And it's a wonderful way to get around both city and country. Motorbikes reduce overall traffic, can fit about 8-10 vehicles into a car parking footprint, have generally low fuel emissions (and can be even lower — lots of new small bikes get ~80 mpg in real world use), and never have trouble finding parking.
Speaking for myself, it makes commuting from the East Bay into San Francisco, not just tolerable, but something to look forward to. 21-25 minutes door to door at peak rush hour; park for free; the view from the bridge is superb.
Of course, the danger of cruising through a flood of slow-moving, angry, distracted, stop-and-go car traffic is considerable — but there's good reason to think (CA CHP motorcycle cop accident statistics) that it doesn't have to be much more dangerous than driving in the first place.
No. Compare even a beefed up e-bike like the greyp to a smaller motorcycle like a Suzuki DR-Z400 SM. The wheels, fork, frame, rear swingarm, geometry and rake are all different. They need to be to handle freeway speeds safely. By the time you've souped up an ebike to be as safe as a motorcycle at high speed, you've converted it into a motorcycle. Those same changes make it less nimble, and therefore less useful, as a mountain bike. I'm not sure I would mix even small motorcycles in with bicycles on a public road.
> Useful to you but not so useful to people that don't know what safe means to you.
I'm an avid motorcyclist, but most people are not. They don't feel comfortable going those speeds unless they have a cage lined with airbags around them. The fatality statistics suggest they're not crazy for wanting such a thing.
The (American) market has shown that people overwhelmingly do not like small personal cars when presented with other options, without the distorting effect of subsidies and tax breaks.
If someone like Apple or another new company could make a one passenger car really cool looking and inexpensive (Say $5-10k), probably electric, small enough so a least two go into a regular parking space, and a way that those people can share spots, it might just take off. Imagine that when you went to the city, if you see an empty spot in your mini transport, you park. No spots? Well you can park with someone else with a mini (and share the price). Set this sharing up in software and let the cars automatically switch positions, if needed, and I think you could have a real winner. Maybe three or six could fit in one spot. Electric cars sucked and only really strange, low status, people drove them. Post Tesla, I would say that is not the case any more. Similar thing could work here.
You can blame it on marketing, but it's still a problem. What you're proposing just moves cars into the "small, cheap, and shabby" category; people buy cars for status, not just economics.
Kei cars (which are similar in size to the classic Mini) do sell large volumes in Japan and are quite cheap, but they don't meet the aforementioned safety requirements (in either the US or EU) and their sales numbers are heavily inflated because you don't need proof of off-street parking to register one.