Exactly. And in a hilly/mountainous area, you get a bike with multiple gears (21 gear bikes are not a rarity even in the north german plains where I live ) prone with electric motor support. If you need to get a lot of groceries you either do groceries more often or get a cargo bike. For bad weather there’s clothing.
Nobody says a bike is perfect for everyone. But the vast majority of people live in urban environments and don’t need to haul tons of cargo daily. Bikes are a piece of the puzzle and if only those people had a car who actually need one often it could be a huge piece.
21 gear bikes are not a rarity even in the north german plains where I live
It is not amount of gears that matter, it is range of transmission that does.
For bad weather there’s clothing.
Yeah, it seems a lot of people just don’t know or don’t want to know what proper clothing is. Maybe they don’t even know it exists.
Nobody says a bike is perfect for everyone.
Well, anyone who can’t use bike will use powered wheelchair.
It is not amount of gears that matter, it is range of transmission that does.
You are completely right. I just don’t want to get too nerdy here.
It is not amount of gears that matter, it is range of transmission that does.
You are completely right. I just don’t want to get too nerdy here.
Yeah, it seems a lot of people just don’t know or don’t want to know what proper clothing is. Maybe they don’t even know it exists.
Which is surprising given how many people I see wearing super expensive outdoor/hiking jackets to go from the parking lot to the supermarket every time a drop of rain falls.
You picked a subcompact car, rather than a vehicle that any person with more than one braincell would pick for moving furniture, such as a truck.
You 100% will have a better time doing everything else I said in even a subcompact like the Polo than a bicycle.
But I don’t need a bigger car 99.999 percent of the time. Why should I buy a bigger one and pay it while not needing it instead of take a rental when I need to?
Please read my other comment.
eBikes really take the sting out of hills.
I live where it snows a lot, winter tires are a must, but so long as bike lanes are properly cleared it’s not really a problem (big IF I know), until it gets to -25C or colder the cold isn’t really a problem (you warm up fast peddling, I normally find myself unzipping my jacket).
My cargo bike is enough for me to take 2 weeks of groceries for 4 people. The largest thing I have transported has been a fridge (which funnily enough couldn’t fit in my EV). I have also transported lawn mowers, bar stools and a rocking chair. For anything bigger than that 30bucks on a uhaul is more than worthwhile, although I look forward to electric uhauls.
E-bikes still have a massive carbon footprint compared to regular bicycles, and the battery efficiency is very adversely effected by high heat (deserts) and low heat (snow) .
Either way, a car, even if its an EV, will be the better pick for every situation I stated above.
E-bikes still have a massive carbon footprint compared to regular bicycles,
The comparison is not between regular bikes and e bikes but between e bikes and cars. E bikes win this.
Either way, a car, even if its an EV, will be the better pick for every situation I stated above.
A 3000€ gaming machine will be better in any task than a 500€ office pc. But as long as the office pc is sufficient, why spend the extra money?
E-bikes still have a massive carbon footprint compared to regular bicycles
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. If you’d prefer to use a purely pedel bike go right ahead, but I find having a boost for heavy loads and hills makes biking preferable in situations it otherwise wouldn’t be. My battery is a 0.8kwh battery, which is more or less 15 iPhone batteries strapped together. My car is a 65kwh battery, literally 100x bigger for only 10x the range.
battery efficiency
Never comes into play, my bike has a 40km range with no load and no pedaling so typically even in winter the battery is far bigger than most trips I would take. The lir is also a longer range option and yiu can quick swap the batteries if you really wanted to marathon. I do take the battery inside in winter as starting it warm does help it alot. I probably would be more hesitant to take heavy things in particular if I didn’t have the battery.
Either way, a car, even if its an EV, will be the better pick for every situation I stated above.
Well no, if you look at my comment I do own a car (bolt euv). I literally couldnt take the fridge in the car, i had to go home and grab my bike which could carry it. I use my bike because my city has good infrastructure that makes it quicker than driving. No need to hunt for parking, and the exercise is nice. Being able to use it while lightly intoxicated is also a plus.
Yeah, I live in Montreal which gets like 90 inches of snow annually and can get down to the -20s Celsius regularly in the winter. And yet I (and many others) still bike throughout the winter. Turns out having good protected bike infrastructure and plowing it regularly in the winter makes biking perfectly practical even in the middle of a cold, snowy winter.
In fact, two of the best cities for biking in North America are Montreal and Minneapolis, both very cold and snowy in the winter.
Yes, that would help, but that would require major reworking of large areas. Additionally, having a large density of population all living on top of each other presents its own unique problems.
Really, its a situation where different people and places need different ssolutions. Some can use public transport and bicycles, and some cannot. And unless the Earths population becomes so large that every square inch of the planet is as dense as a place like Kowloon, cars will continue to fill a use that bicycles and public transport can never fill.
And unless the Earths population becomes so large that every square inch of the planet is as dense as a place like Kowloon, cars will continue to fill a use that bicycles and public transport can never fill.
Cars didn’t exist until 200 years ago and didn’t gain the depandance they have now until 60ish year ago. Cars will cease to exist sometime in the future.
We’re living in a small bubble in history where cars exist, the question is if we want to gradually reduce dependancy on cars now, or wait for the forceful bandage removal.
but that would require major reworking of large areas.
Yes, that’s precisely what will be required. There’s no getting through this without implementing massive changes to our way of life. Everyone wants there to be some kind of easy get-out-of-jail-free card, but that’s not how it’s going to be.
Nearly every person in South California, which is an incredibly high density of population? The entire bottom half of California is practically a desert, literally home to one of the hottest deserts in the entire planet the Mojave which contains the appropriately named Death Valley.
How about the people that live in parts of Arizona, Nevada, Utah, much of southern Texas, and New Mexico? And thats just in the United States. What about people in other continents like Africa and Asia? Large areas of those continents contain entire countries whose borders never leave desert or hills and mountains. Nearly the entire Middle East and top half of Africa is desert. A large part of Australia is desert, its like more than 50% of the continent.
Urban population refers to people living in urban areas as defined by national statistical offices. It is calculated using World Bank population estimates and urban ratios from the United Nations World Urbanization Prospects. Aggregation of urban and rural population may not add up to total population because of different country coverages.
Sorry that I live in a state with a size as big as your county, and a city with a population as large as a lot of countries.
In order to get everything that close you’d have to stack people on top of each other in slums like the kowloon.
Weird take.
No, you don’t have to stack people at all. A small store with 2-3 employees servicing a neighbourhood would very easily be profitable and convenient. You’d need to walk 10 minutes instead of 30 seconds if people were more spread out, but much better than the US big box store surrounded by the parking moat.
Assuming you’re talking about US suburbs, the only change would be some franchise buying a single house in a neighbourhood, bulldozing that and building a small store. That is, if it wasn’t illegal to do that due to zoning laws.
I live in a neighbourhood with a mixture of apartment blocks, parks and stores. When I step outside my apartment block, I can either walk 30 seconds to the store, the park, the vet, etc. Small local stores.
Of course big stores with much more variety and less commonly bought things exist, for that you do need some form of transport, even here. It’s just not necessary to go there to buy pasta and sauce to cook for dinner, for example.