I live in NYC and am a huge fan of the potential electric bikes and, more so here because of living space constraints, electric scooters bring to the table. The problem we have here is that, in the congested areas, the battle to build more bike lanes is being met with resistance and, even when they get built, the lanes are often unprotected and fully exposed to traffic. In manhattan, the city could literally survive with no cars. The mass transit system is excellent and scooters and bikes could do the rest.
I have an electric scooter up here in Montreal, and man is it fantastic. My commute to work is on protected bike lanes literally door to door from my building to the office. I've looked at NYC on google maps street view, and it's crazy how few protected bike lanes y'all got.
I assume you wear a suit and a black helmet, because that's what everyone on a E-scooter in Montréal at rush hour on route vert 5 looks like.
Out of curiosity how would shipping work without car/trucks there? Like I’m fully in support of shifting away from cars but I’m not aware of any sufficiently efficient last mile transportation solutions that don’t use such vehicles.
They said no cars, nothing about no trucks.
Any fully pedestrianized city/area I've been too still allows trucks and emergency vehicles.
Yeah trucks for shipping would still be a necessity.
I mean, electric bikes don't necessarily replace something that actually destroys the environment while electric cars could replace gas powered cars which would be very good for the environment
this is important. e-bikes displace regular bikes and pedestrians.
they could displace cars & motorcycles. but that would take a cultural shift in addition to a technical shift.for example in my neighborhood tons of kids are now riding ebikes around. instead of regular bikes. and they're dumb (read: young and haven't bashed their head enough yet) kids so they make the existing walking and bike paths dangerous with their "three up and reading texts while riding too fast" behavior. (I'm not joking; true scary event while walking the dog). They are mostly smart enough to avoid playing in traffic (drat!) which means they're causing pain for pedestrians and not cars.
As far as I can tell (small sample size) once one of them gets a car they switch and drive their car at speed while still looking at their phones. Presumably the rich kids get electric cars.
I'd vote heavily for more and better bike lanes on all the surface streets. Or a city ordinance that lets them ride their ebikes in traffic like mopeds. Perhaps stricter speed limits on the cars to make this safer. These would be cultural (legal) shifts that help ebikes displace cars.
Ebikes greatly increase potential riders as well as actual riders. This increases infrastructure pressure and makes biking more viable for all. Not to mention shifting more short trips to bike vs car, helping car owners see the other side etc
We live in a society where people rather kiss men than cows.
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