> Straightforward grants that do not hinge on scrapping a motor vehicle have also been raised from €200 to €300 and up to €300 for lower income households and people with disabilities.
Emphasis on "lower income", the cap is 13k euros per year, which is under the annual min wage if you work full time. If you earn above that you get nothing at all
Also, all the options (lump sums and trade-ins) are capped to 40% of the price of the bike. So you'd have to trade your car for a 6000+ euros electric bike to get the full 3000 euros
I’ve lost count of how many times good sounding government programs turn out to be lame once you read the fine print.
I really can’t see many people fitting either of those categories, unless they were already going to get rid of their car. And I’m a big fan of e-bikes.
Most e-bikes cost around $2-3k so it’s basically a $1k subsidy where you pay the other $1k for a bike.
> I’ve lost count of how many times good sounding government programs turn out to be lame once you read the fine print.
This is certainly true. Not sure if the one we had in Norway a few years ago can be classified as 'lame'. But it did more harm than good I think, as electric bikes became associated with a government subsidy for the rich. Most of the money went directly to the richest areas in Oslo (which are the richest areas in Norway probably). The subsidy gave buyers of electric bikes 5.000 NOK (~$500), but bikes were hard to come by and very expensive at the time (2016), so only the rich got on waiting lists for bikes and swooped up all the subsidies.
The same thing happened/is happening with electric vehicle subsidies: it's essentially a 4000€ gift to the rich that can afford a 70k€ car.
What needs to be done is:
(1) End subsidies for electric cars, and give them for e-bikes instead. With the 4k on a 70k you're barely making a dent, and you can use it instead to give e.g. 5× 800€ subsidies on 1000-1500€ e-bikes.
(2) Lump sum instead of percentage. say 800€ on a 1000€ bike or 800€ on a 5000€ bike.
(3) Give the money directly on the purchase instead of returning it later. This latter mode essentially blocks out people who don't have the money upfront. With solar panels this is especially grating: in my country you can get 85% subsidy on solar panels, which is just ludicrously efficient (I installed mine for ~500€ 6 months ago and they have nearly paid themselves back). But for that to work you need to have >5k€ lying around that you don't mind only being paid back in the end of the year! That excludes ~80-90% of people, according to statistics.
Instead of subsidizing e-bikes, install bike infrastructure. Because bike infrastructure helps literally all people on bikes, including e-bikes. Because lets be honest, for most things you would use a bike for, normal bikes work perfectly fine and they are available to the very poor.
And such infrastructure would likely also improve live of pedestrians.
The US builds roads far to wide anyway, and thanks to all the work in Europe we know how to build good bike infrastructure. A new federal code for roads, bikes and pedestrian. This could also massively improve road safety in general.
It's even worse in the US! The electrical rebate is against tax collected, so you not only have to have the money to buy (or borrow to buy) an electric car, but you have to have enough tax liability to take advantage of the whole rebate.
Or lease the car and let the car company take it for you.
If it was an above the line credit, I would have highly considered it.
Same with net metering: you need to be an electricity hog to get the most value.
Otherwise you just accumulate credit that you may never use. Or you create new electricity use which defeats the purpose (but great if you actually sub pre-existing fuel consumption, if you have it). I wonder if nano-markets emerge where you invite your neighbourhood to charge their stuff at your home or run extension cords around…
Better to have a feed in tariff where you’re encouraging to conserve and produce.
That could be relevant very early in the life cycle of some technology, but e-bikes are far from that. They are a very widely available consumer product that frankly doesn't need support for further innovations.
Batteries are going to get better regardless and even if they don't, the current state of the art is by far good enough for 99.9% of practical uses for e-bikes.
Lots of subsidies in Canada for solar installs but no innovation comes to mind.
We’ve had some Canadian content requirements, but it ends up being the mounting equipment and wiring. We haven’t developed capacity to put together our own core inverter components or panels themselves: too cheap to assemble overseas.
> But it did more harm than good I think, as electric bikes became associated with a government subsidy for the rich.
Ultimately the question is: did the electric bike program meet its goals? If one of the goals was to improve access to transportation for the poor, it sounds like it fell short. If the primary goal was to reduce the use of cars, it may have still been a success. (That said, I do question the commitment of those who had the money but choose not to until there was a subsidy.)
Why is it lame that they had a specific group of disadvantaged people they were trying to target? When governments make blanket payouts (i.e. what the US did during COVID) people complain about the money going to people who don't need it. In this case they had a very specific group, intent, and budget. Isn't this what "small" government is supposed to do?
And the bikes they're trying to encourage people to buy probably aren't the high end ones, or even the mid-range bikes. I'm guessing someone did some research at some point.
Obviously because of how they targeted people and not that they targeted a demographic. 13.5% of the population has access to $300, which is fine but is probably not a the typical market for expensive bikes, and $300 will only get you 5-20% off (not including a helmet).
A lot of these programs are made to sound good on campaign platforms but don’t do much at all IRL
You think poor people living in the banlieu are going to get such bikes they can't even afford to have them stolen in 1 hour?
This was probably made targeting some specific category that isn't the one you're thinking.
Better give some money to people who don't need it than make some overly complicated plan that requires a specialist to access and only targets some friends.
> Better give some money to people who don't need it than make some overly complicated plan that requires a specialist to access and only targets some friends.
I personally agree with that. But then it always ending up hurting the politicians that came up with that policy because medias will broadcast 24-7 examples of the few people that received it that did not deserve it. Even 2 years after COVID stimulus, McConnel keeps repeating that people are still so rich from receiving thousands and thousands of dollars and that was responsible for 2022 labor shortage... (for $2000 distributed now more than a year ago)
Yeah that's true. In Italy they gave some money to low income people and I'm sure after the next elections the right wing government that will win will take that away.
They never say how it made people able to avoid joining black market jobs or crime. They just show restaurant owners crying because they can't find (greatly underpaid) workers.
That is true with any amount of subsidy. And yes, and people can use e.g. welfare payments to buy cigarrettes and booze. That is in itself not an argument against welfare payments.
But you get cash from selling your car even without the government subsidy,
If "France is now offering a €4k e-bike subsidy" is 96% the cash they got from selling their car, then it's a strange turn of phrase. It's more like "the secondhand car market is offering a €4k everything-subsidy if you give up your car"!
Why does it sound good to begin with? Realistically who would trade in their car for a bike? I would imagine it would be young upper middle class urban dwellers. Not people with a family, elderly or people that live in cheaper suburban areas. It sounds like its a wealth transfer from taxpayers to the relatively wealthy.
Because French cities are now planned to forbid cars inside the center. A lot of cities like Paris or Lyon have already planned dates for it to happen. Plus, old city centers tend to not have any garage and the few parking places are very expensive. Bicycle lanes tend to replace car lanes and circulating in car is nightmarish on design.
For example, in my city, lots of 2-way streets are replaced by 1-way with bicycle lane. As there is more 1-ways, you sometimes have to drive in circles to get somewhere. On the weekends, parts of the city that are normally drivable are closed to cars. There is a highway entrance near my workplace. Some months ago, there was a stoplight on pedestrian demand, now it is mandatory even though there are close to no pedestrian there. The cars have now to wait 2 minutes more to get on the highway. I can't think of more for now but there are surely other examples.
We have 2 kids, no car. Maintenance is ~200-250 year in shop, 60-80 when done yourself. Insurance is around 4-7EUR/mo. Every year we do the 'how much a car for the same use costs' and it's an order of magnitude more. We live in suburbs, long distance (>10km) is mostly by bus or train. Groceries are fun with the cargo.
The most annoying PITA stuff are:
- theft. I worry a lot and have to fix the e-cargo on a fixed point everywhere. It's not always easy to find a good parking spot. But we got a long motorbike chain and you get used to it. Get insured though.
- flat tire, in the middle of nowhere... You gotta be prepared and either have a spare 'flat' tube or do the quick repair on the wheel, cause the back wheel is hell (for me) to handle. After a bad experience, now we have the kit (xiaomi portable compressor for <50eur, some spare tubes, some gluestuff, and the right strategy) always handy.
Come to the Netherlands and those people are exactly the people biking. The elderly have more mobility and health this way, a cargo bike is a very popular second car replacement, for groceries and kids.
And it's not like maintaining a car is cheap and such a good deal for the poor.
But yes, suburbs make a car required for most people outside of Europe, but we have to start somewhere.
I had a coworker who brought an ebike instead of a second car. Probably others would choose to not replace their car with a new one if an ebike made more sense.
A program might ultimately succeed if it invigorates the market - eventually helping to bring down the price of e-bikes. I feel like (home) solar subsidies did that.
For e-cargos you get good value for <5kEUR. Can't imagine plunking down 6k-10k (yet) on a non cargo ebike. I've tried a lot of the more expensive cargos and it feels some are not even trying to sell an integrated product you can use. Things like unsafe breaks, non-intuitive gear change, front wheel runaway vibration...
Indeed, its possible to bike into Geneva from countryside France without showing papers, at least it was. I almost got smoked in a roundabout there, good times.
For people considering a cargo bike, counterintuitively: a two-wheeled cargo bikes are much easier to cycle than three-wheeled cargo bikes. Actually you are more likely to fall with a three-wheeled cargo bike. Even when parking you would think a two wheel cargo bike easily falls but the kick-stands are easy and it is not a problem.
I’d say so-so. Depends on the use-case. Two wheeled are definitely easier to ride with a faster pace, but they’re much harder to balance when heavily loaded. I have tipped over with heavy loads on emergency stops.
Two wheeled also wins when there’s little space or the track is bad. What’s better really depends on your cycling proficiency, your intended use case and the road network you’ll likely use. And whatever you do, test-ride a few different ones to figure out what works for you. Avoid buying something off the internet without ever trying. (Things are different if you’re buying your second, third,…)
It’s worth noting that the two-wheeler demonstrated in this video is an old-style one with wheels just attached at the box. The Butchers and Bicycles one linked by the grandparent post is one with an actual steering at the front - the box and the bike will lean into a corner, just like a two-wheeler would.
This makes modern 3-wheelers much more agile. They still have certain disadvantages- they’re wide and bulky, you’ll have trouble avoiding potholes etc., but they’re nowhere as bad as those boxes with wheels (tough you can still buy those - their upside is their low price)
Yeah, I've been linked this before in another thread. But somebody there also provided the statistics: even in the "capital of winter biking", about 22% of trips are taken by bike. Which makes bikes a valid alternative, but not a main solution.
For the trade-in a 1500€ cap is available to everyone and depending where you live an additional 1000€ may be available (low emission zone which include at the moment 10 of the biggest cities).
I read the law some months ago and it was 13k per dependant ('part'). This is still a good deal for poor to struggling families. Trade your money pit for this new bike. This specific one is meant for poor families looking for a means of moving around. I can tell, looking at the yearly cost of owning a car, that this could really help some city folks getting out of the trap of auto-credit/insurance/maintenance cost that makes end-of-months a struggle.
And be careful with such subsidies: when they created the 600eur subvention for e-cargo in Paris I observed a (maybe uncorrelated) substantial increase in price of e-cargos...
And it's the French administration. Get ready for months long of back and forth about missing documents or information before you can hope to see your money.
Drivers licenses are a lifetime thing: no need to renew every X years, because it’s not your photo ID.
Another thing they do well (from a US/Canadian point of view) is identify their people.
It’s all national: very little is state by state or city by city.
Need a birth certificate or police report? Just sign in with your national ID and they’re in your mailbox in under a week.
None of this North American garbage where you need to provide fingerprints or further details because you share a birth date with a criminal or have the same name as someone else born somewhere else on the same day.
And when claiming a tax credit, that should make it straight forward, because it will be difficult to make the claim multiple times by varying your demographics.
Tax returns are bloody simple if you’re a non-billionaire: log in and verify that, yes, the information that the government already has about your income and housing situation is correct and click Accept. Done.
More Difficult to cheat on your rental property taxes since every property needs to be declared as an own-use or income property, with further details required for the latter.
Also, all the options (lump sums and trade-ins) are capped to 40% of the price of the bike. So you'd have to trade your car for a 6000+ euros electric bike to get the full 3000 euros
What possible reason do they have for that? All it does is encourage people to buy a more expensive bike.
The reason it is capped at a percentage of the bike's purchase price is to limit abuse. If people have to spend a good chunk of their own money they may think twice, if it's a free ebike everyone will take the offer and immediately resell the bike (yay free money).
I'm any case 4k is huge as most ebikes are cheaper than that... I suspect this is just to generate headline with a big number...
You might have a low value car. I just sold my old car for 600€. If I had an offer like this, and I could swap it for an expensive e-bike, even when paying for the 60% of the bike my car would have doubled its "value".
> All it does is encourage people to buy a more expensive bike
Virtue signalling and a half disguised way of increasing sales and consumerism
If they really cared about climate they'd find proper ways (more/cheaper public transport, state sponsored bicycle sharing, &c.). This is "green capitalism", just slap an "electric" sticker on it and continue with the good old ways
But apparently only expensive and new electric bikes, not regular bikes or used bikes. And you have to make 900 euros a months, otherwise you're not worthy of assistance, but also you have to pay 60% out of pocket....
Yeah, but the bottom of the market where there's no slack isn't where you start.
Kicking the poors while they're down and/or pulling the rug out from under people who are just barely doing better is not a sustainable way of decarbonizing society and it seems like every decarbonizing policy does just that. We can get away with a few such policies but when they're all like that it doesn't work.
I doubt many people would actually replace cars with bicycles.
It's not the same use case and in congested places like central Paris people who need a motor have scooters.
Feedback stats on these schemes are important but rarely conducted or published in a transparent way as the government obviously has a vested interest in claiming that they work great.
Since you need to get rid of a car to get the subsidy and you have to pay a substantial part of the cost of the bicycle yourself, even if you wanted to scrap a car to buy a new one you probably expect to use the electric bike at least often enough to justify paying the subsidized price for it.
The point of my previous comment is that I don't see many people swapping their car for an ebike. That would be the key metric to judge this scheme (alongside the actual cost to taxpayers...)
I am sure some people will use the scheme but probably because they were thinking of getting an ebike anyway and a replacing their car for a new one...
It's the usual and main issue with those schemes: they are political decisions and don't always make practical or economical sense.
> What would you suggest that 'state sponsored bicycle sharing' should consist of
Instead of renting an uber&co bikes (companies which use public infrastructure yet pay virtually no local tax) you'd rent state owned bikes, parked on official bike parkings. It could be part of your existing public transportation package &c.
It really doesn't take a genius to see how the current mayhem could be improved on so many levels
You need to trade-in a car or a van you own since at least a year and it needs to be from before 2006 or 2011 if it's a diesel. Then 40% cap is 1500€ for everyone and if you are way below minimum wage it's up to 3000€.
An additional 1000€ might be available depending where you live (low emission zone which include at the moment 10 of the biggest cities and more to come).
It's worth noting that 2006 and 2011 for diesel are not random numbers: they match Crit'Air 3. Incidentally, any vehicle on Crit'Air 3 will become restricted in about a year (July 1th 2023) in low-emission zones (most big cities).
That restriction means you cannot drive the vehicle in those zones during some periods or when there is a pollution event.
People need cars to do things. Bikes are great (I live somewhere more expensive partly so I can cycle to work) but they don't replace the incredible general utility of a car.
It's possible with a very different lifestyle, a lot of a luck or a very decent income to structure your life in a way that allows zero car usage, but for most people a better car is the best option.
This is a design choice by urban planners for the past 60 years. This has statistically lead to detrimental aspects of every day living, and additionally cars are often not an attainable mode of transport for the poor, and the poor are often living in areas that have to deal with the by-product of pollution.
The incidental-exercise aspects that are positively impacting mental health health and obesity. We need to build better places for people, not cars, and this is something that's been ingrained over legislation from the automotive industry for the past century.
Cars are part of the puzzle, and shared cars could be exceptional. They are not sustainable to produce or operate and never will be.
In the US, people need cars because of how cities are designed. In almost any European city you can live with just a bike just fine. Maybe get a rental or carsharing once a year for a trip to IKEA. Even in more rural places it can be an option if your workplace is close enough.
There are plenty of mid-sized cities with decent bus service and bikeability, where living car-free may not be the easiest option but is totally possible and preferred by many people. Austin, Seattle, Portland OR, Boston, DC...
Those are all gigantic cities, Portland is about as big as the largest city in my country.
There are far, far more cities below 200k and in those its very hard from what I understand. Even some large cities with 500k people have really bad public transport and bad bike infrastructure.
And to live a car free live, you need to live reasonably close to the center where housing is very expensive. From what I understand, the places that are best to live for walk-ability are usually the most expensive.
I've been to Austin and while you can definitely live without a car I don't think it's going to be ideal. It's definitely a grid city that's optimized for cars. I'm not sure about Boston, it's pretty spread out as well but it's enjoyable to walk in, I still wouldn't compare that to any city in Europe.
The winter problem can easily be solved with proper clothing. There are lightweight rain trousers you can wear above your normal clothes when it rains or snows, and of course a jacket with good ventilation.
The summers are more or less solved with e-bikes: you spend less energy paddling, while still profiting from airflow. I hear France has a subsidy for them. Unless you're in Spain or Southern Italy I guess, or there's a heatwave going on.
This is where picking a bike that suits your climate/circumstances come in.
I commute on a bike (at least, if I'm not going out after work) in London. I have a foldable Brompton bike fitted with an e-bike conversion kit from Swytch. I can ride in the middle of summer (ok, maybe not in those 40C days we just had) and arrive with no sweat. And if it rains, no matter, I stop, fold up my bike and jump on the Tube, or a bus.
> In almost any European city you can live with just a bike just fine.
I don't think so. Imagine: two people, each with a job not in cycling distance, and they have two kids at two schools in opposite directions. What do?
It's easy if you get lucky with locations of places you need to go to each day, or (more often) you have enough money to buy your way there, or if you have enough money to buy a place on good public transport routes, but as with most people if you don't, then cars are still the most affordable way to do it.
Not if you have decent public transportation. This is probably a novel concept in America, but in most other parts of the developed world a decent public transportation allows one to live car-free. I use my car so rarely that I am considering selling it.
Most people need cars may be true now, but it's not a law of nature. These things affect each other. The village I was raised has about 8000 inhabitants. That sounds like sparsely populated and indeed, it has no good public transport connection - the closest light rail station is 5 km and there's no bus. But within a 10 km circle, you'll find 14 towns and villages, with a combined citizenship of ~60 000 people. And within 20 km, you'll find 6 actual cites with a combined citizenship of > 500 000 people.
You could run an actual public transport network there. But outside the cities and some light rail, it doesn't really exist - there's just a few bus lines that run every hour or so. Why? Because people have cars. When they tried to set up a bus line for that 5km to the light rail (which runs every 15 minutes, until late night), nobody would take it. People took the cars because they were used to it and didn't want to rely on public transport - especially since that was explicitly branded as "trial" - why change habits? And now, that bus no longer runs and people have to take the car.
Public transport thrives of network effects, but these are hard to establish. I believe it can be done, but only if you have an actual plan and the will to pull it through. It's a marathon, not a sprint as they always say.
If you're getting into regions where public transport is really hard to provide, then you're very quickly away from "most people need cars", because these regions may be large, but very few people actually live there. Let them use cars. Go for the large chunk that should not need cars.
Where I live in Switzerland my very rural village of 5k people had a regular train connection and a regular bus going to village up hill area where my parents used used to live.
Switzerland is somewhat exceptional with even small villages being connected by very regular trains, but its very possible.
And this is not some place where there are lots of other larger villages around.
You don't need to live in city centers to make this perfectly feasible.
My city is 70k people and its perfectly fine without a car or bike. Around this city, there are many smaller towns from 20k to 5k. In almost all of them its mostly feasible to live in without a car.
Before I moved out of my parents house, I lived in a 5k village about 25min by car outside of a 70k city. My parents have literally a herd of cows next to their property. And I live there just fine without a car.
The idea that you somehow need to be Paris density to have decent public transport is just not true.
And that was before E-Bike was even an option. I used to take the normal bike for all activities in the village and that was fine too. With a modern E-Bike, it would be very easy.
I'm contesting the claim that "in most parts of the world one can live car-free". It isn't the case, even more so in the case of the poorer constituency this subsidy is aimed to.
You know that before cars people used horses, which are wildly more inefficient than a car, and disgusting en masse, to the point where there were concerns in the 1800s that London streets would be entirely rivers of horse manure. Bring back the beasts of burden! An ass for every home!
Modern bicycles on modern roads have better range and are far faster than horses. The problem in 1800s London was that bicycles weren't invented yet and the roads weren't asphalt. Vulcanization was only invented in 1839. The Pony Express for example averaged to 10 miles per hour and had stations every couple of miles.
When was the last time you rode an electric bike in summer? Unless humidity is also very high I find it much more pleasant than just walking. You can't compare it to riding a motorcycle because you're not clad in leather from head to toe.
Most southern countries in Europe people aren't clad in leather when driving motorbikes, the most crazy ones might even only have a bathing suit as clothes when going around the traditional Summer vacation regions.
Avoiding sweat is not a good reason to keep people in 5,000lb mobile air conditioners. There are plenty of hot cities where the majority commutes by walking or non-air-conditioned trains.
Hearing what you are saying, and asking myself which has closer form-factor to a horse: a car, or an e-bike?
Also, your (valid!) point that a horse is "wildly more inefficient than a car", how does a car stack up to an ebike, in daily use, in total lifecycle (including disposal), and in land usage?
No they really didn't. Horses were for cargo, people in a hurry, and rich people.
For the most part people walked or more recently used a train or trolley. Now we have bicycles and it turns out if you don't spend trillions designing your towns and cities for the benefit of the auto industry you can get where you're going on a bike or train faster than if you do and use a car because you don't have to spread everything out.
We need to stop framing this issue as "car" versus "no car". It's "cars" versus "fewer cars".
I live in the suburbs of a HCOL city in the US. My wife and I could absolutely afford two cars. We have one. I don't think we could go down to zero cars any time soon, but the transition to one car was a lot easier than we thought it would be.
> I don't think we could go down to zero cars any time soon
Of course I have no idea the specifics of where you live, but I think many suburbs could make this possible within 5-10 years by:
-zoning an area to be the suburb's "downtown", i.e. a few blocks of small apartment buildings with ground floor retail including a grocery store and restaurants
-building high-quality bike lanes to get to the new downtown
-subsidizing a service like car2go to make it easy to access cars on-demand when you need to go somewhere farther
In any existing suburb, you won't get widespread purchase and demolition of existing buildings, rebuilding in a new footprint, and occupancy by businesses in a 10-year timeframe.
That's just not true at all. With the current nationwide housing shortage and sky-high rents, developers will jump on any opportunity immediately. All you need to do is set the right zoning code and streamline the approval process.
That tweet series shows a bunch of individual parcels developed over a typically 6-11 year timeframe. That's necessary, but not sufficient, to generate an entirely "new downtown" widespread redevelopment all happening simultaneously over a 10-year timeframe.
The dates there are just when the street view photos were taken. All of those smaller apartment buildings can be built in under a year, and 1-3 years for a highrise.
So, where I'm at, there's at least 2 months a year where it would be miserably hot to ride a bike for any distance. At least 3 weeks this summer, it's been dangerously hot. We get about 1.5 months total of days at or below freezing. Another 1.5 where you'd really have to bundle up. Then add in days when it's snowing or icy. Then add in days when it's pouring rain.
It would probably be possible to get away with a bike around here if you lived near everything you needed and really planned things out as far as getting places early in the summer and having an emergency plan if something happened and you were stuck somewhere in the freezing cold. At least you have some time in a vehicle cab before the temperature drops dangerously low.
There's definitely places where an ebike can replace a car. There's a lot of places where it would really limit your ability to get anywhere outside of walking distance.
Riding bikes in winter is normal in Scandinavia. If its too cold, you're wearing the wrong clothes.
Too hot, well, people are riding bikes in India. I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one.
Too far? That's an urban design problem. Nobody is suggesting rural people change their cars for bikes, although I do know some people who are loving their ebikes for property inspection...
It's also a scale problem. Inhabitants of dense, large cities like Paris or New York are famously considered generally rude, and I don't suppose there's anything special about those places other than density that would cause this.
Also real estate in dense cities is disproportionately more expensive.
Unclear why people believe this, but it's absolutely not true. Spend a day watching people walk to work in Manhattan vs people sitting still on the freeway in LA and it's clear who's happier and friendly. Road rage is real, and cars make people miserable.
> Spend a day watching people walk to work in Manhattan vs people sitting still on the freeway in LA and it's clear who's happier and friendly. Road rage is real, and cars make people miserable.
Even taking your claim as true, you’ve confused unhappiness with rudeness in placing it here, without that conflation it's a non-sequitur.
> Inhabitants of dense, large cities like Paris or New York are famously considered generally rude
Eh, I moved from a rural farming town to inner London. People in dense cities aren't rude, they're busy. If anything, city people are much more willing to help out, they just won't make a deal out of it. This twitter thread basically sums it up: https://twitter.com/jordonaut/status/1352363163686068226
> Also real estate in dense cities is disproportionately more expensive.
That's not a law of nature. It's a result of deliberate choices made by city governments to restrict the supply of housing over the last few decades. Also the fact that it's so expensive and people keep moving there shows that it's an attractive way to live.
> That's not a law of nature. It's a result of deliberate choices made by city governments to restrict the supply of housing over the last few decades
Is it even possible to build new housing when the population density is already at 20k people per square kilometre, like in the cities mentioned?
> Also the fact that it's so expensive and people keep moving there shows that it's an attractive way to live.
Did you consider that not everyone has a choice in the matter and the alternative is often unemployment? There's a trend towards urbanization because people move to where the jobs are. That alone doesn't make any place more livable.
If you have that kind of density, you can build out and each part of the city is like its own mini city that is perfectly reasonable to live in. If you need to go to another mini city you can bike or jump on public transport.
In Berlin these are refereed to as Kiez for example.
Very large cities don't really have a city center as such, or at least not for most people. And you can have reasonably priced apartments or townhouses in a well connected Kiez that has everything you need to live.
> Did you consider that not everyone has a choice in the matter and the alternative is often unemployment?
And about far more often its the case that people would prefer to live in the city but are forced to live some-where on the far edge and then having to buy a car to drive into the city.
This is what the real problem with the kind of low-density city surrounded by sprawl. The actual city centers are tiny to non existent and lots of cars.
> Is it even possible to build new housing when the population density is already at 20k people per square kilometre, like in the cities mentioned?
Absolutely. The most expensive parts of Manhattan have tons of 3-4 story townhomes that would become 12+ stories practically overnight if the zoning allowed it. Not to mention all the single-family detached homes near subway, PATH, and LIRR stations nearby.
> There's a trend towards urbanization because people move to where the jobs are.
Look at how many people stayed in or moved into NYC after their jobs became fully remote in the last 2 years. It's a lot.
dangerously hot on an ebike!! I live in an extremely hot place, it may be mightily inconvenient, or gross reaching all sweated to office, but not dangerous.
And this is a bit of a theme: anywhere close to a school - even close enough to cycle - costs more to live in. It's fine if you have a good job and can cycle the kids to school and then cycle back and work from home, or you've got enough money to buy somewhere near work and school (because you were fortunate enough to work and live on the same side of the same city) but this will not be the case for huge numbers of people. Huge numbers of people don't have that luxury.
This is exactly what we (my family and me) do. We don't currently own a car and don't plan on buying one but instead use our Babboe Big-E as mentioned. If we - on some rare occasion - require a car/van I can rent one rather cheaply from the local car sharing initiative, called StattAuto.
I’m not sure I understand the car message here because almost none of my friends in France have a car. Hell, I only got my driver license at 31 because I moved to SF and I found it crippling there (for the first time in my life) not to have a car.
Some people need cars to do some things. For many of them it's easier and cheaper to use taxis and rentals than to own a car. As more people give up car ownership it becomes easier for others to follow.
Have you consider that this is the case because it was designed like that, and that it could change if you just stopped constantly doubling down on cars?
Like, its perfectly reasonable in many places to live without a car. In fact, its the opposite of what you suggest, its possible LESS INCOME then having to own a car.
Compare the total cost of living and transportation when living a car centric lifestyle, compare to a bike/public transport one. I personally don't even use a bike, walking and public transport are perfectly fine in most even small (50k) European cities.
Now of course, sadly in many places in the US, living and work is often so far separated and so badly connected that the car is the only viable option. But that is exactly what needs to change.
I live in Oxford, which was definitely mostly designed pre-car. People with kids pretty much still need cars, unless they want to buy a £1m+ house located in the perfect spot.
People who have young kids right now might be a minority, but people who have had kids a some point are a far larger fraction of the population. If the expectation is that all parents of young kids need a car, then there's a high likelihood that they just continue using a car afterwards, too.
Just because you need a car at some point doesn't mean you always want a car forever.
And as soon as kids are old enough to ride bicycles or public transport themselves you live situation changes and you can very likely get rid of your car.
And if you actually look into places like Netherlands you will see that lots of people don't have cars even with small kids. The 'Soccor mom with SUV' cliche in the US, is replaced in the Netherlands by the 'Bicycle mom' who brings here kids in on bicycles.
> Just because you need a car at some point doesn't mean you always want a car forever.
Certainly, but I think it still sets up a certain tendency which gives car usage a headstart.
> And if you actually look into places like Netherlands you will see that lots of people don't have cars even with small kids. The 'Soccor mom with SUV' cliche in the US, is replaced in the Netherlands by the 'Bicycle mom' who brings here kids in on bicycles.
Absolutely, I'm not arguing that. I was mainly responding to the point that the behaviours and needs of parents with small kids supposedly don't matter because at any moment in time there aren't that many of them around.
You absolutely don’t need a car if you live in a French city or in the suburb of the largest ones. Locally public transports are great. Nationally the railway works fine.
I haven’t had a car for a decade. I rent a vehicle once or twice a year when I need to transport things. Economically it’s a lot cheaper than owning a car.
It's quite possible in many cities for a family to have one car rather than the accepted standard of two, however. You don't need to give up both cars.
I guess it works for both, but as a European living in a city, I know far more households with 0 cars than with 2 (and indeed, more with 0 than 1 for that matter).
In the US it's because the least car-dependent cities all enacting zoning ordinances in the mid-1900s that prevented housing supply from keeping up with demand and made it very expensive to live there.
I think the problem in the US is that the car companies have significantly bigger lobbying budgets than the bike industry.
That's why I can use my tax deductible commuter benefits for parking fees at work but not for bike costs. Or why the new "Electric Vehicle" tax credit in the climate/inflation bill can't be used to buy ebikes, only cars. Even though an e-bike is significantly better for the environment than a new Tesla.
The fine print says it all, and it is restrictive. But, as someone who has lived in France for about 16 years, I have certainly met people that meet the requirements. Do they want to have an e-bike? Maybe. I could see someone trading their vehicle and taking advantage of this but probably get another vehicle within the year. There are plenty of e-bike options in France though, and individual cities also offer interesting refunds.
Also, something else we think about a lot in France is the annual cost:
A car costs about €6,000/year (financing, insurance, repairs, tolls, fuel, etc.)[1].
Not entirely relevant since I'm in Belgium and not France, but it's a similar type of scheme with similar intent, get cars off of the road, and I think it deserves some attention.
As for some context, in Belgium we have a high tax burden on wages and one of the ways this was historically cushioned was by allowing companies to offer certain extra benefits to employees at a big tax advantage. One of these things was salary cars and it has resulted in an absolute explosion of subsidized cars among white collar workers. There's about 650000 of these cars on the road, and that's in a country of 11 million people.
About a year ago the government came up with a scheme that allows people to turn in their salary cars and receive the same tax advantaged amount in the form of a monthly mobility budget that can be spent on alternative forms of transportation. I have a little handy app that allows me to get rent scooters, do car sharing, get reimbursed a rental car. It's cumulative in the sense that whatever hasn't been spent by the end of the month, just rolls over into the next months balance. Last but not least, like the French scheme, it's allows for the purchases of e-bikes, bikes, electric motorcycles, scooters etc.
The French scheme seems a bit too binary in comparison.
The cars that will be traded in will be in such bad condition that otherwise they would be exported. Fewer exported cheap cars increase the demand for small cheap cars from other sources. The main product of the french automotive industry is small cheap cars.
This subsidy isn't purely about more bikes, and getting cars off the road, but also - indirectly - to the advantage of the french automotive industry.
I don't think you got your math right: previously one old car would be replaced by one new. The old one would (in your example) find another, presumably poorer local-market owner. With this subsidy, an old car get replaced with an e-bike. It is then scraped or, as you say, exported, so a poorer consumer either saves up and buys a new car, or doesn't. So in both examples you have either same number of new cars sold, or a deficit. Your theory doesn't hold up.
In real life, with subsidies like this, you end up with bigger number of used cars on the market, which also happen to be on average younger than up until this point, because a subsidy like this promotes giving up cars that would otherwise be held by their owners for longer. They also flood the market somewhat, so the price of a used car goes down. A poorer customer in market for a used car now has a better choice of cheaper and younger cars, so unlikely they'd be saving to buy a new car, benefiting car manufacturers.
In real-real life, there's too many variables and your conspiracy theory just doesn't make sense.
EDIT: oh, I now see that you meant that this would increase demand on the markets where used cars were traditionally exported to. Well, that makes sense, but a program like this is unlikely to make a big dent in a used car market abroad, collectively, especially that it is meant to take very old cars off the road, and emerging markets can afford newer cars already? And in particular it wouldn't benefit French manufacturers only.
Sounds like Cash fro Clunkers all over again. If it ends up the same, expect used car prices in France to be much higher for the next few yesrs!
Scrapping cars that are still running isn't the answer here, neither is drastically increasing the use of lithium batteries without a plan for disposing of them later.
This is billshit non-sense that won't die. C4C scrapped 700,000 used vehicles.
The USA sold 16,000,000 vehicles in 2007 and had ~250,000,000 registered vehicles.
What caused used car prices to spike was the fact that new car sales fell from 15 million a year, to 10 million a year, then took five years to recover. That's a net loss of 25 million new cars, or about 10% of the total number of registered vehicles.
In mostly nuclear-powered France it makes sense - both from an environmental and energy security standpoint to replace a large vehicle relying on imported fuels with one that has a 1.5kg li-ion battery.
> neither is drastically increasing the use of lithium batteries without a plan for disposing of them later.
The amount of battery in an ebike is miniscule compared to an EV. On the same order as the utility battery in a car. You could give everyone in europe an ebike and use less battery than is in EVs in california.
Cash for Clunkers wasn’t a bad program. It wasn’t amazing or anything-you could design something else to have far greater impact, but it was still a positive.
> With radio, air conditioning, seated on a comfy seat,...
Last year 40,000 people died in car crashes in just the US. Cars are one of the top contributors to climate change and air pollution. The space they take up prevents people who want to walk from being able to.
But yeah, that's all worth it so you can listen to the radio.
Upfront cost, maintenance costs and access to non-motorized paths and parking are the big advantages to ebikes over emotos for the average commuter case.
Where I’m at my 10 mile commute on a bike path is both faster and safer than via car or emoto.
Emotorcycles also (usually & rightly) require higher levels of certification to ride because they are more dangerous to the riders and other road users.
You can easily carry 3 kids or one adult as a passenger on an e-cargo bike. Or even better, each of the 4 people can ride their own bike and the total cost is still less than one car.
> one doesn't get wet
Fenders
> or freezing cold
Jacket
> goods can be easily transported
Most things people need in daily life can be easily carried by bike.
I get that it’s supposed to get cars off the road, but the assistance without trade-in is way lower and IIRC just for very low incomes (under 15000 euros or so) for the national subsidy.
That means if you need bulk transport you get little to no help on a cargo ebike (which tend to be on the expensive side especially as they’re not ultra common yet), unless you first buy a junker to trade in.
I’ve had a $200 used bike taking me to work every day for almost 10 years now.
$150 in maintenance every year (I like to give it in to the bike shop once a year for maintenance, otherwise basic upkeep with a monthly 30 min tuneup has been just fine) and about $500 in total repairs and replacements over the years means I’m spending about $220/year adjusted over its lifespan. I’d challenge someone to find a transport option where you’d spend that little in 2 months.
That's not my impression, most people I know here in central Copenhagen ride old beaters that cost anywhere between 50-150 EURs, it's a balance between comfort and price: You don't want your bike stolen.
You don't want the expensive stuff if reliability is of prime importance. You want a 3 speed hub gearbox and a cro moly steel frame. Or in areas where servicing a real bicycle is hard to find, a mid range 1x8 derailluer system with bog standard rim brakes. It's not big box cheap, but the former have been being made for a century and are almost identical. New is about €200-500
In places with a decent bicycling culture you can get one second hand for a hundred euros or so.
France has access to shops called Decathlon, who provide extremely good value for money pedal bikes and some pretty solid aftersales service for them as well.
There are also a lot of local grants offered by city councils, departements and regions, and they differ in their income conditions. I created a calculator that reference them all : https://mesaidesvelo.fr (in french)
Do they just scrap the cars they trade in? Isn't that a huge waste of material or do they re-use much of it? Is the benefit from taking a car off the streets greater than the pollution caused by throwing away a large amount of plastic/metal/toxic stuff?
It depends on the car, in the short/mid term the least polluting vehicle is the one you already own. But I feel like people won't trade a newish (ie less polluting car) for a e bike. They probably will trade in shitboxes which barely pass inspection, in that case it probably is a good move.
That being said electric bikes aren't the greenest thing out there, I've heard people boast about being ecological because they bought an ebike to replace their regular bike, or bought an EV to replace public transport + bike, in both case it's a net negative pollution wise.
Wow. I'm shocked that e-bikes are expensive enough for a subsidy of that size. I'd have expected e-bikes to run $750-$2000 (dollar and Euro are close to parity).
$750 e-bikes are not suitable as daily commuter bike - they use cheapest and generally unreliable components if you put miles on bicycle. They are ok for occasional weekend ride with kids but not much beyond that. (essentially quality wise they are equivalent to $100 Walmart bike)
Low end bike suitable for commute is more like $1000-$1200. $2000 is mid range that stops requiring monthly tuning and use some brand name components.
Gov subsidies push non trade-able goods prices up. Ebike is closer to global commodity than something like housing or education. French market is not big enough to move global prices either way. Short term price spike is possible but barrier to entry to import Chinese bikes are low so market will adjust quickly (unless law mandate that you have to buy bicycle made in France)
Even if the law merely mandates you buy a bike from a French retailer, I'd expect to see a substantial part of the subsidy captured by the retailer.
We see the same here in HVAC upgrade programs. To get the rebate, you have to have a state-licensed installation company do the install. When the rebates are increased, prices go up. When the rebate schemes end, there's a big push at the end of the program to get the install done while the rebates are in effect; once the schemes end, prices drop a bit [still end up higher than with-rebate, but by nothing like the full value of the rebate].
The good news is at least one ebike maker is making their bikes compatible with the Apple Find My network and another is using their own GPS tracking system.
I’d expect in the future we could see something like the phone account lock system to just completely disable stolen ebikes like we have seen for phones.
If that was the case there wouldn't be tens of iphones stolen every day from every big city in the west. And indeed the "Find my Iphone" feature is quite nice, but i know for a fact that even with CCTV footage of the thief, plus the location of the iPhone ping shown to the police on the same day, they will not investigate and close the case.
I've been biking in Austin TX for 11 years now, and the only time my bike was stolen was when I left it unlocked at my house for several months.
I'll grant that I've been fortunate and bikes do get stolen far too often (especially, I suspect, e-bikes), but I don't think we have anywhere near a 100% annual theft rate. I'd estimate under 30%. Could be that France is especially bad, though. My intuition is build almost entirely on the experiences of my friends and I here in Austin.
Since this is HN where pedantry rules, I'd like to point out that half of bikes being stolen every 6 months is actually a 75% annual theft rate, not 100%.
But I do agree, this is way higher than basically anywhere in the world except a few metros which are crime hotspots.
depends where you live, but if the infrastructure around you is decent, an e-cargo-bike can do 99% of what a car can do, and you can use short-term rentals for the rest
Okay how does an e-cargo-bike carry 400kg of parts, tools, and equipment, and go up mountains? Are they any good at pulling trailers, maybe 3500kg or so?
I think the objective of measures like this is to encourage use of ebikes for individual/family use, especially in urban or suburban settings (which means 80% of the population), not professional use in rural or mountain environments.
Emphasis on "lower income", the cap is 13k euros per year, which is under the annual min wage if you work full time. If you earn above that you get nothing at all
Also, all the options (lump sums and trade-ins) are capped to 40% of the price of the bike. So you'd have to trade your car for a 6000+ euros electric bike to get the full 3000 euros