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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

#681

Post by Qwertious »

fsckboy wrote: post #674
mdgrech23 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

living in skyscrapers is no different than living in any apartment building, except the larger number of apartments with nice views. what modern skyscapers are doing wrong is putting in only large-footprint high-end retail (like department stores) on the street level, or nothing at all. A zoning change to require small retail stalls at the street level would go a long way to making cities more livable. And all those…

>what modern skyscapers are doing wrong is

...is not mandating proper insulation/noise-proofing.

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

#682

Post by tmellon2 »

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…

You could request your city council to attach a magnet to the ends of their sweep trucks. This would remove all nails and sharp ferromagnetic debris from the bike paths at no additional cost. They do this in certain countries to avoid flats in public buses.

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

#683

Post by obscurette »

shortcake27 wrote: post #475
obscurette wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eastern Europe. My sister works at ER and they are calling cyclists without helmets "organ donor wannabes". The point is that unlike bikers, many of these cyclists don't end up as organ donors and/or "fatality" in statistics. They only manage to cause permanent damage to their head/brain.

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but people who work in ER have skewed opinions because they’re only dealing with the people who end up with serious injuries. You need to look at the bigger picture - first of all what’s the probability of having an accident, then within that probability what’s the difference between wearing a helmet or not. That then needs to be compared against the risks of staying sedentary. It’s compli…

Of course the have their biases, but they actually only ones who see the cases mostly not covered in statistics and they are the ones who can say whether helmet would save someone or not. The problem is that our culture is biased against fatalities. Even in this discussion there are mostly links to graphs about death rates. But these people in ER are the ones who see a lot of cases where death would be better outcome. Looking at my neighbours taking care of almost completely paralyzed son (accident not related to transport), I tend to agree.

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

#684

Post by tmellon2 »

If people can connect small scale renewable power grids (think solar powered grids of a few acres) present alongside highways to charging facilities the revolution would truly happen especially in sunny places (think Texas, Africa, South Asia etc.) !

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

#685

Post by camgunz »

bluejekyll wrote: post #337
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 way that's even remotely possible is to heavily subsidize EVs (probably honestly just providing free swaps) I think that is in contradiction to your initial statement, > 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… Subsidizing car ownership will only make these goals harde…

Yeah, maybe. I just think politically a car buyback program will be somehow less popular than a gun buyback program, and outlawing ICEs even less so.

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

#686

Post by [deleted] »

hedora wrote: post #630
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 you need to check your math. There are 14 times more of these electric mopeds, etc than cars, but they only have 4x more impact than the EVs. So one EV displaces about 3.5x more carbon emissions than the mopeds. To make the 2030 halve our emissions deadline, and 2050 net zero deadline with just little city vehicles, we’ll need to abandon the suburbs, exurbs and rural buildings and infrastructure that we alrea…

[deleted]

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

#687

Post by camgunz »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #637
hedora wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you need to check your math. There are 14 times more of these electric mopeds, etc than cars, but they only have 4x more impact than the EVs. So one EV displaces about 3.5x more carbon emissions than the mopeds. To make the 2030 halve our emissions deadline, and 2050 net zero deadline with just little city vehicles, we’ll need to abandon the suburbs, exurbs and rural buildings and infrastructure that we alrea…

Also I'd just like to add: everyone forgets that not everyone lives near an urban center. It'd be fine to get rid of 90-95% of the internal combustion cars/trucks and then move on to the next biggest target. We don't need to jump to 100% on everything.

This is harder than you'd think. There are something like 282 million cars in the US. Let's say we want to replace half of them with a zero emissions EV, so 140m, and those cost $25k. That's $3.5 trillion we're gonna burn, plus idk, dealing with 140m waste ICE cars. This is not a problem we're gonna solve with EVs any time soon.

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

#688

Post by camgunz »

hedora wrote: post #630
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 you need to check your math. There are 14 times more of these electric mopeds, etc than cars, but they only have 4x more impact than the EVs. So one EV displaces about 3.5x more carbon emissions than the mopeds. To make the 2030 halve our emissions deadline, and 2050 net zero deadline with just little city vehicles, we’ll need to abandon the suburbs, exurbs and rural buildings and infrastructure that we alrea…

I basically agree. We can't rebuild our cities in 7 years, so we have to "patch" cars to be zero emissions. How do you get tens of millions of people to do that in 7 years though? Keep in mind average yearly income is something like $45k and most Americans have less than $500 in savings--not exactly a market ready to wholesale replace their cars.

I think it's clear that if you want to halve transportation emissions in 7 years you have to ban their current ICE car, and the only way you get away with that is to give them a comparable EV. We still have to build out mass transit and rezone everything, and also hit the mute button on NIMBYs everywhere, but short term you have to do a swap, like immediately. The money required for this is... astronomical, it's at least trillions for an ICE/EV swap, but you also need subsidies for auto manufacturers and developers, and you also need to weather the political storm of essentially stealing cars (a huge part of American culture) and putting grocery stores in the suburbs.

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

#689

Post by ryzvonusef »

how is the 2nd/3rd hand market of e-bikes?

with cars, you expect that you would be able to buy today's new and shiny in a few years time, a bit used and scuffed but still useable, for cheaper.

With EVs, that's just started to happen, and even then with inflation the price point is just barely in range, plus with battery degradation fears and lack of easy access to parts etc...it's difficult to manage to get an EV in the lower ranges that most people who depend on the 3rd/4th hand cars for their travel needs.

Ebikes are just too expensive now, and I don't see how they will reach the price point to reach the used-vehicle-buying masses...

especially since bikes are not "registered" and thus easily stolen (and police doesn't care), and with most company bikes having proprietary stuff that makes it unlikely to make certain you will get parts 10 year down the line.

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

#690

Post by dontlaugh »

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.

4 floors high blocks of flats with shops on the ground floor are such a nice compromise in cities. Eastern Europe gets this right.
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