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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

#391

Post by ravenstine »

Moldoteck wrote: post #234
ravenstine wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We cannot reproduce the rates of rich world car ownership in the developing world without mass catastrophe That's incredible! Now show us some evidence.

Evidence like total cost of car infra vs taxes that ppl pay? Evidence that low density areas are subsidized by high density? All this info is freely available online. Difference is US can afford to be in debt, other countries - not so much

Those may be serious problems, but nothing about that says that "mass catastrophe" necessarily follows. Language like that is implying something approaching apocalyptic.

> All this info is freely available online.

Given that the internet is full of conflicting information, and that you seem to know far more about this issue than I do, perhaps you could share a link to some of this information from a source you find credible? I would like to trust you over whatever is at the top of search engine results.

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

#392

Post by estebank »

FredPret wrote: post #384
estebank wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> urban areas, defined as densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas, now account for 80.0% of the U.S. population > (as of 2018) 31% of the U.S. population lives in urban core counties Improving public transportation in cities, makes those cities better for those who live and/or work in them. In downtown SF I counted the number of people in cars backed up in a single city block. The tr…

Yes but the bus in SF isn't a place where the people in those cars would like to be. For anyone who has ever been on a bus, and who has the money to never get on a bus again, buses are a non-starter.

> For anyone who has ever been on a bus, and who has the money to never get on a bus again, buses are a non-starter.

Feel free to elaborate, because that's not a universal position.

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

#393

Post by adrianN »

FredPret wrote: post #232
cedws wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are selfish and DGAF. They will continue to buy the latest and biggest Range Rovers and Ford trucks (pedestrian death machines) to take their kids to school because they desperately need to signal how well off they are. Cars are a disgustingly polluting outlet for people to show off. IMO we should be banning big cars, possibly even legislating new cars are no bigger than a Japanese "Kei" car. Speed restriction…

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Let’s also ban infrastructure that forces people to own cars to participate in society.

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

#394

Post by analog31 »

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.

With the exception of unsafe conditions, riding in all weather is a blast. Though I don't know if I'd think so, if the weather included 100+ degree heat. And I'm fortunate to have terraformed my riding conditions through years of refining my route. I'm of the opinion that route choice is the #1 safety factor for cycling.

Granted it's not for everybody, but the extremes and unpredictability are actually part of why I love the great outdoors.

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

#395

Post by ponector »

Muromec wrote: post #342
cbozeman wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transit does not work in a place like Montana or Wyoming. Sorry. Too large, too sparsely populated. Same reason it won't work for most of Texas either. It's fine in Dallas or Austin, parts of Fort Worth... it doesn't scale to Lubbock or New Braunfels. A lot of people have no interest in living in your concrete jungle... myself included.

I though you are talking about a village with 200 residents, so I had to look it up and oops, it's quarter million city? You gotta be kidding.

Yes, that is funny to read. European cities with population less than 100k could have public transport and bicycle infrastructure while much bigger American city could not.

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

#396

Post by slothtrop »

ska wrote: post #369
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…

> is explicit that it is about taking away choice. But it's a conversation and I am rejecting that framing. Suburbs/Exurbs as practiced in US today aren't some kind of quality of life maximizing end game. They are a natural result of a ton of policy interactions and subsidies, and the focus on it clearly has +ves and -ves. And of course it's always nice if you can get someone else to partially pay for your lifestyle,…

> Suburbs/Exurbs as practiced in US today aren't some kind of quality of life maximizing end game

Notwithstanding that the middle-class overwhelmingly prefers living in the suburbs. "quiet", "safe", etc.

> I think that it lacks imagination to think that we can't structure things differently and have equivalent or better quality of life overall.

No one's saying that. I fully support zoning reform. If one's imagination leads to such bright ideas as "ban cars" however, it will have more detractors.

> if we stop basing policy at multiple levels centered around them, and stop subsidizing car-centered living, I suspect we'll collectively do a lot less driving

That is possible and I support it also.

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

#397

Post by icy_deadposts »

cbozeman wrote: post #301
TheGRS wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't ever put "living in a city" together with "elitist". Living in the suburbs away from the cacophony of the city, a 5 minute drive away from all your favorite chain stores and malls seems much more elitist to me.

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

#398

Post by anon291 »

houseatrielah wrote: post #229
dv_dt wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such an interesting comment to me because it gets so much right on how to motivate ditching cars. If you were funding a campaign to eliminate cars to reduce carbon emissions I think you would meet with widespread resistance. If you promote an idea of a higher quality life that is possible w/o cars and explore that - in the end I think you'd end up removing many more cars than the first approach.

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…

People want suburbia because crime is often lower. Why won't we accept this reality. I don't understand why so called progressives don't just face this issue head on. Increasing incarceration rates makes cities safer. It's true that some small number of people will be jailed. It's also true that more people would move to cities.

And before someone throws out some nonsense politics. I live in the inner city (less than a mile to downtown) in a west coast major city. I can count several neighbors on my block, people who've lived here decades, who are leaving due to crime / rampant drug use.

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

#399

Post by david-gpu »

concordDance wrote: post #292
gemstones wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my walkable neighborhood you know how this problem is solved? The same way it was solved for centuries, high foot traffic incentivized a small grocer to pop up within walking distance. People in the neighborhood generally take jobs in the neighborhood, because there is high foot traffic, so there are jobs. Even doctors and nurses can get in on that, because it’s dense enough that a hospital is easy walking or biki…

Let's say I work in reinsurance. How many reinsurance companies do you think are within walking distance? It's an odd fact of life that as countries get more developed the people in them more heavily specialise. This is one of the reasons cities have much higher wealth production per capita than towns. If everyone is very unspecialized (e.g. "general practitioner" rather than "expert in non-hodgkins limphomas") then…

Somehow most developed countries around the world have figured out how to design cities around walking, public transit and cycling, but it's an insurmountable problem in the US?

It's not magic, folks, just look at how it is done elsewhere. Yes, that includes places with "real winters".

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

#400

Post by ackfoobar »

bluGill wrote: post #265
gmuslera wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another dimension to add: how far do you really "need" to go and how frequently. And why it is so? Remote working vs commuting, local/nearby enough shopping vs long distance for supermarkets, going yourself vs (maybe electric) delivery. If everything around you is built with base assumption that you must have a car, then the optimization was done by someone else with a different definition of efficiency.

Life is a compromise. I'd love to own 100 square miles of land, with my front door on New Yorks Time's square. That isn't physically possible, but it is what I want in the ideal world. (I don't live near New York so I don't know if times square is really where in New York I'd want to live, but it is an iconic place that at least gives the sense of what I mean - you could pick downtown of most large cities). Cars enab…

> That isn't physically possible, but it is what I want in the ideal world.

I think the same can be said (to a lesser degree maybe) about cars, which are very space inefficient. With enough sprawl and a certain density, e.g. in Toronto, it's just gonna be traffic for every one.

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