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The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago

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Re: The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago

#81

Post by xbmcuser »

dpark wrote: post #55
jetrink wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network. A road network isn't the only solution. In the early 20th century, for example, there was a separate narrow-gauge tunnel network beneath Chicago dedicated to freight. Deliveries were made directly to businesses via subbasements or elevator shafts. The network had stations at rail and ship terminals for a…

This is neat but also seems like an insane solution to the problem of “I don’t like seeing service trucks”. How many such tunnels and elevators would it take to supply the buildings in a typical city’s downtown area? And what else could we do with that investment?

they are no longer needed though with last mile delivery robots being introduced that can use the same elevator and stairs as humans

Re: The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago

#82

Post by crazygringo »

coryrc wrote: post #72
crazygringo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is true even in cities where the majority of people don't even drive! I dunno... in New York City there are an awful lot of bike lanes now: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7355559,-73.9921499,13z/data... There's still room for a lot more, but plenty of space has been taken away from automobiles precisely for bikes, scooters, etc. It's trending in the right direction. Especially now that bike lanes are increasi…

Per capita that's table scraps.

I don't even know what that means.

Residential streets with little traffic don't even need bike lines. But many of the busiest avenues have them.

NYC could always do better, but there's nothing "table scraps" here? It's massively improved my cycling experience. And it gets better every year.

Re: The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago

#83

Post by zaptheimpaler »

sheepscreek wrote: post #11
hylaride wrote: post #6

> The e-scooters that clutter up pavements may seem like a new thing, but a hundred years ago, there were already people zooming around London on powered scooters. The problem is that we've given so much space to automobiles that there's no room for anything else (bikes, scooters, etc). Pedestrians have been given a sliver only because drivers need to walk between parking and their destination. This is true even in c…

Probably cause modern logistics, especially last mile logistics, is dependent on trucks/delivery vans/etc. So even though folks in a local area might like to walk around, their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network. I think Bacerlona hits a good compromise. The city has the concept of a superblock, which is a few city blocks grouped into one calm zon…

I live in Vancouver, and we have plenty of both roads and bike lanes. Its not hard to fit a bike lane that's usually 1/4th the width of a lane onto a road or allow bikes to share with cars on smaller roads. We have trucks and vans and lots of deliveries too. The reason most cities are oriented around cars is because we designed them that way and it's difficult to change - there's no logistical constraint, its just politics and cost.

Re: The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago

#84

Post by sejje »

moffkalast wrote: post #44
cons0le wrote: post #35

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Re: The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago

#85

Post by clickety_clack »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #83
sheepscreek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably cause modern logistics, especially last mile logistics, is dependent on trucks/delivery vans/etc. So even though folks in a local area might like to walk around, their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network. I think Bacerlona hits a good compromise. The city has the concept of a superblock, which is a few city blocks grouped into one calm zon…

I live in Vancouver, and we have plenty of both roads and bike lanes. Its not hard to fit a bike lane that's usually 1/4th the width of a lane onto a road or allow bikes to share with cars on smaller roads. We have trucks and vans and lots of deliveries too. The reason most cities are oriented around cars is because we designed them that way and it's difficult to change - there's no logistical constraint, its just po…

I lived in Vancouver for many years, and it’s an outlier in terms of ease of bike lane installation. The city is quite new, and as it grew in the 50s and 60s the roads were designed for a future with more cars than there are now in the city. That means that there’s super wide boulevards and streets everywhere. Cities that were designed for horses and carts barely have room for cars as it is, so there’s almost no room for anything else next to them.

Re: The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago

#86

Post by Epa095 »

_yb2s wrote: post #32
hnbear wrote: post #27

My father was gifted a pair of these for his 50th birthday, would have been 1989, in London. Little ICE scooters. They were a lot of fun and not very safe. We had drunk guests damaging themselves in the street. They became toys for my brothers and I, who had plenty of accidents but learnt to ride them reasonably. The engines didn’t idle particularly well and had no gears. You had to pull start, hop on and go quickly…

Must have been two stroke, 4 stroke motors are too large and heavy for an application like that.

According to Wikipedia

> The engine was an air-cooled, 4-stroke, 155 cc engine over the front wheel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped

Re: The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago

#87

Post by dpark »

bluescrn wrote: post #69
dpark wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol. People will try to paint anything they don’t like as bad because criminals can also use it.

It’s about actively blocking police and other emergency vehicles while allowing a new class of problem vehicles, illegal e-motorbikes, to pass unimpeded. As a motorist, the war on cars (and milking of motorists for tax revenue) would be less infuriating if we didn’t have the rising broad-daylight lawlessness of illegal e-bikes and scooters doing 30mph+ with no pedaling, no tax, and no insurance. Often with corporate…

Sorry, this doesn’t make any sense. If the problem were that criminals have high powered e-bikes, the obvious answer would be to give high powered e-bikes to the police.

What you’re actually griping about isn’t criminals using e-bikes as getaway vehicles, but the presence of these unsafe e-bikes at all. You’re basically saying “how come I can’t drive my unsafe machine but they can drive theirs?” And yeah, I don’t want people zipping by at 30mph on scooters either, but the problem isn’t that the cars are gone.

Re: The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago

#88

Post by Scoundreller »

k4rli wrote: post #77
hylaride wrote: post #6

> The e-scooters that clutter up pavements may seem like a new thing, but a hundred years ago, there were already people zooming around London on powered scooters. The problem is that we've given so much space to automobiles that there's no room for anything else (bikes, scooters, etc). Pedestrians have been given a sliver only because drivers need to walk between parking and their destination. This is true even in c…

Problem isn't the cars. Stop buying uselessly oversized SUVs, and trucks in case of muricans. A Fiat 500/Panda is perfectly fine in cities.

I’d like to see the calculation of the reduction you get in roadway throughput by making the vehicles larger.

If people stay further away from tractor trailers, they’ll stay further away from SUVs too.

Even in an urban environment, if you stop X feet of distance from the back of the vehicle in front, if that vehicle is longer…

Anyways, street parking should be paid by the square foot * 1.25 to account for getting in/out/around parked vehicles.

Re: The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago

#89

Post by sejje »

tw04 wrote: post #33

Did someone actually think scooters were new? We had them growing up, I thought it was common knowledge the only thing novel about e-bikes and e-scooters were the lithium ion batteries and electric motors giving adequate runtime and performance. You could drive a moped on city streets before you turned 16 which got a lot of teenagers in my hometown to work and sports in the summer when their parents couldn’t. But the…

When I was a kid my cousin had an old moped from, I think, the early 70s.

We rode the hell out of it all over our weird, empty, pre-planned city.

If I remember it got just over 100mpg. The grown ups didn't even mind buying us gas.

Re: The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago

#90

Post by oblio »

sheepscreek wrote: post #11
hylaride wrote: post #6

> The e-scooters that clutter up pavements may seem like a new thing, but a hundred years ago, there were already people zooming around London on powered scooters. The problem is that we've given so much space to automobiles that there's no room for anything else (bikes, scooters, etc). Pedestrians have been given a sliver only because drivers need to walk between parking and their destination. This is true even in c…

Probably cause modern logistics, especially last mile logistics, is dependent on trucks/delivery vans/etc. So even though folks in a local area might like to walk around, their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network. I think Bacerlona hits a good compromise. The city has the concept of a superblock, which is a few city blocks grouped into one calm zon…

Last mile delivery can be done with large cargo ebikes capable of carrying up to 250-500kg.

Trucks or delivery vans should only be allowed on roads farther apart than 1-2km, with some exceptions (supermarkets, regular markets, etc).

We have all the technical tools needed, this is about political will.

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