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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
People who grew up in a typical post-ww2 american suburb may not have ever stayed somewhere that doesn't depend entirely on cars to get around outside of manufactured spaces like theme parks.
The American suburbian hellscape is real. I live in one. As far as I can tell the only solution is to burn everything down and start over. I'm open to suggestions though.
Yep, there’s a great book on this topic called “The Geography of Nowhere”. There’s a reason Disney designs things to feel like real places (that don’t exist in America anymore).
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.
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.
> the same mess of cars all over the place, like anywhere else
there are first attempts to reduce the car mess in some cities, mostly by reducing public surface parking and making public transport and biking a viable alternative to car ownership.
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.
> 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?
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.
The way I heard it explained was imagine a toddler jumping up and down on your bed. They could do this indefinitely. Now imagine a rugby player doing the same. The bed wouldn’t last very long.
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.
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.
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.
That's already the norm in the UK. To be honest I'd forgotten many residential roads in the US were dual cartridge ways. That does make things more tricky.
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.
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.
I would personally give way to vehicles of any kind when walking, rather than expect them to give way to me. I have better visibility and awareness, I am easily manueverable and I can stop faster.
I will not put my life in the hands of someone and just hope they see me in order to give way to me. I will take the initiative and be responsible for myself, not require others to be responsible for me... That is called "being a burden".
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Historically, suburbs absolutely were motivated by racism - it's called "white flight".
Today, it usually isn't about racism, it's mostly just continuing status-quo trends without question. But it's important to not put the initial motivation of those trends up on a pedestal.
Plenty of other data shows the same thing. Racism is very much a part of what built suburban america in the large even if it doesn't apply to you or your family personally.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
living in skyscrapers is no different than living in any apartment building, except the larger number of apartments with nice views.
what modern skyscapers are doing wrong is putting in only large-footprint high-end retail (like department stores) on the street level, or nothing at all. A zoning change to require small retail stalls at the street level would go a long way to making cities more livable. And all those people living upstairs generate a lot of foot traffic to help all sorts of businesses thrive. (what I'm talking about overall is what makes midtown NY so unpleasant compared to other NYC neighborhoods)
It is different. if you are very high up there is too much wind for a balcony and you have no relationship with street life (people look like ants). 5-stories aka Paris-size is human scale, anything much taller isn't. The higher the floor, the less frequently people leave their building.
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.
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.
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.
This! Car drivers like to complain about the cost of building bike infrastructure. But if you look at the statistics, bike infrastructure is like 1/100th of the cost per mile as car infrastructure.
Look to join neighborhood associations that influence city policy. Reach out to your council person or the mayor, depending on how big your city is. Talk to neighbors.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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. ;-)
I'm able to fix the front flat tires much more cheaply: just the cost of the inner tube about 6$. but the flat tires happen most frequently in the rear.
the problem is I can't remove the rear wheel myself because the frame doesn't fit perfectly. so, it's nearly impossible to remove the rear wheel unless you're really talented mechanically.
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.)
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.
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.
You could request your city council to attach a magnet to the ends of their sweep trucks. This would remove all nails and sharp ferromagnetic debris from the bike paths at no additional cost. They do this in certain countries to avoid flats in public buses.
Or Kevlar. I had kevlar tyres for a long while and they did much better at keeping me from flats. Also, over time, I learned which blocks are inexplicably thorn filled or nail filled and just avoided them as a general rule.
Also practice changing the inner tube till you can do it at dusk while late for a school meeting and annoyed in general :)
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.
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.
Same here. I commute 3 days per week, 15 km each way. It takes me 35-40 minutes, but I enjoy it and get great exercise. I spend the time thinking about my day, and am happier and more productive if I've gotten that exercise.
I do get the occasional flat, but I learned to change it myself, and can get a new 4$ tube on in about ten minutes.
I pack rain pants and a shell and just put them on if a bit of rain comes. I only give up when the roads are snowed in and haven't been cleared yet, which is only a few days per year.
Most complaints about weather and maintenance are easily dealt with with a few basic skills and simple preparation.
It might sound like year round commuting is extreme - but ive found it far easier and far more enjoyable than I expected.
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.
It's still more joyous than driving in those same conditions. The wind against the cheek, the body warming up with exertion, the endorphins or whatever when you finish, the biker is much closer to these things than the driver.
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.
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.
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.
> ”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.
Not at city speeds they’re not. City streets with EVs are much, much quieter than ones filled with roaring combustion engines. There’s a reason why regulations require EVs to have noise emitters when moving at low speeds (but they’re still much quieter than combustion cars!)
Not to mention the benefits of cleaner air, and far less waste heat being emitted.
Did you see the video I linked or are you just playing a game of repeating your beliefs?
Even electric cars at city speeds are above 75dbA, which may be of course less than a loud combustion motorcycle, but nonetheless already into "loud" territory.
Let me rephrase: in a real-world city environment, electric cars are very quiet compared to combustion cars. For one thing, unlike combustion cars, they are absolutely silent when stopped at intersections or in traffic!
Of course they do still emit some noise when moving, and this noise increases with speed. But not enough to annoy you when you’re trying to sleep at night, or have a conversation with a friend. It is always combustion vehicles which do that!
This isn’t my “beliefs”, but actual real-world experience of living in a busy, noisy city where there are large numbers of EVs.
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. :(
And intentionally designed to destroy communities that were experiencing very high economic growth and an easy way to implement redlining and segregation.
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?
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.
We change the zoning code so that it becomes legal to build a grocery store in those areas, then let the market do its work.
Yes, we rebuild those cities: but that need not be done by force. We can simply relax the draconian Euclidean zoning rules which prohibit traditional mixed-use city building.
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."
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.
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.
So, and I guess I will belabor the point, not all disabilities work the way you think.
I am freely mobile. But ... I have an extreme photosensitivity disorder. (At this point someone is going to make sunscreen noises and I sigh) There's a lot of us out there and we basically need to be under something to get around without accumulating more damage. During the night, I am completely free. During the day, I am wrapped up like the Invisible Man, scampering from one shadow to another, with layers and layers of protection. If I didn't have a car (with a special film covering the windshield, technically illegal), I don't know how I would get around.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
He's talking about infrastructure cost (how much it costs your municipality to provide the services that you use, like the roads) while you are talking about cost of life (how much it costs you to pay for other things that you need, like food or getting your car serviced).
On the infrastructure front, suburbia simply cannot compete with cities. Infrastructure cost is bound to be more efficient where people live in more densely populated areas. The length of pipes that a municipality needs to lay down in order to serve a single family home in the suburbs is the same as a whole 6-story building in the city (the diameters of the pipes might differ). On a per-capita basis, there's no contest.
A particular factor in the funding of suburban streets is that the initial paving is often subsidized by the federal government. Once the streets start crumbling down after ~20 years of usage, then the real cost hits. Here's an explanation by Not Just Bikes:
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.
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.
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.
I bumped a cyclist while I was edging out into a blind intersection (one of those that gets parked up all alongside it) because I was looking one way and he raced in front of me from the other. Like, neither of us really did anything wrong, but he was nearly severely injured and I nearly went to prison. Cars are dumb.
We also moved to NL and we love it, even though yeah there are surprisingly still lots of cars here. It's definitely the case that walking/biking has a hugely good effect on individuals and society. Just seeing people on the street, congregating, going from dinner to after dinner drinks, everything is just more human.
You’re only comparing the upsides of walking to downsides of cars. Re: Security, I lived in a walkable city, well, guess what happens when you walk in those beautiful utopic cities with diversity, you get mugged. And I was luck to not hold my boyfriend’s hand at the train station, a gay couple died for that. And it’s so forbidden to talk about it that, when you have a discussion about rape, many girls will admit to it, “but don’t talk about it, it would make people racist.” And indeed people would compound on this experience, while always dodging the racism labels, but always very distinctly describing this exact toxic behavior of walkable cities.
I’ve moved to a car-centric city with gated communities. Much less stress. No need to deal with predatory people in the building. No need to deal with awful people defending the predatory people. I miss walking, but it’s a straight up better quality of life.
> 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.
Adding to this, it also appears that even low levels of PM 2.5 air pollution has negative impacts on health over a long timeframe (including increased risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, death, and more).
WHO is now recommending average annual exposure targets should be set 2-3 times lower than current EPA levels and a whopping 5 times lower than EU standards. Serious health complications occur above this level. [1]
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.
I don't think you're wrong per se, but I hesitate to say that the problems we have are that everyone individually but also en masse decided to move to the suburbs and also drive big honkin' cars everywhere, all the time. I think it's more likely there were systems and incentives (both economic and cultural) that led to this. I think this is actually good news, because it means we can fix this with some (slow) cultural shifts and (less slow, hopefully) policy changes. If we really had to directly convince 10,000,000s of people to move into townhomes we'd have no hope.
(FWIW I've lived in lots of places, tiny apartments, townhomes, big apartments, single rooms, mcmansions, old houses. I've been lucky enough to more or less choose them--most people live wherever they can--and for the last ~10 years have chosen tiny apartment. I like the idea of living small, they're a lot more maintainable, cheaper, and I used to move a lot so having a ceiling on the amount of stuff I could have was real attractive)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was probably good value for anyone that owned any surrounding property.
Ideally the increase in property value should be captured by the public who made the investment - self funding effectively. But that's just the old LVT argument.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
As transit gets good people start to realize they don't need to drive so they don't even if they could. Yes driving gets easier, but transit should stand well even in the face of little traffic
> 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.
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)
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.
Your problems seem to highlight especially America's problems, where "raving lunatics" seem to be found also in road rage, at groceries, churches, and schools (highway shootings, especially).
But in Japan, Switzerland, Barcelona, Italy, Ireland, Austria, Sweden, or the Netherlands I've not experienced this much; in many of these cultures since the public bus also serves schools and the elderly, they solve these problems.
Ever been in a car driving next to a raving lunatic? Nearly get forced offroad at 60mph into a gully by a braindead 'passer'? 'Throwing tax money...' ... you mean, like building yet another $500M freeway that almost immediately becomes congested? (Heavy shopping: Did that recliner fit in the back of your BMW?)
I've ridden metro buses since I sold my Dodge van in 2006. Total raving lunatics: 1. Collisions/repairs,oil changes, tires, license fees: $0. Total buses that chugged: none. Grocery-shopped by bus? Always. Waiting for a bus that never came? 1.
Heavy shopping? delivered. (It's a thing now.)
Bad weather: usually I wait until tomorrow.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
Unless you consider that most areas (urban and rural) in both Texas and Montana were founded before the car existed; that the ebike has higher speed, higher carrying capacity, and lower costs of ownership.
If you add that in with legacy residents complaining of population booms and losing "the old ways", or nostalgia for self reliance, then Montana fits in perfectly. (Ps I rode in the ~1 uber in Missoula in 2018, and the hotel I stayed in Bozeman in 2022 had free bikes - and many bike lanes, and a nice bike trail)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> just build new cities less around cars and let people choose that life if they want
We should modify existing cities with better transit and make them hostile to cars, and then offer excellent car transfer points. If you want to use the city, use the train.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
> 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).
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
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:
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.
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.
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.
> If we give every person a car to drive every day, today - that's enough to make it unsustainable.
Leaving aside that we aren't, sustainability necessarily implies perpetual increase. This hypothetical doesn't make sense. If the demand were there to supply everyone with a vehicle, we would, the materials are there. That would of course result in environmental encroachment, but not indefinitely. Plus vehicles on the road will all be EV in the coming decades.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You broke the site guidelines egregiously here. I've already scolded the other user in a different context, but it's not ok to break the rules regardless of how wrong/provocative another comment is or you feel it is.
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.
Oh how the goalposts doth shift. We are talking about ebiking, not walking. Those of us who are mindful of ecology, climate, and urbanism know lack of walkability is a problem. It doesn't have to be, but it is. It is another issue worth addressing at the policy and funding level.
If people can walk for some of their trips 50-80% of the year and ebike for most of the rest, that is a huge win even if not everyone can adapt to the 'unbearable' sacrifices that go along with that kind of change. "But not literally everyone can do it so it's a terrible suggestion and you are an elitist." Ok cool.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I think you need to check your math. There are 14 times more of these electric mopeds, etc than cars, but they only have 4x more impact than the EVs. So one EV displaces about 3.5x more carbon emissions than the mopeds.
To make the 2030 halve our emissions deadline, and 2050 net zero deadline with just little city vehicles, we’ll need to abandon the suburbs, exurbs and rural buildings and infrastructure that we already have, and replace it without producing any additional emissions. Also, in the US, most cities that experienced significant growth after ~ 1950 need to have their new parts razed and rebuilt to accommodate public transit routes and add walkable amenities.
None of that can possibly happen at sufficient scale in the next 7 years, and it certainly would have massive environmental impact if it did.
Alternatively, we could switch all cars to EV’s, use existing construction and infrastructure, and get a > 75% reduction in transportation carbon, even without cleaning up the power grid.
In reality, we are already cleaning up the grid, and time of use subsidies are doing a good job of moving time-shiftable demand to high-production times, when the grid is cleaner.
EVs are currently one of the biggest, easy to time shift loads.
So, we can have a 90% solution to transportation carbon, or go for a 97.5% improvement (rounding the 3.5x improvement moving to mopeds would give up to 4x), but then emit way more carbon than total transportation emissions while we rebuild an unprecedented number of cities all at once.
I’m all for public transit, and think all new urban / suburban housing should be built along high capacity transit corridors, but doing that isn’t going to solve global warming in time.
Also I'd just like to add: everyone forgets that not everyone lives near an urban center. It'd be fine to get rid of 90-95% of the internal combustion cars/trucks and then move on to the next biggest target. We don't need to jump to 100% on everything.
This is harder than you'd think. There are something like 282 million cars in the US. Let's say we want to replace half of them with a zero emissions EV, so 140m, and those cost $25k. That's $3.5 trillion we're gonna burn, plus idk, dealing with 140m waste ICE cars. This is not a problem we're gonna solve with EVs any time soon.
Oh I understand the difficulties, I have designed a bunch of charge stations. (Civil Engineer) Most of the grid infrastructure I know of in my area is near capacity too and can't really accommodate new hookups.
My point is just that I see a lot of 100% goals and I'd really like to shift the narrative to 90-95%.
Hah! Yeah ok fair. I think along with the 90/95 thing I'd like to see us think more in terms of incentives, trajectories, and underlying causes. People are practically entirely the products of systems and cultures, and whenever we're try interventions at the exit of the function they're uniformly despised.
I basically agree. We can't rebuild our cities in 7 years, so we have to "patch" cars to be zero emissions. How do you get tens of millions of people to do that in 7 years though? Keep in mind average yearly income is something like $45k and most Americans have less than $500 in savings--not exactly a market ready to wholesale replace their cars.
I think it's clear that if you want to halve transportation emissions in 7 years you have to ban their current ICE car, and the only way you get away with that is to give them a comparable EV. We still have to build out mass transit and rezone everything, and also hit the mute button on NIMBYs everywhere, but short term you have to do a swap, like immediately. The money required for this is... astronomical, it's at least trillions for an ICE/EV swap, but you also need subsidies for auto manufacturers and developers, and you also need to weather the political storm of essentially stealing cars (a huge part of American culture) and putting grocery stores in the suburbs.
> I think you need to check your math. There are 14 times more of these electric mopeds, etc than cars, but they only have 4x more impact than the EVs. So one EV displaces about 3.5x more carbon emissions than the mopeds.
This is not the case. The cited 4x in oil demand is just a part of the main problem (CO2 emissions). E-car carbon emissions over the lifecycle are still ~50% of fossil fuel cars, due to their large manufacturing co2 footprint and impact of the 10-100x higher electricity usage to power them. The battery sizes body masses are O(100x) bigger than e-bikes and energy usage per km O(10x) bigger.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nonsense. What people want is a hard reality compared to the 4 year political cycle which ultimately drives policy.
You are, of course, free to devise strategies to win the public's hearts and minds. I will root for you in this endeavor. But what you aren't allowed to do (outside the comfort of your armchair) is to deny political reality. Your constituency simply won't stand for it, and will root you out like a bad tooth - and I say that as public policy practitioner, that was voted in and out of office.
It's for this very reason that moneyed interests that outlast the political cycle have an outsized policy impact: they can push their agenda for decades until they manage to change "what people want", forcing the politicians to follow suit or disappear. Car dependency is a good example.
You seem to be arguing for my point. Just because you couldn’t deal with what people want as an elected representative doesn’t mean it can’t be changed, isn’t being changed right now.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Fabergé 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
The trouble with trains is they are unresponsive to people’s needs. The #1 problem w/ trains in Europe is they are frequently two or three times the cost of air travel. So long as that is the case Europe has a carbon problem. I guess you could make air travel three times as expensive but isn’t the answer, if you don’t want far-right populist parties to take over, to get the cost of rail down?
In the U.S. we have almost forgotten the memory of resentment against railroads (eg. the word “railroading”) who would build tracks past your town but no station, instead they’d build the stationa few miles up the track where they owned all the land and could take all the profit of rising real estate values.
No wonder people were in such a hurry to tear up all the old railroad right of way as soon as they had the opportunity.
spins a scenario where people who can’t imagine they can afford to eat meat (kinda ridiculous when they can 3-d print organisms and have enough energy to spare to drive plate tectonics) reject the idea of building a planetary transit system based on rail because: doesn’t the current generation get to decide where they go and not have that decision forced on them?
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.
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.
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.
To be fair I'm not saying ban all cars, but otherwise you're right. Over the last ~100 years a lot of cultures and activities have grown up around super easy car ownership and use. Just like, teaching your kid to drive is a big cultural thing. It's a huge lift, but the downsides of car-centric societies are pretty well known at this point.
I don't for a second think the US will do this, FWIW. We'll probably over the next 10-30 years give the highways and interstates to AI (at insane expense) and never slough off the scourge of SUVs in the last mile. The US probably has enough natural resources to manage this, though as fewer and fewer Americans want to be miners and auto workers the burden will shift internationally, which is its own moral issue. We'll still have all the problems of noise, tire pollution, pedestrian/cyclist/motorist deaths, drunk driving, waste cars, super inefficient use of energy and labor, and an increasingly isolated and sedentary society, but IMO it's clear the US is fine with all of that.
What I think will actually chafe us is watching other societies do better. It's already happening. The wealthier among us travel to Asian or European countries see how they're not car-centric, and feel envy. They agitate for it in their communities, which puts them--even more--at odds with other US cultures that love cars, and political strife intensifies. The elite will force auto manufacturers to stop producing ICEs, car America will rebel, blah blah blah.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
- 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.
> 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.
People who think their will be this mass migration away from personal cars once buses, trains, and bike paths are everywhere are completely delusional.
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)
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.
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.
I posted using the twin cities metro area as my reference. Maybe in the downtown core of the cities this is true but biking in winter is not an option for the majority of the population in the combined metro area.
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.
I realized I had just assumed that electric buses were significantly heavier than ICE buses. They can be much heavier; however, using an aluminum frame or smaller batteries (if you don't need the range), can bring the weight down considerably. It's hard to get exact weights because the weight varies by configuration.
I was mostly thinking of efficiency issues. But apparently, they have lead to issues with road wear in Indianapolis[0], although this may in part be due to poor planning on the transit agency or public works' part.
Huh I hadn't realized this might be an issue; thanks for the info. I know roads are rated for weight but I didn't think electric buses might have been so heavy to generally exceed it.
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.
Higher tax is not a must, one can have amazing public transportation infrastructure like in Tokyo or Hong Kong, but most US cities can't do that with all the roads and highways in place.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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:
Build efficient and affordable public transportation first, and without worrying about getting pushed onto the tracks. Japanese never banned cars, and people are predominantly using public transport. Switzerland never banned cars, and it pollutes far less than US. Also they accomplished that without letting >30mph e-bikers blasting through sidewalks.
It is sad a lot of western progressive totally forget about how western civilization was built. And resorting to “macro “ control strategies that never really worked.
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.
It doesn’t work in the developed world either. We all hate pollution, sitting in traffic, lack of green space, obesity, lack of childhood autonomy … and yet society seems incapable of coordinating on solving it.
Most of Europe is small, walkable cities. There are of course still highways and city roads, but most things here function as you're describing. Come on over, the water's warm ;)
> 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)
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.
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.
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".
The majority of people do not choose to live in one town and commute to work to a different one that doesn't have a good transit connection with the first.
The solution sure isn't providing even more infrastructure to the method of transport that is least efficient (passengers/hr, ongoing cost, space wasted for parking), most polluting (particulate, noise) and most dangerous to others (injuries per Km travelled).
People constantly defend cars based on how convenient it is for the person driving them without taking into consideration how their choice affects everybody outside their car. This method of transport is unique in the magnitude of its externalities compared to the alternatives.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 1000× cars easily.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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?
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.
- If we're serious about meeting the 2030 "halve our emissions
"We¹" are not serious about it.
Biden talks pretty but has increased the production of fossil fuels,
beyond what even Trump did and we are now exporting more LNG than
any other country. (That changes, we are at the top, the nr 1 spot
might change between competitors now and again)
Yet we are all so happy with Biden cause he -says- the right words.
Same with Norway.
So many people saying the right things at the right places with the
right photo ops.
Yet we are not producing more fossile fuels than ever before.
The state has decided that we will increase production until 2026,
and -then- we will really cut back.
Yeah right.
Then we saw last winter many countries opening up coal powerplants again
to have enough energy. You cannot be serious about 2030 and the climate
in general, when you restart that kind of power plant.
¹ Those who run countries and have been elected to do so.
> 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.
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
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
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
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.
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
I don't have a source. I just think that the habitat loss from roads/parking lots is massive, pavement changes watersheds, tires cause massive pollution, rubber farms and plants are disgusting, iron ore mines are disgusting, rare earth mineral mines are disgusting, the money we'd spend on building/buying/maintaining cars and their infrastructure is an unimaginable blunder (literally trillions), waste cars are a disaster. Like if something came from space and forced this on us it would be a total catastrophe. Us choosing it doesn't change that fact.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I've had two bikes stolen and one car stolen. I've had other attempts at stealing my bike. I've been in both bike accidents and car accidents over the years as well.
Anyway, your quote was "it feels like 50/50 it’ll get stolen". It just seems problematic mixing what you feel and some objective probability - it's easy to give people the impression the chance of bike theft is actually that. I mean, say "I'm afraid - here are the actual odds..."
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!
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.
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".
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
That's my point though is with the eBike, I can dress warm for the start of the ride, and then crank up the pedal assist when I start warming up too much.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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).
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.
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).
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cycling anywhere near 20mph is beyond most peoples physical capabilities... with the small exception of steep downhills where the energy is "free" (at least compared with walking where you capture none of it) anyways.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
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> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
IANA automotive engineer either. I'll quote national bureau of economic research:
> The probability of a fatality, conditional on a collision, is 0.19 percent -- or about one in five hundred. The authors find that being hit by a 1,000-pound heavier vehicle results in a 47 percent increase in the baseline probability of being killed in the accident...
I can imagine parents not wanting to take the risk of being outside two-tonne metal boxes on the road with their children. Infrastructure matters a lot.
I drop my kids off at school on the way. They bike too. Started with a trail-a-bike, and now they are their own bikes and I bike with them to school on my way.
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.
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...
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.
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).
> (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.
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.
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?
This was 10-15 years ago, so I don't have my notes lying around. However, I do remember that it was based on the calorific efficiency of bread bought at a supermarket. Other foods may vary - for instance if you grow potatoes in your back garden then it's probably going to be a lot more efficient.
I can well believe that there is a 10:1 ratio between energy in and mechanical energy out of a human.
However my point wasn't that cars and humans are about the same. That's probably only true in the "same order of magnitude" sense. My point was that humans are way less efficient at propelling a bicycle than an electric motor is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.......
> 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.
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.
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 £20 a day. Not a special deal, that’s just the price. A week would make that £140. An old car would cost almost twice that in taxes. Then you have maintenance, insurance, MOT, and devaluation.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
A good test for this theory could be the price and availability of the less finely tuned e-bikes, eg based on the 8-fun swxk front hub motor manufactured since the 00's and the low tech pedal assist sensor (as opposed to torque sensor).
It does not look electric (Hidden battery in frame). Is super cheap ($900). Has normal tires. (easy replacement) and is fairly light (small battery). The belt-drive eliminates all issues with a standard metal chain.
All the pros of an electric bike and none of the cons. (assuming we're talking about class 1 ebikes)
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 £700-1,000,000. Same thing half way in will be £1.5-2mil, anything within a short walk or bike ride of any central office will be £3 or £4 million at least (assuming you can even find anything "normal" in terms of housing). An entry-level Tesla is £40k, and a "good" non-FAANG SWE salary might be £75-100k.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
Practically all of the US includes almost everywhere I have lived except for major cities. Especially in the Midwest and ESPECIALLY in the South walking to get groceries is a death wish.
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.
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.
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.
We are tiny though, mostly high density and had a great rail inhertence. Given where we could be, I think we are car obsessed.
Note also that car use and the right to use residential streets as commuter rat runs
is becoming bound up with stupid culture war politics.
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.
I just got back from a road trip in France and the UK and it's funny how much of the reddit-tier discourse is correct yet simultaneously so wrong. There are plenty of rural towns where everyone owns cars. There are highways, strip malls, large shopping centers with massive parking lots, and populated areas with bus service at best. The difference is the scale and the US lands embarrassingly far on one side of it. Even in the smallest rural towns in France we visited, we could hop on regional rail to the nearest large metro area.
>> 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.
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.
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).
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.
Your point #1 was the case for our family as well. E-bikes allowed us to go from two cars to one car which has been amazing. So many of these conversations get caught up in ban bikes vs. ban cars and it is exhausting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course the have their biases, but they actually only ones who see the cases mostly not covered in statistics and they are the ones who can say whether helmet would save someone or not. The problem is that our culture is biased against fatalities. Even in this discussion there are mostly links to graphs about death rates. But these people in ER are the ones who see a lot of cases where death would be better outcome. Looking at my neighbours taking care of almost completely paralyzed son (accident not related to transport), I tend to agree.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Scooters live a hard and short life from what I have understood. So they are not very environmentally friendly given their resource intensity over their life cycle.
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
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
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.
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
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.
"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."
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.
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]
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 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%
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.
In my experience bikes with Bosch/Bafang motors/batteries will be more reliable and easier to find service for. There are many brands/options/price points with that constraint.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
I'm a big e-bike fan but they are not a universal magic bullet. To be practical for daily needs you must be
--In a city or otherwise have a fairly short commute (i.e. less than 20 miles; probably less than 10 for most people)
--Where it's usually not raining or freezing
--Where riding a bike is safe
--Where you have a way to bring the bike indoors or otherwise protect it from theft at your destination without needing a lock that weighs as much as the bike.
There are a great many places in the world that meet those criteria, but there are also a great many that don't. And a huge number of the "don't" places are in the US, unfortunately.
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.
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..
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.
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.
with cars, you expect that you would be able to buy today's new and shiny in a few years time, a bit used and scuffed but still useable, for cheaper.
With EVs, that's just started to happen, and even then with inflation the price point is just barely in range, plus with battery degradation fears and lack of easy access to parts etc...it's difficult to manage to get an EV in the lower ranges that most people who depend on the 3rd/4th hand cars for their travel needs.
Ebikes are just too expensive now, and I don't see how they will reach the price point to reach the used-vehicle-buying masses...
especially since bikes are not "registered" and thus easily stolen (and police doesn't care), and with most company bikes having proprietary stuff that makes it unlikely to make certain you will get parts 10 year down the line.
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 :
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.
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.
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.
Public transit is hot garbage in 99% of cities in the US. Bus routes represent a shuttle for moving the poor, elderly, and infirm between various public assistance offices. It won't go away, but it's unlikely to ever be more than that.
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.
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.
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.
I live in an apartment, I'm unable to install a charger in the garage for various reasons. But I can take the battery off my e-bike, bring it home and charge it.
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").
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
If people can connect small scale renewable power grids (think solar powered grids of a few acres) present alongside highways to charging facilities the revolution would truly happen especially in sunny places (think Texas, Africa, South Asia etc.) !
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.
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 cliché 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
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)
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.
It is crazy in California - it feels like almost every kid here in coastal california has an eBike. Which is great! (Even if they are a bit nuts with them at times)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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'.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I can speak to my own experience as a regular e-bike rider in my city which has built one basic bit of infrastructure that's dedicated to micromobility.
I've been commuting on an e-bike for the past year, and I've recently ordered a replacement e-bike with newer technology (https://www.rohloff.de/en/products/speedhub/e-14). I have racks with waterproof panniers mounted semi-permanently. I pack my work clothes and laptop in bags that I can easily slide into and out of the panniers. I use an StVZO light powered by the bike's battery pack that illuminates the path in front of me effectively while respecting oncoming people.
I live in an American city that built a 10-mile rails-to-trails crushed gravel "linear park" about 8 years ago, and I've been commuting on it by bicycle since it opened, at first on a non-electric bicycle. It's about 10 miles long, and I ride the entire length of it every day I go into the office.
The trail's cost to develop and maintain is a fraction of what it cost to build and maintain infrastructure for vehicular traffic. I haven't been able to find any reports of injuries from collisions on the trail. It's quiet and peaceful to ride along. The air is mostly free of emissions from gasoline motors, tires, or brake pads. The only "road closures" have been due to work on roads that cross it. There is never a traffic jam. There are no stop lights or stop signs, only crosswalks where motorist traffic stops for me as soon as I get to them.
Once I get downtown where I work I never have to worry about traffic, since I can bypass it in the bike lanes. You have to pay a lot to park a car near my office, but I can stow my bike in a locked cage for free. If I want to combine my commute time with cardio time all I need to do is switch off the motor, pedal away, and take a shower once I get to the office. If I instead just want to get there without needing to change clothes or anything I switch on the motor.
There is a shopping district about 2 miles from my neighborhood that's often congested. There's a quiet street and a raised trail through a shallow lake that I often take my e-bike on. Trying to navigate the parking lots is a nightmare with hardly any parking and near-constant gridlock on busy days. I zip past all of that and park at the racks directly in front of the entrance to the stores. I don't get bags at the store, but instead transfer what I buy directly from the cart into my panniers.
Maintenance on my e-bike is a fraction of maintenance for my car. I have sealant in my tubes, and that's made the occasional puncture a non-event for me. The space that the bike takes in my garage is almost negligible. It's light enough to hoist up on a wall hook. I charge the removable battery pack from a 120v outlet.
If something were to really go wrong with my e-bike, I have another much less expensive meat-powered bike with a rack that I can transfer the panniers to and use while I get the e-bike repaired.
My workplace has a sensible WFH policy, where I come into the office a couple of times a week for in-person collaboration and can WFH the rest of the time. I check the weather forecast for the week on Sunday and move in-person meetings around to days when it's going to be nicest. If I really need to go in on a bad weather day, my bike has full-size fenders, and I have shoe covers, gloves, and water-resistant clothing that make riding in the rain not so bad. I still prefer to ride on the trail in the rain rather than drive my car mainly because traffic tends to be worst on those days.
My own quality of life has benefited immensely from an e-bike and a single relatively inexpensive gravel trail that my city converted from some old railroad tracks. As more people discover the joys of e-biking, I hope that translates to more pressure on municipalities to build infrastructure that makes micromobility more safe and comfortable for everyone.
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.
The statistic you cite show exactly what one would expect: Bicycles are less safe than cars. Mopeds and e-bikes are mixed in with bicycles, so it's impossible to tell how safe or unsafe those are. It's important to look at the statistics per trip or per mile traveled, rather than absolute numbers.
Cars are around 20 injury/total collisions per 10,000,000 trips. Bicycles (which includes mopeds and e-bikes) are about 10x that, at around 15 injury collisions per 1,000,000 trips.
My city doesn't release similar statistics, but I suspect they'd be worse. Does your city enforce traffic rules for e-bikes? Mine doesn't. They run red lights and are a menace. At the same time, they don't take the same skill as riding a bicycle, so there are many idiots out there. I would guess they're about 10x less safe than bicycles in turn (here).
As a footnote, your trucks are crazy scary. Do you know why? They outnumber all other vehicles _in absolute numbers_ for collisions, despite being a tiny portion of the trips.
> The statistic you cite show exactly what one would expect: Bicycles are less safe than cars
Let's place the blame on the people at fault of those injuries, not on the victims. Otherwise we would believe that schoolchildren are dangerous because of all those mass shootings.
So, who kills whom? Cars cause the vast majority of the injuries and deaths. Yes, pedestrians and cyclists are the ones dying, but only because car drivers are killing them. Replace cars with lighter vehicles and both pedestrian end cyclist deaths would plummet.
How many people are injured or killed by bikes or mopeds? You called them a "menace", but how many people have they killed in the past five years, and how does it compare to cars? Who is the actual menace, the schoolchildren or the shooters?
The problem in my city is that the people at fault are generally:
- Idiots on new-age vehicles (especially those one-wheeled things)
- Idiots who park on the stop on the side of the road with emergency blinkers (hi, Amazon delivery drivers)
- Idiots who stop in the middle of an intersection
All of those cause unsafe driving, as other drivers are forced to maneuver around things the roads and traffic weren't designed for.
My goal isn't to assign blame, though. My goal is to make sure as few people die as possible. Personally, I'd also usually rather risk death than a crippling injury. If I die, that sucks. If I'm a quadriplegic for the rest of my life, that sounds a lot worse. I'm not sure why you're okay with cyclists dying.
As points of data:
- I once crashed a car on a highway. My only accident, in many years of driving. The car was totaled. No one was injured. It was pretty amazing.
- I've injured myself seriously on bicycles several times, despite far fewer miles commuted and being much more careful. Only one of those involved a car. One involved a pothole, and the most serious one, a hidden metal plate.
Having an engineered metal cage around you does wonders for safety.
I stopped seriously commuting on my bicycle when I had a child. The risk wasn't worth it. I'd start again if the city were designed for it, but I'd want dedicated bicycle arteries -- bikeways without cars, pedestrians, or idiots on one-wheels. I'd be okay with ebikes and scooters IF there were some ways to keep idiots off (traffic enforcement, licensing, or whatever). In the city I was born, somehow people seem able to handle ebikes, scooters, and mopeds safely. In the city I live in, they somehow can't.
> The problem in my city is that the people at fault are generally
How do you know? My city does publish statistics and theirs do not match your opinion.
> My goal isn't to assign blame, though. My goal is to make sure as few people die as possible
If you want fewer people killed, finding out who is killing them is an important first step. My city's statistics show that cars are at fault 70% to 80% of the time when they collide with a pedestrian or a cyclist. Not to mention the obvious fact that the car is the one physically doing the killing, as collisions between pedestrians are resolved with a "sorry" rather than a visit to the ER.
> I'm not sure why you're okay with cyclists dying
And here is where I stop this conversation, as you are obviously not acting in good faith. For the record, I am a cyclist and have not driven a car in my life. Just to underline how assissine your accusation is.
> How do you know? My city does publish statistics and theirs do not match your opinion.
How do you know the sun shines during the day? Because I live here. I see what causes unsafe conditions on roads.
And yes, although cities are different, by-and-large, the statistics published by your city DO match my opinion.
> Not to mention the obvious fact that the car is the one physically doing the killing, as collisions between pedestrians are resolved with a "sorry" rather than a visit to the ER.
Not so for bicycles, and even less so for new-age electric devices going 20-30MPH depending on jurisdiction.
My city has a 25MPH speed limit for cars (although most cars break it). For new-age electric vehicles, the speed (and injuries) are similar. However, drivers are licensed. Most one-wheels, mopeds, ebikes, and similar are driven by idiots without licenses or clear law enforcement.
Yeah, and you could get much better results if we would agree on taxing the boomers for their irresponsible car overuse.
My rich boomer parent bought a new car right before going into retirement, and now she burns even more petrol than she used to burn irresponsibly before retirement.
Previously there were a lot of excuses around needing it for work related stuff, which was complete bullshit of course but now she will burn petrol to go on holidays for 3-4 days with in general at least 1000km roundtrip.
The worst part is that she has the time/flexibility and also money to take the train (there even is a serious reduction card for seniors). But she doesn't. Because she can. Because the car doesn't look expensive enough.
Seriously it's really needed to tax the boomer to death on that front at least, they already own all the valuable real estate we can't let them get away with burning more of our future.
It won't happen because they hold all the political power thanks to their numerical majority (especially among voters).
Cars, like many current problems, are a boomer related/created problem. If you want to fix the wound, you need to extract the thing that created the wound in the first place.
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.