Twike

These things are still a bit far outside the mainstream, but if anyone hasn't tried an ebike yet, I highly encourage it!

It really is magic mobility, with the free feeling of being on a bike, without the sweat or the necessary fitness to travel at 20 or even 25 mph.

I don't think Twikes (or other recumbent bikes / velomobiles) will gain popularity in the near term, but I'm very confident that ebikes will continue to grow.

It's fine, the main problem is that 90% (imaginary data) of the cars in cities are not used.

If all "normal" people used car sharing services or taxis, then a lot of roads could have 1 more lane (where parking normally occurs), which would increase the throughput of the streets.

All the peak hour traffic circling around their destination struggling to find a parking spot would also disappear.

This would reduce the overall traffic noticeably, and everyone would get to their destination quicker and with less stress.

The problem with this is that so many people obbsess over vehicle ownership, that probably banning car ownership (with reasonable exceptions like modified cars for accomodating disabilities, oldtimers, cars with baby seats installed, etc..) in cities would be required to make this happen.

Speaking from an experience living in a big city, where I owned a car, but transitioned to using car sharing, even for long trips around the country.

I hope this link is from a clever would-be startup founder so they can show our positive responses as they pitch basically the same idea to YC.

More seriously, pedal power is great, better for the environment and better for its users. I expect obesity rates would drop dramatically if we had better cycle infrastructure (I'm in the UK, statement works in most places) and especially if we had family friendly power assisted cycles.

In the UK they're limited to 15mph and only operate in assist mode (as opposed to full drive). Where are you that allows that kind of speed?

For anyone who has trouble understanding this perspective because they've lived in car-dependent hell their entire lives, I recommend the Not Just Bikes channel. He does extremely detailed comparisons of US cities vs Netherlands and other places. Here is a recent one [1].

For me, I always felt that something was wrong about American cities / suburbs but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Then, I spent a few months in Tokyo and something "clicked". It's an entirely different paradigm that forced me to reevaluate what I thought was possible.

When I returned to the US, on the ride from the airport my first thought was: Everyone in this traffic jam is going the same direction, and would fit in a handful of train cars. Why are we OK with this??

People say trains are expensive, but they don't realize how much money we spend on cars. Americans spent $1.1 TRILLION on personal vehicles in 2017 [2], not including the hundreds of billions spent yearly on road maintenance. Redirecting a fraction of that money would more than pay for high-speed rail.

Let's do a crude estimate. Using the chart here [3], we can expect to pay somewhere between $3-163 million USD per mile of high-speed rail. The distance from NY to LA is 2789.9 miles.

At $100M/mile, which is excessive, it would still only cost $279 billion. We could build THREE transcontinental high-speed rail lines every year with the money we spend on personal automobiles. If we're as cost-effective as Japan at $2.6 M / mile, we could afford to build 384,000 miles of high speed rail every YEAR.

Subway lines in a city are more expensive, around $200-400 M / mile, but of course there are fewer miles to cover, so the result is the same. New York pays an excessive $2.5 billion per mile, but my understanding is that is due more to corruption and red tape.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54

[2] https://www.itdp.org/2019/05/23/high-cost-transportation-uni...

[3] https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/high_speed_rail_...