I live in Seattle, riding in the rain is not really a problem. A halfway decent outer shell protects you from the rain.
I carry my kid on my bike. My wife's bike has a whole box up front that could carry two kids. (Mine has a long tail with a captain's chair on it.)
I can carry shopping easily. I've carted something like 6-10 cubic feet of soil on it before. Cargo bikes are made to carry stuff.
Ebikes can go as fast as you can pedal them, and will stop assisting you at 28mph. I've regularly hit 30mph on downhills, and here in Seattle you can treat stop signs as yield signs. In practice, because I don't have to stop every block and because I can take paths and other shortcuts and I don't need to find parking, trips under a couple miles are generally faster on the bike than in a car.
Nah. It's easy enough to chain up to any ol' bike post. It's a midsize cargo bike. My wife's bike takes a bit more work, but she's got the whole bucket at the front going on.
I live in Seattle, it's cold and rainy all year long (more or less). I still prefer using my bike over a car (though I have no problem with small car that replaces big car.)
I also live in Seattle, bike to work three days a week, and don't mind biking in the rain and cold.
Even so, I think mobility vehicles like this are excellent and should absolutely be part of our transportation systems. Sometimes you:
* Have a disability that prevents you from biking.
* Need to pick something up from the store that won't fit in your paniers.
* Want to bring a passenger who doesn't bike.
* Need to bring a small child who can't bike or doesn't have the endurance.
* Need to carry something you can't get wet and won't fit in your panniers.
* Are going somewhere nice and need to arrive without your hair and clothing discheveled.
* Won't have a safe place to park a bike.
* Need to leave something with your vehicle and want to be able to lock it away.
There is a reason cars are so popular. They are amazingly useful and convenient. I dislike arguments against cars because so many of them try to downplay the benefits as if car consumers are idiots. The benefits are real and profound. The problem with cars isn't that they aren't as great as people think they are. It's that the externalities often don't make the benefits worth it.
Any vehicle that can give you many of those same benefits while reducing those externalities should be applauded.
Thank you so much for posting this sane response. As the spouse of someone who can't walk due to a disability (and also can't move themselves in a wheelchair), reading these discussions where people assume everyone is young, able-bodied, and lives in great weather gets really tiresome. It often feels like they're intentionally not arguing in good faith because some of the points are so obviously incorrect.
I don't think that's an assumption (it's certainly not one for me). Bikes are great, most folks could use bikes. Some folks cannot, and we should ensure our spaces are available to all of us.
And I deal with a similar issue in my own life -- not due to a disability, but due to another form of discrimination. Believe me, I'm well aware that spaces aren't designed for everyone. If I gave the impression that bikes were the only or universal option, then of course I apologize!
Of course. I explicitly tried to say this -- bikes are fantastic, small cars like this are ok too (though, building for cars carries a lot of externalities with it).
You are weird. I am a born-and-raised PNW resident and a very small proportion of the population can tolerate having to wear a rain suit to bike home from work or go to the grocery store for 6-8 months of the year.
Do the napkin math on how many of the residents (don't forget children and old people) in your neighborhood bike year round vs. the number who use a car daily. Being on a bike seeing the few other people who bike in the rain is a form of availability bias.
Right? I sold mine, getting rid of that car was a huge sigh of relief. From parts shortages to labor shortages to weird manufacturing defects that no one could correct to the "overpromise and underdeliver" attitude of the company...
The car was cool for a few years, and then it became deeply irritating. We got a Volvo, and holy shit the Volvo had better tech.
I remember years ago seeing videos/posts about how much safer the Tesla was as far as build qualities. I don't know if those are still there, but surely they have been watered down with all of the software so the overall rating of the car is much less.
I'm glad that chemists are researching this. We should also stop using plastic wherever possible.
Let's start with single use packaging of things. WAY too much stuff relies on cheap, disposable plastic that could be shipped/packaged in another, more sustainable material. It will mean more expensive, harder to handle materials, but if we can at least use materials that biodegrade, are fully recyclable, or are inert (e.g. glass), we'll save future generations a massive headache.
Agreed. This is actually a "why public systems fail" critique approaching from the left -- we assume systems need a cost to function correctly. For something like transit, collecting fares involves:
1) Systems and equipment to issue and collect fares -- boxes, kiosks, scanners, currency handling, staff to collect and deposit currency, arrangements with payment providers, educational materials about paying fares, websites with instructions on how to pay fares (often in multiple languages)
2) Systems to enforce fare payment -- humans, typically, to police the fares
3) Systems to analyze fare rates -- are fares too low, too high, are they being paid at the correct rates, do we need to publish new content on how much fares are changing this year
4) Queues to pay fares -- entering a bus or train requires a turnstile, tap, or other impediment that slows access
5) Systems to ensure everyone has access -- either fares price out the poorest, or we provide means for the poor to get reduced and free fares. Provide systems for workers to get fares subsidized through their workplaces.
These systems are really inefficient. I mean, they might be run efficiently, but their existence is itself an inefficiency. If we believe transit is useful and valuable, we could simply pay for it once in taxes. Cutting out all the fare maintenance systems would save a huge amount of money, which could be spent on maintenance, comfort, cleaning, additional routes, etc. and the experience would be much nicer (hop on/hop off whenever you need).
Hamburg's busses don't have coin boxes or sell tickets/fares? You don't have any mechanism that requires swiping a card, tapping a device, showing a card/ticket to an operator, or otherwise proving you have, in fact, purchased a fare?
It's pretty quick, but on the busiest bus routes it slows things down.
Edit: Reading up, it looks like they don't really have those things, and rely on a combination of very infrequent inspectors (which do slow things and cost money) and the honor system.
In Switzerland there are no gates or a need for "showing a card/ticket to an operator, or otherwise proving you have, in fact, purchased a fare".
You just enter the bus/train/tram vehicle. Maybe a ticket controllant comes, maybe not (most often they dont come and check)
EDIT: To get a ticket you simple open the app and "check in". When you leave the transport you open the app and "check out". At the end of the day the system calculated the cheapest ticket for you based on that 24h period. This works across the entire country. From local buses to high speed intercity rail
You are haltingly recapitulating Evgeny Morozov's essay "Why You Should Ride the Metro in Berlin" (which is really about public transit in a large portion of Europe).
The inspectors don't slow things down. (They do cause other more serious issues, but still far less than anywhere in the US.)
I carry my kid on my bike. My wife's bike has a whole box up front that could carry two kids. (Mine has a long tail with a captain's chair on it.)
I can carry shopping easily. I've carted something like 6-10 cubic feet of soil on it before. Cargo bikes are made to carry stuff.
Ebikes can go as fast as you can pedal them, and will stop assisting you at 28mph. I've regularly hit 30mph on downhills, and here in Seattle you can treat stop signs as yield signs. In practice, because I don't have to stop every block and because I can take paths and other shortcuts and I don't need to find parking, trips under a couple miles are generally faster on the bike than in a car.