cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/17684914
I just want cheap and reliable mass transit.
Yes! Fuck this individualistic “you should cycle instead of taking the car” language. We need collective investment in mass transit, because not everyone can bike to work, and even less people want to do it in the rain.
I cycle almost every where, at every weather, but at distances above 30km, it’s just taking too long to be viable for every day tasks or visiting friends and family.
Public transport is neccessary.
I used to cycle out of necessity but after a while i just got sick of it from either not wearing enough and being too cold, wearing too much and being too hot, and having to guess correctly whether it’ll rain or not but be miserable even if I prepared for it.
I always have my rain poncho with me. I love when it rains because it feels like sitting in a tent where your head sticks out.
I always get too hot under anything waterproof no matter how cold it actually is outside, especially if I’m exercising. I hate how they eventually feel like they’re sticking to your skin
Where you can take your bike with you. The two modes of transportation combined is almost perfect.
The emission savings from replacing all those internal combustion engines with zero-carbon alternatives will **not **feed in **fast enough **to make the necessary difference in the time we can spare: the next five years. Tackling the climate and air pollution crises requires curbing all motorised transport, particularly private cars, as quickly as possible. Focusing solely on electric vehicles is slowing down the race to zero emissions.
Ah thank god we still have 5 years. Now the climate scientists just need to advise the general public to start shooting all the cars through the motorblock because it has been scientifically proven that is the one way we’ll make it.
Published: March 29, 2021 10.59am EDT
OH MY GOD!!! WE ONLY HAVE A YEAR LEFT TO MURDER ALL THE CARS??
@LarmyOfLone @grue Shooting the engine block draws too much attention. Home made spike strips and caltrops, on the other hand, can have a chilling effect on drivers. When you never know if the highway is going to be shut down because 30 cars all got flat tires in the same spot, and the devices that caused it are attached to the road with epoxy or JB Weld.
Actually a better idea is just dumping 2-3 cups of sugar in the gas tank. Will muck up the fuel injection system and put it out of commission pronto.
Haha well that could cause serious accidents. And I sort of expected like two decades ago in my naivete that we’d see “electric car conversion shops” spring up. Take out the motor block and tank and replace it with standardized electrical motors and special adapters and just put some lithium battery block in the trunk.
I think something that gets regularly overlooked is scooters. They can be gas or electric and they will drastically reduce emissions. ICE scooters can do 100 mpg and the manufacturing emissions are going to be a sliver of what a car or truck would be.
Make one that doesnt go BrrrrAAAP ! And I’m onboard:-D
On a serious note, electric; bikes, scooters, cargo bikes, small utilitarian vehicles, busses are the future of the city IMO.
There are some very cool electric ones now.
I recently bought one that does ~40km on a single charge and doesn’t go above 25km/h and honestly I don’t get why anyone would need more (people living in the hellscape distopya commonly referred to as “the US” need not reply).
Roads and highways would be perfectly fine cycling infrastructure, if we just got the giant motorized death machines off of them.
I liked your comment, but there is a lot more space that could be regained for pedestrians as well if we cyclists took only the space we needed. Car infrastructure is easily converted into one, but not into the other and asphalt causes heat islands.
Plus, roads are important for the people who can’t walk or cycle as well as for emergency services. Goods can’t all be transported by bike, either. Of course, that doesn’t require multiple lanes. Part should be kept, part turned into small green spaces to compensate for the environmental effect of the road, and part should be used for separate cycling and walking spaces. It becomes a bit more complex with streets that aren’t big enough for all that, of course.
And with decreased car use comes increased accesibility and speed for emergency vehicles and essential transport. And if we remove street parking, there will easily be enough space for cycling and walking space. Did you know all parking spaces in the US take up the same surface as the whole of connecticut?
Sure, but I was replying to a comment thread about replacing roads and highways with cycling infrastructure.
They were piggybacking off you, saying there’s even more space to be gained once the usage of cars goes down
I’m autistic and always grateful for comments like this, thanks! Sometimes I genuinely don’t get it.
I have an EV and I still agree with this. An EV is better than an ICE vehicle but it is no substitute for designing cities around people - footpaths, cycle lanes, recreation, public transport etc.
what do you use your car for? like piano transportation?
To do things. Drove my kid to school 8km at 0610 today for a school trip, then a 20km drive to work, then later to get groceries etc. I wish I could cycle but my personal circumstances don’t allow for it. Doesn’t mean that my situation applies to everyone or that towns & cities shouldn’t be designed with cyclists & pedestrians first, cars second to lessen the need for cars because I think they should.
I am actually considering getting an EV for transporting my Cello :/
It’s unfortunately not possible to reliably transport it by bike (strong winds, icy conditions on my rather hilly ride to the city). Makes me miss out on re-joining an orchestra.
Everything else (groceries, work,…) would still be by bike, just… That.
What you need is a trailer that you can attach to your bike when you need to haul something large. It works great. I use one that even folds and doesn’t take much room when not in use (it can also be used by hand by adding a little wheel at the front).
Smh I put my piano on my bike racks. It’s the timpani that go in the car - the rain ruins the skins.
Cycling and walking are also far healthier options since they count for the whole “if you walk at least 30 minutes a day your chances of heart conditions drop by 70%” thing.
Even better, the fewer the cars around, the better it gets for everybody who walks and cycles (due to decreased pollution and less danger on the road).
Even electric cars and even if 100% of our electricity was from renewables still pollute due to the micro-particles produced by the tires when rolling on the road (and heavier vehicles make this worse).
I think cardiovascular disease risk drops more than 70% if you dont eat meat, which is another critical requirement for softening climate catastrophe too
You can eat meat and stay perfectly healthy
Cycling would also help to reduce the amount of dangerously fat people. Which is an ever increasing problem.
And not just fat people. It helps prevent cardiovascular diseases.
For me the biggest benefit aside from generally increased fitness is how it helps with my mental health. It’s hardly a new revelation that exercising regularly is good for your mental health. But it’s so much easier to get yourself to move when you have to to get somewhere than it is if it’s purely for exercise. At least for me.
But it’s so much easier to get yourself to move when you have to to get somewhere than it is if it’s purely for exercise. At least for me.
That’s definitely not just in your case!!
We can keep going. Reducing the amount of fat people will ease the strain on hospital systems and health care expenses.
Even if expenses remained the same, the reduced number of patients would mean more attention and level of care per patient.
Expenses was a broad statement by me. To elaborate, it would lower expenses by reducing those needed acute care. Even small things that would be otherwise seen as outpatient or phase 2 recovery post surgical procedure are suddenly inpatient because the patient was 200lbs overweight.
With less acute visits, insurance rates can go down because more people can opt into a federal health plan. Then more people are being seen for routine visits and preventative care. This would shift overall patient volume to outpatient freeing up EMS and acute services for more emergencies or when necessary.
Then there are the various links between homelessness, obesity, mental health, drug use, Etc. Then there are the links between these factors and capitalist society. Way more things are linked to this and it’s why staying healthy is SO important.
True story: I was just at presentation for cyclists… there were maybe 30 of us. Every single person, young and old, were trim and healthy looking.
Go to any car show, and let me know if you can say the same. LOL
I dated someone for a couple months who was really into cycling. Like, she’d ride from NYC up to Storm King (~75 miles) for funsies. She had the body of a greek god. (Was also super smart and pursuing an interesting career. I’m still sad she dumped me, but she was reasonably kind about it.)
This reminds me of a story of a guy that lost his license due to an accident he caused, he was extremely overweight and had heart medication.
His coworker asked what he was going to do about it and if there was a possibility of him quitting or getting fired because he couldn’t drive to work anymore.
The guy asked his coworker for a spare bike and started going to and leaving from work in a bycicle from that point on and about a year (or maybe less than a year?) later, the guy is already off heart medications, lost something along the lines of 100kg, something crazy, and he was as fit as he could be.
He got his license back and decided to not drive anymore unless absolutely necessary. They guy was essentially unrecognizeable.
As inspiring as that sounds, I wonder about how easy it is for someone facing obesity to ease into cycling. Their own machine and their balance struggle will have an uphill battle against that weight, and it may be especially scary if they live in a car heavy area.
Curious about this story, since I may know people who would benefit from such experience, both in terms of fitness and extra transit options!
I got you (apologies for the Reddit link)
https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/1jl1l7h/mate_lost_his_licence_for_dui_and_its_been_the/
Fk yeah Jeff
It also help to just feel better in general.
Increased exercise won’t reduce the number of fat people. Fat people are caused by hormone levels typically due to diet. If you increase calories burned and do not address the hormones, fat bodies will simply increase caloric intake to maintain the balance.
Cardiovascular health and strength improves with increased activity. And these are great health benefits. But diet is the way to reduce the amount of fat one is carrying.
dangerously fat people
This isn’t a particularly nice phrasing - I think the same meaning could easily be conveyed with some slightly kinder choice of words.
Threateningly chubby?
Problematically plus-sized?
suspiciously reddit-worded?
Venomously rotund?
Expensively not dangerously
In my country its not just expensive but also dangerous. Lots of health issues and lowered life expectancy
Yeah, but bicycles don’t have the same profit margins as cars
Edit: just gonna add that I was being snarky with this comment. I’m for walkable cities with quality public transportation infrastructure.
Bikes really are a downward spiral. First people don’t need to spend 20% of your annual salary into their car so they have all this extra money that they can use.
Worse! Since they are now traveling through their city in open air rather in a glass and steel prison they might start noticing local businesses and spend their money there rather than the billionaire’s owned giant box store.
And now that they arrive home on their bike they will stay to notice their neighbors, maybe even say hi and start building local communities. It’s also much easier to build a local community when you don’t have deadly machines that you need to avoid passing in front of your house all the time.
My $4k piece of carbon and $3k hunk of titanium would like to have a word…
I would bet just about anything that the only reason profit margins could possibly be higher for a car is due to volume — which, if everyone rode bikes, wouldn’t be an issue at all.
Absolute profit, sure — cars are more expensive, so they’ll win out.
$7k doesn’t get you much of a car. That’s the beauty of bikes, getting something that is basically professional-tier is still quite within reason to be purchased by an average consumer.
Lol $7K doesn’t get you much of a bike these days, at least if you’re trying to keep up with the lycra warriors. Meanwhile you can still get a top-shelf '90s era bike for $50.
Idk, I’ve built a very respectable bike for $2k. Sure, if you want to top spec absolutely everything, that will cost you, but you really, really don’t need it.
and yet people will be shocked that a decent everyday bike can cost as little as £500. For some reason they expect them to be practically free. For much less you can only buy a BSO (Bicycle-Shaped Object)
You can definitely get a good daily-driver for less than that if you buy used and aren’t scared of learning a bit of bike maintenance.
Alternatively, people should look into cycling co-ops. There’s one in my town that refurbishes old bikes and sells them for around $100 (Canadian)
I think maybe in total I’ve sunk ~$2k into my road bike, and that’s with upgrades for more than half of that figure. By being strategic (i.e making liberal use of AliExpress), you can get a very high quality bicycle for shockingly little money.
Might be less of a difference than we would think since every shared car would presumably become multiple bikes.
Eg: Family of 4 that have 1 car, turns into 4 bikes?
Of course big oil wouldn’t like that very much. Screw you big oil, you are a turd.
Around here families of four probably have at least two cars. I didn’t realise what ‘car-dependency’ looked like until I moved out of London. People tell me, “You don’t have transport,” but I walk, I have a bike, I get the bus or the train.
It’s worse for the economy if people have to buy and run cars because that’s money that could have spent elsewhere. It’s “lost opportunity cost” to have to have cars.
Bicycles also help reduce health costs. As does walking and good public transport.
have you seen the latest price of the most expensive bikes? Maybe not a car price of the last couple years, but the most expensive bikes are the same price of small car in the 90’s and 00’s.
And please also note, that people have more than 1 bike (but not the expensive ones)
People don’t buy carbon fiber bicycles for commuting and those who do tend to have them stolen unless the have a closed and locked place to but them at both ends of the commute.
If there’s one thing I learned from living in The Netherlands is that you want a bicycle for day to day commute which is impeccably maintained whilst looking like crap (which explains why most bicycles outside Amsterdam Central Station look shabby).
Fancy bicycles are for Sunday Cyclists.
Also park your shitty looking bike next to one of those fancy bikes.
👍
Modern bikes are beyond insane. Like, $10K to $15K is considered normal and appropriate - just to get disc brakes, electronic shifting, internally-routed cabling etc. Meanwhile I look for '90s era hybrids on Craigslist for $50 or thereabouts and get thousands of miles out of them - and somehow I’m still able to shift gears and stop when necessary.
I’m an avid cyclist and I would never spend 10k on a bike. For my nice favorite bike it was $2500. I commute on a vintage road bike and it works great, it was $200 on fb marketplace.
vintage road bike
Like, with downtube shifters? I obviously like to poo-poo advanced bike technology, but indexed shifting is one thing I’m hugely in favor of.
Yeah it’s a Bianchi Europa. I guess the downtube shifters are bearable for me if I’m not racing. Especially since if it gets stolen I only lose $200. And I guess the $200 of work I put into it for funsies lol.
Agree. I saw a review of an e-bike that could ring using an alarm if you didn’t find it or something. Why?!
We need to develop e-bike and cargo-bike vehicules to be fully inclusive to people who can use regular mecanical bike but why make it full of electronics and computer? They only needs lightings and a motor, that’s not rocket-science.Wow. I bought my city ebike for about $2K and it’s served me fine. I’ve maybe spent $50 in maintenance in the year since, and $200 in cycling gear.
Electronic shifting?
Yeah, like the derailleur is moved by a little electric motor instead of by cable. So you can control it with your phone - which is considered important for some reason.
As I understand it, the gears always being perfectly indexed is the big selling point for electronic gears.
I wouldn’t know since I run mechanical, but this is what I’ve heard.
I mean, in 40+ years of bike riding (always mechanical) I’ve never had a problem with the indexing on shifters. At most I occasionally have to click a lever twice instead of once, or twist the handlebar a bit more. It just seems like a (very expensive) solution in search of a problem.
You’ve never used the barrel adjuster in 40 years of riding?
Oh my god
Electric cars have very little upsides compared to gasoline cars. They’re basically made for the car industry. Not the consumer.
What we need is more cycling and public transportation.
That statement is just straight out false. Yes electric cars still represent a huge deal of energy needs for producing, but they are much, much more efficient at using energy than ICE cars. If I remember correctly it was something like 40% vs 90% energy efficiency? That’s why if you put several electric cars connected in a row, place them on tracks, externalize the power source, and you get the most efficient way of travelling - trains.
It may help with the car pollution but car infrastructure is also miles and miles of lanes that add to the heat island effect and force homes and business further apart, reducing density. The secondary and third order effects of car culture are significant.
Not to mention that all that car infrastructure is bankrupting US cities/towns (maybe places outside the US too, but I wouldn’t know).
Yes, and electric cars still produce lots of tire and brake dust. But to say they are not an improvement over ICE cars, is a lie.
Tire dust, absolutely. Probably even more than ICE cars since EV’s are heavier.
But brakes? Yeah no. To get the most range out of your EV you always want to slow down by recuperating/regenerating. The classic brake only gets used at (near) standstill or the occasional hard braking for collision avoidance.
That makes sense. TIL
The (urban) issue is the space they require when not in use. Public transport and cycling require a lot less parking space. Shared (quick easy short term rental) electric vehicles are quite a good thing too.
But that’s neither better nor worse than ICEs, not really the point we’re discussing
Exactly part of OP’s point?
Yes, electric cars are just like trains
- They run on steel rails, just like trains
- They hold 50+ people per cabin, just like trains
- They have their own dedicated travel paths, only stopping at loading and unloading platforms, just like trains
- They have enormous, efficient engines and pull multiple passive trailers, just like trains
ngl you had me in the first half
That’s why if you put several electric cars connected in a row, place them on tracks, externalize the power source, and you get the most efficient way of travelling - trains.
Sounds right when said like that, but I think very important factors are missing in that comparison. Maily: energy used per person & space used per person.
Most cars on the road are only transporting one person (the driver), which leaves a lot of wasted space. Trains on the other hand can carry way more people than cars can when using the space amount of space.
I don’t know energy used per passenger but it’s certainly less for train vs car (when both running on renewable energy).
Apparently (I think C02 emissions should give us the same idea if we assume both use clean energy): Eurostar: 6g CO2e per passenger km Electric Car: 53g (one passenger) CO2e per passenger km (or 13g with 4 passengers)
Don’t think a lot of trains are as clean as the eurostar worldwide but it’s possible to be that clean.
Theres many more benefits to trains too such as: You don’t have to drive (browse lemmy while travelling), cheaper, 20x safer, a good train system can save you time, less waste (when your car eventually is scrapped, I’m sure a lot if recycled, but must still be a lot of waste, including energy spent recycling). Probably a lot of other stuff too.
p.s. sorry if i am wrong about stuff im trying to be right ;()
Why do we care much at all about energy consumption if it’s all renewable?
Because the grid is not 100% renewable, and even renewables have some carbon cost. That line of thought is what crypto bros and AI idiots often use to justify wasting energy. It’s always better to reduce our energy consumption.
Renewable energy also requires mining, processing, production, waste management… It’s still a waste to use energy as if it is free, it never is and never can be, all energy usage has a footprint on the planet.
Norwegians and Icelanders need to stop showing off all their hydro and low population density.
Most countires won’t be able to scale up their electricity generation by like 20-50% or so (to accomodate a large switch of transportation energy) without burning a lot more fossil fuel. Or building many large nuclear plants. Or damming up and flooding several large valleys. Fossil fuel is still the cheapest fastest and easiest way to scale up electricity generation - and ramping up the duty cycle of existing power stations is the easiest in the short term.
Maybe if each EV came with enough additional solar and batteries to offset their electricity consumption (especially at peak). This’d increase the costs a fair bit but it’d make them much better for net greenhouse gas emissions.
Note that even in an era of fairly rapidly increasing renewables - from 1980s to now - the overall share of renewables in global electricity generation has not increased much, 25-30% ish last time I looked.
This is because new demand has always come along to offset the new renewable electricity generation. This will continue with electrification of transport, heating, plus all this ai and server farms and stuff, add in general population growth and economic development - I don’t believe the world is going to be able to grow renewables anywhere near fast enough to keep up with all that. Not without some cold fusion type technology leap.
I think we could do it with sufficient investment. But you make a good point, in the short term it will still be a bit before we’re fully renewable.
Come on nobody is that dense. You have to be trolling
Electric cars just replace a car with another car. I’m not even convinced we need lots more public transport, at least not long-range public transport.
Especially long range. International/Interstate high speed rail should be the norm.
We can replace a lot of existing cars in single digit years it will take decades to build out transit everywhere
This is the same argument that results in the majority of software created being slow stupid trash. “We don’t have time to fix those major architectural problems that are going to grind improvement to a halt later, we need to release this new stupid feature yesterday because line must go up.”
You actually always have to take care of near and long term in any real world situation.
Even if you need/prefer an ebike you get about 85 ebike batteries out of one Nissan leaf not even a powerful e-car the most pedestrian one.
Yes, I will cycle 15 miles (one-way) to the nearest produce section.
I’m all for bikes in sufficiently urban areas, but they are never going to be reasonable for 90% of America (by land mass, not population).
We need passenger train service (or other mass transit) that can cover lower density areas and still be reliable. (There’s active train tracks within 100m of both my driveway and the produce section, so for me a passenger train would be ideal.)
Thats more a problem inherrent to how america builds its cities than it is a problem inherrent to the bicycle. I agree we still need to buld rail, but you would likely still have to increase density to get good ridership. Otherwise you start to sacrafice speed for frequent stops serving low density. A problem many buses already face.
“City” is an optimistic word for where I am compelled (by familial duty) to live. But, we need to plan for my density, too. Otherwise we’ll still have millions of cars on the roads and they will need somewhere to park when they visit the city.
When I visit a real city, I don’t mind paying for parking. I’d prefer not to have to pay for parking to get groceries each week, but that would probably be fine. But biking is not reasonable, and mass transit is unavailable.
Some places build transit stations outside of cities or in specific locations for people to drive to there then transit into the city. This can help control where the cars are instead of havings thousands of cars all trying to find on street parking downtown.
Yeah I see this problem too. I wonder if it might be a zoning issue. I think right now in the US in these areas we have suburban “centers” with Costco’s, Lowe’s, etc. and strip malls. All which require huge large parking areas. How would it look to provide people what they need, without the detrimental effects of car centered land use?
Okay, so counterpoint: In a lot of ways, the EU is like a country. And it’s a large one - maybe not quite the US’s size, but big. And much of it is bike friendly.
No, people don’t traverse the mountains in their little hand-me-down red bike. But they don’t often traverse those mountains every month anyway. And when they do, trains exist for that.
So this exposes not a landmass problem, but an urban planning problem. It is the easiest thing in the world to stand in the middle of an 8-lane stroad in the boonies, where people are waiting 5 minutes to traverse two blocks of traffic lights to get to the quarter-square-mile parking lot outside their coffee shop, praying you’re not killed as you wait for the walk signal, and scream at the top of your lungs “What in the everloving fuck is the point of all this?” And it would be a family-friendly exasperation since it would be drowned out by engine noise.
We can build about 8 new walking-friendly cities in the space taken up by one goddamn McDonald’s parking lot.
If you think urban planning has anything to do this how I get to the grocery store, you aren’t facing the problem.
The population density of the EU is 106/km2. The population density of my county is 22.4/mi2 (8.64/km2).
In a small European town, you get on your bike, travel two blocks through zero red lights, and arrive at a cozy corner shop that has everything you need for lunch and freshly baked bread. If you don’t have a basket on your bike, you just walk there instead.
The gigastores we associate with groceries in the USA are a product of our car culture. Someone has braved the highway ramps, so they need to bring back a big haul in their large trunk. Of course, that also leads to food being wasted as we buy in bulk and let it expire.
Citing population density is just exemplifying the planning problem. You can look at Australia’s population density too, but it’d be disingenuous to include the large outback - which no one settles into, because why would they. Same question for America’s pointlessly broad frontiers, where everyone just seems to want to get away from each other.
Population density is relevant here, I’m not grabbing a lot of extra uninhabited territory to make the number bigger, I’m just using the smallest organizational unit that includes all my weekly trips.
I’m not trying to get groceries from a gigastore. This grocery store building has been there since I was a child in the 80s and while it is bigger than the store my father used to run, it’s less than 20% the size of the WMT supercenter down the road – half the size of the grocery section of that “gigastore” (it’s not a max size supercenter). But, it is the closest produce section. You can be shelf-stable stuff from the dollar store(s) much closer, but I do sometimes need produce and I’d rather shop at this locally-owmed location than the chain dollar stores. (I don’t even this they are franchises, just corporate owned.)
This is exactly the problem that urban planning is meant to solve. Our specific US problem may not have been solved YET but that doesn’t mean it can’t be. As an engineer, one of our sayings is “anything can be engineered, it just depends on how much money you have”. So for this problem, it’s more about our communal values: if we decide as a community to value public transit and pedestrian friendly urban planning, we put our community funds in those areas instead of centering cars.
Why the fuck is the nearest produce section 15 miles away? That’s a major planning failure. Most trips that Americans take are less than 3 miles, so planning by population would be a lot more sensible than planning by land mass.
Well, there are a lot of reasons, I suppose. It’s hard to name just one, but I guess because it isn’t profitable to run a produce section any closer? That’s not a root cause, and it’s not something that reveals individually actionable items, but it’s what I have. I’m not even sure there a collective action the 300 residents could take, other than funding a non-profitable community grocery store, maybe? But most of the residents are living below the poverty line, and the ones that aren’t are either retired or otherwise uninterested in that kind of community action.
There’s only 19k people in the whole county and 15mi. is the distance from where I live to the county seat.
I agree that urban planning should stop subsiding cars. But, America is, by land mass, not very urban, and I’m stuck in one of those areas.
It really seems like your phrasing and tone indicate you think your views are incompatible with the thesis of this article, but they aren’t
Sorry, my bad.
If we had passenger trains with bike storage, I would never need a car again. We will never see that in America though. We can barely get infrastructure built. We have no national impetus to get it done.
people who live in 90% of the least densely populated land on earth are… not that many people in the grand scheme of things.
And if you live close enough to civilization to have utilities like power maybe it’s possible to also have a grocery store that’s closer than average distance between towns in germany. Might even be beneficial idk.
My father used to run the grocery store in town. My brother ran it for a bit, too. I don’t know the ultimate reasons it ahut down, but Dad wanted to retire and brother decided it wasn’t worth it to run.
There’s a dollar store in town, and an another 5 min north, and another 10 mi. south, but no produce at any.
I want to move back to a more urban area and be able to walk to a grocery store in 15 minutes, but Dad needs someone to live with him since he is now disabled. (Brother died.)
I remember there was a problem getting wholesale deliveries at the small scale needed to serve this town of barely 300 people.
I would love to be able to ride trains to get places and not have to drive everywhere.
I don’t dislike driving, but if I could fit my schedule around public transit, I think I’d prefer that, most of the time.
Good public transit would be so frequent you wouldn’t need to fit your schedule around it. I live in a place with passable public transit and I never check schedules before leaving the house. I wait 10 mins max (I’m still annoyed sometimes tho)
So the tracks are already there they just don’t run passenger trains on it?..
worse, a lot of places have “rails2trails” programs where they rip out old train tracks and put in bicycle paths instead.
It makes more sense to put trains there and convert old car roads to bike paths
I like “rails2trails” bike paths because they tend to be flat (since trains can’t handle steep grades unless they’re a funicular or cog railroad), but I agree that running passenger trains again would be even better.
There’s no reason we can’t have more strict requirements of grade for bike roads.
I’ve been in bike roads that ran parallel to car roads. The bike road went up and down while the car road was at a better grade. So I got off the bike road and went on the car road. Its like these idiots think were out riding for fun on weekends or something.
The solution is regulations.
Yep. Passenger service stopped in my area before I was born, but my father remembers being able to use them that way.
Freight trains run through multiple times a day, still.
The “old train depot” meuseam / visitor’s center is literally across the street from the grocery store w/ produce section.
15 mile with an electric bike and good infrastructure that let you go fast is doable. And electric bike is already so much better than a car because it weight much less and as such consume much less. But I agree overall it does not replace a train because people won’t cycle when it rains.
I’d rather cycle when it rains than get a train, assuming it’s not like 3 hours in a freezing temperature watching cars go by while I’m stuck at cyclists-only red light.
That’s still almost an hour each way with the US class 1 ebike limit of 20mph. Not really doable for me or most people purely from a time usage stand point, not to mention 2 hours in the weather if it’s poor.
An electric motorcycle would be a lot more interesting to me, because it’s not held up by the stupid US ebike laws with such low speed limits.
45min-1 hour for one way to work is already what I do with public transport and it considered kind of standard time of commuting in Paris. In bike it is harder I have to admit you have to be willing to spend the time and have the physical condition to do it. The pro of taking public transport is also you can do other things while transporting even if limited but it is less tiring than driving a car or bike :)
Well sure, but if you add another 2 hours to get groceries on top of your commute that becomes kind of difficult right?
I’d be willing to take longer, but I wouldn’t want to do the trip uncovered in the rain. Also, the highway doesn’t have a shoulder in one section, so I’d have to route around that to be safe on the bike, and I don’t know how much length that would add to the trip (and it would probably involve adding travel on unpaved / dirt / gravel roads…)
For what it’s worth, US limit is only 20mph with full motor. Class 3 is allowed, with 28mph (45kph, actually) when using pedal assist. I threw a larger chainring on my eBike to make maintaining 28mph easier and I just pedal everywhere.
Most bike paths are class 1 at least where I am, I don’t think I’m going to pedal faster than 20 especially with a load of groceries.
Even 28mph isn’t that fast when the roads I take to the store on a motorcycle are 45-60mph limits.
State-bound, but this.
to be honest; a factor of 10 seems a bit low
who do I need to kill to get the infrastructure going?
You can start with politicians like Doug Ford in Ontario, Canada. He passed bills letting him rip out fairly new bike lanes from Ontario’s largest city’s downtown, banning the entire province from building new bike lanes without his approval, and hidden in his bill is legislation that lets him build highways without doing any environmental assessments.
All while Canada is in a economic and housing crisis, a time where bicycles and bike lanes can lower cost of living and support denser housing developments.
he’s been on my list since that wind farm thing
Whoever rules Prague. I travel to a lot of European cities and that one is continuously throwing a middle finger at pedestrians, especially given the size and planning of the city center.
I was surprised to see even Berlin and Munich doing much better.
I used to cycle 7 km to work, but now, after moving to suburban village, there is no way to go other way than car. Especially with small kid. Unless you are fit enough to do 25 km every day by bike and risk your life (and potentially kid’s) on the street between cars. So no, there is not realistic to “fuck cars”. I am speaking from European perspective, probably US has the car things much more fucked up.
risk your life (and potentially kid’s) on the street between cars
I dunno, boss, seems like a plenty good reason to say “fuck cars” to me.
I don’t think you realise how much you’ve been fucked by car. I presume you move out to the suburb not because the city council decided to exile you and never let you stay in the city, you move out because you have a car and can drive 20+km toward your destination, which then mean everything is so out of your way you have to use car to do everything. So no, you’re the one that got fucked by motonormativity and yell “cum inside”, you don’t get to then deny everyone a better solution.
Did the 2x12km for theee years, only got ran down once.
I did have beast legs though :-)
Unfortunately I live where its cold and raining 99% of the time. They are trying to build a line from where i live to where I work though so it might be bearable to bike the distance to the station in the rain
Bicycles just aren’t suitable for cold places. They only work in places with warm, sunny weather. Like Norway.
I saw a lot more electric cars than bicycles in most of norway.
The netherlands, a huge cycling country, is also known as a dreary place where it rains more than the sun shines. You just put on a good waterproof outfit and you’re good. Cycling heats you up as well, so as long as you have good clothes I would say its doable up to and including freezing temperatures, depending on the road surface.
But it only rains about 7 times a year during normal commuting hours. Most rain the Netherlands falls at night.
Do you have a source for that?? Because I would be very surprised if this is true from the amount of times I remember arriving at school soaking wet.
https://www.hetregentbijnanooit.nl/site/totaaloverzicht-van-10-meetjaren-het-is-volbracht/
Though it seems I’ve got my numbers mixed. Must’ve read 7% before instead of 7 times.
Thanks! So it seems around 10% of commutes are wet for this guy, or around 31 rides per year.
It also helps when your office has showers and indoor parking. This is part of bicycle infrastructure that is normalized the more we ban cars.
Maybe
I get mild frostbite super fast though because my circulation to my fingers are nonexistent
I also unfortunately live in the lands of cars, in the part of the washington where theres no real bike lane and I have to share the road with cars
Please think of putting pressure on your local councils to improve bike infrastructure. GCN recently mentioned that more people are in favor of increasing bike paths (in uk and us studies) but carbrains complain louder, so let yourself be heard!
The Netherlands is also flat as fuck.
Hills are why bikes have gears and there are plenty of chilly hilly places with strong bike infrastructure and culture. Not Just Bikes goes off on this subject frequently. Check them out on nebula or youtube for a laugh and some good information.
Netherlands also has constant eleventy mph winds that try to blow you back to where you started, so there’s that.
Where I live it’s either cold and burns my lungs to do any outside exertion or hot and saps all my energy, with a brief tolerable window between.
I found masks can help with the cold air if you don’t have a scarf
I live in Denmark and despite wind and horrible weather still we manage to bike everywhere for most of our needs.
Summer was unbearably hot, and I decided to commute via a bus with AC instead of a bike, but in september I started using a bike and didn’t stop unless there was pouring or there was snow on the ground.
I even in mild rain I just took my bike. First winter season I used a bike at all, not to mention riding in a full face cover, leather or ski gloves with a ski jacket.
I also researched some motorbike rain pants but we’re in a decade long drought, so far didn’t need them.
One thing tho. If it’s raining you better have disk breaks, the clampy ones just slip on wet wheels. I had to re-learn how to stop safely.
Being waterproof is probably the biggest thing I miss from upgrading to an ebike from an old acoustic bike
Acoustic bike sounds so wonderful.
It makes pleasant sound when you pedal it.
Ebikes should handle rain just fine though (I know mine does). Just don’t ride it into the river.
Riding into a river isn’t a great idea on an acoustic bike either, of course. The main reason is that you don’t want to be swept away by the current. The secondary reason is that you’ll have to clean and re-pack your bearings etc. (especially axles and bottom bracket) afterwards.
Kinda depend on the manufacturer, but the motor should be waterproof. Throttle, the screen, and the connector though, might not. I’m using a conversion kit on my bike and the equipment is those no name cheapo one, but other than the screen condensation after riding through heavy rain, it’s still going strong. You could identify the stuff that need waterproofing and do it yourself though.
Good luck. I hope there isn’t too much wind. I find it the worst part of bad weather cycling
I live in a similar climate and use rain pants.
Rain pants and rain overshoes. It’s a bit annoying to take them off after you arrive, but that’s a small
Although I am privileged enough to just take the bus or WFH if the weather is truly terrible (like freezing rain).
I have the opposite problem. If I tried to bike home from work in the summer, I would literally die of a heat stroke. I biked to college and even when I had a 7am class, I would arrive drenched in sweat and have to do a paper towel bath in the restroom.
