When I was growing up, I was a sci-fi nerd. I loved the idea of cool little electric cars. But the ones I'm seeing around here are huge. We're also learning that even electric cars are fucking up the environment.

What I didn't imagine is electric bikes and scooters. So that's been a cool thing (I have both), but it has downsides too.

I volunteer at a local hospital, and we've seen a huge uptick of injuries from people riding electric scooters and bikes. The reason is that more people are on them, but our infrastructure in my city doesn't support them very well. So people are having to ride on busted sidewalks, roads with no bike lane, etc. So a lot of people crashing them (and not wearing a helmet).

So I think the only we can really reduce car usage is to make the city unfriendly to cars. But that ain't gonna happen here anytime soon. A strip of road near me actually was finally updated with a pretty wide bike lane last month because it's close to a school, but holy shit, people in my neighborhood are still bitching about how we didn't need it and it was a waste of resources. smh