7 ms·
There's electric bikes in China that are more like a Vespa than anything. Commuting this way was pretty great when I owned one. The range is perfect for urban c
by IIAOPSW 3y ago
There's electric bikes in China that are more like a Vespa than anything. Commuting this way was pretty great when I owned one. The range is perfect for urban commuters, charging it at night is basically negligible in your power bill, it slips right past the cars so there's no such thing as traffic (whatever cars pass you, you pass them right back by the next red light), likewise parking is a non-issue as it takes a fraction of the space, and its so dirt cheap that even if its stolen or totaled or breaks its not a huge pain. It doesn't have trunk space but for an urban commute that doesn't matter much. There's just enough under-seat storage for a laptop and some stationary. Look into it, the import laws on cars probably don't apply, and if they do even with tariffs the vehicle is so dirt cheap to begin with you may as well eat the cost. It cost a low 3-digit US dollar value back when I bought one.
- iambateman 3y agoThis is all true…and also American drivers are legitimately aggressive toward these kind of vehicles. They have a terrible reputation, primarily because they get used a lot by people who can’t afford a car. I wish it were different, but driving a moped/Vespa on American roads is a pretty big risk.
- bioemerl 3y ago> primarily because they get used a lot by people who can’t afford a car. Primarily because they are slow and constantly get in your way, building a train of cars and making many people late for work.
- DontTrustOver25 3y agoWhich is why we need to invest more in non-car infrastructure like ample bike lines, reliable publish transit, and pedestrian friendly sidewalks :)
- IIAOPSW 3y agoand funky atoll autocorrect
- ElFitz 3y agoSo American drivers are aggressive towards those they think to be poorer than them? Why do you think that is? (genuinely curious)
- seanp2k2 3y agohttp://www.temporarilyembarrassedmillionaires.org/ http://www.temporarilyembarrassedmillionaires.org/
- bluSCALE4 3y agoAmericans are aggressive as hell. I'm willing to bet that cyclist are maimed and murdered hourly by aggressive drivers and get away with it. I was personally ran off the road by an SUV because I apparently angered the driver, because yeah, killing me totally teaches me a lesson.
- fortuna86 3y agoUS isn't even on the top 10 list of worst / most aggressive drivers. They at least respect lanes as drawn on the road.
- masklinn 3y ago> They at least respect lanes as drawn on the road. Sometimes anyway. Ignoring lanes when making a turn (e.g. drift out on a multi-lane turn) is sadly common.
- gnz11 3y agoNot to mention failing to stop at the clearly marked lines at intersections. They seem to stop either a car length behind the line or a car length over the line in the crosswalk.
- masklinn 3y agoAlso related to both, cutting corners (literally) when making turns, american drivers seem to have a real problem with tight turns. One reason why it’s risky to stop over the line incidentally, as a car making a shallow turn is very likely to step into your lane if they don’t take an over-wide turn instead.
- steve76 3y ago[dead]
- noobermin 3y agoDitto re bikes, but with widerspread usage attitudes will change.
- mcv 3y agoYou mean fat-tired e-bikes? I see them a lot in Amsterdam too. They're definitely more like mopeds and scooters than bikes, unlike regular e-bikes that pretend to be bikes. I'm not sure which ones I prefer (I'm not a fan either way), but they're both a massive improvement over the old fuel-burning two-stroke mopeds and scooters. (By Dutch law, two-stroke engines didn't have to meet the same pollution rules as 4-stroke engines, so these things were pretty dirty.)
- gibagger 3y agoThese are terrible. Frequently modified by the seller to work just by squeezing the throttle. In any case, even if they don't do that, all it takes is for people to lazily flop their legs to trigger the sensors just enough so that the engine can kick in. These are, by all practical intents and purposes, scooters without plates and without mandatory helmet. I also dislike that these modified ebikes (not just the fat ones, but also some older models of vanmoof) can do 35-40 silently on a bike lane. I've had a couple close calls because they caught up to you almost three times as fast as a regular person on a regular bicycle do and, unlike the dirty mopeds, they are noiseless so you don't hear them coming with enough notice.
- pchangr 3y agoAFAIK, those were US models driving in EU. https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/10/21558235/vanmoof-slows-s3-x3-europe-japan-speed-limit https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/10/21558235/vanmoof-slows-s...
- serf 3y agothe speed thing isn't something that can be easily regulated without proper enforcement; it's trivial to convert a bike to an e-bike, and the open source firmwares and controllers out there are free of mandatory or regional speed-limiters. it's nice that vanmoof tried to help on their side, but it's something that should be enforced at the local traffic/policing level.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoI don't have a good impression of chinese electric bikes. They don't make very much noise behind you (unless they have a speaker) and the people driving them are often doing dubious things that maybe the bike shouldn't be doing, like balancing a bunch of empty water bottles. But I guess I feel the same in SEA where instead of electric bikes you have to contend with a sea of gas mopeds.
- IIAOPSW 3y agoWhat you don't have a good impression of is the Ebike drivers, not the Ebikes.