akgerber

9 ms·

61.
by akgerber 6y ago
As an American, the only time a car represents freedom to me is on a road trip through rural areas, and it's perfectly easy to rent one for that purpose. The rest of the time, it's a massively expensive and dangerous anchor.
62.
by akgerber 6y ago
If they had bicycle infrastructure like China, cheap/lightweight ebikes/emopeds/escooters would be a very good option for cheap/clean/reliable urban transportation.
63.
by akgerber 6y ago
The Tesla factory is a former GM/Toyota factory notable for introducing Japanese quality practices to the US, and it ran until 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI There's an episode of This America Life
64.
by akgerber 6y ago
This also makes it quick and easy to share photos to social media.
65.
by akgerber 6y ago
The lower energy due to lower speeds and vehicle masses make ebike crashes far less severe than motor vehicle crashes. We have 40,000 dead a year in the US in car crashes, plus three million nonfatal injuries. I'm sure someone among yo
66.
by akgerber 6y ago
The motors likely use a relatively standard voltage/current & would very likely be amenable to a consumer e-bike battery— an expensive component, for sure, but much cheaper than a whole bike.
67.
by akgerber 6y ago
Those were usually much cheaper & junkier pieces of equipment than the Jump bikes.
68.
by akgerber 6y ago
Ubiquitous car ownership is physically impossible in urban areas— usually at least 10 people live in a building one or two parking spaces wide, and even if parking were solved, urban roadways cannot handle all those cars driving at once — a
69.
by akgerber 6y ago
People from the suburbs are great to have in the city if they're people. It's just that their cars are deadly and a massive waste of public space. Rail remains the best solution for this, as it will be again when we're on the
70.
by akgerber 6y ago
Europe, for decades, promoted diesel cars for the sake of fuel efficiency in the erroneous belief that effective car-scale emissions filtration could be developed. The US didn't, and gasoline car exhaust, while still terrible for human
71.
by akgerber 6y ago
Hopefully it will be a huge moment, but without safe bike infrastructure (of which car-free or local-car-access-only areas are the best type) the traffic that comes roaring back will scare many new cyclists away. The city's failure to
72.
by akgerber 6y ago
Only folding bikes are allowed on trains or buses, hence the local development of the Brompton folding bike. In the Netherlands, it's not uncommon to have a cheap bike at both ends of a rail commute.
73.
by akgerber 6y ago
Wait until you hear about 'free' parking.
74.
by akgerber 6y ago
One challenge for the sturdy commuter bike in the US is that cities are built around the car and commute distances are large, rewarding faster bikes. But reliability for commuters is certainly a big part of the recent boom in single-speed r
75.
by akgerber 6y ago
Dockless bikeshare bikes are often built as you describe. Docked bikeshare (as mostly operated by Lyft in the US, formerly Motivate/Alta) generally uses bikes built similarly to high-quality Dutch city bikes and maintains them.
76.
by akgerber 6y ago
Bike trails aren't used in winter because they aren't maintained, just as roads that aren't maintained in winter aren't driven on.
77.
by akgerber 6y ago
The convenience factor is also engineered. It's not convenient to drive unless there is ample parking at every destination, and policies in the US and many other countries has basically banned building new places without ample parking.
78.
by akgerber 6y ago
There are actual policies (the easiest one is stopping mandates for huge amounts of free/discounted parking at all new homes & businesses) that make it possible for people who would rather not drive to not drive, and many 'pro
79.
by akgerber 7y ago
There aren't that many movies out there about the excitement of a technical career and that movie was a great one.
80.
by akgerber 7y ago
The bicycle is only debatably simple, considering that it's the culmination of quite a few relatively-advanced technologies and processes: steelmaking, pneumatic tires, interchangeable parts, ball bearings, bowden cables, etc.
81.
by akgerber 7y ago
The mills at Lowell are a National Historic Park now and they still have a weaving line running. It's a fascinating place to visit.
82.
by akgerber 7y ago
The law under the Uniform Vehicle Code, adopted by most states, is that there is a crosswalk (marked or unmarked) between any two sidewalks at a corner. Drivers have a legal responsibility to yield to pedestrians there. Drivers almost alway
83.
by akgerber 7y ago
Even in those parts of the US where we live at similar or higher density versus the Netherlands, biking is far less common because the motoring community has seized most of our streets for car storage, crowding out the kind of bike infrastr
84.
by akgerber 7y ago
Not everyone wants to live in a dense city. But not everyone wants to live in a sprawling suburb, but we've engineered financial and educational systems and property rights norms that make it difficult for even those who wish to live i
85.
by akgerber 7y ago
Outrage about child labor in the bicycle delivery business is well over a century old, and for good reason [0]. Newspaper delivery, on the other hand, was a short before-school/after-school job (back when evening papers were a thing) t
86.
by akgerber 7y ago
I tried setting up credit freezes at all 3 credit agencies as a result of the law making it free in the wake of the Equifax breach. It took maybe 5 minutes at Experian and Transunion. Equifax's site 500'd when I attempted to set i
87.
by akgerber 7y ago
Thredup/Grailed/TheRealReal/Etsy/Rent the Runway are bigger companies in that business. Amazon also sells 'Warehouse deals' of returned product at a discount. There are also chains of 'buy/sell/t
88.
by akgerber 7y ago
I spent summer 2018 biking across Europe & everywhere I went, from Spain to Scotland, was much hotter than the climate data I looked up on Wikipedia prepared me for. It definitely felt like the climate had tangibly changed— especially i
89.
by akgerber 7y ago
$10k a month is $120k a year which is around 20% of the stated income, and a significant proportion of it is paying down principal, which is to say, building wealth. 2 or 3 years of wealthbuilding at that rate is enough to pay for the media
90.
by akgerber 7y ago
The way the United States provides schooling free of charge from age 4 to age 18, and expects families to pay massive tuition bills before and after, does make parenting expensive at times— especially for young families starting out. $500,0

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