Even in cities that are pretty hostile to bikes, electric bikes/scooters are an amazing middle point between walking and all the expense of a car (purchase, loans, fuel, maintenance, insurance, registration, tickets, etc.).
The problem with electric cars is that you're still taking a heavy metal box, a large storage chest, a couch, and two recliners with you whether you need them or not. That's always going to be a problem, no matter how well charging works.
I agree. I'm all for phasing out cars completely, but I don't think it is realistic even if there would be support for it.
Next best thing is to move cars to the edges of districts in urban areas. Create big parking spaces, covered in solar panels and equip them with chargers. Design them in such a way that everybody can walk in 5-10 minutes to their home from these parking spaces. In the space that we save this way we can have cycling lanes and trees. Of course, every house should still be reachable by car, if only just for mail delivery, for moving, for doing groceries etc. And people with handicaps should be able to get a permit to park near their houses.
I know one such district near me and its lovely. And one big city in the Netherlands is planning to build a new district in this way for 10000 people, it should be amazing to live there.
When you couple this with drastic improvements to public transport, I think we can move to pretty much ideal cities within a single generation, without abolishing cars and too much inconvenience. It is much easier for newly build districts, but I think this concept can be retrofitted to existing areas very well, if you can find enough parking spaces or garages at least.
But I think they should be completely removed from some very common actions, anyone capable of walking/cycling/using public transit going for non-essential trips of less than say, 5km, should not be allowed to use a car.
Definitely anything under 1km should not be allowed. Those distances are easily walkable or bikeable. Of course, this will require that the built environment allows walking or biking (guess what, that makes for amazingly liveable environments, so it needs to be done anyway).
Anything between 1-5km is debatable, but those distance are easily bikeable and it takes about the same time, especially in a city. Similar problem with walkability/bikeability. At these distances public transit also becomes a solid option.
Anything between 5-10km requires either great bike lanes or at least decent public transit.
Anything over 10km is fair game for cars. Though for good to great public transit corridors, that's definitely a very viable option.
I think if we somehow manage to enforce this, we'd be in an amazing place, including for drivers. Because a huge chunk of the non-essential traffic would be just taken off the roads, leaving roads MUCH emptier, so whoever is still driving would get to where they need to a lot faster.
That's part of it. I had a look in central London and I could sort of charge but the costs are very different too - something like £20k for a car whereas I got a used ebike for £180 and it's much quicker to get around on and you don't have the parking issues.
Always thought that the parking meters should be changed out for chargers that act as parking meters too. City would get more money and the infrastructure would be there to help with downtown charging. Duel use meters would still allow ICE to use the them too.
As EVs become more popular, big name stores should start adding a few chargers to their parking lots.
Apartment complexes could add them to entice maximum capacity too.
Or get rid of parking lots and build other infrastructure. Solar roofing is quite expensive and it is also much easier to do on an existing building which requires less investment.(Thus is done first). I've seen some happen but only as trail-by-subsidization or because the owner didn't care about the cost.
It’s not so much of a problem due to the average daily drive being a fraction of range. So long as you can charge at home, city life is fine for electric cars.
Most countries still do not mandate that new apartments include charging ports for parking spots. So densely-populated areas will still be plagued with non-EC compatible buildings for decades to come. That's what "city life" mean in several countries.
Cities shouldn't have to mandate carparks, let alone charging in them. Having no car at all should be viable and we should build toward that.
Pre-empting, obviously many places still require cars, but we shouldn't codify cars into the building code. It makes everything that bit more expensive, and it's a waste of valuable city real estate.
At the moment the cost per square meter in Melbourne and my city means a single carspace is worth more than my salary. That's ridiculous.
Electric self-driving taxis are going to be big in the medium-term. Or some other personal transportation method. Static routes and stations are not really up to the job.
(Edit: not that these necessarily need car parks, but they'll need to wait somewhere when they're not carrying passengers)
> Electric self-driving taxis are going to be big in the medium-term.
This claim has been made for years now and a number of big companies like Google, Uber and Tesla have tried to jump into this market, but does this hold up?
I vaguely recall a self driving taxi service being active in some areas, but how are they doing?
Anyway, static routes and stations work fine for big parts of e.g. the Netherlands, but you need a good structure of bus routes and transit hubs. It's a fact that it takes longer than driving for most trips though and IMO the cost should be a lot lower, but that's the tradeoff made.
In my regional UK city, most of my trips look something like: X minutes by car/taxi (although driving you need to park, and taxi you need to wait), 1.5-2X to cycle (direct but need to contend with hills, rain and much increased risk), and 2-4X to use public transport (total time, door-to-door, need to rush to get the thing and wait outdoors for 5-10 minutes) (2X being the ideal case of home to centre, 4X for point-to-point two places outside the centre).
It's not even remotely competitive, and for that reason private cars are used for some ridiculously high proportion of journeys (90% of passenger miles overall).
In the UK only 17% of commuters use public transport, and 5% use "other" including bicycle/motorcycle/taxi.
> 1.5-2X to cycle (direct but need to contend with hills, rain and much increased risk)
I think a lot of what you're saying can be solved with cheaper ebikes and better bike infrastructure. Even the rain :-)
If it rains a lot you put on a big bike poncho, which turns you into a big sail and slows you down, and that's where the <<e>>bike part of ebike comes in, since you pump up the assist and still go fast.
Your experience matches mine here in Australia, and it's fine justification for why we don't take public transport, but not why there shouldn't be more and better public transport. I would much much prefer to be taking a train from nearby into the CBD as it is faster point to point, more predictable and less stressful. The trouble is I live too far away from a station so every train journy starts with 30 minutes of car travel in the wrong direction.
The consensus seems to be on my side in spite of lower share of total commutes, because housing near stations is significantly more expensive. From that I infer two things, public transport is desired, and there's not enough of it to support demand.
I agree it's something that would be nice, but it's so far away - decades at the current rate. We can't even build housing in the UK, never mind infrastructure or industry.
"Having no car at all should be viable and we should build toward that."
Yeah its sounds great until you need mass transport system to support this idea which means only mega cities can benefit the most when tier 2 and tier 3 cities is having a hard time investment
Tokyo has a great subway system (for the most part--there are locations that aren't that well served) and there's good train service between many moderate-sized cities in Japan. But my experience is that, once you get to a city outside of Tokyo, the public transportation options aren't great.
You don't need a car, but you won't be able to reach everything outside the cities. It's fine since everything you need is in the cities, and you would never run out of stuff to see, do, survive with. So "need" is a strong word, but certainly if you explore further out you will want a car.
Not really a bad experience but I was able to walk as a tourist to where I wanted to go because the areas were pretty centrally located. The one time I took a bus to somewhere--don't remember location--it wasn't that convenient.
Kyoto has a lot of buses, so maybe that’s where it was. I’ve found that they’re usually on time and not too crowded, but maybe you had a different experience.
See: the Netherlands. Or Switzerland, for counterexamples.
If anything, properly built small cities and towns are actually even better for public transit, since they're small. You don't need to cover a lot of ground.
Heck, everyone talks about self-driving taxis. Self-driving trains and buses, that's where it's at, actually. A decent chunk of the cost (and limitations) for public transit is the need for human drivers. Self-driving buses could have longer routes, could drive around the clock, etc, etc.
Ah, forgot, they could also be much smaller, but still cost effective. Think 10-15 places for smaller routes. That would do wonders for connectivity in more remote places.
> If anything, properly built small cities and towns are actually even better for public transit, since they're small. You don't need to cover a lot of ground.
Agreed, with the caveat that everything is crazy expensive now so smaller cities struggle to afford to build even a small amount of rail. We had excellent public transport in the 1900s, it was torn up for the automotive revolution, and now we can't afford to put even a 10th of it back. We struggle to put an extra station into an existing line, let alone new lines.
One of the big issues is that property is so expensive in the modern west that buying up the land to build is prohibitively expensive. The old game of private rail companies making money off property around public transit stops isn't working here at least, because property is already so unaffordable, there's no room for price growth.
What they could do, if the political will is there, would be just to build lots of bus lines. The lanes for sure are there and buses are much cheaper. You can run a lot of bus lines for 1 tram/light rail/metro line.
Densely populated areas shouldn't have surface-area-inefficient cars as a main mode of transportation at all! Good public transport and the other 2-wheel modes should do just fine, but of course those aren't as profitable.
Good public transport is the key part and I can tell that in most European cities, not the capitals that everyone visits when they say they have been on country XYZ only hanging on the city center without even venturing into the suburbs, that is quite far from where they were supposed to be.
A lot of people look at Europe through the lens of the tourist areas of large cities. As someone who has spent a lot of time in the UK countryside and smaller towns, there is absolutely not a good public transit system even if there might be a few buses during the day.
Heck. I arrived by train from London to a town where I found the busses to the start of my walk were basically non-existent. Fortunately a taxi pulled up as I was trying to find a taxi service by cell as the train station didn't have any staff.
Bus deregulation wrecked public transport for much of the smaller places in the UK.
One of the positive things labour has done is allowed local authorities more control over this, which should help - I can also imagine them being very bad at communicating this if it does.
Of course I'd prefer a bunch more investment too, more train lines and go ahead with many of the previously touted tram schemes.
It’s a great ideal state, I just happen to think it’s several decades away. Most people reading this will never witness it. We’ve already heavily invested in what you say should not exist. Financial inertia is strong to keep things on that path. However if we, US, shrink our vehicles we can double or triple the throughput of current roads.
Agreed, but they're not that complex to retrofit to a parking space. I can foresee a future where each space has a port and an account card reader - they'd make the buildings more valuable, the supplier to that space has a basically guaranteed income stream, and the government has an easy emissions reduction. Wins all round, so why wouldn't it happen?
The operator could demand an exclusivity contract from the landlord, provide faulty equipment, then charge high fees to repair it, eventually leading to many stalls non-functional until the contract is invalidated in court or the two parties settle, the chargers are ripped out, maybe with purposeful permanent damage to the wiring to make it unusable, and another mildly more honest provider comes in and does something slightly better but not by much.
Or, an enterprising landchad could realize they can charge 10% more kWh than people actually pull (blaming efficiency losses), along with a healthy margin for "maintenance".
Sure, it's a market with massive abuse potential, but we have a world full of them and we regulate to control the abuses. The underlying service is clearly of societal benefit and would clearly be profitable to all parties, so it's worth doing and working out the regulation to make it viable.
>It’s not so much of a problem due to the average daily drive being a fraction of range
Most people who own a car in cities in Europe also use it for long commutes to visit family in weekends or on holidays, often crossing borders. Range is then a problem since most families can afford only one car so edge cases matter. Maybe the wealthy Benelux and Scandinavia have top EV charring infrastructure but a lot of central, eastern and southern Europe is lacking.
We're thinking of switching to an EV, and we're basically one of the anti-examples that people like to use. Central Europe (Prague), we live in an apartment, we park our one and only car on the street, no street charging options anywhere. I don't commute to work daily and my neither my nor my wife's workplace has chargers.
But it turns out that the Lidl that we go to has a charger, there are like 10 chargers on the 110 km trip to our families (and they both live in houses with driveways, so "granny charging" is available). Our last two holiday stays were in hotels that had chargers.
Just looking at the options, it doesn't seem like range will be a factor at all. And we're actually looking at cheap cars with 50 kWh batteries, not even the current high end.
It is the 1% or 10% case. Like for me going to bigger airport. Renting a car would be complete waste for it to sit a week there. And for range I would want something that can get me there in one go and back also in one go, with week of sitting idle. As adding extra 30 minutes to 1h travel time on top of all time it takes is less than ideal living. And public transport would add even more time or less flexibility those types of trips.
Also there is some possibility that there is no power at for example summer home...
For me it is only the visiting family use case, where rental doesn't make sense. We have car sharing in the city (Miles) which fixes almost all use cases. Driving to the airport only when without kids, as they both still need car seats, that I can't leave. Otherwise car sharing rental is perfect to get to the airport.
Not based on where I live. Many people I know routinely drive hundreds of KM on a weekly basis to their families and renting a car for that doesn't makes sense.
The Hyundai Ioniq 6 has a range of over 500 km, and typical 20-80% charging times are around 20 minutes. Where in Europe can you drive 350 km and not pass a single charger?
Where did I say there are no chargers? Charging on long trips increases the time of the journey by a lot. And many EU drivers don't have money for a new Ioniq 6.
It increases it by 30 min every 3 hours, rounding down. My family used to do 7 hours once or twice a year, roughly 500km, so an EV would have added an additional hour. But we also typically stopped for roughly 30 min for lunch, so it would have only added 30 min to our half-country journey. Add an extra 30 min to the journey if we had a cheap EV with sub 160 km range, or an extra 15m to each stop for a top-up for comfort. This of course depends on charging infrastructure, but I'm betting it's developed enough for most trips at this point.
This was pretty rare for us, though we had family that did 12 hours trips in 2 segments with the same frequency. They already stopped for lunch, so they could in theory have gotten away with only charging then, not adding any time to their trip, but more reasonably it would add an extra 30 min to each leg.
Interested to know how often this stuff happens in the EU.
So my last really long drive was Prague to Amsterdam, last year. We did three stops, first to fuel the car and grab some breakfast, then for a bathroom break and to grab some lunch, and the last one was to get a McFlurry and another bathroom break. The total time spent on the stops was easily over an hour.
If I punch the same trip into one of the EV trip planners online and set the car even to something meh like an MG4 with the 51kWh battery, which is cheap EV that doesn't charge very fast, it's telling me I'd have to stop 4 times (instead of 3 times) and for 1.5 h total (instead of a bit less than that).
I don't know what you do for a living or how much you hate traveling, but for me this is a non-issue. I make maybe 1-2 trips like this a year (and <10 trips around 500 km) and spending like 15 % more time on the road is something I wouldn't even notice, much less care about.
Heck I can't plug my car in at home and it's still fine. I simply plan for the fact that I might spend 20 minutes here or there at the charger, at most once a week. Best case I do some grocery shopping, worst case I just sit in the car watching YouTube, either way is fine.
I don't know, I'm kind of annoyed to have to go to the charger. My parents' house has a plug and the car is always full, whenever I need it. It does make a difference in convenience, so I'm installing a charger in my garage in a few days as well.
However, many parking lots have slowish AC chargers nowadays, so it's very convenient to have the car charge for an hour or two while I do my shopping or whatever.
Basically, it's the difference between having to wait specifically for a charge or whether I'm doing my own thing and charging the car as a bonus.
I'm in US and most of our cities are mainly comprised mostly of suburban single family houses, but even if you don't live like that, you could also easily seek out a weekly/biweekly charge station and cover most of your needs. The problem comes with long range drivers and charging station availability concerns
This is also a big problem for multi-modal commuting. Do I really want to lock up my bike in a location that screams 'the owner won't be back for 9 hours', knowing police won't investigate bike theft?
I know this is not a very helpful w.r.t. protection, however there is https://bikeindex.org/ - recently I was listening to a Darknet diaries podcast https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/153/ which has a nice story about stolen bikes and what to do about it.
If all those e-scooter rental startups can have remote GPS tracking and theft alarms then it really shouldn't take much to implement that into personal ones too. I mean people leave those things absolutely everywhere and they never get rightfully stolen.
A 4G modem would probably be overkill, but one might be able to do it for free with lorawan. Or alternatively a big label saying "this bike is GPS tracked" with absolutely no extra hardware at all and hope that bike thieves are dumb fucks.
Time to start using bikes made out of heavy incompatible parts and welding on the tracker then?
But yes I do partially agree that it probably wouldn't help much, since it's more about the thieves not wanting to mess with a company with funding and a legal department behind it vs. some random bloke who they can rob with impunity. Private bike security firms might be an answer to the issue, you pay a monthly subscription, they put their own trackers on your bike, employ licensed people who retrieve stolen ones at gunpoint and guarantee protection up to some total cost. Probably not cost effective though I guess, given that the police themselves have given up.
It doesn’t have to be drunks. I know plenty of people who, if they’re forced to move hire bikes left blocking the pavement, will do so carelessly as a matter of principle.
I got a cargo e-bike (Aventon Abound) and I have a cafe lock and a chain lock. Luckily the bike doesn't look "cool" so I am less worried about thieves. It's also quite heavy so the cafe lock is almost always enough. If I am leaving it downtown for hours then I also use the heavy duty chain.
I get around on an acoustic bike, but have a lot of friends with e-bikes. I believe this is extremely locale-dependent. For instance there's relatively little bike theft in my locale, except around the university where it's just really easy pickings.
I think you can learn a lot by looking at how bikes -- acoustic and electric -- are already being parked and locked in your district. For instance my daughter is attending grad school in a big city, and while we were walking around, I noticed that the most decrepit old bikes were secured with giant U-locks plus chains. Hmmm. So my daughter rides a bike of similar ilk, and secures it in a similar fashion.
And I noticed the most beastly of chains and locks in New York City.
Plus, people generally seem to prefer e-bikes where they can take the battery pack with them.
Not even an insider joke, everyone knows what an acoustic and electric guitar is. and funny is subjective, I had a good chuckle and will use the terminology now
I've been getting around on acoustic bikes for 35 years. 7 of them have been stolen in that time, yet still I've saved tens of thousands of dollars relative to the cost of relying on public transit, and hundreds of thousands of dollars relative to the cost of buying and operating a motor vehicle.
I typically use a heavy cargo bike. I only use its built in front wheel lock, it's so heavy, it can't be easily stolen, so I never lock it against posts and such.
I always lock and secure my road bike against street furniture, though.
Yeah, a lot of the cargo e-bikes are closer in size to a moped than to an acoustic bike, which makes them much more difficult to steal. A heavy-duty chain and a keyed ignition are typically an effective deterrent.
I don't. Theft risk and storage is definitely a challenge. A lot of commuters find somewhere to stash them at work. The problem might get better as ebikes become more common and lower in price.
Yes, but 10-15 kg is still comparable to a regular bike or a heavy bag of groceries. I rode a 19 kg one (50 km range, street legal), carrying it up to the third floor at work wasn't a problem.
True if it's just point to point commuting to a place with safe storage. But then I can't take it by strapping it on my backpack and going to shops, etc where a bike would get stolen.
Consider an electric unicycle (EUC). It's much more compact, so you can easily bring it into shops and other buildings, as well as it's much less troublesome when you use public transport (most models can be easily kept between your legs).
From the safety point of view it's not as bad as it seems on the first glance, especially if you don't plan riding on it faster than 20-30 km/h.
Note that electric bikes/scooters get approximately zero consideration from cars. I was traveling in a bike lane last year and a truck just turned right into me. I easily could have died if not for my helmet. (Which received a glowing 5-star review for that performance, btw.)
The tech itself is sound but there appears to be some unresolved issues around sound ridership practices that could be addressed. E-scooters were introduced locally a few years ago by a couple of rental ap companies and attitudes of local drivers have shifted to naked hostility in response to users flagrant disregard for both traffic laws and common sense. Understand I make no effort to excuse the behavior of motorists which varies on a spectrum from negligent to actively homicidal depending on how badly traffic is being impeded. The reality of the situation is pretty resistant to high-minded ideals however and choosing these modes of transportation in many metro areas is intentionally putting yourself at risk.
In my jurisdiction it's literally illegal to make a right turn without ensuring the bike lane is entirely clear. Not to say that legality has ever dictated driver behavior, but what happened definitely wasn't just me impeding traffic.
Allow me to stress my total lack of support for motorist behavior. I rode a liter bike for a number of years and got so inured to motorist-induced near-death experiences that I wouldn't even comment to my coworkers on the days only a single driver tried to kill me on either my morning commute or when I left the office for lunch. I get it, but getting it doesn't change attitudes, aptitude, or attentiveness of the other folks on the road that have a weight advantage measured in tons. Full Disclosure: I loathe cyclists on the road. I find the act of intentionally putting oneself at risk for the privilege of presenting an impediment to normal traffic just insufferably self-absorbed and a troll of the first order. That said I give a full lane when passing or slow to match speed at a safe follow distance if passing isn't a safe option. Just because I find it to be nuisance behavior isn't grounds to hassle or threaten anyone, the roadway is a public resource after all.
This is weird. What am I supposed to do, ride my electric scooter on the sidewalk? It has a top speed of 45mph.
I obey traffic lights just like everyone else, I don't just get in front of people randomly. Though of course, that doesn't stop people from deciding to shove the side of their vehicle into me.
I feel like if you are arguing the same side, it's really hard for to tell since you also talk about how cyclists are trolling you by choosing to impede traffic instead of just getting a car. But otherwise yeah, scooter clearly has risks.
Also light transport works great for for single people and dinks. Once people have kids they likely would want a car. By that time you don’t want to do daily shopping and you don’t want to carry four bags of groceries on a bus, plus on average a couple of times a month you need to transport bulkier items -yes you could rent a car for that each time, but people like ad hoc convenience, they don’t like planning things in advance, if they can avoid it.
Also an e-bike in the snow or pouring rain is miserable if it even works at all. There are some situations where they're great, but cars are just a lot more flexible. One vehicle that does everything.
A cheap car costs around 300€ per month (including taxes, repairs, loss of value, etc.), or way more if you drive a lot or if you have a car that is new-ish. I don't think that 4-8 deliveries per month would cost more than 80€ per month in delivery cost. Also, what's keeping you from going shopping by bike? We do it all the time.
I really don’t think you can argue that buying a car for groceries is cheaper than getting them delivered every once in a while. Even just in terms of gas and taxes it’s already more expensive.
As anecdotal example: My diy ebike will do about 80km unassisted (aka peddling for show) with .85kwh. Looking at what scooter should be able to do when not going too fast is a big order of magnitude (but not two) in kwh/100k. Though headwind is going to matter more on a bike/scooter than a car. I guess with a more efficient motor you could get up to two.
Nope. Is as horrible as it gets. They silently swing by the pedestrians with over 20mph, many drive drunk or don't know/avoid traffic rules and there is 0 enforcement. And if you get hit by them good luck getting compensated for your hospital bills.
Scooters should ride on the road. There is huge backlash in the Netherlands on the growing amount of scooters and especially fat bikes [1] riding on the bicycle paths, often ignoring speed limits and increasing risks by 10x.
The conversation really should be centered on “normal” e-bikes with light pedal assist, but these monsters are imported at extremely cheap prices and becomes first choice for teenagers and anyone on a budget.
[1] low-rider bikes with very wide tires, basically an electric motorcycle where you barely have to pedal
They are electric motorcycles and without registration, insurance, helmets, etc. they are breaking all kinds of laws. But for some reason the police here in the UK don't give a shit.
The damages caused by small electric vehicle users is not material when put into the context of all vehicular violence, where cars overwhelmingly dominate.
Exactly. They are a scourge. My best friend’s son had facial reconstructive surgery due to a scooter crash and a coworker’s son broke his arm, quite a bad break.
I know far more people who ride bikes and I literally know 1 person that fell and was injured. I think it's very clear scooters are far more dangerous than bikes.
I've ridden many thousands of kilometers on all kinds of regular bikes, e-bikes, e-scooters (of the small-wheels kind), electrified kickbikes (of the big-front-wheel kind) and actual scooters (of the vespa kind) and it all feels roughly the same to me. If you're an idiot who couldn't be bothered to learn how to ride $vehicle, you will likely crash $vehicle.
The issue is that e-scooters (of the small-wheels kind) are nowadays the weapon of choice of idiots who don't take riding seriously — because they're the cheapest and most portable solution that doesn't require any energy expenditure (unlike a bike) or special skill (unlike a onewheel or similar).
Yeah, I’ve racked up more than 2000 km on my e-scooter too with no issues, and I agree with your assessment - I see plenty of people riding responsibly but some people doing absolutely crazy things on scooters (often riding on busy roads, and at similar speeds to cars - crazy) and think it’s just a matter of time when you ride like that…
On bike paths at the legal speed limit here (25 km/h) you’re far less likely to have problems, especially if not riding while affected by any substances.
