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A bike. If everyone just rode a bike, not only accidents would be less lethal, there would be a lot less congestion and pollution. Also we might get fitter too.
by nico 4y ago
A bike. If everyone just rode a bike, not only accidents would be less lethal, there would be a lot less congestion and pollution. Also we might get fitter too.
- vkou 4y agoAnd barring that, an electric scooter.
- jonhohle 4y agoAnd maybe an electric motorcycle or trike for when you have to carry more stuff. And an electric car for big families, and an electric van for vacations…
- asdff 4y agoThe right answer is the tool for the job. Chances are you don't need a huge pickup truck when you buy $200 of groceries. I can do it in a bike with some panniers so that means everyone can do it with an ebike. Need more than $200? Just take multiple trips a week and cancel your gym membership. Need to haul a few hundred pounds of manure? By all means take the truck. It's just when you look around at the modern world today, a lot of people are sitting in traffic by themselves in a vehicle on their way to work less than 10 miles away, or buying a few things from the store less than 2 miles away as soon as the need arises. Its a lot of wasted vehicular capacity. If you were a business buying a machine that you only used a fraction of its capabilities, you'd consider getting away with a leaner machine for most use cases. For a lot of people I talk to about getting around when it comes up, the major stopping point with biking is just the lack of infrastructure and feeling afraid of cars. Most people aren't comfortable taking the lane while biking so it becomes a dangerous experience when they don't. As the saying goes, though, if you build it, they will come. Any city I've been in that has built out a gridlike network of bike lanes seems to have a lot of people riding around. Once you build them that network you enable a lot of trips for those people uncomfortable with the existing road network.
- galangalalgol 4y agoAre there any good examples of how to do this infrastructure? In my neighborhood they took the major street in the neighborhood and took one of the lanes and painted it to be a bike lane mext to the sidewalk, and parking spots further out. No physical median, just white paint on light concrete. No one parks in those spots, they would get demolished by cars. And no one bikes there, they bike on less busy streets one block in either direction. Also, at every intersection the parking spots disappear for a right turn lane. The bike lane doesn't, but it is hard to see so the cars go over the whole way. A nearby neighborhood did something similar but with physical medians. Much better, but still people just use less busy streets mostly. My main issue getting to work is not those streets, but post ww2 neighborhoods that have one entance and exit forcing me on to highways with glass covered shoulders and speedlimits over 55. That is what I want them to fix. But that would actually involve earth moving and eminent domain, not just a bit of paint or concrete.
- asdff 4y agoI think Irvine California has done a good job adding bike lanes to that sort of suburban design
- goblinux 4y agoWhat about trucking and shipping? The US - where this study took place- is huge, and most of it is very far from ports. 18 wheelers/semis are the biggest users of the American highway system and are necessary to get goods to/from production and consumption sites These trucks also contribute to the rise in vehicle size. I did not like driving when I was in a sedan sized car sharing the high speed highways hours from cities on those highways
- Schroedingersat 4y agoWell put the trucks moving stuff in places where the people koving themselves aren't. If they're going extremely long distances you could even have some kind of dedicated hard wearing road surface. And if lots of them are going to the same place you could get them to move in a convoy. And once they're in a convoy you could hook them together...
- dnadler 4y agoSo build an entire second interstate system? That’s not really realistic, which tends to be the problem with most ideas to move away from cars.
- COGlory 4y agoI'll just bike all around Montana.
- ironmagma 4y agoWe might also get heatstrokes. Source: Florida resident
- kqr 4y agoI wonder how the climate got so hot...
- ironmagma 4y ago“Collectively, cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of all US emissions, emitting around 24 pounds of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases for every gallon of gas.” (Source: epa.gov) So to answer your snarky question with snark in kind, mostly from the other 4/5 of emissions.
- ARandomerDude 4y agoDo that with two toddlers and let us know how it goes when you get back from the grocery store.
- asdff 4y agoI see parents bring toddlers in trailers to grocery stores and farmers markets routinely these days. They make these big ebikes that can even haul kids directly without the trailer now and millennial parents have been buying them.
- frumper 4y agoThat’s cute, but not practical for most people.
- asdff 4y agoI mean it could be. Life existed before the car. Your grandparents might have even experienced that as a toddler.
- frumper 4y agoLots of things could be, but removing cars from the average American's life will limit job opportunities, limit economic choices, and consume a lot more of our time.
- asdff 4y agoIt's not about removing cars, its about limiting them and choosing a more appropriate tool for the job. Sometimes you can get away with a hand trowel instead of an excavator.
- frumper 4y agoYes, but if you own a car, then you're already paying for something that can save you time and personal energy so you can do things you enjoy, like playing with your kids, or tending your garden. Often times the quickest and easiest tool to use is what you're going to reach for, and that's a car most of the time.
- ghastmaster 4y agoIf everyone rode a bicycle, there would be a lot more bicycle deaths. According to table 6 of this study, https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/21/1/47 https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/21/1/47, 71.4% of the fatalities involved motor vehicles. If we apply that percentage to todays number of bicyclist deaths (900) in the USA, we get 257 deaths that do not involve motor vehicles. If we add congestion into the mix since everyone is bicycling, I imagine a higher number of accidents would occur. Right now an estimated 67 million people in the USA ride a bicycle for an estimated 15 billion hours combined per year. 228 million licensed drivers times 290 average hours on the road equals 66 billion hours per year. Let us assume the bicyclists will have to spend three times more travel time due to lower speed of bicycles. That equals roughly 200 billion hours of bicycling per year. 200 billion hours divided by 15 billion equals 13.3. 900 257 deaths per 15 billion hours equals 3,341 deaths per year. The average number of deaths per year from automobile crashes for the last few years is about 36,000. Even if this is a conservative estimate. I think it is safe to say you are essentially correct.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoNetherlands has ~200-250ish cycling deaths a year with a ~30% modeshare. Half are elderly. About a third are on ebikes 87% involve a car. That's around 0.8 deaths per hundred thousand people worth of bike modeshare not invovling a car. 1/15th of the USA and a quarter of netherlands road deaths. This is with drunk cycling penalties being almost completely unenforced (although not sure how it compares to US drunk driving prevalence). Granted cars are used for the longer trips so it's not completely sound, but bikes are used for congested trips. Small vehicle modeshare also shortens all trips. My guess is the safest vehicle would look like a train followed by lightweight velo no heavier than a dutch bike (and not optimized for aero) or a recumbent trike with a roll cage and a lap belt. Also we can conclude that either current ebikes are too fast and heavy, or they result in people cycling who would be too frail otherwise.