my area doesnt even have sidewalks
Because to them, ‘car’ and ‘vehicle’ mean the same thing.
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Let it be known that I do not want to attack you personally. But the notion of electric bikes being death traps is something I can’t take seriously. I could go outside right now and film the street for an hour and watch 50% of bikes going by being electric, not to mention that you’d be hard pressed to find anyone wearing a helmet or protective gear.
Electric bikes here are generally limited to 25kmh (15mph) and the electric motor will stop the moment you go over that speed. Besides, most people generally don’t reach that speed because the largest users of electric bikes here are the over 50.
In my personal experience the problem isn’t so much the vehicle as the infrastructure being made for it. For context I live in the Netherlands in a smaller city (far from Amsterdam).
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25mph != 25kmh
Here the trains and busses are both electric, and the buses charge with overhead chargers at the main bus station.
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You don’t need cars to travel small towns. People have been travelling small towns without cars for thousands of years.
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As the other people mentioned. In North America, the percentage of urban populations is 85%, Latin America 81%, Europe 75%
Yes, rural areas are probably in need of private vehicles, but not everyone out of those 85-75% of people need a car. We’ve become too reliant on them.
Those stats are a bit misleading. For example, I live in a “urban” environnement, aka a town, but the closest anything is still 15km away.
What is an anything in your mind
What we do have at a walking/biking distance is a bakery, a pharmacy, a coffee shop, an antique store, two art galleries.
Anything else such as food, school, work, train station, doctor, veterinary, you name it, is 15k away.
It sounds like your town needs a tram station
So nobody lived on that mountain before cars were invented?
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They should return to premodern life if it’s the only way to avoid climate collapse and the end of human civilization. Going back to the industrial age is better than being sent back to the stone age.
Fortunately, we don’t have to do either, because there are safe, clean, modern solutions to transit.
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EVERYONE is going to DIE if the climate collapses.
Because a train isn’t going to drive me from home to anywhere that’s not a train station.
You’ve got legs, and if you can afford a few hundred dollars you’ve got wheels. By all rights, anywhere you need to go ought to be walking distance from a train station. The reason it’s not anymore, is that Americans demolished their cities to build parking, and now everything’s too far away.
Just an add here … Pedestrian fatalities are up, largely due to huge vehicles in general. But EVs tend to be very heavy because of the batteries. So collisions tend to be very unpleasant.
Can confirm. Rode a 1000w electric bike to work every day and couldn’t wait to get a car after all the near-misses I had. It’s even more dangerous than a pedal bike cause no one expects a bicycle to be going almost 30 MPH. Almost got hit at least 3-4 time from people turning right cause they didn’t expect me to be inside the intersection so soon.
They’re a lot of fun for recreation but not as a daily driver, unless you have a suicide wish.
It’s almost as of going 50kph with a bicycle isnt a good idea to begin with
It sounds like the only reason they’re dangerous in this case is that cars are on the road. Since cars are unethical and should be banned, I don’t see why electric bikes would be any problem in a sensible society.
No, e-bikes with these specs are considered vehicles just like motorcycles (in the EU) and need to follow the same rules.
For example, you can’t overtake people on the right, because it’s stupid and dangerous (and illegal). And assuming the other guy meant he almost had near-misses while riding on the bike path - e-bike hauling ass at 30MPH has no place on any bike path, it’s dangerous for everyone around.
It sounds like the person above lives in one of those countries where they drive on the right, so the bike lane would be to the right of the cars. So that person is just using the bike lane normally and cars are turning through the bike lane without looking, which is illegal.
If you’re going 50km/h on a bike line, absolutely no one driving car is expecting you to arrive to the crossing in 3 seconds from 50 meters away.
You absolutely have to slow down to a crossing on a bicycle, motorized or not. And this is coming form an cyclist who doesn’t own a car or a license.
Edit: also if you’re speeding like that on bike lanes where others are going on average less than half your speed, you’re causing danger to others.
Ride like maniac and die like maniac
America has high speed multilane roads with as many turnoffs and driveways as a street. They’re called stroads. Maybe the person above is having problems with those.
I find these discussions seem to be dominated by young urbanites. People who don’t need a car to get around as opposed to the huge number of people who live in areas that require a car to function. They are also physically able to bike many miles every day in any weather.
I took public transportation when I lived in a big city and was glad to have it but anytime I needed to go beyond a limited area in the city I needed a car. Now I live in an area with very limited public transportation and very very little is in walking distance and biking for my needs is not an alternative. Frequently using 100% public transportation routes would increase your travel time by a large amount, time you may not have or want to sacrifice. If you live in country like France it seems like the transit unions have a stranglehold on the nation as they can shut down everyone at will, if you have a car you at least have an alternative. There are also breakdown issues, maintenance shutdowns, etc. You also run into the last mile issue a lot. Where you need to go is frequently not a reasonable distance from the stop. I usually needed a car to get to the train stations for instance.
huge number of people who live in areas that require a car to function
That is exactly the problem. Areas that require a car to function shouldn’t exist. That’s what those “young urbanites” are arguing for.
And there are a lot of great point there about mixed zoning, but nuance is important. Should small towns with nearly nothing available locally, where you have to travel outside of town for most things just not exist? Even if they do have train connections (as they often do where I live, in Europe), you usually only have one train every 1-2 hours unless there’s some specific significance to your town.
Improving things is a nice goal, but it often feels like here that people just want to eliminate anything that doesn’t conform to their ideals of how the world should be like.
I would have to drive about 45 minutes to get to any form of public transport that isn’t a school bus.
Wow, that sucks. We should definitely build some transit near you so you aren’t so isolated. You need some freedom.
yeah I think its aimed to help fix the high traffic areas, for me when I was able to take the train from near my home to near my work it was amazing, it went pretty much parallel to the highways so you could drive and maybe get there a little faster but riding the train made it so you had time to play game boy or read a book instead of staring at the bumper in front of you in traffic. more trains and public transportation for commuting and cars for leisure like going on a road trip to go camping
All we honestly need is a few community shared self driving cars in each neighborhood to fix the last mile issue with mass transit, but the fuck cars absolutists often would rather have trains built to every houses doorstep than admit cars could still hold a purpose.
Well see the problem with self driving cars is that most of them put out PM2.5 pollution that gives asthma and lung cancer to little kids.
Young people often have the tendency to be both ageist and ableist at times.
Hi, I’m disabled and I can’t drive. Stop fucking calling the transit and walkability movement ableist. The transit and walkability movement has been life-saving to people like me.
I understand and I’m glad you’ve benefitted from it, but you’re ignoring the large number of people with disabilities that cannot walk any significant distance, while they can still drive. Old people also have an easier time driving than they do walking long distances and using public transit. Hell, I personally know plenty of people who choose to drive because they can’t walk for long without someone actively assisting them, even though they can still drive. My sibling, in fact, is one of them; the ‘transit and walkability’ movement doesn’t give two shits about them, however.
I’m not against more public transport and foot access; in fact, as an able-bodied young male who doesn’t want unnecessary debt or to be stuck in traffic, I’d prefer it. However, let’s not pretend that a lot of people haven’t been completely forgotten by the ‘lul fuck cars’ crowd.
Dutch style microcars are a greener and safer solution to physical disability and aging than full size full speed cars. Especially when you’re talking about elderly people with deteriorating eyesight and slower reactions. Car dependency helps a precious few disabled people while leaving the rest of us up shit creek and contributing to the extinction of the human species. The transit and walkability movement has a solution for everyone.
Yeah, cuz people don’t need to shop. Also, I’m sorry if people like my sibling fall into a ‘precious few’ but you’re gonna need to get everyone on board if you’re selling accessibility.
The transit and walkability movement has a solution for everyone.
Clearly.
I don’t know who told you that you couldn’t, but you can park a microcar at a shop.
People need space to put stuff, and there’s only so much that can be put into a dinky-ass microcar’s boot. Not to mention, people travel in groups too.
I’m too disabled to drive, I don’t live in a city, and I only bike between 0.5 and 1 km per day. I don’t have the slightest need for a car and I can still do whatever I want.
Be nice if we had trams tho
What is the advantage of autonomous trains over regular? It seems to me that when driving a train is your job, the autonomy just takes it away.
If we didn’t have capitalism, people wouldn’t need jobs. We could automate jobs away and instead of starving, people would just have more free time
Some people enjoy driving trains.
Yes, that should still be allowed. But people shouldn’t have to drive trains to live
theres countless mountains of actual work to be done that couldn’t be automated.
Yeah, and we should focus all our time and effort on those problems instead of wasting time driving trains.
Ok, name a system better than capitalism then
Bicycles are one of the most energy-efficient ways to travel, and electric ones even more so. But absolutely no one refers to them as “vehicles”…
Of course they’re vehicles. When you’re riding a bicycle you are operating a vehicle in traffic, like any other. What would you call them otherwise?
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say nobody refers to vehicles as bikes
For me it’s because I want an electric car and don’t really care about other modes of transit. I don’t want to be in a dense city, and a car is far more practical outside of one.
How do you have time to do anything when you’re stuck in traffic all day?
I’m not. I largely work from home, but when I am out I don’t go into the city because I’m not a big fan of being around people.
Oh, so you do all your travel in the suburbs? Goodness, no wonder you work from home! You poor thing.
Eh. 3 bedroom house for $1300/month, 2 car garage with a forge inside it, and a 2Gbps unlimited fiber line. I’m fine not venturing into the city.
That house would be even cheaper if there were less demand for it, and there would be less demand for single family homes if the supply of medium density dwellings were improved. Lots of people would want to live in the cheaper to build, cheaper to live in terrace houses, row houses, duplexes, town houses, flats, and brownstones. And with people moving out of the suburbs, your suburb house would get cheaper.
What I mean when i say I want a subway system
I see nothing wrong with a complex subway map and it is absolutely not a disadvantage. Try comparing it to a map of the roads maybe? A 2D space served by 1D lines necessitate a mesh-like network to do well, has nothing to do with transit or cars, a comprehensive system will always look like this.
And you memorize literally all the stations and their order if you take transit regularly.
Im not in disagreement. I actually prefer being a sardine in a can than driving.
![[meme] Why do people only seem to mean cars when they talk about electric and/or autonomous vehicles?](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8b4f07d2-ffe9-468c-a7da-0e970998b67f.png){kind=link}