Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by peoplefromibiza 1378 days ago
> Most people are capable of riding a bike - especially an e-bike - to get to where they're going.

I'm getting an electric moped or motorscooter at that point.

They are more durable, require less maintenance, are safer and handle adverse weather conditions better, can be more easily insured and are harder to steal. Also they usually cost the same or less than a good e-bike.

Problem is the main path to move around a city with a vehicle is still, and will still be in the future, a road.

We will simply switch to more eco-friendly vehicles.

People will still want to move and carry other people and heavy stuff around without exercising, that is a modern obsessions, but not actually so common as one can imagine.

Yes people own bikes, yes they do casually run them once a week or every 2 weeks (especially because kids), but except some notable (small and completely flat) exceptions, like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, in Europe Berlin comes third with 13% usage.

And Berlin is considered a bike friendly city.

Truth is that if numbers were reversed, 13% of the people used a car in Berlin, we would be saying that __only__ 13% of the people are using a car.

In London, a 9 million people city (10x Amsterdam), only 2% of the people use a bike.

It means that anyway there are more people using a bike everyday in London than in Copenhagen.

I think what we really need, especially in oversized-for-no-reason USA, are smaller cars, like the Citroën Ami which I personally love. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_Ami_(electric)

2 comments

Have you thought about something like a RadRunner https://www.radpowerbikes.com/products/radrunner-electric-ut... ?

It is an ebike but is pretty cheap (less than 2k Canadian Dollars) and has a passenger seat as well. Also has a throttle so you don't have to exercise at all if you don't want to.

When I'm not walking or using public transport, there are good options for car/scooter sharing here for about 20 cents per minute.

Scooters are all electric, like this one https://www.cooltra.com/en/

Berlin might be considered bike friendly but it's very far from being a good city to bike in, I regularly travel there with my bike and can compare with other European cities: - You can get around but bike paths on sidewalks are very badly maintained - Bike paths across major streets (such as the lanes on Skalitzer Straße, Karl-Marx Straße, etc.) suck balls. - Cars are often stopped on the bike lane as it's not separated from the road like in the Netherlands, and Germany being so car-centric it's allowed to stop over bike lanes. - There are many cobblestones streets to rattle you around, no separate bike lanes on sidewalks for those. - Often, bike lanes on sidewalks are very bumpy due to tree roots' undergrowth. - Bike lanes in general are very poorly separated from other traffic even though the city has quite a lot of space to properly separate pedestrians, bikes and cars.

I do enjoy Berlin to bike as it's extremely flat but the infrastructure is not even close to good. In Stockholm I have some issues with maintenance and some bike lanes in the center but its infrastructure is much more inviting to biking than Berlin. Sharing a 50-60km/h road with cars just separated by a painted line is not great.

> In Stockholm I have some issues with maintenance and some bike lanes in the center but its infrastructure is much more inviting to biking than Berlin.

And yet according to ECF (European Cyclists Federation) Stockholm is stuck at 9% usage.

My point is: there are many other factors that drive bike adoption, bike lanes, infrastructures and "they are good for your health" are not enough to convince a majority of the people, apparently.

Or maybe, except Holland, 15%-20% is kinda of a hard limit, very difficult to surpass, and we should start considering that in general no more than that will use a bike and plan infrastructure accordingly.

Sometimes I have the feeling that wishful thinking takes precedence over harsh reality.

The only other country where bike usage is more than 30% that I know of is China, for the opposite reason though, people are too poor to afford to buy a car.

That also explains the boom of dirty cheap micro electric cars in China.

It's not really a hard limit if there are exceptions, though?

The issue is that The Netherlands has been moving in this direction for 50 years. It takes decades of consistent policy to convert a city from car-only to multi-modal, and adoption will only increase once a critical mass has been attained.

For cycling specifically, it's about the value of the network: what I've seen happen in many places is that they construct a bike path, evaluate it a few years, and then conclude that there's not much bike traffic, so it must be that the people simply aren't interested in cycling. That conclusion conveniently ignores the fact that the bike path terminates on a dangerous multi-lane road at both ends.

You simply won't see cycling adoption rise with half-hearted implementations like that. Only when people can safely make a full trip to their destination does the alternative begin to appeal, and only then might you see a generational shift to cycling. So for a city that's completely car-dependent now, you're looking (roughly) at a 25-year policy window to see the full effects.

Why except Holland? Or parts of Denmark and Germany for that matter? It seems that 30-40% of bike share is definitely already happening in the harsh reality [1]. Add in another 30% walking and public transpor and a majority car-free city is definitely possible. And highly desirable for a myriad of reasons (public health, quality of life, sustainability, energy independence) [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share
Stockholm's weather and geography is very different than Berlin, Amsterdam or Copenhagen. Bike infrastructure is also a second-class citizen for now and the public transportation network doesn't allow bikes (except local trains out of rush hour) which doesn't help usage as it's a sprawling city focused in multiple "centers" located around stations.

The ECF data you mention is from 2012, it's 10 years old...

Not sure what you are basing your hard limits on, care to share if it isn't just guesswork?