They don’t just look like giant asshole, the act like it ! I have seen a few here too (Gatineau/Quebec/Canada) and they love to piss off people by spewing that black stinky smoke directly in the face of bike riders and people walking around. Pisses me off that these assholes make enough money to buy these huge trucks just to piss off good people.
I wish i could also move more people with me on the bicycle
Depending on the size of those people: bike child seat, bike trailer, or they can ride their own bicycle. Cargo bikes can easily carry two kids or one adult without even using a trailer.
It would also be great if there was some sort of heater/AC in it as well
That is called “dress for the weather”. Even snowflake pinko commies like me can do it.
I ride from -20 to +35C in basically any weather and since jackets and shorts exist that’s all that’s needed. My friends have their own bikes they can ride…
People be growing up knowing nothing but absolute car dependency and the infrastructure that comes with it. They cannot fathom any other way of existing.
I should have been more verbose. We as a society (in North America especially but also elsewhere) have suffered through decades of redlining that has resulted in racial and economic divides.
The wealthiest suburbs are being subsidized by the poorest neighbourhoods with all the money being funneled into infrastructure that directly supports car dependency.
In order to participate in society, you are now required to own, maintain and insure your own vehicle(s).
I am suggesting that we’ve been robbed of a way of life where cars are not necessary to survive. Where your kids can hop on their own bikes and safely take themselves to where they need to go without worrying about if they’ll be struck by a car.
I’m talking about active transport not as a hobby for the privileged, but as a normality for all.
Where I am there are hills everywhere. You know that old joke about walking five miles uphill to school in the snow, and ten miles uphill to get home? That’s here. Plus, it’s the UK, so when it snows, the roads and pavements are lethal.
Plus, some people have kids under 5 😉
More seriously though, because of the amount of hills, and the fact that most people work all day, bikes are not the best option here. The nearest supermarket is several miles away with a lot of hills in between. If you’ve got plenty of free time, riding to the shops with the kids could be fun, but for most people public transport is the answer. It’s just a shame that it’s terrible here .
I’d love to get an ebike, but at the moment the price is too high, from what I’ve seen. The cheapest ones seem to be over £1,000, unless you get the little fold up bikes, but they don’t look like they’d be comfortable for a long ride where you’re pedaling lots.
A gravel bike style would be better here too, simply because we’re in the valleys, and lots of the trails are a bit rough.
Back to the point though, getting to the shops and carrying a week’s worth of shopping on a bike with young kids is impractical here. It would be great if it was practical, but other than the hills, we don’t have the infrastructure for the most part. The roads have to be shared, even if it’s just for now, and there are lots of stretches here where there’s not the room for bikes with motor vehicles, and especially not on the pavements. This time of year is even worse - it’s dark in the morning and night, and the weather is usually crap. All of it increases the risk of accidents, and that’s the last thing any of us want.
Well I live in Sweden and we have snow here too buddy. Lousy public transport sucks though, but that’s what you get in a carcentric society, no options…
Exactly, you live in a country that doesn’t shut down because of half a millimetre of snow. We genuinely get public transport shutting down if there’s snow, and we’ve infamously had trains stop running because of the wrong type of leaves on the line. For a country that mostly has adverse weather conditions, we’re absolutely useless if the weather’s anything but dry and sunny.
I honestly don’t know what we can do here to get better public transport and encourage people away from cars. Once you’re further down the valley, there’s enough room to build other transport methods alongside the roads to allow a transition, but further up, there’s barely enough room for cars to pass each other in some places, which means that buses would struggle too, and there’s no room to make a one way loop to free up space either.
Jacket doesn’t do shit for rain. Believe me, I’m an Aspie and I have too much sensory issues for getting out of home in bad weather. The day it rains is the day i WFH. All the problems stem from the fact that the jacket is too close to the body, generating sweat (and I already sweat too much without it), not to mention it’s not watertight. An enclosed velomobile would probably solve the problem, but I don’t think this sort of vehicle is legal in Poland and can guarantee getting to the office as fast as I’d on a motorcycle or even a moped.
Same. And that includes snow and ice, for those at the back that think that riding a bike in winter is only possible in LA. If people can walk in that weather, people can ride a bike even more easily as the exercise keeps you warmer.
And a small distance to my destination. When my previous job was 8 km from home, I could do the journey in half an hour on a Xiaomi M365 e-scooter, very popular in Poland. But unfortunately our company was absorbed by another one, with office 16 km away, which means prohibitively long (for my sleep-deprived ass) 55 minute commute. And no, public transit doesn’t make it shorter. So a motorcycle driving license it is.
Clickbait headline, and stupid article. At no point are they making the claim that EVs are worse than combustion engines. The author posits that bicycles and walking are even more climate friendly than driving a car of any kind (duh). This entire article could be replaced by the sentence, “We should keep building trams and bike lanes in the EV era”.
The point is that the money spent on electric car subsidies went mostly to more wealthy people and took money away from investing in things like better public transport.
Electric motorcycles do not belong on bicycle and pedestrian paths. My biggest issue with ‘ebike’ users is they do not understand or care about trail etiquette.
I don’t know, the people riding bicycles over the 3 foot wide sidewalk on the bridge (which has a bike lane going each way) in my city come across as selfish assholes.
As much as I agree, these are different things. EVs are fixing greenhouse gases. While the others are also bad things, they aren’t really global climate changers.
Not op, but the material gathering and building of EVs is far more energy intensive and resource intensive than gas cars. They do even out but it takes a number of years on the road depending on the vehicle.
Additionally they are very heavy which requires more infrastructure maintenance and therefore more emissions.
That is to say EVs are not a sure fire improvement and it depends on the car, the place you are, the supply chain producing your car, where it’s going to end up, and your own driving habits.
Or we could just invest in rail instead of doubling down on private vehicles. Then we can be sure.
Doesn’t need to be a “green energy paradise”, just a reasonably well connected first world country.
Take a look at Electricity Maps. Unless you live somewhere isolated or with very poorly developed grid infrastructure (or some central US states, apparently), you should see a non-trivial amount of electricity being generated by non-fossil fuels. For example, at the time of typing this 77% of the electricity I’m using is low-carbon and 50% of it is renewable.
That’s the kicker. EVs don’t have to rely on fossil fuels to operate (but they can make use of them depending on the grid infrastructure). ICE cars on the other hand are burning fuel wherever they go.
Walking or cycling will always be the least polluting means of getting around, but if you really need a car then you could do a lot worse than getting an electric one.
The problem is, the way I see it, all energy use is connected. Basically the problem we have is energy consumption grows faster than clean energy production. So requiring more green energy in this context still sucks. Even where I live where all of our energy is green (at least in the grid), extra energy can be sold either via selling it to other provinces/states, or by making deals with companies to do their production here where energy is cheap and green.
Energy is a commodity on a market. If you use it to inefficiently move people, you can’t use it for other things. Remember that to move a 150 lbs person in a car, you have to move about a ton and a half of car…
I’m really sceptic about that kind of metrics because many of them take carbon offsets into account, and carbon offsets are mostly greenwashing.
Power mix in the world right now is over 50% coal and gas, and only hydro is over a 10%. This is worldwide, so mix varies depending on where you are.
In the end EVs are no making a dent in power demand. They are increasing it. The percentage of fossil fuels is maybe going down but total fossil fuel consumption is increasing as our demand does. Green energy is only taking some of the slack from the increase.
EVs will be remembered as the thing we did to keep using cars and feeling good about it.
Except EVs still have a significant carbon footprint from their manufacture. So do train cars and buses, but to transport everyone in cars instead of public transportation would require orders of magnitude more materials, and therefore a much higher carbon footprint. Not to mention the poor land use that car dependency causes, which both leads to deforestation and impedes reforestation, which is a further climate change contributor.
EVs also have the ability to live longer. If an average EV is usable for twice as long as an ICE vehicle, its carbon footprint from manufacturing is already down to 50%.
So can transit vehicles, in fact they last even longer so I don’t see this as an advantage for EVs. In Vancouver, Canada for example, there are fully self-driving electric trains from the 80s that are still running perfectly fine today, and the only reason they’re getting scrapped soon is because they’re loud and uncomfortable compared to newer trains, which even then I personally don’t like the transit agency’s decision to scrap them because that’s super wasteful, they could probably run another 40 years with good maintenance.
Transit projects ALWAYS go over budget and over time. That’s just what happens.
But they are never regretted after they are built. Those expenses are only terrible to people as they are built but as soon as it’s done people can’t imagine how they lived before it. Transit projects always at least break even in the long run. They really are “if you build it they will come”
Also, you know what else goes comically over budget and over time? Car infrastructure projects! But when talking about highways it’s “an investment for the country’s mobility and ultimately its economy” yet with trains it’s “a pointless money sink that will never succeed due to this one very commonly experienced setback.”
(Full disclosure I’m not in the UK, I’m annoyed at him for the people there too, especially since their politicians’ attitudes toward high speed rail seem pretty similar to attitudes in Canada where I am.)
Ah Canada, where 50% of the population lives within the pretty narrow Québec City - Windsor Corridor and yet we don’t have any decent rail service, let alone anything high speed.
I live out in the Maritimes, so this isn’t even something I’d directly benifit from, but it’s one of the most frustrating policy failures in this country for me.
It might sound crazy, but a coast to coast high speed rail line could potentially be conceivable in Canada if we really went all in on rail. We only really have one or two major cities for each of the interior provinces and BC, so just draw a line connecting all of them. There’s not that much in the way outside those cities, and this corridor could connect to the Montreal-Quebéc corridor, and then further on toward the east coast where it again only has to connect a few major cities.
The biggest problem would be BC though, we have a ton of mountains over here which might require some serious tunneling.
Perhaps we could colocate it with the Trans Canada Highway corridor?
Yeah, I get it. Private vehicles everywhere on the side of the street are an eyesore and take a ton of valuable public space. If at least e-scooters were as small as a car it wouldn’t be such a big deal to see them parked everywhere.
My biggest issue with scooters is that the sidewalks on most streets in North America are way too narrow to safely use them while others are walking, and we’re seriously lacking in dedicated bike lanes. Both of which are issues with the prioritization of car infrastructure over all else as opposed to problems with scooters themselves. Since scooters cannot safely run on the road but is still too fast for exclusively pedestrian paths. Where there are dedicated bike lanes in my city, scooters share them with bikes perfectly fine.
I feel like most roads where you’d ride a scooter the cars would be less of a problem if they followed the speed limit. Scooters should be able to go down 45mph roads just fine but there’s always some massive truck going 60.
Yeah, unfortunately speed limits don’t mean anything and studies show that drivers pretty much always drive as fast as they think they can regardless. The issue is that North America has stroads which are highly conducive to driving fast, damn near highway speeds. If we had the narrow, potentially tile or even cobblestone local streets that European and Asian cities have it would be less of a problem because those conditions directly promote lower speeds and more attentive driving.
I’ve heart NotJustBikes say similar things. I normally don’t favor control over everything but at this point I would be ok with cars having electronically controlled speed limiters to not exceed the speed limit of whatever road they’re on.
It’s really just created such an entitled, careless, and demanding mindset where bikes need to have speed limiters on them for safety but Fred can buy a 1200hp 3 ton weapon with no limiter.
It’s also not unheard of either. IIRC Japan had speed governors on their cars for a time, which limited them to their national highway speed of 100 km/h (which is still very fast to be fair).
I’m perfectly fine with there being interstates that go 85mph I just don’t want people driving so fast in dense areas with mixed traffic. If I could have people just not be assholes that would be great but I feel like driving the speed limit now is just reason for someone to get angry with you and want to drive you off the road.
I’d love to ride a bike everywhere I can but every road I would be riding would have traffic going over 45mph with massive vehicles who have drivers so impatient they’d rather run you off the road than share the road.
we need to infiltrate civil engineering standards boards and make protected bike lanes mandatory for all roads with 4 or more car lanes or speed limits over 25 mph. then they'll be the default everywhere because going against code will invite lawsuits
This is the kicker. They are a pretty good solution now, but they could be amazing.
At least in my country they need to hammer out a consistent set of rules and laws regarding their use. Last time I checked the vast majority of them are effectively illegal because under current laws they are too powerful to be considered an assisted pushbike, you cant register them as a roadgoing vehicle because they dont have indicators and brake lights and you cant ride them on the footpath because riding on the footpath is against the law.
Which puts them in that lovely legal space of “Does a cop want to fuck with me today?” Fortunately our police tend to be pretty cool on the subject because they know that technically taking it out of your house is illegal which is dumb.
also, if the West did adopt EVs en mass (hard to even imagine), all those ICE vehicles aren’t just disappearing. They’re getting exported to the rest of the world as cheap used cars. Nothing has been “replaced”, you’ve just made more cars and more pollution.
@TheLastHero@Masimatutu Nah, there's not much intercontinental transport of used cars. Too expensive and complicated. If the West adopted EVs en mass there would be a lot less gasoline consumption there, and little increase elsewhere.
I disagree. The UN predicts the number of light duty vehicles to more than double by 2050, with 90% of that growth happening in non-OECD countries. Granted that would be a mix of new and used cars, but the vehicle trade is only regulated on the national level. That means there are considerable financial incentives to export abroad and take advantage of regulatory inconsistency.
For example, stricter emissions laws means that many cars may not be able to be driven at all in a country, but those laws do not exist elsewhere- that will cause an oversupply of cars that can’t be legally sold domestically, but demand for cars is only grow in the global south as their economies and standards of living improve. Logistic and shipping costs also get cheaper every year and shouldn’t be relied on as a economic deterrent, and it’s apparently already cheap enough for the US, Japan, and EU to export 14 million used vehicles between 2015-2018. Rich counties and their populations tend to replace their cars far before their economic life is over as well, and vehicle values depreciate far quicker in the OECD compared to elsewhere. There’s goi lot of economic pressure to
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