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They neglected a huge part of the coming electric vehicle picture: lightweight, slow-speed electric vehicles. Almost 60% of US car trips are 5 miles or shorter

They neglected a huge part of the coming electric vehicle picture: lightweight, slow-speed electric vehicles. Almost 60% of US car trips are 5 miles or shorter. (2017 ref: https://nhts.ornl.gov/tables09/ae/work/Job63697.html https://nhts.ornl.gov/tables09/ae/work/Job63697.html, 2009 ref: https://nhts.ornl.gov/tables09/fatcat/2009/vt_TRPMILES.html https://nhts.ornl.gov/tables09/fatcat/2009/vt_TRPMILES.html) Scooters, e-bikes, and electric cargo bikes (not to mention the human-powered versions!) will soak up an enormous portion of the current automobile demand, and leave us with massively positive outcomes in terms of congestion, pollution, road safety and community cohesion.

burlesona 8y ago
I agree, I we may be at a point in time analogous to people in the early 2000's discussing the next revolution in PCs... and not really appreciating that the next revolution was going to be mobile. I think transportation is a lot more interesting than just cars - electric (and non-electric) cars will probably be part of the equation forever, but I suspect we're past peak car.
- GW150914 8y ago
  People have been saying that for a very long time, and every decade or two someone bets real money and loses horribly. I think the last time was Kamen thinking the Segway would change human transportation forever. Such visionaries tend to conveniently forget people who have families with kids, the price, and the fact that if their device can’t totally replace a car then it’s just an added expense many can’t afford.
  - octorian 8y ago
    This is why any half-measure is kinda a waste. The overhead to "rent something for the occasional need" is far more of a real-world hassle than people are willing to put up with. Also, having kids dramatically changes what you need in a vehicle, in ways that make any ride-sharing or rental option a significantly greater pain than it would otherwise be.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - soperj 8y ago
    And yet tons of people do it in europe with kids because the infrastructure exists.
    - GW150914 8y ago
      You mean the rich, temperate parts of Western Europe, most of which could fit inside Texas? Sure. If you’re being more honest it’s the urban areas of the richer, temperate parts of Weatern Europe, which is an even smaller geographic area with a total population that’s less than the US, or about 1/5th of China or India. I love cycling in Paris and Amsterdam, not so much in New York City in the winter. I also wouldn’t love to do weekly shopping for a family of 4+ using a Segway and public transportation. Edit: I’m curious if those downvotes represent disagreement, or just distaste.
      - dagss 8y ago
        Probably because you talk about size of population on the level of countries/continents which is clearly irrelevant to the question here (where population of an individual city is what matters, at best). So not distaste or disagreement, but irrelevance. If you think "Europe has a smaller population than US" is relevant to whether using public transport where the infrastructure exists is possible for families then you need to state why more clearly.
      - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
        I live in Norway, in a city of 180-200k people. Folks use public transportation or walking all the time. With children. For everyday food shopping. You don't need to shop only once a week - 2-3 times makes carrying your goods easier. You can dress for the weather. It isn't all that big of a deal. Children in strollers have warm stuff around them. They sell bikes with studded tires for use on snow. It was tiring when I first moved here, but you get used to it and it isn't a big deal. Kids get used to walking and will sometimes even help carry things back. I'd more argue that the real reason it doesn't work so well in much of the states is because the public transportation sucks. Walkways suck most places - half the towns I lived in didn't even make sure you could walk to the stores on sidewalks. More people were expected to work 50-60 hours a week on top of this. Poor folks sometimes work two jobs. Many employers don't have secure places to put your stuff while you are at work (no bike racks, no locker to put your winter gear or umbrella in). Fixing these problems help greatly.
  - sam_goody 8y ago
    Out where I live, the electric bike is as common as a regular bike. When I first saw one, people said it was a useless half measure - if you don't want to peddle, you would take the car. The has proven wrong, and as time goes by, the reverse happens - it replaces the car. You should realize that many people who buy these scooters and electric bikes are doing so to replace the bike, not the car. But then over time it replaces the car for 90% of the trips.
    - GW150914 8y ago
      Electric bikes are a huge improvement over standard bikes, and no improvement at all over a car for a significant number of use cases. They’re also no more useful than a bike in places where roads are poorly maintained, rain and snow are frequent, or no bike lanes exist. They’re not useful for taking kids to school, or doing significant errands. They are amazing for a single person to get around cheaply without killing themselves on every hill, and probably a godsend in SV. Most of the world doesn’t have SV’s weather though, and a lot of people have kids. Electric bikes and scooters are very cool, but they’re no more a solution to the car in most cases than a motorcycle or Segway. They do nothing for people with long commutes, or who live in spread-out suburbs. No one is trading in their minivan for a moped.
      - jacquesm 8y ago
        > They’re not useful for taking kids to school, Where I live a few hundred thousand kids are taken to school by bike every day. All the way up to age 10 or so it's pretty common to see parents with kids on the back (and sometimes on the front or both) of their bikes. https://www.24baby.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/mamafiets.jpg https://www.24baby.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/mamafiets.j...
        icebraining 8y ago
        Even in Brussels, with its heavy traffic and unseparated bike lanes, there are quite a few parents taking kids around on bike.
        8y ago
tormeh 8y ago
I don't think so. A car is the most outwardly visible status/everything symbol you have. This is important, especially for men without a family. They're not going to want to be seen in a Renault Zoe or a scooter.
- Jill_the_Pill 8y ago
  This old-fashioned attitude is worth changing then.
- stellar678 8y ago
  I remember back in 2007 when I would try to talk to people about this badass upcoming Tesla Roadster that could smoke supercars. A very common thing I heard was: "Yea that's interesting, but I mean, a silent car is just not cool like a screaming V12." Times change. Outward status also comes from travel, clothing, food, lifestyle, and housing choices. -- The flip side of the equation is that cars (even electric ones) have enormous externalized costs that are not paid by the owner/driver of the car. As those costs are accounted, the balance will continue to tilt away from cars where they can be avoided. (Particulate pollution from tires, brakes and road surface wear has an enormous public health cost, congestion & long commutes have enormous productivity and health costs, parking and sprawling development have enormous unaccounted infrastructure costs.)
- selimthegrim 8y ago
  You know what cured me of this? Being the proud lessee of an environmentally friendly, low-end-torque having, fuel-sipping 2014 VW diesel Jetta. Oops.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    2 out of 3 ain't bad...
- xorfish 8y ago
  A Tesla isn't a status symbol?
azeotropic 8y ago
America is not the Bay Area. Those short trips are across town to pick up the kids at school or take them to sports or go grocery shopping or other errands. In the snow. Uphill. Both ways. Nobody is going to use a scooter or an e-bike for that. If someone made an electric minivan, sure, that might soak up most of those trips, but for some reason nobody makes one.
- stellar678 8y ago
  Well, if you say so. Clearly your opinion about people's travel has a lot more validity than the research conducted by the American (err, United States) Federal Highway Administration.
  - MBCook 8y ago
    It doesn’t matter if it’s a 5 mile trip. What if three of that’s on the highway? Is that little electric scooter going to do 70 safely with all the SUVs around weaving in and out? Without me getting squashed? And when it’s snowing heavily? And maybe there’s already a foot on the ground, plus a whole bunch of ice? You think a lot of people are going to want to do their 5 miles then? Being on a motorcycle is pretty dangerous because cars don’t watch out for you. Being on a bicycle is far worse. Being on a little electric scooter on “real“ roads sounds like a death trap (again, saying nothing of large roads/highways). Don’t say scooter lanes. That doesn’t seem to protect bicyclists. Yes, all this can change. But right now it’s a BIG issue for small transportation replacing cars. I’ve seen one or two people in the suburbs around me using tiny segues or high quality hoverboards. I just can’t see that catching on for any realistically sized group of the population the way everything works right now.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      5 mile trips with three of those on the highway typically have alternatives with all 5 off the highway.
- HarryHirsch 8y ago
  It would be progress if the kids could get their own electric scooter to go to school or soccer training. It would increase their social skills, it can't be good to be dependent on the parents for everything when cooped up in an exurban paradise.
ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
I never thought of that. Are there the same moves in tiny electric hatchbacks (eg kei sized, not Leafs), scooters, mopeds, etc as there is currently in fullsize cars? I'd love a high quality electric moped to run down the shops and pick up milk and bread, or pick something up from the post office. All I've seen is those cheap plastic electric mopeds that people get from eBay/Aliexpress or Costco. I don't remember seeing anything of the big-name quality.
- stellar678 8y ago
  It's a good point that design and manufacturing quality are an important component here. I know the e-scooters used by Lime and Bird have seen a pretty quick iteration, and the models they have on the streets now are a lot better than the ones they had when they launched in my city just a few months ago. In terms of in-between vehicles, I haven't seen too much yet. Our current street designs (at least in most of the US) make it really hard to operate a vehicle that is too small/slow to share the big & high speed lanes and intersections, but too large to move onto sidewalks or pedestrian spaces when you need to fill the gaps between safer/slower infrastructure. You could look at what they drive around the retirement communities, seems to be a lot of designs that use a golf cart as a starting point.
  - ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
    Yeah I'd absolutely love to use a golf cart or similar, but I need something street registerable (I live in an inner city high-rise in Australia). Our local councils get these awesome little electric golf-cart things to roam around servicing things, but they're not legal for us to own, which is a real shame. Something the size of a golf cart, so it can be tucked away in a corner somewhere, or parked sideways with tail to curb and be no longer than the standard width of a parking spot, would be absolutely incredible. It would only need ~20-30km range, seat 2, and have a small area for storage, and I truly think it would be pretty popular for inner city dwellers. Most people just keep a cheap car tucked away in a back street nearby, or use Vespa-style scooters.
    - 8y ago
neap24 8y ago
Totally agree. I just ordered an e-bike a few days ago because a lightweight, flexible vehicle that can travel with ease in a bike lane or on a sidewalk is much more appealing to me than investing in another car and everything that comes along with it (insurance, registration, inspections, etc.).
billfruit 8y ago
It seems wasteful to use cars for short travel, esp for a single person or two persons. In third world people would use the motorcycle for such short travel, even if they had a car. And you can buy motor cycles that can go nearly 100kms on a litre of petrol.
- gambiting 8y ago
  The reason why it's not more popular in the 1st world countries is that a motorcycle/moped is yet another vehicle that you need to tax and pay insurance on, while you are already paying not a small amount of money for a perfectly usable car - why double your expenses? Not to mention that in a lot of climates riding a bike/moped is a really bad idea in winter without significant skill and gear.
  - usaar333 8y ago
    Safety concerns are also a huge issue with motorcycle adoption.
adrianN 8y ago
Not if the car lobby can help it. Think of the jobs! Case in point: E-Bikes in Germany. You can either buy an e-assist bike that is allowed on bike paths and doesn't cost tax. Those are limited to 200W and 25km/h. That means you still impede traffic in 30km/h zones where people typically drive 35-40. Or you can spend more and get an S-Pedelec. That costs tax, isn't allowed on bike paths, and needs a driver's license. It can go 45km/h, meaning that you still impede traffic on normal 50km/h streets where people usually drive 55-60. All other electric vehicles, scooters, longboards and the like are either illegal or limited to slow speeds (12km/h I think?). To me it seems fairly obvious to me that these regulations were made to prevent competition with cars. The rules for S-Pedelecs are the same as for small motorcycles, the previous big competitor to cars in cities.
- avar 8y ago
  The EU-wide 25km/h limit is extremely frustrating. It makes it so that you can't "take the lane" on the very common 30km/h roads without impeding traffic, and subjectively it's just the wrong speed. A huge number of cyclists on non-E-bikes easily bike at 25-30 km/h, whereas 30-35 km/h is way less common.
  - dagss 8y ago
    I support it for lanes with a mixture of walking and biking (which at least in Norway is almost all the bike lanes). There is a huge difference in outcome in colliding with pedestrians in 25 km/h vs 30 km/h. Non-e-bikers that hit 30 km/h necessarily have a certain amount of training to keep those speeds consistently, while e-bikes give people on their first bike trip the same speed.
    - avar 8y ago
      Well it's a good thing that your disagreement with me isn't going to translate into any votes on the matter, since Norway just adopts EU policy, and doesn't vote on it :) More seriously, I can see that point, you can come up with good reasons either way. But I think the actual reason is just arbitrary. I'm not aware of any trial program where they tried different speeds, tried to gather statistics on safety etc. This 25 km/h number was just arbitrarily chosen by some bureaucrat, likewise for 20 mph. Whether something is an overall win for safety is a much more complex question than about the physics of colliding with a pedestrian at either 25 km/h or 30 km/h. If it was 30 perhaps you'd get more people to ride bikes, and then you'd be in the worst case colliding with a cyclist instead of that same person going 50-80 km/h in a car.
Waterluvian 8y ago
I'm excited for a critical mass of those kinds of vehicles. I want one now but someone in an SUV is going kill me one day so I avoid it.
- stellar678 8y ago
  Yeah - given all the data we have showing that SUV design is basically set up to kill pedestrians, I have to wonder when Ralph Nader is going to come out with “Unsafe at Any Speed 2”.
knolan 8y ago
I’m starting a new job, my cycle commute will increase from just 6 km to 18 km (and a few more as we’re going to buy a home). This is on the edge of my fatigue anxiety so I’m considering an e-bike. Not only is it considerably cheaper than a beater car due to tax and insurance costs it’s faster overall even with the European 25 km/h speed limit. The bus of course takes twice as long and costs around €1500 per year. Talking to various dealers and reading online it’s crazy how many new models there are this year. Giant alone have 38 new models.

burlesona 8y ago

I agree, I we may be at a point in time analogous to people in the early 2000's discussing the next revolution in PCs... and not really appreciating that the next revolution was going to be mobile. I think transportation is a lot more interesting than just cars - electric (and non-electric) cars will probably be part of the equation forever, but I suspect we're past peak car.

GW150914 8y ago
People have been saying that for a very long time, and every decade or two someone bets real money and loses horribly. I think the last time was Kamen thinking the Segway would change human transportation forever. Such visionaries tend to conveniently forget people who have families with kids, the price, and the fact that if their device can’t totally replace a car then it’s just an added expense many can’t afford.
- octorian 8y ago
  This is why any half-measure is kinda a waste. The overhead to "rent something for the occasional need" is far more of a real-world hassle than people are willing to put up with. Also, having kids dramatically changes what you need in a vehicle, in ways that make any ride-sharing or rental option a significantly greater pain than it would otherwise be.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- soperj 8y ago
  And yet tons of people do it in europe with kids because the infrastructure exists.
  - GW150914 8y ago
    You mean the rich, temperate parts of Western Europe, most of which could fit inside Texas? Sure. If you’re being more honest it’s the urban areas of the richer, temperate parts of Weatern Europe, which is an even smaller geographic area with a total population that’s less than the US, or about 1/5th of China or India. I love cycling in Paris and Amsterdam, not so much in New York City in the winter. I also wouldn’t love to do weekly shopping for a family of 4+ using a Segway and public transportation. Edit: I’m curious if those downvotes represent disagreement, or just distaste.
    - dagss 8y ago
      Probably because you talk about size of population on the level of countries/continents which is clearly irrelevant to the question here (where population of an individual city is what matters, at best). So not distaste or disagreement, but irrelevance. If you think "Europe has a smaller population than US" is relevant to whether using public transport where the infrastructure exists is possible for families then you need to state why more clearly.
    - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
      I live in Norway, in a city of 180-200k people. Folks use public transportation or walking all the time. With children. For everyday food shopping. You don't need to shop only once a week - 2-3 times makes carrying your goods easier. You can dress for the weather. It isn't all that big of a deal. Children in strollers have warm stuff around them. They sell bikes with studded tires for use on snow. It was tiring when I first moved here, but you get used to it and it isn't a big deal. Kids get used to walking and will sometimes even help carry things back. I'd more argue that the real reason it doesn't work so well in much of the states is because the public transportation sucks. Walkways suck most places - half the towns I lived in didn't even make sure you could walk to the stores on sidewalks. More people were expected to work 50-60 hours a week on top of this. Poor folks sometimes work two jobs. Many employers don't have secure places to put your stuff while you are at work (no bike racks, no locker to put your winter gear or umbrella in). Fixing these problems help greatly.
- sam_goody 8y ago
  Out where I live, the electric bike is as common as a regular bike. When I first saw one, people said it was a useless half measure - if you don't want to peddle, you would take the car. The has proven wrong, and as time goes by, the reverse happens - it replaces the car. You should realize that many people who buy these scooters and electric bikes are doing so to replace the bike, not the car. But then over time it replaces the car for 90% of the trips.
  - GW150914 8y ago
    Electric bikes are a huge improvement over standard bikes, and no improvement at all over a car for a significant number of use cases. They’re also no more useful than a bike in places where roads are poorly maintained, rain and snow are frequent, or no bike lanes exist. They’re not useful for taking kids to school, or doing significant errands. They are amazing for a single person to get around cheaply without killing themselves on every hill, and probably a godsend in SV. Most of the world doesn’t have SV’s weather though, and a lot of people have kids. Electric bikes and scooters are very cool, but they’re no more a solution to the car in most cases than a motorcycle or Segway. They do nothing for people with long commutes, or who live in spread-out suburbs. No one is trading in their minivan for a moped.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      > They’re not useful for taking kids to school, Where I live a few hundred thousand kids are taken to school by bike every day. All the way up to age 10 or so it's pretty common to see parents with kids on the back (and sometimes on the front or both) of their bikes. https://www.24baby.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/mamafiets.jpg https://www.24baby.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/mamafiets.j...
      - icebraining 8y ago
        Even in Brussels, with its heavy traffic and unseparated bike lanes, there are quite a few parents taking kids around on bike.
      - 8y ago

tormeh 8y ago

I don't think so. A car is the most outwardly visible status/everything symbol you have. This is important, especially for men without a family. They're not going to want to be seen in a Renault Zoe or a scooter.

Jill_the_Pill 8y ago
This old-fashioned attitude is worth changing then.
stellar678 8y ago
I remember back in 2007 when I would try to talk to people about this badass upcoming Tesla Roadster that could smoke supercars. A very common thing I heard was: "Yea that's interesting, but I mean, a silent car is just not cool like a screaming V12." Times change. Outward status also comes from travel, clothing, food, lifestyle, and housing choices. -- The flip side of the equation is that cars (even electric ones) have enormous externalized costs that are not paid by the owner/driver of the car. As those costs are accounted, the balance will continue to tilt away from cars where they can be avoided. (Particulate pollution from tires, brakes and road surface wear has an enormous public health cost, congestion & long commutes have enormous productivity and health costs, parking and sprawling development have enormous unaccounted infrastructure costs.)
selimthegrim 8y ago
You know what cured me of this? Being the proud lessee of an environmentally friendly, low-end-torque having, fuel-sipping 2014 VW diesel Jetta. Oops.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  2 out of 3 ain't bad...
xorfish 8y ago
A Tesla isn't a status symbol?

azeotropic 8y ago

America is not the Bay Area. Those short trips are across town to pick up the kids at school or take them to sports or go grocery shopping or other errands. In the snow. Uphill. Both ways. Nobody is going to use a scooter or an e-bike for that. If someone made an electric minivan, sure, that might soak up most of those trips, but for some reason nobody makes one.

stellar678 8y ago
Well, if you say so. Clearly your opinion about people's travel has a lot more validity than the research conducted by the American (err, United States) Federal Highway Administration.
- MBCook 8y ago
  It doesn’t matter if it’s a 5 mile trip. What if three of that’s on the highway? Is that little electric scooter going to do 70 safely with all the SUVs around weaving in and out? Without me getting squashed? And when it’s snowing heavily? And maybe there’s already a foot on the ground, plus a whole bunch of ice? You think a lot of people are going to want to do their 5 miles then? Being on a motorcycle is pretty dangerous because cars don’t watch out for you. Being on a bicycle is far worse. Being on a little electric scooter on “real“ roads sounds like a death trap (again, saying nothing of large roads/highways). Don’t say scooter lanes. That doesn’t seem to protect bicyclists. Yes, all this can change. But right now it’s a BIG issue for small transportation replacing cars. I’ve seen one or two people in the suburbs around me using tiny segues or high quality hoverboards. I just can’t see that catching on for any realistically sized group of the population the way everything works right now.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    5 mile trips with three of those on the highway typically have alternatives with all 5 off the highway.
HarryHirsch 8y ago
It would be progress if the kids could get their own electric scooter to go to school or soccer training. It would increase their social skills, it can't be good to be dependent on the parents for everything when cooped up in an exurban paradise.

ObsoleteNerd 8y ago

I never thought of that. Are there the same moves in tiny electric hatchbacks (eg kei sized, not Leafs), scooters, mopeds, etc as there is currently in fullsize cars? I'd love a high quality electric moped to run down the shops and pick up milk and bread, or pick something up from the post office. All I've seen is those cheap plastic electric mopeds that people get from eBay/Aliexpress or Costco. I don't remember seeing anything of the big-name quality.

stellar678 8y ago
It's a good point that design and manufacturing quality are an important component here. I know the e-scooters used by Lime and Bird have seen a pretty quick iteration, and the models they have on the streets now are a lot better than the ones they had when they launched in my city just a few months ago. In terms of in-between vehicles, I haven't seen too much yet. Our current street designs (at least in most of the US) make it really hard to operate a vehicle that is too small/slow to share the big & high speed lanes and intersections, but too large to move onto sidewalks or pedestrian spaces when you need to fill the gaps between safer/slower infrastructure. You could look at what they drive around the retirement communities, seems to be a lot of designs that use a golf cart as a starting point.
- ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
  Yeah I'd absolutely love to use a golf cart or similar, but I need something street registerable (I live in an inner city high-rise in Australia). Our local councils get these awesome little electric golf-cart things to roam around servicing things, but they're not legal for us to own, which is a real shame. Something the size of a golf cart, so it can be tucked away in a corner somewhere, or parked sideways with tail to curb and be no longer than the standard width of a parking spot, would be absolutely incredible. It would only need ~20-30km range, seat 2, and have a small area for storage, and I truly think it would be pretty popular for inner city dwellers. Most people just keep a cheap car tucked away in a back street nearby, or use Vespa-style scooters.
  - 8y ago

neap24 8y ago

Totally agree. I just ordered an e-bike a few days ago because a lightweight, flexible vehicle that can travel with ease in a bike lane or on a sidewalk is much more appealing to me than investing in another car and everything that comes along with it (insurance, registration, inspections, etc.).

billfruit 8y ago

It seems wasteful to use cars for short travel, esp for a single person or two persons. In third world people would use the motorcycle for such short travel, even if they had a car. And you can buy motor cycles that can go nearly 100kms on a litre of petrol.

gambiting 8y ago
The reason why it's not more popular in the 1st world countries is that a motorcycle/moped is yet another vehicle that you need to tax and pay insurance on, while you are already paying not a small amount of money for a perfectly usable car - why double your expenses? Not to mention that in a lot of climates riding a bike/moped is a really bad idea in winter without significant skill and gear.
- usaar333 8y ago
  Safety concerns are also a huge issue with motorcycle adoption.

adrianN 8y ago

Not if the car lobby can help it. Think of the jobs! Case in point: E-Bikes in Germany. You can either buy an e-assist bike that is allowed on bike paths and doesn't cost tax. Those are limited to 200W and 25km/h. That means you still impede traffic in 30km/h zones where people typically drive 35-40. Or you can spend more and get an S-Pedelec. That costs tax, isn't allowed on bike paths, and needs a driver's license. It can go 45km/h, meaning that you still impede traffic on normal 50km/h streets where people usually drive 55-60. All other electric vehicles, scooters, longboards and the like are either illegal or limited to slow speeds (12km/h I think?). To me it seems fairly obvious to me that these regulations were made to prevent competition with cars. The rules for S-Pedelecs are the same as for small motorcycles, the previous big competitor to cars in cities.

avar 8y ago
The EU-wide 25km/h limit is extremely frustrating. It makes it so that you can't "take the lane" on the very common 30km/h roads without impeding traffic, and subjectively it's just the wrong speed. A huge number of cyclists on non-E-bikes easily bike at 25-30 km/h, whereas 30-35 km/h is way less common.
- dagss 8y ago
  I support it for lanes with a mixture of walking and biking (which at least in Norway is almost all the bike lanes). There is a huge difference in outcome in colliding with pedestrians in 25 km/h vs 30 km/h. Non-e-bikers that hit 30 km/h necessarily have a certain amount of training to keep those speeds consistently, while e-bikes give people on their first bike trip the same speed.
  - avar 8y ago
    Well it's a good thing that your disagreement with me isn't going to translate into any votes on the matter, since Norway just adopts EU policy, and doesn't vote on it :) More seriously, I can see that point, you can come up with good reasons either way. But I think the actual reason is just arbitrary. I'm not aware of any trial program where they tried different speeds, tried to gather statistics on safety etc. This 25 km/h number was just arbitrarily chosen by some bureaucrat, likewise for 20 mph. Whether something is an overall win for safety is a much more complex question than about the physics of colliding with a pedestrian at either 25 km/h or 30 km/h. If it was 30 perhaps you'd get more people to ride bikes, and then you'd be in the worst case colliding with a cyclist instead of that same person going 50-80 km/h in a car.

Waterluvian 8y ago

I'm excited for a critical mass of those kinds of vehicles. I want one now but someone in an SUV is going kill me one day so I avoid it.

stellar678 8y ago
Yeah - given all the data we have showing that SUV design is basically set up to kill pedestrians, I have to wonder when Ralph Nader is going to come out with “Unsafe at Any Speed 2”.

knolan 8y ago

I’m starting a new job, my cycle commute will increase from just 6 km to 18 km (and a few more as we’re going to buy a home). This is on the edge of my fatigue anxiety so I’m considering an e-bike. Not only is it considerably cheaper than a beater car due to tax and insurance costs it’s faster overall even with the European 25 km/h speed limit. The bus of course takes twice as long and costs around €1500 per year. Talking to various dealers and reading online it’s crazy how many new models there are this year. Giant alone have 38 new models.