[ndsipa_pomu]

Electric cars were invented to save the motor industry, not the planet.

What we need to do is to get as many people using active travel as possible, and recognise that electric bikes and electric scooters solve almost all the issues with EVs. They're much lighter than ICE vehhicles, don't cause congestion and with removable batteries, don't have any problem with finding charging points. Also, with removable batteries, it's possible to just swap in a fully charged battery - makes sense for delivery companies that have a fleet of riders on e-scooters.

[frumper]

Unfortunately solving almost all of the problems isn't good enough. Electric bikes and scooters don't solve the problem of getting to work in a reasonable amount of time.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Your fallacy there is letting perfect be the enemy of good.

E-bikes and e-scooters are sufficient to transport a sizable percentage of the working population in less time that it would take a typical car, and the benefit is that every journey that they don't make in a car reduces congestion for everybody else as well as substantially less pollution.

I would consider that the main failing of the personal motor car is that people try to use it for everything and design roads/cities around it. However, that doesn't work when the population density increases as more and more roads need to be built which then separates the businesses and houses even more which then requires yet more roads. Rinse and repeat until you have people sat in traffic queues just in an attempt to commute to work.

[frumper]

Your fallacy is assuming that the e-bike is a "good" solution for me. I'm not even suggesting perfect, it's so far outside of realistic that it isn't a viable solution. According to Google Maps, each way of my commute is 47 minutes in car vs 4.5 hours on a bike.

[ndsipa_pomu]

It's not particularly relevant whether e-bikes are suitable for one person (i.e. you), but whether they are suitable for a lot of people in and around cities where the biggest issues with congestion and pollution are.

The problem is that if people only think in terms of the car form-factor, then congestion is not going to be improved and pollution from tyres is going to be almost as bad as the ICE vehicles that get replaced. Of course there's also the resource usage of cars in terms of building them and requiring lots more energy to shift them around due to their weight.

[frumper]

I replied to

>recognise that electric bikes and electric scooters solve almost all the issues with EVs

and you are coming back with that it's not relevant whether they are suitable for me, but I'm saying it's quite relevant to me. I'm also not alone as everyone I know could by an e-bike, yet almost all of them still choose to buy cars. People are voting with their dollar and it seems to be a clear decision that e-bikes aren't a solution for them.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Unfortunately, people voting with their dollars is a large part of the global climate problem. However, e-bikes are certainly becoming popular, so I don't agree with your assessment.

In the U.S. (and other countries), there's the additional issue of people being stuck with how cities/suburbs have been arranged around the use of personal cars and don't have access to functional public transport or where active transport is impractical. However, there are plenty of places that haven't made that mistake to the same extent and that allows people to have flexibility in how they choose to travel.

[notacoward]

> Your fallacy there is letting perfect be the enemy of good.

Isn't that also approximately what you are doing? Yeah, maybe e-bikes and scooters are better for many (but certainly nowhere near all) use cases, but then regular bikes or public transportation or not needing to make a trip at all (e.g. WFH instead of RTO) are often better still. Your suggestion is clearly in the middle of the spectrum. Firing salvos to your left while ducking those from your right isn't going to be very persuasive.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Not really as I recognise that transportation involves many solutions - active transport (walking, cycling), EVs (including scooters, e-bikes and cars) and public transport. No one solution solves all the issues and journeys of different lengths will lend themselves to different solutions. Unfortunately, too many people think that only car transport is an answer and use cars for short trips when walking is likely to be quicker (certainly much healthier).