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280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars

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Re: 280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars

#371

Post by slothtrop »

seryoiupfurds wrote: post #310
concordDance wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only problem that self-driving cars will ever solve is where to put VC money in a zero interest rate world. We've had freight trains and mass transit for centuries. They solve stress from a 30 minute daily commute. Public transport is never door to door and there are always changeovers and cancellations, while self driving cars on demand can be door to door and is far less dependant on whether there's a labour…

> Public transport is never door to door and there are always changeovers and cancellations, while self driving cars on demand can be door to door and is far less dependant on whether there's a labour dispute or leaves on the tracks. My city's automated metro comes every 90 seconds at rush hour, and every 3 minutes the rest of the day. The commute from my old neighborhood was 25 minutes including walking, and now tha…

Zoning reform is a necessity but it won't resolve infrastructure problems extending to transport so quickly. Climate change (exacerbated through growing emissions) is a near-term problem.

Re: 280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars

#372

Post by shortcake27 »

bluGill wrote: post #305
shortcake27 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but once or twice a year, we take a 1000 mile road trip that would be considerably more painful in an EV. If we're only going to own one car, it still needs to be ICE. You could just rent a car for those two trips like you suggested yourself in your first paragraph ;). Optimise for the most common scenario, not the least common one. > Would I still be able to run a 2023 EV in 2044? Will the batteries last that long…

The cost to rent a car for a week is getting close to the cost of just owning a car. (very much it depends, if you only own new cars renting is cheaper, but most people own older cars which are much cheaper). Plus when you rent they worry about little scratches and such which limits what you can do on vacation.

I’m not sure what math you’re on, usually the metric is 1-2 months to match ownership.

I recently hired a small car for £20 a day. Not a special deal, that’s just the price. A week would make that £140. An old car would cost almost twice that in taxes. Then you have maintenance, insurance, MOT, and devaluation.

Re: 280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars

#373

Post by david-gpu »

JAlexoid wrote: post #350
slothtrop wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think it's really about taking away peoples choices OP of this comment tree is explicit that it is about taking away choice. But I think it should suffice to make the alternatives more attractive. People are open to renewables, but not a drastic reduction in their quality of life. We should not demand a reduction or stagnation in quality-of-life for developing countries either as it's inhumane. Ostensibly t…

Suburban sprawl is both ecologically and financially unsustainable, with city dwellers subsidizing suburban living.

Which adds salt to the wound because car traffic in denser areas is largely caused by the surrounding suburbs, as the locals can get to places by walking and transit, and often don't even have a car.

Re: 280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars

#374

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

kikokikokiko wrote: post #345
houseatrielah wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the root cause is further up the chain of casuality. People need cars because they live in the suburbs, they live in the suburbs because they have children, they want to raise children in more square footage than the urban housing stock offers. Notable exception being Tokyo Ironically, if you look NYC in the 1910s, kids used to play baseball in the street because it wasn't yet overrun by cars, suddenly not en…

"Notable exception being Tokyo" The fact that the japanese in general have no children at all makes this notable exception not be one at all. Humans are not meant to live on top of one another. To me the correlation between fertility and urbanization is a clear sign that living on the burbs is a plus for quality of life and the perpetuation of the human race. Cars are just a necessary tool for being a human in 2023.

Heavily disagree with that humans aren’t meant to live on top of each other. We are a tribal species. We all slept together in caves, huddled under the same furs, building housing that expands to fit all our elderly and our young under the same roof. But we were also meant to roam, our toddlers literally run nonstop. We’re not built to yield to concrete paths bearing metal beasts. The issue is that our children cannot play tag wherever they please out in the open, under the watchful eye of a community to make sure Bob doesn’t pull Sally’s pigtails again. The community cannot keep an eye out for SUVs whose sightlines seemed design to hit children.

Re: 280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars

#375

Post by mnw21cam »

thelastgallon wrote: post #2

We don't need a 4000 lb vehicle to move a ~200 lb person. In order of efficiency: (1) Walk (2) Unicycle, roller skate, scooter (no battery, very little material) (2) Bike (3) Electric bike (and all forms of newfangled electric: escooters, segways) (4) Electric motorbike or scooter (5) Mass transit (can be public/private) transportation: Electric trains (6) Mass transit (can be public/private) transportation: Electric…

If you're defining efficiency as energy required to travel a distance, then an electric bike that doesn't require effort from the rider is going to be way more efficient than walking or cycling.

That was one of the exercises I had when studying - calculate the energy intensity of various modes of transport. It turns out that if you calculate the whole energy requirements to get the extra food into someone's mouth that they'll want if they are walking or biking, then it's not much different to the amount of energy that would be used by just driving a car. Making food is energy-intensive, and the conversion efficiency into mechanical output by a working person is very low. In contrast, an electric motor and a battery can both be made extremely efficient.

Re: 280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars

#376

Post by Rebelgecko »

vikramkr wrote: post #87
k_dumez wrote: post #17

"In the United States, a staggering 60% of all car trips cover less than 10km." Being lucky enough to live in a walkable city (NYC) this is insane to me. The world is so car-brained.

Uhh, 10 kilometers is a LOT. I would not walk 6.2 miles for groceries. Or to work. Or to most things frankly

My bike commute to work is almost exactly 10km. It's great, and often faster than driving would be.

Re: 280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars

#377

Post by vbeeaz »

lepus wrote: post #346
vbeeaz wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My man, the post explicitly says "Banning gas/diesel cars gets there".

But my man, there's a thing called an electric car and you said a "war on cars". Be more specific if you're actually saying there's a "war on GAS cars".

Electric cars cost like double what a normal car costs, thus making sure only the wealthy can afford to drive one, while the plebs can get around in public transportation or whatever.

Re: 280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars

#378

Post by tomcar288 »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #295
Glide wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a positive vision of where society can go rather than having to sacrifice and buckle down. Do people not remember riding bikes as kids? Riding a bike is _still_ fun. It never stopped being fun. Now you can do that and get to work.

Riding a bike is not fun if you're doing it to commute - having to do it in all weathers, in traffic that feels unsafe, even if you don't feel like it and got poor sleep etc. It's really fundamentally not the same.

I spent almost an entire year e-biking to work 7 miles and back 7 miles. I can tell you, all the issues you mentioned are correct.

I think, if we had dedicated bike lanes that were away from the main roads, at least we can address the safety issue. that would go a long way towards getting me back to commuting on an e-bike.

One more big issue for bikes is the cost of it. I've commuted almost 1100 miles on my ebike and already have had 3 flat tires! That's a cost of about 10 cents a mile which means that the cost of flat tires is twice as much as all my other bike commuting costs (depreciation and repairs). So, we also need to address the nails and screws on the paths issue. i think that would be greatly solved with increased bicycle adoption.

Re: 280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars

#379

Post by JAlexoid »

concordDance wrote: post #206
camgunz wrote: post #83

I've said it before and I'll say it again: building the future around cars of any kind is completely unsustainable. We cannot reproduce the rates of rich world car ownership in the developing world without mass catastrophe (raw materials/labor needed for construction and maintenance, raw materials/labor/space needed for roads and parking lots, literal tons of waste--batteries, tires, steel, plastic, foam--, energy ne…

> The only problem that self-driving cars will ever solve is where to put VC money in a zero interest rate world. We've had freight trains and mass transit for centuries. They solve stress from a 30 minute daily commute. Public transport is never door to door and there are always changeovers and cancellations, while self driving cars on demand can be door to door and is far less dependant on whether there's a labour…

That's fine and dandy, but that will still produce the core problem - increased traffic... which would make your 30min commute, a 2 hour commute. And "build more roads" has been proven to not ease traffic at all.

Meanwhile, even with issues with public transit - a 30 minute commute is still on average a 30 minute commute.

Re: 280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars

#380

Post by xkekjrktllss »

camgunz wrote: post #83

I've said it before and I'll say it again: building the future around cars of any kind is completely unsustainable. We cannot reproduce the rates of rich world car ownership in the developing world without mass catastrophe (raw materials/labor needed for construction and maintenance, raw materials/labor/space needed for roads and parking lots, literal tons of waste--batteries, tires, steel, plastic, foam--, energy ne…

> building the future around cars of any kind is completely unsustainable

But it's potentially profitable in our highly financialized economy, and nothing else is.

> If we're serious about meeting the 2030 "halve our emissions" and 2050 "zero our emissions" goals, EVs will not get there

Their purpose is merely to rescue the coastal urban California real estate prices by displacing the pollution to a less wealthy geographical area. The rest is just marketing.

> I get that whole economies are built around producing/maintaining cars and related infra, but it was wildly disastrous.

Wrong. Whole economies are built around profit and that is what's disasterous.

> We're well into sunk cost fallacy territory here, like, on a species level.

You're wrong again to think we had a choice. Capitalism pits everyone against each other in ruthless pursuits of profit for the sake of survival and life meaning. It's more than economic gridlock; it's social gridlock.

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