Hopefully some of the people sitting in parliament will read this. In many cities we still have to fight for bicycle infrastructure. Car centric city designs should really start going out of fashion
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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The worst is when they install bike infrastructure that will just randomly end and dump you onto a busy street, and then complain no one is using the fancy new bike lanes...
Have some of these here. Absolutely wild, that the bike lane ends where it would become useful: Before a traffic light, so that you have to take part in the traffic jam of cars.
But what am I even talking about. Traffic lights per se are an anti-pattern of city design.
Traffic lights per se are an anti-pattern of city design.
It’s a pro and a con. Cars waiting is a good thing. Car drivers chose cars for convenience so anything that makes them inconvenient is a positive factor to getting them out of cars. I’m in a place where bicycles can turn right on red but cars cannot. And there are cycle paths through woods and fields and niche trafficlight-free places cars cannot go.
I love traffic jams because cyclists are immune to them and car drivers can only sit in frustration as they get passed by cyclists.
A couple intersections are still fucked up though, where cyclists might have to wait for ~2-3 differently timed lights to cross an intersection. Luckly red light running is not generally enforced against cyclists.
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Oh yea, here they painted the gutter red and called it a day. One such red gutter directs you right into a busy 6 way intersection and just ends there, it's unofficially called the suicide lane.
The current plan where I live, is to chuck the bicycles on the footpath with pedestrians.
Heyyy, we tried that! Yeah, went about as well as you can expect.
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Isaac Asimov decades ago imagined a future where nuclear plants provided infinite clean energy, and still people in his cities moved on foot, on large systems of conveyors.
The conveyors imagined by Asimov and Heinlein have got to be the dumbest things they ever thought of. I love those guys and generally they had interesting ideas but this one... wow.
In Paris Montparnasse just after 2000, they had a speed conveyor, like at the airport but accelerating up to (IIRC) 11km/h (and decelerating at the end ofc). Wild times!
They lowered the speed as I guess too many people fell. It wasn't really intuitive as the handrail didn't accelerate at the same way so you had nothing to hold onto. I don't know what happened with the project.
It was called the TGV, Tapis Grand Vitesse mimicking the TGV for Train Grand Vitesse (the French speed trains acronym).
I mean, I don't think conveyors are a good solution, but it's telling that someone so long ago already rejected cars as a viable transportation method.
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78% of microplastics in the ocean come from car tires. EVs are heavier, and produce more microplastics. 10-20 bikes can fit in one car parking space. Bicycles and trains are hundreds of times more efficient than cars in terms of energy and space... And bike crashes don't kill over a million people per year globally.
It's kind of obvious. We can have a future worth living in, or we can have cars, but we can't have both.
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I'm starting to have the same feeling about personal jets.
No hatred against minotories please!
No conclusions without adequate data, please. ;-)
I'm just suggesting that giving them pedal powered planes, like the Gossamer Albatross, might help, but may not solve all our problems.
A recent study found that a single unmuffled scooter driving through Paris at 3am can wake up 10,000 people.
So sure, scooters have low CO₂ emission but I would like to see a ban on non-electric scooters for their sound emissions, at least during certain hours.
The European Union should push electric motor scooters and allow them 55 km/h (kph). Gas-driven motor scooters are only allowed 45 km/h. They should be discouraged by higher taxes as they are in Asia.
Why did you write "kph" if you are aware of the correct "km/h"?
So muffle 'em?
Muffled scooters are still fucking loud.
And what, only wake up 8,000 people instead? I’ve never heard an unmuffled one, but those little 50 cc fuckers are screaming loud in the high pitch frequencies - a perfect recipe for wakefulness. I often wake up when one of those assholes drives within a block of me at night. It doesn’t even have to traverse my street.
Even if it wakes 5,000 people, who then take 1 hr on avg to return to sleep, 5,000 man hours per scooter per day of lost sleep has to have a measurable loss of productivity and even quality of life.
Related fun fact: most of the noise cars produce at highway speeds is from tire noise, not from engines.
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The scooters they mention in the article are the e-scooters you ride standing up in the bike lane. Not mopeds.
I also think mopeds are a good replacement to cars, much more appropriate for 1-2 people in urban areas. But it needs to be the quieter models. The two-stroke-engine ones are just really too loud for a city. (and they burn motor oil as well as gas)
The scooters they mention in the article are the e-scooters you ride standing up in the bike lane.
No they are not. That makes no sense. Stand-up e-scooters are relatively quiet. Quotes from the article (emphasis added):
“worst of all, the high-pitched wail of motor scooters that speed by every few seconds.”
“Motorcycles and scooters — often with their exhaust systems illegally modified to boost noise and power”
“The noise can be ear-splitting,”
Obviously you would not describe a stand-up scooter as ear-splitting or capable of waking someone up. They’re talking about gas small gas combustion engines, most of which are the worst variety on scooters: 2-stroke.
Or if you meant the OP’s article is talking about e-scooters, that article actually covered both:
“Weight rates are usually over 10 times more favourable for the average motorbike or scooter and, of course, even better for lighter vehicles such as electric bicycles or kick-scooters.”
My reaction was to the idea that motor scooters are more favorable by a factor of 10 due to the weight -- which is true, but my criteria is more complex than just ecocide-avoidance… I want my sleep too!
True, I was talking about OP's article but you're also right that they mention both. I was thinking of the mentioned ban of scooters in Paris, this one only refers to the stand up e-scooters.
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EVs vs alternative transport is a false dilemma. It's pretty obvious to me that they should do both.
Every car we have should be electric, but we need to have a lot fewer of them.
Yes, I agree. Need much more cycling, walking infra. And public transport
I have wondered about the impact of all these massive cars. It's interesting that they impact both traffic and energy, although obvious if you think about it.
The high level of European industry specialisation in producing high quality ICEs accounts for its leading position in the market. However, electric vehicles do not require the same level of know-how, opening the door to other players. China became the top global car exporter in 2023, exporting mostly to Europe and Asia.
Okay, fine. But so what? There is no way that the world is going to continue to use ICEs in the long run. You could say "German auto manufacturers have a comfortable, entrenched position, so we want to defer transition away from ICEs for a year", but you're not going to hold things there.
The EU automotive sector has traditionally excelled at producing vehicles with internal combustion engines (ICEs). The sector accounts for around 8 % of the EU’s gross domestic product (GDP) and for 12.9 million direct and indirect jobs. However, the green transition, digitalisation and global competition have fundamentally altered its business model.
Yeah, technology changes over time.
Promoting electric cars may lead to market distortions that run counter to European industrial interests. While complementary measures such as those contemplated in the critical raw materials act take effect, and besides the obvious move towards public transport, one way to allow the EU car industry to adapt while still reducing CO2 emissions could be to limit the size, weight and engine capacity of urban vehicles.
Learn to make electric vehicles, Germany. If you want to ban outside competition to the European market, then straight-up ban outside competition to the European market. Sitting on ICEs has to be the most ridiculous way to do industrial protectionism one can imagine.
You knew that this was coming down the road for ages. Every industry needs to deal with technological change, whether it's farmers shifting from oxen to tractors or the post office dealing with the shift to telecommunications or farriers dealing with the shift from horses to cars.
China also dominates production of almost every raw material, technology and component used to make electric vehicles.
That's not because China is mining everything, but because it's dominant in processing. If you want to bone up on processing, go for it. Germany's had a history in the chemical industry too. BASF is the largest chemical company in the world today.
The dependency is also unnerving German and other European car manufacturers, whose home markets are now threatened by good-quality Chinese cars and China’s control of the processing of lithium.
Concern is so great that the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has launched an anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese imports, amid fears that big manufacturers including Volkswagen and BMW will have trouble matching the supply of electric cars from China.
But lithium does not, in the main, come from China, so how has Beijing achieved such a commanding position? Was Europe asleep at the wheel?
Lithium supplies are dominated by five countries, with the bulk of the mineral mined in Australia and Chile, but it is China that has taken the raw material and become the dominant supplier of refined lithium.
“They are now the global hub. This gives them economic leverage – or, to put it more bluntly, the means of economic coercion,” says one EU source.
Hell, even if it were mining, Germany has far higher known per-capita lithium reserves than China does; just isn't mining it.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lithium-reserves-by-country
Total lithium reserves in megatons:
China: 5.10
Germany: 2.70
Europe as a whole has comparable lithium reserves even in absolute terms.
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