Hot take: if you can choose between an #ebike and a car, of course take the bike.
However if your choice is between a regular bike and an e-bike the former is much more environmentally friendly.
In short, biking become less and less environmentally friendly the more regular bikes get replaced with e-bikes and e-scooters.
Why is it that people cycle more in the Netherlands than in any other country ? The answer is in the infrastructure. Long established blog with content up to the present day detailing how the infrastructure of the Netherlands makes cycling so pleasant that almost everyone cycles in this country and a higher proportion of cycle journeys are made here than anywhere else
@hembrow @WhyNotZoidberg I feel like blaming ebikes for that seems like a bit of a stretch, then? Especially as the prices for all bikes are high. One reason I bought my ebike was precisely that - if I was going to buy a cargo bike anyways, I might as well get electric assist.
If car ownership is increasing, that's the issue, and the ebike stuff is likely to be a symptom and not a cause. I do also wonder about public transport cuts, which are themselves something RW governments like to do.
@prestontumber You can feel that way if you want, but e-bikes are at least a large part of what is destroying cycling in my country and I'm not happy about it.
Public transport has little, to nothing at all, to do with any of this. Dutch people don't use public transport very much at all.
About 2% of all journeys in this country are by train, and about another 2% are by bus/tram and subway combined. That's not changed in years.
http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2015/05/how-much-do-dutch-really-cycle-how-is.html
@WhyNotZoidberg
...literally nothing you have posted supports that, especially if regular bikes are getting more expensive as well. You can do "old man yells at cloud" all you like, but it's not actually objective.
Disregard public transport all you like - inadequacies in transit are a reason people may choose autonomous modes of transport, and cars are one such mode. You can say "that hasn't changed in years" - has the population? Has the housing market? Has the median age?
@prestontumber Not only have you completely missed the point, but you've also begun an ad-hominum argument. Is that objective in your world ?
You clearly have no idea about how the Dutch bicycle market works.
To maintain our fleet of 23 million bicycles in 2000 with sales of 1.5 m bikes per year in 2000 required that each bicycle would last around 14 years. A bicycle would typically be on its third or fourth owner by the time it was beyond economic serviceable age and end up scrapped.
With sales of proper bicycles plummeting in large part because of people who buy new bikes buying e-bikes instead, and because e-bikes go to landfill after five years because they can't be repaired, we now need each new real bicycle to last 60 years in order to maintain the fleet size. That's impossible.
This effect will take a few years to make itself obvious, but without enough bicycles we won't be able to cycle as much as now.
If you can magically come up with a method whereby a fleet of 23 million bikes can be sustained from annual sales of 350000 new bikes without requiring them to last >60 years on average please let me know.
Please read the blog post. I already explained all of this, *and* also answered many of the typical responses that people come up with:
http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2022/03/the-challenge-of-declining-bicycle.html
@WhyNotZoidberg
@hembrow @WhyNotZoidberg You're the one who started the incivility, not I. You don't get to go on arrogantly about "feelings" when my statements were clearly just a courtesy to avoid pointing out that you were making the fairly elementary logical fallacy of confusing correlation with causation.
I have heard your argument, I just find it perplexing you want to pretend that bicycle sales exist in a vacuum, even in a country as bike-friendly as NL.
@prestontumber I wish I had a solution but unfortunately, I don't.
"Don't buy ebikes" is indeed a non-starter. They've been pushed incredibly heavily by bicycle manufacturers and the idea of not being required to do much actual pedaling has clearly been made very attractive to "bicycle" customers. Consumerism is in. Repairability and sustainability are not. E-bikes lean on an open door with today's consumers.
I think what we're watching now is very close to a repeat of what happened a hundred years ago when many established bicycle manufacturers switched first to manufacturing motorbikes and then started making cars. Just like early motorbikes, early e-bikes also looked like bicycles. But newer e-bikes are becoming steadily less bicycle like, heavier, bulkier, much less efficient and no longer really rideable without the motor. It's the same profit chasing as a century ago combined with the same selling ease to the customer as before.
Sadly, "don't vote for right-wing politicians who make driving more attractive" is also a non-starter. My country recently voted for our most right wing government since the 1940s occupation. We already have a remarkable number of financial disincentives for cycling and they're not going to fix any of that.
We're in a bad place.
@WhyNotZoidberg
Why Not Zoidberg? 🦑
David Hembrow
Preston Is Not My Real Name