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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

#531

Post by nradov »

tomcar288 wrote: post #378
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most bikes come with the cheapest possible tires and inner tubes. If you're going to ride a lot then it's worth buying something more robust, even if they're a bit heavier. Continental Gatorskin tires are pretty good, and you can also get puncture resistant tubes with thicker walls and internal liquid sealant.

It also helps to carry a CO2 inflator with a few cartridges. Much faster than a hand pump.

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

#532

Post by scatters »

ponector wrote: post #362
Muromec wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then don't commute in bad weather and in unsafe conditions. Working from home and improving road infrastructure is totally an option.

Work from home is an option only for some office folks. Would you be happy if your baker, barber, car mechanic will not commute to the workplace if it is raining?

I'd be happy if they have an easier and safer commute because everyone else is staying home.

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

#533

Post by teemur »

galangalalgol wrote: post #358
willio58 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If some people need to use cars for mobility or business reasons, that is fine with me. Definitely. For stuff like that, emergency services, delivery, trash collection, etc. larger vehicles on streets are totally fine and I think most would agree. I don't even necessarily think we should ban all cars, but we should definitely stop incentivizing them by heavily subsidizing car infrastructure with city budgets funded…

On another HN thread it was discussed that because road wear and tire wear and hence micro plastics, scale to the fourth with vehicle weight, a few large delivery vehicles are far worse than many lighter ones. It is better for us all to use the lightest vehicle we can to go get groceries and take our garbage to the recycling facility (or landfill) than to have trahs trucks, delivery trucks, or busses move us about. T…

> road wear and tire wear and hence micro plastics, scale to the fourth with vehicle weight,

(Emphasis mine) Do you have a source for this? I do not see how this specific claim could be true, and I am not sure how exactly that needs to be modified to make it true.

I mean, if you take a vehicle that weights one ton and double the number of wheels, that specific claim says that the road/tire wear would not change, as the vehicle weight stays the same. Further, doubling the wheels can't easily be distinguished from splitting the load to two vehicles with half the weight, which should reduce wear & tear of each vehicle to one sixteenth, totaling to one eighth. So there is kind of a contradiction.

And as a sanity check, a passenger car weights ~10^3 kg. A large truck weights ~10^4. So a truck would wear the road something like as much as 10 000 passenger cars. That's a bit hard to believe.

So the actual law might be something like tear & wear scales to the fourth of the weight on a single wheel. But even that leaves something to hope, as I think you need to assume similar wheels. So maybe the actual law has something to do with pressure on the road?

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

#534

Post by treis »

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.

This is a widely believed factoid on the internets but is not supported by the numbers. Roads have always been a relatively small percentage of government spending and has been going down over time. The big ticket items for local & state governments are criminal justice, education, health, and in many areas pensions for retirees.

This site has a good graph half way down showing the relative growth in spending by area:

https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative....

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

#535

Post by rootusrootus »

thepasswordis wrote: post #483

I became very disillusioned with my “eco conscious” friends when they all went so hard against the bird scooters. These seemed like such an obvious and amazing solution to having too many gas powered cars in the road. The cost was very low, the distance you could travel was high, and they were everywhere. This seemed like such a massive ray of hope. When people started throwing them in the water, or damaging them int…

Doesn't take too many near misses or having to walk out in the road to get around a pile of cheapo scooters before you want to join the folks throwing them in the river.

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

#536

Post by volkl48 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #482
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…

> 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. Wouldn’t write these off so quickly. I know two people who ditched their cars in Phoenix, one of whom went car free, because of Waymo. (By analogy: without cabs and Ubers, many more New Yorkers would have a car parked in an outer borough.)

I will point out that getting around by cab is only really "solving" the problem of urban car storage and not....any other issues with cars in urban environments, like traffic or the portion of public space devoted to car travel lanes.

And in some cases they may actually make traffic worse with increased circling behaviors in the highest-demand (and often, most congested) parts of the city.

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

#537

Post by cogman10 »

uoaei wrote: post #528
cogman10 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regarding payoff: My research says 5-8 years on average (12k miles per year) after accounting for production and emissions (generation for EV, gas for ICE), so I'm curious to know where you get your data. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac7cfc This is actually really common data. I'm curious to know where you got yours. > I'd like to see empirical studies on this but I suspect the sample size o…

> https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac7cfc Very interesting!! Especially Fig. 5. Thanks for the link. Summary: * ICE vs battery crossover at 18k-24k miles (1.5-2.0 years avg usage) and Hybrid vs battery crossover approx 36k-48k miles (3-4 years avg usage). Reducing car usage obviously extends those timelines. * ICE with 12k-18k miles is equal to battery with 0 miles, Hybrid with 18k-24k miles is eq…

No problem.

It's also important to be aware that this is a snapshot in time. (2022 to be precise). What was true then won't be tomorrow due to an evolving battery landscape and grid energy mix.

We don't for example, see a lot of batteries made from recycled material today because the demand for batteries vastly outstrips the amount of recyclable material we have. That won't be true until both the market starts to saturate with batteries and the current crop of batteries starts to hit EOL (probably 10 maybe even 20 years).

I'm actually really impressed with where recycling is today, they are WAY further along than I expected. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xrarUWVRQ )

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

#538

Post by sgregnt »

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…

I like my lifestyle around car, and driving. I lived in Europe without car and woth car in US. Much better in US. And I suspect the world can support 1000× cars easily.

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

#539

Post by rootusrootus »

trashface wrote: post #110

I've seen a lot of these on my local walking path. Which is exactly that - a narrow, paved walking path, in a park. Sometimes they will use their horn to alert peds walking they are passing - which is like, a car horn, because they need that for roads. I've never been "horned" but I've heard it and its not pleasant. Other times they just blow right by no warning. And unlike walkers or bikers, I almost never see them…

Yeah there's a real problem brewing there, we've created bicycles that can go as fast as cars, but the folks riding them seem oblivious to that and think it's okay to blast down bike paths and sidewalks. Yes, getting hit by a car is technically worse, but a couple hundred pounds of human going 25 mph still does quite a lot of damage.

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

#540

Post by aembleton »

tomcar288 wrote: post #378
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Worth looking into solid tyres such as tannus tyres. I've had these for years and it means I don't need to worry about punctures.
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