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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

#691

Post by mnw21cam »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #430
mnw21cam wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Would you show your work? I am curious and a little bit skeptical. A gallon of gasoline has about 31,000 kcal. In the US, a typical sedan gets about 30 miles per gallon. Walking a mile at 150lb bodyweight burns about 100 kcal. (This is non linear though: walking longer distances will burn less per mile on average) If we assume linearity, to walk an extra 30 miles in a day you'd need 3000 more kcal of food. What is th…

This was 10-15 years ago, so I don't have my notes lying around. However, I do remember that it was based on the calorific efficiency of bread bought at a supermarket. Other foods may vary - for instance if you grow potatoes in your back garden then it's probably going to be a lot more efficient.

I can well believe that there is a 10:1 ratio between energy in and mechanical energy out of a human.

However my point wasn't that cars and humans are about the same. That's probably only true in the "same order of magnitude" sense. My point was that humans are way less efficient at propelling a bicycle than an electric motor is.

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

#692

Post by cpursley »

jackson1442 wrote: post #626
vel0city wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was shocked by how walkable it was. I don't see why it would be shocking. It was a city for nearly 3,000 years before cars arrived.

People who grew up in a typical post-ww2 american suburb may not have ever stayed somewhere that doesn't depend entirely on cars to get around outside of manufactured spaces like theme parks.

Yep, there’s a great book on this topic called “The Geography of Nowhere”. There’s a reason Disney designs things to feel like real places (that don’t exist in America anymore).

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

#693

Post by eastbound »

CalRobert wrote: post #520
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 think the hardest thing to get across is that _LIFE IS BETTER_ this way. Having 2,000 kgs of metal hurtling by at 80 kph half a meter from your six your old's head while you walk to school SUCKS. It's horrible. But hopping with my 4 year old in the cargo bike and my 6 year old on her own bike is sheer, utter, bliss. Little kids ringing their bells and chatting with new friends on the way to school is a joy that I f…

You’re only comparing the upsides of walking to downsides of cars. Re: Security, I lived in a walkable city, well, guess what happens when you walk in those beautiful utopic cities with diversity, you get mugged. And I was luck to not hold my boyfriend’s hand at the train station, a gay couple died for that. And it’s so forbidden to talk about it that, when you have a discussion about rape, many girls will admit to it, “but don’t talk about it, it would make people racist.” And indeed people would compound on this experience, while always dodging the racism labels, but always very distinctly describing this exact toxic behavior of walkable cities.

I’ve moved to a car-centric city with gated communities. Much less stress. No need to deal with predatory people in the building. No need to deal with awful people defending the predatory people. I miss walking, but it’s a straight up better quality of life.

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

#694

Post by CalRobert »

eastbound wrote: post #693
CalRobert wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the hardest thing to get across is that _LIFE IS BETTER_ this way. Having 2,000 kgs of metal hurtling by at 80 kph half a meter from your six your old's head while you walk to school SUCKS. It's horrible. But hopping with my 4 year old in the cargo bike and my 6 year old on her own bike is sheer, utter, bliss. Little kids ringing their bells and chatting with new friends on the way to school is a joy that I f…

You’re only comparing the upsides of walking to downsides of cars. Re: Security, I lived in a walkable city, well, guess what happens when you walk in those beautiful utopic cities with diversity, you get mugged. And I was luck to not hold my boyfriend’s hand at the train station, a gay couple died for that. And it’s so forbidden to talk about it that, when you have a discussion about rape, many girls will admit to i…

I'm sorry to hear that but it sounds like a separate issue from car dependency. Obviously personal safety is important regardless.

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

#695

Post by cornholio »

svnt wrote: post #270
cornholio wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a little something that's missing from the analysis above: what people actually want. And what many people want, across many cultures once they reach a certain level of wealth, is the suburban home: low density living in isolated housing units set in a park like environment with ample greenery. Just look at almost any billionaire's mansion and you will see this pattern which becomes an aspiration for the mid…

Setting aside that your opinion is not data, this is how you mentally entrain the future of society in a terrible moment in an unsustainable industrialization ramp. What people want is incredibly malleable. To behave otherwise at a policy level is to enslave yourself to the lowest common denominator.

Nonsense. What people want is a hard reality compared to the 4 year political cycle which ultimately drives policy.

You are, of course, free to devise strategies to win the public's hearts and minds. I will root for you in this endeavor. But what you aren't allowed to do (outside the comfort of your armchair) is to deny political reality. Your constituency simply won't stand for it, and will root you out like a bad tooth - and I say that as public policy practitioner, that was voted in and out of office.

It's for this very reason that moneyed interests that outlast the political cycle have an outsized policy impact: they can push their agenda for decades until they manage to change "what people want", forcing the politicians to follow suit or disappear. Car dependency is a good example.

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

#696

Post by codedokode »

mdgrech23 wrote: post #437
kikokikokiko wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Living in sky scrapers sucks and is not enjoyable. Same with living in suburbia. The sweet spot is densely packed urban areas that are built on the human scale.

> The sweet spot is densely packed urban areas that are built on the human scale.

Near the subway, and surrounded by historical buildings and nice architecture ... where an apartment usually costs an exorbitant price.

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

#697

Post by rglullis »

Reason077 wrote: post #550
willio58 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agreed. And while everything you said is super important and true, one piece that really makes me pumped about this movement to ditch cars is more around quality of life. If you have to get in a car and drive to a parking lot somewhere to get groceries, commute to work, go out with friends, get healthcare, etc. You will obviously live a less healthy life both physically but also mentally because of it. Walking…

> ”Cars our LOUD. Even electric cars unfortunately” While it might be true that there isn’t a huge difference at highway speeds, EVs can make a massive difference to noise levels on city streets! When cars are crawling along in city traffic, engine noise dominates. As electric vehicles have started to become dominant on central London streets, this has been really noticeable. Sometimes I’ll see queues of cars waiting…

Electric cars are loud as well. Most of the car noise is due to tire friction. Start at 11m10s mark on https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8

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

#698

Post by tonyedgecombe »

teemur wrote: post #533
galangalalgol wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>That's a bit hard to believe.

The way I heard it explained was imagine a toddler jumping up and down on your bed. They could do this indefinitely. Now imagine a rugby player doing the same. The bed wouldn’t last very long.

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

#699

Post by JAlexoid »

linuxftw wrote: post #559
afuchs wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can compare old houses at the edge of a city which cost four times as much to new builds at the far edges of that city's metro area which cost significantly less. The more expensive houses require significantly less infrastructure and cost the government less to support because of their location. A huge undercurrent in urban planning discourse right now (e.g., Strong Towns), is that if all subsidies and taxes were…

I'm certain this logic only applies to mega cities. The vast majority of smaller cities and towns are like one or two streets of high density and the rest is suburban or rural. There's not actually anyone in the 'city' to subsidize those around it.

Those are not suburban.

You're equating rural areas, with suburban.

And no, it's not about mega-cities. Detroit is not a mega city.

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

#700

Post by JAlexoid »

treis wrote: post #534
JAlexoid wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Roads aren't the only expense, just like you said.
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