per person per
| year on roadways in Montana.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| To be fair $1200 of that was to plan the potlucks and the
| Christmas party.
| ahoy wrote:
| It doesn't matter if everyone in lubbock drives cars,
| thats obviously not what this thread of discussion is
| about and you know it. It matters if everyone in
| Austin/Dallas/Houston is forced to drive cars. Quit being
| dense on purpose.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| The $20k car is not elitist but the $2k ebike is?
| Interesting.
| epistasis wrote:
| It's always hilarious to me when people driving $60k
| vehicles ask me how much the ebike cost and say "that's
| expensive". The ebike costs less than they pay in insurance
| a year, much less maintenance, gas, etc.
|
| Some people have weird ideas about cars being "for regular
| people" while any money spent on a bicycle is a luxury.
| cbozeman wrote:
| I can't carry four other people on my ebike, along with
| stuffing a minimum of one duffle bag per person, and
| usually being able to squeeze two in, along with a cooler
| for drinks, snacks, and sandwiches.
|
| My Telluride can do that though.
|
| Even if I could somehow fit all that shit onto an ebike,
| I wonder how long it and I would be able to make it
| before we give trying to go the 125 miles from Fort Worth
| to Possum Kingdom Lake...
|
| This site infuriates me sometimes at the complete and
| utter lack of understanding of most of the United States.
| webdood90 wrote:
| > This site infuriates me sometimes at the complete and
| utter lack of understanding of most of the United States
|
| Most of the US in what capacity? Square miles? Because
| the majority of the population lives in Cities.
|
| I love reading comments like yours. All throughout this
| thread you've vehemently argued that your perspective is
| the right one.
|
| It's a reminder to me that close minded people like you
| actually exist! You're not here to discuss, you're here
| to argue. That's pretty unfortunate.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| Saying the majority lives in cities is pretty BS though.
| They aren't all living in walkable downtowns like
| Manhattan but rather are living in places like Houston,
| Phoenix, or Denver that have a few sq miles of what many
| would consider walkability, very spotty public
| transportation, and weather for part of the year that
| keeps all but the insane from wanting to walk to their
| destination.
| epistasis wrote:
| As somebody who has lived in many parts of the United
| States, your comment is infuriating to me.
|
| My family of four gets around great on bicycles,
| including when two of those members could not yet cycle
| themselves.
|
| You simply buy a bike that allows easy carrying of little
| people and all your baggage. Instead of some silly road
| bike or mountain bike that is meant for sport.
|
| You don't see me making up complaints about the
| impossibility of transporting a finally by car because a
| Lotus can't fit them all.
|
| Or how a car can't go from SF to Hawaii. Why would you
| ever buy a car if it can't support that vacation, right?
|
| These are ridiculous complaints not connected to reality
| or towards actually looking at the high value that
| various modes of transport can provide.
| riversflow wrote:
| I've driven a $3k car for almost 15 years. It has needed
| 3 sets of tires, 2 sets of front struts, a brake job, new
| power steering lines and a timing belt. I did all of that
| work, less the tires, myself. I spend about $1000 a year
| on insurance and registration.
|
| The utility I get out of the car, in absolute terms, is
| incomparable to my ~$1500 bicycle(that I purchased for
| utility and even commuted on for several years). I have
| slept in my car many times. My car has snacks, spare
| clothes and shoes, a blanket, a pillow, towels, pen and
| paper, bags for groceries, kick scooters, folding chairs,
| spare chargers and cables, amongst other things.
|
| Regular people need to bring things they own with them
| and take them back home. Bikes are trash for that. When
| I'm on my bike, my credit card serves the function of
| space.
| rckclmbr wrote:
| I agree that an ebike isn't a replacement for a car in
| all circumstances. However, it is a replacement for a 2nd
| car. We have kids, groceries, vacations, beach trips, etc
| and have to have a car for. My wife usually has the car
|
| I use the ebike every day to commute, and for lots of
| groceries or coffee runs. I've ridden that (or my road
| bike) ~40k miles over the last 5 years. For the
| "emergencies" that I do need a 2nd car, I uber. I think
| I've done it 5 times in the last 5 years.
|
| In terms of dollars saved, at this point an ebike almost
| costs me nothing. I just use miles traveled * .55 for
| cost savings over a car.
|
| In terms of co2 saved, I don't know but I consider it a
| win.
|
| In terms of life enjoyment, I'd MUCH rather be on my
| ebike than stuck in a box.
| epistasis wrote:
| So you are not driving a $60k vehicle, living a life of
| luxury?
|
| I regularly bring things with me on my ebike because it
| has plenty of room to strap stuff on, and baskets that
| are handy for throwing stuff into it. I have a cheap bike
| trailer for moving bigger things that would require, say,
| a trunk.
|
| You were not the type of person who I am complaining
| about, but bikes are a great money saving device for most
| people, and should not be viewed as luxury items.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _The ebike costs less than they pay in insurance a
| year, much less maintenance, gas, etc._
|
| Let me just get on my eBike and cruise the streets in the
| 4+ months we have snow, and 6+ months it's cold.
|
| We don't all live in California.
| david-gpu wrote:
| I live in Toronto and, like many other people in cold
| areas, bike year round. Biking is warmer than walking,
| and the streets aren't exactly empty in winter either.
| barbazoo wrote:
| There are certainly regions where the weather is
| impractical to commute or run errands on bikes. But often
| all one needs is the proper gear and some willingness to
| change habits.
| epistasis wrote:
| You don't even address a single aspect of my comment.
|
| Why is my cheaper bike a "luxury" while it allows me to
| save tons of money in insurance and gas, while the
| elitist in a super expensive car considers a very
| practical piece of gear a luxury?
| stouset wrote:
| > That's very elitist.
|
| No, it is a fact. That it doesn't align with the choices
| you've made in your life doesn't change that.
|
| > Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit
| systems or works the usual 9-5.
|
| Tell me you've never been outside the US before without
| telling me you've never been outside the US before.
|
| Joking aside (there are plenty of other countries with
| transit as bad as the US), plenty of other countries _have_
| figured out how to make public transit and alternative forms
| of transit (bikes, scooters) widely practical. Many places
| have optimized themselves for car travel, and if we want any
| chance of a livable world 100 years from now, we need to
| start optimizing for a different reality.
|
| Yes, we will never get rid of cars entirely. But we _must_
| find a way to get rid of cars for the 95%+ of trips that are
| part of day to day life (groceries, errands, commuting).
|
| A car-centric lifestyle _is_ incompatible with a livable
| planet. Deal with it, my kids aren't ditching for Mars or
| TRAPPIST-1 or whatever.
| cbozeman wrote:
| > A car-centric lifestyle is incompatible with a livable
| planet.
|
| No it isn't. We just haven't figured it out yet. Those
| aren't the same thing.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| They take up a lot of space and require a lot more energy
| to move around. Even if we get 100% electric vehicles
| with all clean power generation - it's still a massive
| toll on the environment.
|
| A car isn't a helicopter, they require reasonably good
| roads with high costs of maintenance(and a lot of other
| infrastructure to support roads).
|
| Also car dependent lifestyle means that population
| density drops, with less walkable places than ever.
| slothtrop wrote:
| > A car-centric lifestyle is incompatible with a livable
| planet.
|
| There's no reason to believe this.
|
| Unsustainability is only ever a result of perpetually
| growing demand, or demand growing faster than technological
| innovation. Global population growth rate is projected to
| stagnate in 100 years, so it's a moot point, and from a
| purely engineering perspective, emissions are a solved
| problem. The real issue is that emission are poised to rise
| in the short-run because demand is growing so fast in east
| Asia (and to a lesser extent through immigration to the
| West).
|
| This is a near-term problem, unsustainability doesn't
| belong in the conversaiton. The question is really whether
| we want to weather that strain with current trajectory, or
| spend and implement policies to mitigate the climate
| effects during that period.
| notatoad wrote:
| nothing about living in a city or riding a bike instead of
| driving a car is "elitist".
|
| elitism is using a vehicle that has an average annual
| ownership cost of $12000 and takes up a parking space
| everywhere you want to go.
| riversflow wrote:
| > average annual ownership cost of $12000
|
| Lots of people buy luxury cars, driving up that figure, so
| it hardly matters when we are talking about marginal
| utility for someone, shall we say, disadvantaged. Which I'm
| guessing you've never been?
|
| My annual cost of ownership on my car is like $2500. I can
| sleep in my car too, and store clothes and food securely in
| it. Oh and get on demand heat & A/C access.
|
| If you don't have much, having a car is a lot.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| In "tell me you're American without telling me you're
| American" we have "building urban sprawl and car
| dependency is great because you might lose your job to
| at-will employment and your home to medical bills and
| have no social safety nets and resort to living in your
| car and /then/ wouldn't it be shitty if you didn't have
| one?". Like, maybe there's a different ... way things
| could be?
|
| It can go with the thread on Signal where $338k/year was
| not much money, but the cost of SMS messages and cellular
| phonecalls was outrageously expensive.
| riversflow wrote:
| I never said urban sprawl was good, get outta here with
| that. Things _could_ be different, but they aren't. And
| it's not like any of those things you mentioned are
| likely to change rapidly either. I speak to the present
| day reality, which is that cars serve a lot of people as
| a capital asset and they don't have to cost 12k /year.
| notatoad wrote:
| >Which I'm guessing you've never been?
|
| i've been poor enough that i couldn't afford a car, so
| any "poor people need cars, not bikes and transit"
| argument feels a bit hollow to me.
|
| and the immediate assumption that i'm talking from a
| place of privilege rather than experience is pretty rude,
| tbh.
| cvoss wrote:
| I don't think GP claimed living in a city or riding a bike
| was elitist. I think the claim was that imposing solutions
| that only work in cities as if they work for everybody is
| elitist. And, speaking for myself now, it's important to
| remember that, in many contexts, living in the city is a
| luxury that many cannot afford without greatly diminishing
| their current standard of living. Outside the city, housing
| is cheap. You have to be very wealthy or else give up a lot
| to move into a city.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| [edit: retracted]
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| You should check the definition of urban that's being
| used there - it's not what you'd call "cities".
| TheGRS wrote:
| I haven't ever put "living in a city" together with
| "elitist". Living in the suburbs away from the cacophony of
| the city, a 5 minute drive away from all your favorite chain
| stores and malls seems much more elitist to me.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| No it's just physics. Carrying around an extra several
| thousand pounds of steel will always be a burden on more than
| just the one doing it.
| jpatt wrote:
| Globally, your stance is very elitist. Only about 18% of the
| world has a car.
|
| https://www.pd.com.au/blogs/how-many-cars-in-the-world/
|
| North America is already auto-dependent and EVs are an
| important piece of the puzzle for that region. Their point is
| that EVs won't possibly work resource or cost-wise when that
| 82% inevitably gets richer and asks, "what about me?"
| thehappypm wrote:
| I wouldn't say elitist. I think different environments have
| different needs.
|
| The US, for example, has roughly 1/4th the population
| density of the E.U., 1/0th of India's and Japan's, 1/5th
| China's.
|
| Maybe Europe and Japan can urbanize and get connected via
| HSR, but, the US is much sparser. Suburban houses with
| yards make a lot more sense; cramming into the cities and
| relying on public transportation just feels stupid to a lot
| of people.
| bobajeff wrote:
| I also don't live in a city with useable mass transit either.
| Bus routes take far longer to get to a place than by car and
| there are no train or subway lines nearby. Every place I've
| ever lived you needed a car to get around.
|
| That said, I would love it if I could get around this place
| without the need of a car. I would love it if my shopping
| centers were beautiful walkable areas with little shops I
| could get to on foot.
|
| Traffic sucks, driving sucks and my shopping center is a
| bunch of big box retail and grocery stores that spread out
| around neverending road construction far away from where I
| live.
|
| I don't think things will ever get better either but
| eventually this common design pattern will severely screw us
| all over.
| ska wrote:
| > No thanks. Also, some people like cars. Deal with it, i'm
| not ditching for an e-bike or whatever.
|
| I don't think it's really about taking away peoples choices,
| just mostly about policy impacts.
|
| Currently car ownership and sub/exurban housing are
| subsidized in various direct and indirect ways. If policies
| changed and other things were emphasized instead, you could
| still choose to live in the same way, it would just be more
| expensive.
| slothtrop wrote:
| > I don't think it's really about taking away peoples
| choices
|
| OP of this comment tree is explicit that it is about taking
| away choice. But I think it should suffice to make the
| alternatives more attractive. People are open to
| renewables, but not a drastic reduction in their quality of
| life. We should not demand a reduction or stagnation in
| quality-of-life for developing countries either as it's
| inhumane. Ostensibly they would be just as interested in
| pursuing renewable tech if it can help them grow.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Suburban sprawl is both ecologically and financially
| unsustainable, with city dwellers subsidizing suburban
| living.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Trivially resolved through zoning reform. Rhetoric
| surrounding "banning cars" will not deter sprawl or
| achieve anything of note, it will just be considered
| fringe fanaticism.
|
| > unsustainable
|
| The global population growth rate is going to stall, and
| by extension, cities will cease to grow. Sustainability
| is a moot point.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| > Rhetoric surrounding "banning cars"
|
| Which I never engaged in. Banning cars is nonsense and is
| counter productive.
|
| > The global population growth rate is going to stall
|
| If we give every person a car to drive every day, today -
| that's enough to make it unsustainable. That's the whole
| point. We don't even have to have any growth in
| population.
| david-gpu wrote:
| Which adds salt to the wound because car traffic in
| denser areas is largely caused by the surrounding
| suburbs, as the locals can get to places by walking and
| transit, and often don't even have a car.
| treis wrote:
| This is a widely believed factoid on the internets but is
| not supported by the numbers. Roads have always been a
| relatively small percentage of government spending and
| has been going down over time. The big ticket items for
| local & state governments are criminal justice,
| education, health, and in many areas pensions for
| retirees.
|
| This site has a good graph half way down showing the
| relative growth in spending by area:
|
| https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-
| initiative....
| ska wrote:
| > is explicit that it is about taking away choice.
|
| But it's a conversation and I am rejecting that framing.
| Suburbs/Exurbs as practiced in US today aren't some kind
| of quality of life maximizing end game. They are a
| natural result of a ton of policy interactions and
| subsidies, and the focus on it clearly has +ves and -ves.
| And of course it's always nice if you can get someone
| else to partially pay for your lifestyle, but that's
| inherently got downsides.
|
| I think that it lacks imagination to think that we can't
| structure things differently and have equivalent or
| better quality of life overall. Will fewer people choose
| to live in suburbs? Sure - that's how incentives work.
|
| I don't think "banning cars" makes any sense. But if we
| stop basing policy at multiple levels centered around
| them, and stop subsidizing car-centered living, I suspect
| we'll collectively do a lot less driving, which doesn't
| seem like a bad outcome, and more likely to have +ve
| impact than the fantasy that EVs are a drop in
| replacement for ICEs, no other changes needed.
| slothtrop wrote:
| > Suburbs/Exurbs as practiced in US today aren't some
| kind of quality of life maximizing end game
|
| Notwithstanding that the middle-class overwhelmingly
| prefers living in the suburbs. "quiet", "safe", etc.
|
| > I think that it lacks imagination to think that we
| can't structure things differently and have equivalent or
| better quality of life overall.
|
| No one's saying that. I fully support zoning reform. If
| one's imagination leads to such bright ideas as "ban
| cars" however, it will have more detractors.
|
| > if we stop basing policy at multiple levels centered
| around them, and stop subsidizing car-centered living, I
| suspect we'll collectively do a lot less driving
|
| That is possible and I support it also.
| ska wrote:
| > Notwithstanding that the middle-class overwhelmingly
| prefers living in the suburbs. "quiet", "safe", etc.
|
| Right, but they currently believe those things for
| reasons that are inexorably connected to those same
| policy choices.
|
| However, there is no reason to assume that if those
| policies change, peoples impressions and preferences
| won't change too. Quite the opposite, actually - that's
| just how incentives (and the related PR) work.
| slothtrop wrote:
| > Right, but they currently believe those things for
| reasons that are inexorably connected to those same
| policy choices.
|
| Only in the chicken-and-egg sense that policy choices
| make suburbia prioritized, but I don't think it's enough
| to say that special policies are what wholly render
| suburbia quiet and safe (to the extent that if you were
| to enact the policy change you want, suburbia will still
| be regarded as such).
| ska wrote:
| Quiet I think is somewhat intrinsic, although the
| desirability of that is socially constructed, and changes
| over time. I also think people care about "quiet house"
| (which is to some degree a choice during construction)
| more than "quiet neighbourhood". The latter, after all,
| can be construed negatively or positively.
|
| "Safety" perception though seems to largely be a social
| construction. By this I mean it seems pretty clear (US
| context) that a) most people have opinions, often strong
| ones, about safety that b) don't seem much related to any
| data or real science [1] and c) are quite often affected
| by softer things like political messaging and PR.
|
| If I'm right about the above, there would be no reason to
| assume it would not change also. Of course it also
| implies that change could not be driven by reality either
| :)
|
| [1] real science in this area seems inherently difficult,
| and available data of poor quality
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit
| systems or works the usual 9-5. Even in large urban areas it
| 's tricky to get around past a certain time. I remember
| working unexpected shifts and later staring at closed metro
| stations, having to walk in the rain to get home._
|
| These conversations are difficult to have here.
|
| You get people from large metropolitan areas who have no clue
| how "the deplorables" live, making calls to "ban cars".
|
| "I can walk around and talk to my neighbours and it's so
| quiet!". Yeah, I have all that where I live, and I own two
| cars.
| macNchz wrote:
| Having grown up in a rural place, I'd say the way
| infrastructure is built in America arguably serves the
| rural poor the worst. Totally dependent on cars to go
| anywhere, with effectively no choice but to spend a large
| portion of your income on a likely old and and unreliable
| vehicle, to get to a job that will happily fire you for
| being late if you have a problem with it. Once upon a time
| even quite small rural towns had actual shops, trains, even
| trams, that people could live nearby to, but we've mostly
| gotten rid of those.
| parl_match wrote:
| > Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit
| systems or works the usual 9-5.
|
| Have you been to the suburbs of Japan? Or France? Towns
| created before cars were invented. Lots of single family
| homes, and a smattering of small vehicles used for work.
|
| It can work, but we've built huge car-required cities and
| towns and lifestyles and it's a sunk cost fallacy. And it
| feels "normal" to us, but it's not. It's bad for the
| environment, and it's bad for us.
|
| Hours spent in a car is directly related to obesity. Exhaust
| fumes and tire particulate matter is directly related to
| asthma and cancer. Your car is killing you.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Right, I'm not sure exactly what it is, but car ownership
| in the US seems to have been subsidized. You should be
| allowed to have a car if you want and not be taxed unfairly
| for it, but it shouldn't be that almost every job basically
| requires one. And to get there, I don't think we have to
| ban things or restrict people's lives, just build new
| cities less around cars and let people choose that life if
| they want.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > just build new cities less around cars and let people
| choose that life if they want.
|
| New cities aren't a good solution, they almost never work
| out. That's effectively ceding everything that's already
| been built to the automobile and telling people "if you
| don't like it, uproot your life and go somewhere else."
|
| I would rather see the places that were originally built
| without cars in mind return to prioritizing walking,
| cycling, and transit. Let the exurbs be the exurbs, sure,
| but let's have our old cities and inner ring suburbs not
| cater to cars so much. They weren't built for cars in the
| first place.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Over 80% of the US population lives in an densely populated
| area and RE-establishing public transit is not even remotely
| an insurmountable challenge logistically.
|
| The only thing standing in the way of mass transit are
| congressional representatives from rural areas representing
| counties that have less population than one square mile of
| Los Angeles.
| CalRobert wrote:
| It's pretty elitist to make me pay for your parking in my
| city.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| Extremist nonsense. Why not restrict access to electronics,
| heating and cooling and lighting in the developing world?
| Meanwhile, here on earth, there are and will be micro EVs,
| trucks and busses and material advancements for batteries and
| recycling. Just take a look at the chinese market, there are
| many affordable options for the everyman. Also, if you don't
| think self driving cars will solve any problems you haven't
| driven anything with level 2/3 cruise control. Transport
| modernization in the developing world will be analogous to
| mobile phone proliferation in the developing world (in place of
| having a POTS), it doesn't have to mirror Norway
| cornholio wrote:
| There is a little something that's missing from the analysis
| above: what people actually want. And what many people want,
| across many cultures once they reach a certain level of wealth,
| is the suburban home: low density living in isolated housing
| units set in a park like environment with ample greenery. Just
| look at almost any billionaire's mansion and you will see this
| pattern which becomes an aspiration for the middle class. Most
| people, given enough wealth, desire and choose the McMansion.
|
| This choice, replicated across millions of families, has
| massive implications: urban sprawl and low density make transit
| unworkable, shops need large catchment areas that can't no
| longer be reached on foot or bike, and it all devolves into car
| dependency. These communities will need point to point
| transport for the foreseeable future.
|
| So you either double down and hand-wave reality away "no, we'll
| just build high density housing along transit corridors", or
| you accept that people won't magically do what you think is
| right, and find real solutions. Electrifying cars is the low
| effort solution, but we could imagine making point to point
| transport more like public transit, for example, a Boring
| company Loop- type system where pods exit the tunnels and
| complete the last mile on the street level, of where self-
| driving taxis get you to a multi-modal terminal where you can
| catch a traditional train for the city center.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| It's possible to have both: bike stations near train
| stations. Ppl from suburbs/low density areas go with bike to
| train station, and to their destination with the train. You
| may say ppl don't want this and this may be true, it's about
| tradeoffs: do you optimise for medium-high density or for
| low. Nowadays us/canada&even some europe does for low density
| brugidou wrote:
| There are plenty of dense cities around the world where I'm
| sure the owners of apartments in the (walkable) center would
| have enough money to buy a house/McMansion in a nice suburb.
|
| And some do. But plenty don't. And building dense walkable
| cities with nice public transportation works very well and
| does not make these cities less attractive as far as I can
| tell.
| marssaxman wrote:
| If that were true, you'd expect suburban houses to be more
| expensive than those in the city, but in reality it is
| generally the opposite. Here in Seattle, we watch the urban
| population grow in lockstep with the availability of new
| housing, year after year, while the cost of that housing
| continues to rise - much faster than the general rate of
| inflation. Simple economics suggests that city life must be
| very desirable, and that the urban population would be
| growing even faster if more housing were being built:
| therefore, some fraction of those people who end up in the
| suburbs are moving there not because it is their preference,
| but because wealthier people have outbid them for the more
| desirable city life. This is what people mean when they
| complain about gentrification.
|
| You cannot be sure Americans actually want to live in suburbs
| when that is all that most of them have to choose from, and
| that is the case because American zoning codes adopted in the
| mid 20th century made it difficult to build much of anything
| else. Car dependency was _created_ , by law; do not mistake
| it for revealed preference.
| TheGRS wrote:
| And yet skinny houses in dense neighborhoods are always
| scooped up the moment they hit the market in my area.
| svnt wrote:
| Setting aside that your opinion is not data, this is how you
| mentally entrain the future of society in a terrible moment
| in an unsustainable industrialization ramp.
|
| What people want is incredibly malleable. To behave otherwise
| at a policy level is to enslave yourself to the lowest common
| denominator.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| In large part, people want what we are taught to want. A
| hundred billion humans lived and died without ever knowing
| about or wanting Coca Cola or a Ford F150s or a McMansion or
| a photo album of their children or a poster of Marilyn Monroe
| in primary colours or a Faberge egg or a KFC bucket or a
| private jet or a luxury yacht. Such things didn't exist, and
| nobody suffered a moment for it. The things we want as
| animals are such things as warmth, shelter, calories,
| respect. Most everything else is a manufactured desire, and a
| lot of the remainder is "wanting nothing, seeing someone else
| have a thing, wanting that thing".
|
| Marketing turned women on to smoking, turned Americans onto
| sodas, turned Americans onto cars, onto basketball, onto Nike
| sneakers, onto fast food burgers, onto SUVs and are now
| turning Americans onto pickup trucks - it's not accidental,
| it costs billions and takes years. Billionaires don't want
| luxury yachts because they develop a mysterious desire to go
| boating, they want luxury yachts because they are useful tax
| vehicles.
|
| Talking about "what people want" without taking into account
| that what people want is malleable and flexible, is missing
| something important.
| concordDance wrote:
| This argument is overly general, allowing you to dismiss
| any expressed desires as "not real".
|
| There is, in a sense, genuine suffering from not having a
| dishwasher or a bike or a basketball or a poster of the
| horsehead nebula even though we lived without them for
| millenia.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| I'm not saying they aren't real desires, I'm saying that
| "the future can be whatever we want it to be" is hackable
| by advertisers and we should want some defense against
| that.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I agree with you that people should be allowed to live in the
| time of communities they prefer, and if hose are suburban
| mansions so be it. If they also want cars, so be it.
|
| Where, perhaps, you and I disagree is that I think that
| people who buy these houses and cars should pay for the full
| cost, including all negative externalities, of their choices.
| Taxes should be imposed that should then try to reverse those
| negative externalities where possible. And I assure you,
| those taxes will easily double or triple the price of
| gasoline and those houses. Getting CO2 out of the atmosphere
| is really really difficult, and infrastructure costs of
| cities vs suburbia obey power laws.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| I mean... You don't even need to impose new taxes. Just
| having people in suburbia actually pay the actual costs of
| maintenance of the existing infrastructure, would make them
| rethink their decisions.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Suburban sprawl is literally a result of policy, not just
| "what people want". Most people would love to live in a
| gigantic castle in the Loire valley with a helicopter taking
| them to the office - should we subsidize that as well?
|
| Enabling people's wants by subsidizing it from other people's
| pockets - makes for a very bad result.
|
| Start removing tax breaks for home ownership, rationally
| spreading the burden of maintaining infrastructure and other
| fun things that are subsidized today - you'll quickly learn
| that most people will weigh their options and think twice
| about McMansions.
|
| The reality is - many people would love to live in a small
| town, with a train station to take a reliable ride to work in
| the city. Look at what happened in England, when already
| subsidized train tickets from satellite towns rose in prices.
| linuxftw wrote:
| The 'we' subsidizing the middle class is the middle class.
| "We" are paying for it. What 'we' are also forced to
| subsidize is the everyone else on top of our choice of
| accommodations.
| afuchs wrote:
| I can compare old houses at the edge of a city which cost
| four times as much to new builds at the far edges of that
| city's metro area which cost significantly less. The more
| expensive houses require significantly less
| infrastructure and cost the government less to support
| because of their location.
|
| A huge undercurrent in urban planning discourse right now
| (e.g., Strong Towns), is that if all subsidies and taxes
| were removed both the poor and rich living closer to the
| city (or in older, denser suburbs) would have more money
| at the end of the day, while most living in significantly
| less dense housing would not be able to afford to pay for
| their lifestyle.
| linuxftw wrote:
| I'm certain this logic only applies to mega cities. The
| vast majority of smaller cities and towns are like one or
| two streets of high density and the rest is suburban or
| rural. There's not actually anyone in the 'city' to
| subsidize those around it.
| afuchs wrote:
| There are a lot of cities in the Rust Belt and Midwest
| like I described, with the regional population around 1-2
| million which are far away from being mega cities.
|
| In the few examples I've personally visited, the
| residential density in the older "upscale" neighborhoods
| tends to come from duplexes and single family houses on
| small lots (or larger lots with a comparatively small
| amount of street frontage). There's some large buildings
| mixed in along with some very upscale condos and row
| houses.
|
| Outside of extreme cases, infrastructure costs tend to
| become dominated by how long the road or pipes are,
| rather than the number of people using them.
| em500 wrote:
| > Just look at almost any billionaire's mansion and you will
| see this pattern which becomes an aspiration for the middle
| class. Most people, given enough wealth, desire and choose
| the McMansion.
|
| Billionaires tend to have lots of houses, including condos in
| Manhattan and London. And probably a yacht too. Not sure if
| we can derive a lot about general housing preferences from
| that.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > We cannot reproduce the rates of rich world car ownership in
| the developing world without mass catastrophe
|
| That's incredible! Now show us some evidence.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Evidence like total cost of car infra vs taxes that ppl pay?
| Evidence that low density areas are subsidized by high
| density? All this info is freely available online. Difference
| is US can afford to be in debt, other countries - not so much
| ravenstine wrote:
| Those may be serious problems, but nothing about that says
| that "mass catastrophe" necessarily follows. Language like
| that is implying something approaching apocalyptic.
|
| > All this info is freely available online.
|
| Given that the internet is full of conflicting information,
| and that you seem to know far more about this issue than I
| do, perhaps you could share a link to some of this
| information from a source you find credible? I would like
| to trust you over whatever is at the top of search engine
| results.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| The guy in this thread provided a link to strongtowns,
| there are other sources too, but I suggest starting with
| it since they cover most of what I'we written.
|
| For me, mass catastrophe is not just referring to
| economic side(imo failing to maintain car infra bc it
| costs too much at some point bc of low density of
| population & high wear of the roads is pretty bad) but
| also the time lost on travel compounded over years for
| all ppl bc of the spread, the isolation of the ppl from
| each other, limited mobility options for old ppl or ppl
| with disabilities, higher pollution (even if we replace
| all cars with electro, it doesn't solve pollution fully,
| bc of tire wear particles, tonns of asphalt that should
| be renewed bc of many cars, etc...). When added all
| together, the image is not looking good. Us can 'afford'
| this bc of usd/dollar, loans and their economic position
| globally(when I write afford I mean they can afford to
| ignore the problem, at least for some time) but for other
| countries it may result in an economic suicide
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Don't forget the bit where many cities are running in the
| red (existing infra costs more to maintain than it nets in
| taxes), but they "make it up on growth" by continually
| expanding
| afuchs wrote:
| With the risk of sounding like a broken record, it's what
| Strong Towns bases their advocacy around:
| https://www.strongtowns.org/
|
| There's also a overview of their stuff from Not Just Bikes,
| but these videos are somewhat hit or miss since his works
| have a tone which can come off as being condescending: http
| s://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6...
| concordDance wrote:
| > The only problem that self-driving cars will ever solve is
| where to put VC money in a zero interest rate world. We've had
| freight trains and mass transit for centuries.
|
| They solve stress from a 30 minute daily commute.
|
| Public transport is never door to door and there are always
| changeovers and cancellations, while self driving cars on
| demand can be door to door and is far less dependant on whether
| there's a labour dispute or leaves on the tracks.
|
| They save thousands of hours per person over a working life.
|
| (Also, before you comment: remote work doesn't suit everyone or
| every job and being able to work in a job that doesn't have to
| be within a few miles of your home and your partner's job is a
| huge flexibility, efficiency and career boost)
| gemstones wrote:
| In my walkable neighborhood you know how this problem is
| solved?
|
| The same way it was solved for centuries, high foot traffic
| incentivized a small grocer to pop up within walking
| distance. People in the neighborhood generally take jobs in
| the neighborhood, because there is high foot traffic, so
| there are jobs. Even doctors and nurses can get in on that,
| because it's dense enough that a hospital is easy walking or
| biking distance, and their jobs are 100% not remote-friendly.
| concordDance wrote:
| Let's say I work in reinsurance. How many reinsurance
| companies do you think are within walking distance?
|
| It's an odd fact of life that as countries get more
| developed the people in them more heavily specialise. This
| is one of the reasons cities have much higher wealth
| production per capita than towns.
|
| If everyone is very unspecialized (e.g. "general
| practitioner" rather than "expert in non-hodgkins
| limphomas") then walking and biking could work okay, there
| should be a couple of jobs in range (having alternative
| employment options is vital for healthy employee-employer
| relations). But that's just not how an advanced global
| economy works.
| david-gpu wrote:
| Somehow most developed countries around the world have
| figured out how to design cities around walking, public
| transit and cycling, but it's an insurmountable problem
| in the US?
|
| It's not magic, folks, just look at how it is done
| elsewhere. Yes, that includes places with "real winters".
| concordDance wrote:
| Uh, I live in the UK. Public transport is only good when
| compared to cars in 5mph traffic in roads not designed
| for that many cars.
|
| Say I live in Benson and want to get to the Oxford
| Science Park for work. Do I go for a walk and two busses
| at 1 hour or do I drive for 12 minutes?
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| > Public transport is never door to door and there are always
| changeovers and cancellations, while self driving cars on
| demand can be door to door and is far less dependant on
| whether there's a labour dispute or leaves on the tracks.
|
| My city's automated metro comes every 90 seconds at rush
| hour, and every 3 minutes the rest of the day. The commute
| from my old neighborhood was 25 minutes including walking,
| and now that I moved to the suburbs I added a 10 minute bus
| ride to get to the station.
|
| My parents recently gave me their old car, and it's fun to
| have it for weekend adventures. (I'm not an anti-car
| extremist!) But for commuting to work it isn't much better to
| be sitting in traffic while the train zips past.
|
| This infrastructure wasn't all that expensive to build and
| your city could have it too. The only special requirement to
| make it succeed is to rezone the areas around stations for
| high density housing, so they'll have lots of built-in
| demand.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Zoning reform is a necessity but it won't resolve
| infrastructure problems extending to transport so quickly.
| Climate change (exacerbated through growing emissions) is a
| near-term problem.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| That's fine and dandy, but that will still produce the core
| problem - increased traffic... which would make your 30min
| commute, a 2 hour commute. And "build more roads" has been
| proven to not ease traffic at all.
|
| Meanwhile, even with issues with public transit - a 30 minute
| commute is still on average a 30 minute commute.
| oezi wrote:
| > whether there's a labour dispute
|
| Crazy thought: if they strike and you can't get to work then
| don't go but put pressure on those who are at fault for the
| strike: stingy businesses.
| freeopinion wrote:
| Transportation spans a huge spectrum. From walking to
| hoverboards to bicycles, e-bikes, motorcycles, cars, trucks,
| semis, trains, planes, cargo ships, etc.
|
| Gasoline/diesel vs electricity is orthogonal to most of that.
| So is "self-driving".
|
| It is great to have progress in batteries and charging. It is
| great to have progress in bicycle wheels and in snowmobile
| treads. It's great to have advances in cheaper rail beds and
| rotary masts.
|
| It would be amazing if we had serious innovation on creating
| safer separation of transportation modes that promoted more
| progress on multiple axes simultaneously.
| Angostura wrote:
| > EVs will not get there. Banning gas/diesel cars gets there.
|
| So we can have EVs as long as we ban petrol/diesel cars?
| lost_tourist wrote:
| 1st point will never happen in democracies
|
| 2nd point is also debatable in western democracies.
|
| What you proscribe is only possible (currently) in
| dictatorships. It may be possible in 20 years after many more
| weather and climate disasters
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| If you live in a suburban house, with a yard, and drive a car,
| its likely poster is part of the problem.
|
| Its easy to externalize blame and point fingers to
| something/someone else, when the reality is that people need to
| look inward.
|
| The uncomfortable truth is these macro policy desires, are very
| much a case of "Do as I say, not as I do"
|
| I speak this as someone that does not own a car, or have a
| yard, and drive a moped everywhere.
|
| Yet, I don't want to restrict anyone in the future from owning
| a car (gas, if cost is an issue for the poor), or living in the
| suburbs.
| Arelius wrote:
| Isn't it a bit audacious to assume the parent lives in a
| suburban home with a yard and drives a car? Many people
| don't. And it'd often a choice of values and principles. Of
| which the parent shared theirs.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| I have a suburban/rural house, with a yard, and drive a car.
|
| I also put over 2000 miles a year on an ebike, which equates
| to about 30kWhr of electricity. That e-bike is designed to
| take a substantial amount of cargo, or two kids.
|
| I can get to the post office, polling place, local deli,
| library, and a bar in about 5 minutes. The supermarket,
| pharmacy, pizza shops, restaurant, bank, hardware store etc
| in 15 minutes. A friend I visit regularly is 15 miles away
| which I consistently do in under 40 minutes versus about
| 25-30 in the car, even though the route I take to avoid a
| single-lane undivided highway is longer.
|
| Yes, a lot of rural/suburban neighborhoods are isolated by
| wildly unsafe roads between them and services. But in many,
| it's very easy to get to many of the places you need to go,
| via bicycle.
| willio58 wrote:
| I live in an apartment-style shared home, we have a shared
| front lawn (not our choice), and I do own a car. I think it's
| great that you live without a car, a yard, and drive a moped!
| I'm slowly transitioning to that life myself. I've talked
| with our landlord about getting rid of the grass and I rarely
| use my car now that I live in a walkable neighborhood. I'd
| love to get rid of it someday soon! I say all of this to let
| you know we're on the same "team".
|
| I need to make myself clear though around this line "I don't
| want to restrict anyone in the future from owning a car".
|
| I don't care if anyone owns a car, I don't think that's what
| really matters. What I do think is that we as a nation (I'm
| in the U.S.) need to stop cities from continuously
| _subsidizing_ car infrastructure through taxation. You
| mention cost issues for the poor. Please realize those poor
| people you speak of are forced through taxation to subsidize
| car infrastructure even though those same poorer people may
| not even own cars themselves. This is really where the system
| breaks down. Poor people who may live in city centers are
| paying a portion of their taxes for the rich people to have
| nice roads paved out to their spread-out suburbs. Those who
| choose to live in the suburbs should pay for the increased
| costs of infrastructure that they require. You should pay
| fewer taxes to live more efficiently in urban or shared
| housing.
|
| A lot of the ideas I'm spouting off here are from
| organizations like StrongTowns. They and others like them
| have been doing a great job of putting words into action, but
| we need many more people to be in this movement and we
| shouldn't promote infighting on details. Individual change is
| great, but it will not change anything at scale. The same
| thing goes for climate and general social progress. We need
| to force change at the government level, and stopping the
| subsidization of car infrastructure is just one step in that
| long process.
| bluejekyll wrote:
| > The only way that's even remotely possible is to heavily
| subsidize EVs (probably honestly just providing free swaps)
|
| I think that is in contradiction to your initial statement,
|
| > building the future around cars of any kind is completely
| unsustainable. We cannot reproduce the rates of rich world car
| ownership in the developing world without mass catastrophe...
|
| Subsidizing car ownership will only make these goals harder to
| attain. Swapping the car out for free for an EV bike, that
| would be great. Subsidizing only the people who _need_ a car,
| ok (ambulatory issues, etc), but we should not subsidize car
| ownership in general.
|
| The other part of this that I'm becoming more aware of as it's
| researched more, is that the Air Quality in an area is actually
| more effected by dust and particulate matter from tires,
| brakes, and roadways than greenhouse gases (this is different
| from Climate impacting Greenhouse gas effects). What this means
| is that EV cars won't fix the Air Quality of an area, but EV
| bikes definitely would.
|
| In short, I agree with your initial statement, but it's how we
| get there that needs some adjustment. Leverage more transit and
| bikes as solutions rather than subsidizing car ownership.
| xkekjrktllss wrote:
| > _building the future around cars of any kind is completely
| unsustainable_
|
| But it's potentially profitable in our highly financialized
| economy, and nothing else is.
|
| > _If we 're serious about meeting the 2030 "halve our
| emissions" and 2050 "zero our emissions" goals, EVs will not
| get there_
|
| Their purpose is merely to rescue the coastal urban California
| real estate prices by displacing the pollution to a less
| wealthy geographical area. The rest is just marketing.
|
| > _I get that whole economies are built around producing
| /maintaining cars and related infra, but it was wildly
| disastrous._
|
| Wrong. Whole economies are built around _profit_ and _that_ is
| what 's disasterous.
|
| > _We 're well into sunk cost fallacy territory here, like, on
| a species level._
|
| You're wrong again to think we had a choice. Capitalism pits
| everyone against each other in ruthless pursuits of profit for
| the sake of survival and life meaning. It's more than economic
| gridlock; it's social gridlock.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _only problem that self-driving cars will ever solve is where
| to put VC money in a zero interest rate world. We 've had
| freight trains and mass transit for centuries._
|
| Wouldn't write these off so quickly. I know two people who
| ditched their cars in Phoenix, one of whom went car free,
| because of Waymo. (By analogy: without cabs and Ubers, many
| more New Yorkers would have a car parked in an outer borough.)
| volkl48 wrote:
| I will point out that getting around by cab is only really
| "solving" the problem of urban car storage and not....any
| other issues with cars in urban environments, like traffic or
| the portion of public space devoted to car travel lanes.
|
| And in some cases they may actually make traffic worse with
| increased circling behaviors in the highest-demand (and
| often, most congested) parts of the city.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| My work requires me to come to office on certain days. Not only
| are there no sidewalks to the office, the roads are egregiously
| unsafe even in a car. Even if a moped or bike were feasible,
| there's nowhere to live within any reasonable distance. The
| office is isolated on the big acreage it purchased.
|
| If I could, I would bike a half hour to work, easily. I can't.
| It's just not safe. Everything is built for big, fast cars.
| ahoy wrote:
| It's an incredible crime that basically no american can live
| within 5 miles of their work. Car companies ad the government
| that capitulated to them fucked us so bad.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| I'm not much farther, but there are no pedestrian routes to
| get there, just highways or roads with no shoulder at
| 55mph.
| patagonia wrote:
| To be completely explicit, you're telling anyone with any need
| or desire to pull a trailer or go off publicly planned and
| constructed roadways that their needs or desires are not even
| on the table for discussion. I don't believe it is in fact
| necessary to eliminate cars as a primary mode of transportation
| in the future in order to meet climate goals. But, even if it
| was, the argument just will not fly with many many many people.
| I could easily counter with the argument that we should keep
| cars but eliminate all air and boat transportation (and
| recreation) and eliminate the future production of computers.
| The path forward will not look like either of these proposals.
| Gud wrote:
| You don't need to own a car to do this.
|
| The simple fact is, public transport in most places sucks.
|
| I've moved to Zurich, and there is no way I'll drive a car
| willingly again. Taking the tram everywhere is extremely
| liberating.
| patagonia wrote:
| I lived in New York City for 5 years. I loved it. I didn't
| own a car. I took the subway, cabs, trains, and planes
| everywhere. But, I didn't go camping or own a boat. I live
| in South Carolina now where I tow my catamaran to different
| regattas or just to the beach for fun. I go camping with an
| amount of gear that would be completely unreasonable to
| take on a train. Public transportation does not allow for
| the same activities as a car or truck. That's just
| obviously true. I'd be happy to give up my car. I would not
| give up sailing or the type of camping I do. People that
| hunt, should they give up hunting because they can't
| transport their game? How are contractors going to get
| equipment to the worksite? Cars/trucks/vehicles are not
| just for moving people.
| nradov wrote:
| Well obviously middle class people shouldn't be allowed
| to go sailing if that conflicts with urban planning and
| climate justice goals. Such activities should be
| restricted to the elites who can afford to keep their
| private yachts moored in the local marina. All for the
| greater good.
| Gud wrote:
| I am not saying no one will never need a car again.
|
| What I am saying, is that due to poor planning, a lot of
| people need to use cars when it shouldn't be needed.
|
| Most European cities that I have visited kind of get
| public transport 80% right.
| CalRobert wrote:
| I think the hardest thing to get across is that _LIFE IS
| BETTER_ this way. Having 2,000 kgs of metal hurtling by at 80
| kph half a meter from your six your old's head while you walk
| to school SUCKS. It's horrible. But hopping with my 4 year old
| in the cargo bike and my 6 year old on her own bike is sheer,
| utter, bliss. Little kids ringing their bells and chatting with
| new friends on the way to school is a joy that I feel
| privileged to be able to experience with them.
|
| And when you don't surround every building with 3 acres of
| parking, everything is closer together. It's so much closer
| together that, for the most part, you don't even need to drive
| for much.
|
| I didn't even _want_ to move to the Netherlands. I wanted to
| live somewhere I could be car-free and feel safe with my kids
| biking to school. It's ludicrous that cars have utterly
| conquered the entire damn planet, and all humans have is a
| desperate rearguard action in a tiny country largely below sea
| level. And even here, there's more cars than I'd like.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| It indeed is. I don't even need to drive most of the time
| when living inside the city. The bike serves most of the
| needs and it's vastly cheaper.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| This morning a combination of sun in my eyes, a blind spot,
| and a dewy morning almost led me to run over two people
| legally crossing the street. My significant other had to
| scream at me to stop. I could have killed two people. All I
| was trying to do was get coffee. I need to get rid of this
| death machine fast.
| sgregnt wrote:
| I like my lifestyle around car, and driving. I lived in Europe
| without car and woth car in US. Much better in US. And I
| suspect the world can support 1000x cars easily.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| > start making it way way more easier to get by w/o a car.
|
| How exactly could do this by 2030/2050?
|
| So much of the existing infrastructure is built at a low
| density with the expectation of having a car to get around.
|
| What do we have to do? Rebuild all our cities at Japan level
| densities so we can have reasonable tranit options? Ban living
| in those cities and force everyone to move to a few high
| density cities? Rebuild all our highways/roads with enough
| transit infrastructure and staff to let people travel their
| existing routes without a car?
|
| "Make it way way more easier to get by w/o a car" sounds less
| feasible to me than scaling up EVs.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Starting with the areas that already have sufficient density
| but don't have safe bike infrastructure: build a network of
| safe bike infrastructure.
|
| The area I live in is like this. Philly and its surrounding
| suburbs are absolutely already dense enough to make cycling a
| practical way to get around, but it's not particularly safe
| or pleasant to do so.
|
| So there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in places that are
| already pretty dense. But in addition to that, upzone broadly
| and remove parking minimums. I think there's a good chance
| that leads to higher densities pretty quickly in areas with
| high demand.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > I've said it before and I'll say it again
|
| To the same effect. Perhaps a real study on this issue would be
| more elucidating?
|
| > Banning gas/diesel cars gets there
|
| You've effectively ended farming and rural life.
|
| > is to heavily subsidize EVs
|
| The only reason you have to subsidize them is because they are
| not adequate replacements for ICE cars. Perhaps if they just
| made EVs better, people would _want_ them, and they wouldn't be
| _forced_ into buying them.
|
| > The only problem that self-driving cars will ever solve is
| where to put VC money in a zero interest rate world.
|
| People value their own time. Perhaps you don't, but it should
| rightfully be part of this equation.
|
| > I get that whole economies are built around
| producing/maintaining cars and related infra
|
| Yea.. because they are a good utility and serve a real purpose.
| We didn't decide to build cars, the market demanded them.
|
| It's always amazing to me that people will "say it over and
| over again" to no effect, yet walk past the fact that basic MPG
| fuel economy hasn't improved in 30 years.
|
| > like, on a species level.
|
| Or, take any account of exactly how bunker fuel oil shipping
| consumes.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| A few people have asked for recommendations, and I just spent
| months researching ebikes to buy.
|
| Cheap and cheerful: Priority Current. Mid hub, internally-geared
| rear hub, upright position, cheap. Can get from Costco on fat
| discount for $2,600. Not a cargo bike, but amazing to go to the
| shops.
|
| Longer-term: Specialized Globe Haul. I feel the same way about it
| as I do my pickup truck - it can go anywhere, do anything, and
| seems incredibly happy to either cruise around town or eat shit
| for hours. I absolutely adore it and cannot recommend it enough.
| It also has a big dealer network, something you don't get with
| the DTC boys. A steal at $3,500, but you can almost certainly get
| it for less at your LBS
| hurryer wrote:
| Looking at both of them, they look very heavy (not considering
| the motor and battery).
|
| And the gearing seems limited.
|
| Are they actually usable in non-electric mode?
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| Yes, both of them are. The Current in particular rides very
| normally when the battery is dead. The Haul rides fine, but
| like a fat tire bike that weights 90#.
|
| If you want light + power + midhubed, you're going to spend a
| LOT of money. That's Riese and Mueller territory
| AdamN wrote:
| 30-40m each way to work and usually get to drop off my kids at
| school on the way ... love my Xtracycle Stoker!
| FpUser wrote:
| I have bike, e-bike and EUC (monowheel / electric unicycle). My
| only car (minivan) is only for far travels or bringing heavy
| items.
|
| Out of all 3 EUC is the most fun.
| anderber wrote:
| Electric motorcycles in developing countries could be huge. So
| many things are done in them: deliveries, taxis, work
| transportation, etc. A combination of that and some form of non-
| oil public transportation would be huge.
| julienreszka wrote:
| Have you seen the picture with the 2 children plus one adult on
| one bike? Make me really uncomfortable I immediately imagine how
| they risk to be crushed by a truck.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Why would there be any more risk than if they were instead
| walking on the road ?
| Axsuul wrote:
| Bikes often have to ride on sharrows and share the road with
| fast moving cars. Pedestrians usually have a much better
| degree of separation.
| dublinben wrote:
| Sounds like we should get rid of trucks then.
| didntcheck wrote:
| Be the change you want to see then. Logistics demand comes
| from the consumer
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| Another comment mentioned pros and cons for the user of the
| ebike.
|
| As a frequent pedestrian on the nearby heavily-used trails, I see
| a number of cons for everyone else:
|
| Despite a prohibition on motorized vehicles on these trails, they
| exploit a loophole for handicapped users, and the agency in
| charge refuses to do anything to fix it.
|
| Even if it makes sense to allow these motorized vehicles, the 15
| MPH speed limit is frequently violated. Many of these people
| (especially scooters) don't wear helmets and speed recklessly,
| zipping between walkers, joggers, people pushing toddlers in
| strollers, etc. I saw a scooter user painfully wipe out just a
| few weeks ago. I'm sadly awaiting the first case of serious
| injury or fatality (to the user or others) caused by an uninsured
| speeding e-bike or scooter.
| hurryer wrote:
| Why do you care if they don't wear helmets?
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| Because if they suffer a serious injury they are going to
| drain hospital resources from people who did not cause their
| own disease/injury, possibly become a permanent disabled
| person on the public dole, and in general raise the cost of
| health care.
| hurryer wrote:
| You can make this point about a lot of activities, sports,
| drinking, smoking, drugs, eating too much.
|
| And a helmet doesn't prevent broken bones, spines, so they
| will still drain hospital resources.
| p_j_w wrote:
| This is far less likely in a world where people don't use
| their cars to drive 2 minutes to the grocery store.
| shortcake27 wrote:
| It's not quite that simple. Helmets are deterrents -
| Melbourne is a fantastic example where cycling is less
| common than it should be and public bike schemes keep
| failing specifically because of the requirement to wear a
| helmet. Companies like Lime try to solve this by attaching
| a helmet to the scooter. 90% of the time the helmet is
| missing. Yeah I could spend 30 minutes walking to every
| scooter in the area trying to find one I can ride legally,
| or I can just get an Uber.
|
| When people are deterred, they take less eco friendly forms
| of transport, and are less active. This has negative health
| consequences, although difficult to measure and compare.
| But it's not black and white.
|
| The entirety of Europe gets by perfectly fine with public
| healthcare and no helmets. So I don't buy the argument that
| this is truly a problem for healthcare.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > The entirety of Europe gets by perfectly fine with
| public healthcare and no helmets.
|
| Yes and no. The Netherlands is seeing some second-order
| effects of this:
|
| https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2023/16/more-traffic-
| deaths-in...
| obscurette wrote:
| Eastern Europe. My sister works at ER and they are
| calling cyclists without helmets "organ donor wannabes".
| The point is that unlike bikers, many of these cyclists
| don't end up as organ donors and/or "fatality" in
| statistics. They only manage to cause permanent damage to
| their head/brain.
| shortcake27 wrote:
| Sorry if this sounds harsh, but people who work in ER
| have skewed opinions because they're only dealing with
| the people who end up with serious injuries.
|
| You need to look at the bigger picture - first of all
| what's the probability of having an accident, then within
| that probability what's the difference between wearing a
| helmet or not. That then needs to be compared against the
| risks of staying sedentary. It's complicated.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Imo it's the opposite))) a helmet can protect from fatal
| injuries, meaning hospital does not need to treat the rest
| if the person dies. Having a helmet means less chances to
| die bc of head injury but more chances hospital will treat
| your broken bones. Anyway, helmet helps only for light
| accidents, with most car accidents ppl will die regardless,
| there are even some stats that with car accidents a helmet
| somehow gives green light to autodrivers to drive more
| aggressively
| paddez wrote:
| Helmets prevent a particular type of injury - traumatic
| brain injury This is true for all types of transportation
| including driving.
|
| Traumatic brain injury is a common outcome of an automobile
| collisions - yet we don't see people with the same concern
| for introducing mandatory helmets in day-to-day driving.
| deepspace wrote:
| In my home town we already had several pedestrians badly
| injured, and one killed by a "small" motorized vehicle driving
| on sidewalks, back in 2012.
|
| The same driver was involved in all of the incidents, she was
| elderly and the vehicle in question was classified "mobility
| aid", though it looked just like a small car.
|
| I am adamantly of the opinion that any vehicle that shares
| trails, sidewalks, etc. with pedestrians MUST be speed-limited
| to walking speed. That includes mobility chairs, scooters, and
| similar.
|
| Unfortunately, the handicapped community vehemently opposes
| such speed limits.
| didntcheck wrote:
| Where I live we get delivery cyclists racing down pedestrian
| precints at scary speeds. And I've similarly thought "someone's
| gonna get killed here one day, and possibly not the rider".
| This was true even with ordinary pushbikes or lighweight
| electric-assist bikes, but in the past couple of years most of
| the full-time riders seem to have moved to thick tyred and
| heavy motor-only bikes, which carry a lot of momentum down
| those busy shopping streets
| trashface wrote:
| I've seen a lot of these on my local walking path. Which is
| exactly that - a narrow, paved walking path, in a park.
|
| Sometimes they will use their horn to alert peds walking they are
| passing - which is like, a car horn, because they need that for
| roads. I've never been "horned" but I've heard it and its not
| pleasant. Other times they just blow right by no warning.
|
| And unlike walkers or bikers, I almost never see them coming back
| the other way. I think what has happened is they discovered the
| path is a quick cut-through to roads they want to get to on the
| other side.
|
| Last time I was out I saw a literal motorcycle on the path. It
| wasn't a big one, but no doubt, it was a straight up gas-spewing
| motorcycle, no question about it. I had to laugh in between
| choking on its fumes.
|
| I'm used to getting buzzed by cyclists but this is a bit much,
| and I've been walking less in the worse-affected park. Another
| park I walk in is a national park and the rangers don't tolerate
| that kind of crap. But the state and local parks don't have the
| manpower to enforce.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| Completely agree.
|
| This form of transportation needs it's own infrastructure. We
| need wider dedicated paths for this much higher efficient form
| of transportation that can carry many more people than car
| lanes can. Like in the Netherlands the Unites States needs to
| build an entirely separate bike path network so that these
| bikes can stop being ping-ponged between getting killed on the
| roads and slightly annoying pedestrians.
|
| Every single person that converts from driving a car to riding
| an e-bike is one less person creating traffic. If there's
| anything cars hate more than pedestrians, hate more than bikes,
| it's other drivers. This will be a huge win for drivers.
| paddy_m wrote:
| That is rude behavior from those two wheeled users. If you
| honestly look at the dangers and attitudes involved I think you
| will find that drivers of cars are a much bigger problem.
|
| In a large portion of cases where a bike is using pedestrian
| infrastructure, or going the wrong way on a one way street, it
| is because the alternative would be more dangerous.
|
| It is unpleasant to be buzzed by a two wheeler, that is
| inconsiderate full stop. However the actual consequences of a
| collision are much much less severe. The fastest e-bikes go
| around 20-28mph, and mostly travel slower than that. A heavy
| ebike + rider weighing in at 350lbs at 28mph has an energy of
| 1.2437e+4 J, a 3500 pound car moving at 20mph has an energy of
| 6.3454e+4 J, 6 times as much. Cars regularly go much much
| faster around pedestrians. Bottom line, you'll break a bone
| from a nasty bike collision, the car driver will kill you.
| However drivers of cars aren't held accountable.
|
| We dedicate so much of the US built environment to cars, for
| their movement, and free storage. Look at how wide car lanes
| are... encouraging speeding (despite what the speed limit signs
| say). Look at how entitled car owners are that they think its
| fair for them to store their private property on public space
| for no charge. If we gave a small percentage of the space
| dedicated to cars for bikes, bike use would flourish because
| it's safer to ride a bike. Given that most trips are less than
| 3 miles, its also quicker to get around on a bike, especially
| an ebike than a car.
|
| [1] https://www.1728.org/energy.htm
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Yeah there's a real problem brewing there, we've created
| bicycles that can go as fast as cars, but the folks riding them
| seem oblivious to that and think it's okay to blast down bike
| paths and sidewalks. Yes, getting hit by a car is technically
| worse, but a couple hundred pounds of human going 25 mph still
| does quite a lot of damage.
| montebicyclelo wrote:
| Propelling 1500kg around at speed just to get a 80kg human
| somewhere, doesn't seem super efficient, (apparently electric
| bikes are around 30 kg).
| jjcoffman wrote:
| Something I've thought a lot about is why don't we have more
| support around golf cart and golf cart adjacent vehicles? They
| are fairly cheap compared to a car, can be BEV, drive around on
| most city streets, fractions of the weight and danger to
| pedestrians etc.
|
| I know it doesn't work in a lot of areas due to weather etc, but
| it seems like an obvious stop-gap solution.
|
| It is also kind of "cool" to drive around in a golf cart
| fatherzine wrote:
| There is a delightful little town on an island off SoCal coast,
| Avalon, where the main mode of motorized transportation is
| indeed the golf cart. The shaping constraint is geography, the
| town is on an island by a bay surrounded by steep hills,
| medium/long distance travel is out of the question. Would be
| difficult to transition nearby LA megalopolis to such a mode of
| transportation without enforcing political barriers to travel,
| which in practice would require a ruthless tyranny.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalon,_California#Transportat...
|
| "The main method of transportation within the city is by small
| gasoline or electric powered motorcars referred to locally as
| "autoettes". These include numerous golf carts and similarly
| sized vehicles. Vehicles under 55 inches (140 cm) wide, 120
| inches (300 cm) long, and less than 1,800 pounds (820 kg) may
| qualify as an autoette. Any resident may acquire an autoette
| permit with the restriction of one permit per household. It is
| very difficult for a private citizen to get a permit to have a
| full-size vehicle in Avalon."
| jjcoffman wrote:
| Well, I think this is letting perfect be the enemy of good.
| You could definitely improve the support for these types of
| vehicles and add incentives to purchases and use. As one
| example in CA you can't drive on on roads that have a speed
| limit higher than like 40 or something. So adjusting speed
| limits in towns or providing exemptions for city streets'
| right lanes or something would go along way with adoption.
|
| I'm not saying you would ban cars, just incentivize using
| more economical modes of transport. My family of 4 would
| happily use a golf cart if my community had support for them
| on city streets.
| kfarr wrote:
| I agree and love the electrek dude and his Chinese import mini
| truck, but automobile companies are trying to make money.
| Selling a plastic molded macho truck for 90k fully loaded is a
| high ticket item with relatively good margins compared to low
| cost mini cars. The incentive tends towards gigantic tanks, not
| a joke, it fulfills fragile human ego and makes a bunch of
| money.
|
| Here's the link I refer to above, it's a great read and shows
| that the tech and demand is there but the regulatory
| environment in US and profit motive means it's a huge uphill
| battle. https://electrek.co/2023/11/14/two-years-after-
| buying-a-2000...
| jjcoffman wrote:
| It doesn't have to be big car manufactures though. In fact
| there are already many golf cart manufactures which can drive
| on roads with speed limits lower than 40 (or something like
| that. In CA)
|
| Most cities now have 40+ limit roads though which makes it
| impractical or impossible to use them. A tweak to that law
| would make them viable. Also, brand new they are like $10k
| Terr_ wrote:
| I encountered that once in Hong Kong, more specifically in
| Discovery Bay on Lantau Island... But that's because regular
| cars were banned for private ownership.
|
| That was over 20 years ago, and it seems that with the growth
| of the place and the supply-limits imposed by the local
| government, the carts have become insanely expensive. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/golf-carts-a-
| must-h...
| adolph wrote:
| There is limited support in the article for the headline claim.
| The largest BEV transition is in the very large fleet of Chinese
| mopeds, from ICE to EV. As a result less oil is being used in
| that segment. It isn't a transition from ICE car to BEV moped as
| many comments opine. The article links to a Bloomberg document
| quoted below.
|
| _EVs of all types are currently displacing 1.5 million barrels
| per day of oil demand. 67% of this is from two- and three-wheeled
| vehicles and 16% is from buses. Passenger vehicles represent just
| 15% of displacement today, but this is set to grow sharply._ [0]
|
| In chart "Global EV Fleet sizes by segment and market" [1]
| Electric two- and three-wheelers are 95% in the China market.
|
| 0. https://bnef.turtl.co/story/evo-2022/page/7/1
|
| 1. https://bnef.turtl.co/story/evo-2022/page/3/1
| robotburrito wrote:
| Electric cars are totally overboard. I think that if you change
| infrastructure a bit you will see many get bike-pilled by
| electric bikes. Especially as Americans get poorer and unable to
| afford automobiles.
| chucknthem wrote:
| My e-bike uses the same battery cells used in Electric cars, so I
| have to give credit to what Tesla and the electric car industry
| has done to make long range ebike batteries affordable.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Where's the proof that they actually are ? It seems to be
| <<projections>> at best.
|
| Where are the respective numbers of light/heavy oil/electric road
| vehicles, how much they consume, and where the electricity for
| the electric ones is coming from ?
|
| Latest oil consumption numbers seem to be from 2020, a rare year
| they were down, but that's more likely to be an effect of Covid,
| the trend is still of growth otherwise :
|
| https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-oil-sup...
|
| Don't get me wrong, more people having better access to
| transportation is a good thing, but that's not going to solve the
| issues coming with oil usage, if oil usage is not going down.
| cozzyd wrote:
| It's kinda weird how there are tax incentives for electric cars
| in the US but not for electric bikes (or... analog bikes, for
| that matter).
| mtrees_io wrote:
| hate to be the stinky kid at school, but Honda Ruckus. its specs
| after twenty some years still beat out at ebikes. yes i dont have
| a car just my rucky (midwest usa)
| t43562 wrote:
| I live near a couple of big supermarkets. I can ride to them
| easily but it's an uphill journey back and my last bike was
| stolen.
|
| If I solve the stealing problem by adding some sort of bike shed
| and get an electric bike I'll be very happy to ride most of the
| time to do shopping.
|
| The key issue is that I don't live miles from shops that have all
| the basics. I think if zoning laws allowed it then many trips
| could be satisfied by a bike.
| nfriedly wrote:
| My wife and I got an electric cargo bike with seating on the back
| for both kids this summer, and we love it. We jokingly call it
| our "mini van" and we've put ~170 miles on it, many of which
| would have been (gas) car trips otherwise.
|
| Initially I pedaled a non-electric bike when all four of us
| wanted to go somewhere, but after a month or so we got a second
| (non-cargo) ebike.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What bike did you get?
| nfriedly wrote:
| The first one was a RadWagon 4 -
| https://www.radpowerbikes.com/products/radwagon-electric-
| car... - with a lot of accessories, so it looks a bit more
| like the "Everyone Pile In Kit" here:
| https://www.radpowerbikes.com/pages/bike-
| customizer?pid=4584...
|
| Second was an Aventure.2 -
| https://www.aventon.com/products/aventure2-step-through-
| ebik...
| jwells89 wrote:
| I love the idea of some small electric vehicle like a moped for
| things like grocery errands, but would not feel comfortable
| riding them on many of the roads where I live which are full of
| large vehicles moving at high speeds.
|
| I also worry about theft. I don't know what rates of that are for
| mopeds, but for bikes it's quite high, and at least with those
| you can always buy cheap bikes that don't hurt as much to lose
| (and are less likely to be stolen anyway). Electric bikes and
| mopeds are not cheap and eating the cost for one would hurt.
|
| With those concerns in mind, it feels like the best I can do is a
| used Leaf, even though that's considerable overkill.
| lacoolj wrote:
| Crazy how being in the US (not a super dense area like NYC but
| still a big city) and reading this headline immediately results
| in a disconnect for me.
|
| I don't believe I have ever encountered a moped in the wild, and
| I've never even _seen_ an e-bike (literally would not be able to
| describe what it looks like to you if you paid me, other than "a
| bike with two wheels and a handlebar, I assume").
| notjustanymike wrote:
| If you've lived in NYC for the last decade this is completely
| obvious. First came CitiBike, then came Vision Zero, and now
| years later we have growing infrastructure to support new methods
| of transportation. Is it perfect? Oh god no. But it IS so much
| better than ten years ago.
|
| It's also not happening because we're a bunch of flower loving
| hippies. Instead it's pure economics and practicality. Faster,
| more enjoyable, and cheaper that both cars or public transport.
|
| Electric transportation with appropriate infrastructure is more
| practical.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I would like to point out that the people in those pictures are
| wearing short sleeves and it is sunny (and presumably warm).
|
| As someone who had to scrape ice off of my windscreen this
| morning while the temperature inside the passenger compartment
| was creeping up from 1 degree above freezing, the inevitable
| suggestion that bikes are a better solution than cars is going to
| fall on my deaf ears. You're not going to get me to drive my
| very-young kids around in near-zero freezing rainy conditions in
| an open cargo bike with no heating. Sorry.
|
| Don't get me wrong ebikes are great, but suggesting that we
| should all have bikes doesn't work if you don't live in
| California.or somewhere else where it is also mild and never very
| cold or very hot.
| proee wrote:
| Is there a market for something in between bike and car, like a
| micro-electric car that holds 2 people max.
|
| I know these exist, but I don't think they've caught on for
| whatever reason.
|
| I would be cool to see some kind of federal incentive to buy a
| super small electric car instead of a full-size EV.
| Tade0 wrote:
| What you need is the final stage of vehicular evolution - a
| golf cart.
|
| We'll not there yet as a civilisation, but I hope it happens
| during my lifetime.
| brotchie wrote:
| Bought a super rugged, dual battery, two-seater, motorbike-
| looking eBike for Burning Man. Turns out it's also amazing for
| getting around San Francisco.
|
| Good sized road presence, better-than-moped acceleration and
| silent except for tire-on-road noise. Does 50km/h no sweat and
| ~100km range. Bright front light as well, so cars see you coming.
|
| That + Waymo access has transformed my experience in the city
| (Waymo is hugely superior experience to Uber / Lyfy). Using the
| car less and less.
|
| Living in the future.
| slothtrop wrote:
| This has turned in to a r/fuckcars thread.
|
| Zoning reform is the cure, if we want 15 min cities. The market
| will do the work, if you let it. Plus, many problems are just
| housing problems in disguise (including homelessness). Rhetoric I
| see here about banning cars is both redundant and ridiculous. If
| people have more convenient options, they won't use cars anyway.
| If you deign to "ban" cars without a replacement people accept
| and find convenient, not only does that not help anyone, it will
| be ignored and cast off as fanaticism.
|
| Granted as climate is an issue we want to address in the short-
| run, that can demand some imperative policy moves to encourage a
| faster transition. Still need zoning reform first though.
| Anything resembling "degrowth", however, will just make peoples
| lives worse in the developing world and here.
| didntcheck wrote:
| Yeah, this is what annoys me with a lot of the fanatics. If
| your carrot is apparently so good, then why do you need the
| stick? Almost nobody has a problem with building walkable
| neighborhoods and "15 minute cities", what they have a problem
| with is the direct attempts to just make driving _worse_ rather
| than making the alternatives better. Frustrating cars is a goal
| loudly and proudly declared (hence the name of that sub), then
| suddenly turned round and called a "conspiracy theory" when
| someone dares to say they don't like it. That phrase seems to
| have made a comeback to be the thought-terminating cliche and
| shunning-smear of the 2020s thus far
|
| The whole attitude is just completely elitist, thinking that
| they know what people want better than they do themselves, and
| calling them all manner of names for being impertinent enough
| to hold an opinion of one's own rather than yielding to their
| betters
| afuchs wrote:
| In the context of the US, the vast majority of all
| infrastructure built or rebuilt over the past century was
| optimized for cars at the expense of everything else,
| including demolishing buildings which helped to create the
| demand for that infrastructure in the first place.
|
| Because car traffic was prioritized over everything else it
| created a situation where improving any alternative will
| unavoidably require some sort of compromise.
|
| Although, somewhat non-intuitively policy choices which
| discourage driving can free up space on roads and create a
| better experience for other drivers. (I can't find an
| original source, but I remember hearing about a planning
| study in some European city which found that about a third of
| the drivers who contributed to the traffic jams in that
| city's downtown were just going for a drive and didn't have
| any specific destination)
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I hadn't properly calculated how much my e bike saves in energy
| and oil until now. I always think of it in terms of maintenance
| reduced and fuel not consumed with the car I already own... But
| at this point it has completely prevented the purchase of second
| vehicle.
|
| I bet it's the same for many people like me. I guess I'm around
| year 3 of not needing a second car. In fact, I bought a home with
| a two car garage because I anticipate needing a second car... But
| not yet, and probably not in the foreseeable future.
|
| It's strange to think of. That happened very organically. I
| always had the expectation of needing the second car, but because
| of this cargo bike, I've found ways to avoid it. I always thought
| it was expensive ($7k CAD) but now I feel like it was really,
| really cheap.
|
| I guess my car-centric brain didn't believe I could actually
| avoid the second vehicle. There's sacrifice for sure, it's not a
| perfect replacement, but it's a great one. I hope this trend
| continues.
| charlie0 wrote:
| Did they account for the rise in remote work? I'd say that would
| have a much bigger impact than anything else. I used to drive 7
| days a week, now it's just 2, if that.
| jwr wrote:
| I ride my E-bike every day, to office and back, and to run
| various errands (in a European city with some, but not enough
| biking infrastructure). After several months of doing this,
| sitting in the car trapped in traffic feels almost painful.
|
| The bike gives me real freedom: I can stop pretty much anytime I
| want, I can park close to any destination without searching for a
| parking spot. Compared to this, being stuck in traffic in a car
| feels like being in jail. You can't stop, you can't move, you
| can't park, you have to follow the traffic.
|
| Some common misconceptions:
|
| 1. An E-bike does not always replace a car, it replaces some/most
| of car trips and a second car in our case.
|
| 2. An E-bike is not for "the lazy people". Pedal assist (which is
| how this should be one, not like I've seen on some US bikes where
| you press a button and the bike goes brrrr) means that it's like
| normal biking, except with a tailwind. You can bike longer
| distances, you don't arrive sweaty, you can carry lots of cargo.
| 1323portloo wrote:
| The average American is not going to accept an e-bike, moped or
| motorcycle as a replacement for their SUV/wheeled living room.*
| Autocycles are starting to become more mainstream thanks to
| companies like Polaris that focus on performance ATVs and
| 3-wheeled motorcycles. They would be a good middle ground for the
| future, either as electric or small-displacement gas engines.
|
| They need better penetration in more states and need to have the
| same insurance and operator licensing as a regular 4-wheeled
| automobile. My state allows autocycles where you can use a
| regular drivers license, but the vehicle is insured as a
| motorcycle (higher premiums), you must wear a helmet (but my
| autocycle has an enclosed body?). One of the states that borders
| mine does not permit autocycles as an automobile, so I wouldn't
| be able to drive there for any reason.
|
| * For years I have bicycle commuted and picked up groceries year-
| round in a place with hills that gets real winter snow. It takes
| a level of commitment that most people just do not have.
| ak217 wrote:
| As e-bikes and electric cars multiply, managing the sustainable
| repair and total lifecycle of their batteries is going to become
| a lot more important.
|
| Currently we treat e-bike batteries as disposable. When a battery
| dies, you are invited to throw it away in a designated way, and
| maybe if you're lucky it will be sent to a recycler that takes
| apart the casing, throws it away, melts down the cells and
| rebuilds them. If you're lucky, the e-bike or scooter has a
| standardized interface that takes a new battery.
|
| This is wildly wasteful and unsustainable. Lithium ion batteries
| have a limited lifespan and are sensitive to being left
| discharged for a long time. When they break, it's usually a
| single cell out of a hundred that takes out the whole pack. It is
| entirely possible and safe to replace a pod that comprises 10% of
| the pack and prolong the life of the battery for several years,
| if the other pods check out.
|
| This process should not be done by consumers. It requires local
| repair shops to be able to get training and certification in
| these repair procedures. We need "right to repair" laws for
| standardized swappable battery connectors and modular battery
| internals - this will make a huge difference in our future
| transportation carbon and resource footprint (of course, cars and
| overweight SUVs should be charged proportionately to their
| footprint too).
| thepasswordis wrote:
| I became very disillusioned with my "eco conscious" friends when
| they all went so hard against the bird scooters. These seemed
| like such an obvious and _amazing_ solution to having too many
| gas powered cars in the road.
|
| The cost was very low, the distance you could travel was high,
| and they were everywhere. This seemed like such a massive ray of
| hope.
|
| When people started throwing them in the water, or damaging them
| intentionally it really made me question what their actual
| motivations were.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Doesn't take too many near misses or having to walk out in the
| road to get around a pile of cheapo scooters before you want to
| join the folks throwing them in the river.
| daneel_w wrote:
| Because there aren't 280 million EVs on the planet yet.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| so I have a mental model I wanted to share. I hope it's simple.
|
| Imagine the 80/20 rule - we all know it. It's simple. 80% of the
| good stuff comes from 20% of the effort. 80% of the value society
| gets from journies comes from 20% of the actual journies. Doctors
| driving to hospital, farmers driving food to market etc.
|
| Now repeat the 80% rule on the remaining 80% of journeys - and we
| find that 16% of the value we get comes from just 16% of the
| effort.
|
| So we can argue that 96% of the value society gets comes from 36%
| of journeys- basically 2/3 of all we do is just crap.
|
| So how do we find ways to replace 2/3 of the effort
|
| much more public transport is the first take.
|
| Reduced door to door deliveries perhaps (I mean is a deliveroo
| starbucks a good idea?)
|
| but then we hit the big infrastructure stuff - denser housing
| (ala strilong towns) and yes, spend energy moving humans but not
| a ton of metal around the human.
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| that's why tesla is not the future
|
| it's just an expensive toy for boomers
|
| a small scooter would suit satisfy a lot of travel needs for lots
| of people and free the road space
|
| bikes flow like water, cars flow like tetris, it would solve most
| traffic congestion
|
| bikes (EV or ICE) require a lot less resources to produce and
| have a lot better mileage
| engelshell wrote:
| Last summer I wanted to get an e-bike, work was only a few miles
| and I enjoy the morning air. Looking around the apartment complex
| there wasn't anywhere to store it! Sure I could get a very
| expensive lock, but people get spiteful when they can't steal
| bikes, so they destroy them.
|
| If I had the money in cash I was thinking of doing a DIY carbon
| fiber build that I could easily put over my shoulder and carry up
| the stairs and hang on the wall. The actual electronic components
| are pretty simple, we just need innovation and scale to make it
| affordable.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I wonder: why are people using e-bikes and mopeds instead of
| public transportation?
|
| To those bent on removing the ability to use a car from others:
| are you going to prevent people from using e-bikes and mopeds
| too?
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