When I first saw one, people said it was a useless half measure - if you don't want to peddle, you would take the car. The has proven wrong, and as time goes by, the reverse happens - it replaces the car.
You should realize that many people who buy these scooters and electric bikes are doing so to replace the bike, not the car. But then over time it replaces the car for 90% of the trips.
Electric bikes and scooters are very cool, but they’re no more a solution to the car in most cases than a motorcycle or Segway. They do nothing for people with long commutes, or who live in spread-out suburbs. No one is trading in their minivan for a moped.
Where I live a few hundred thousand kids are taken to school by bike every day. All the way up to age 10 or so it's pretty common to see parents with kids on the back (and sometimes on the front or both) of their bikes.
https://www.24baby.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/mamafiets.j...
Totally agreed, but bike infrastructure is something that you can actually decide to implement.
During the summer, Iwould take my three kids to the daycare/summer program by bike. Two would sit in the Burley Bee bike trailer and the third would sit in the Thule Yepp maxi bike seat. It's a 3 mile trip one way and would take me about 20 minutes. I would then ride back to work.
I also would do some grocery shopping with the trailer used as storage. I didn't get rid of the minivan, but I didn't drive it more than a few times a month.
Also, having kids dramatically changes what you need in a vehicle, in ways that make any ride-sharing or rental option a significantly greater pain than it would otherwise be.
I love cycling in Paris and Amsterdam, not so much in New York City in the winter. I also wouldn’t love to do weekly shopping for a family of 4+ using a Segway and public transportation.
Edit: I’m curious if those downvotes represent disagreement, or just distaste.
So not distaste or disagreement, but irrelevance.
If you think "Europe has a smaller population than US" is relevant to whether using public transport where the infrastructure exists is possible for families then you need to state why more clearly.
You don't need to shop only once a week - 2-3 times makes carrying your goods easier. You can dress for the weather. It isn't all that big of a deal. Children in strollers have warm stuff around them. They sell bikes with studded tires for use on snow. It was tiring when I first moved here, but you get used to it and it isn't a big deal. Kids get used to walking and will sometimes even help carry things back.
I'd more argue that the real reason it doesn't work so well in much of the states is because the public transportation sucks. Walkways suck most places - half the towns I lived in didn't even make sure you could walk to the stores on sidewalks. More people were expected to work 50-60 hours a week on top of this. Poor folks sometimes work two jobs. Many employers don't have secure places to put your stuff while you are at work (no bike racks, no locker to put your winter gear or umbrella in). Fixing these problems help greatly.
Its because things are built in a manner optimized for automobile transportation. Fixing sidewalks isn't going to fix mega grocery stores miles and miles apart. Places where people walk/bike tend to have a business infrastructure built to support it.
But it doesn't matter how far you live either. I've often lived within a mile of grocery stores, but the infrastructure isn't there. There isn't always even a sidewalk to get to bus stops. Sometimes the bus stop is just a sign, no sidewalk. Busses rarely go inter-city and often don't go to workplaces on the outskirts of town (at least not in many smallish cities). They aren't efficient.
Why would anywhere build smaller stores similar to walkable places when the infrastructure isn't there, anyway?
You said I live in Norway, in a city of 180-200k people. Folks use public transportation or walking all the time. With children. For everyday food shopping.
Is Norway not one of the richest WE countries? (Not temperate though, fair enough.)
The country has a very high standard of living compared with other European countries...
According to United Nations data for 2016, Norway together with Luxembourg and Switzerland are the only three countries in the world with a GDP per capita above US$70,000 that are not island nations nor microstates.[18]
Yes... yes it is. It also has a bit over 5 million people, with about a million Living in Oslo, or 1.5 million if you go for the whole metro area. That’s great, but doesn’t have much to do with most other cities on Earth in terms of population density, population as a fraction of the country’s total population, and wealth. For example NYC has a population density of about 27,000 per square mile, and Oslo has about 8500. How does street crime compare between a major American city and Oslo?
Sadly, the diversity of cultures, politics, and incomes which define a city like NYC also make it hard to just say “let’s have a better environment for bikes!” I’m. It sure how you’d go about changing that, but I’m pretty sure articles like this and comments about Norway may not inckude realistic solutions. If I lived in Oslo, I’d bike a lot too, but if I lived in NYC I wouldn’t because I like living. Public transportation in the states varies massively, but either way simply saying “fix it” without a concrete way to make it happen in the real world of vested interests, cultures, and politics is sort of pointless.
I've never lived in NYC. I spent the first 35 years of life in Indiana, though, in towns smaller than this. The crime wasn't bad. One place even happened to have bus service. Indiana has about the same population as Norway over less land area, though admittedly it likely isn't as rich. Indianapolis is probably the only place comparable to Oslo as I can't remember how big Ft Wayne is.
Large cities aside, it doesn't take much to make a city walkable. Put sidewalks in, zone correctly, and put up areas to lock up bikes. If we can require places to have a minimum amount of parking spaces, what is so difficult to require a place to park bicycles? If you can zone for different things, wouldn't it be possible to zone for grocery stores near neighborhoods and give tax breaks to those chains instead of large box stores?
Concrete "fixing" does require some regional specialization, and I'm sure one solution isn't going to work for everywhere. Most cities aren't NYC, though.
Edit: I should also mention that part of the trend here is to make it more inconvenient to drive in town. They are actively taking away driving lanes to encourage walking and public transport. Most of the smaller cities in Indiana could do some of this as well.
Don't know why that person was going on about it only being temperate places, then comparing to New York, which has to be one of the richest places on earth.
Then you’ll add that you can’t cycle in the winter in New York because Western European has more moderate weather. But I’ll point out that many of the Western Europe capitals have a colder winter than NYC.
But then if you accept that, you’ll move on to claims about how you can’t go shopping for a 4 person family using a bike. Then I’ll share stats that the average US family size is 2.58, and that all kinds of stores offer home delivery.
The point is that people come up with a litany of rationalizations for the status quo, but it ends up sounding like apology for car culture when even heavy drivers would complain about all the negatives (congestion, parking, pollution, shitty drivers) in other forums.
I’m guessing some of that is behind the downvotes.