Hacker News Reader

Comment by radu_floricica | Hacker News Reader

Try tracking delivery riders. They're pretty constant at 23-24 kph.

Also, you can't have an omelette without breaking eggs. Moving away from the big, polluting, dangerous cars will necessarily involve a transition path for those that can't or don't want to use muscle power. Having small, clean, relatively harmless electric vehicles is honestly by far the best transition path I can see. Hell, I wouldn't mind seeing them with a roof in a few years.

There should be limitations, but they should well thought out. Speed capped at 25 is a big one. Separating them from pedestrians is a huge one.

But overall, please also think of the upside. Having a e-something in the streets ensures that at least half a car is staying home that day.

View on HN

>Having small, clean, relatively harmless electric vehicles is honestly by far the best transition path I can see. Hell, I wouldn't mind seeing them with a roof in a few years.

Why not put them on the road instead of the bike lane, then?

Because once you increase the speed to mesh with road traffic & add strength to survive a collision with a car, you have a car.

Bingo. You have <5kph for walking, 10-25 kph for this whatever-it-is-which-I-hope-grows, and 50+ for cars. They can mix occasionally, separated with paint or good will, but as much as infrastructure permits we need all three.

Sorry, a 25kmph electric go kart ("e-scooter") with a roof (!) is not a bicycle and is not the right vehicle for a cycle lane.

Sensible transport segregates vehicles by their performance characteristics. In order to travel in the cycle lane you need to be going at bicycle-level top speeds with bicycle-level acceleration. More or less. E-scooters have a much higher top speed than most normal cyclists actually accomplish in the real world and, much worse, have far steeper acceleration curves. If there were lots of vehicles of the kind you imagine in cycle lanes they would be going much faster than real cyclists actually do and consequently overtaking constantly.

This doesn't really happen much in practice for a couple of reasons. Firstly, e-scooter's wheels are too small and their wheelbases too short to comfortably travel in the cycle lane (or on the road) so they travel on the pavement and drive pedestrians barking mad. Secondly, partly because they are made of chocolate and partly for inherent design reasons, they don't last long (shortish MTBF, near infinite MTTR) - this does a lot to keep them off the roads - except when operated at a loss by venture-backed startups from California.

And your idea that if people weren't on e-scooters that they would be in cars or something - not really. In my area they would be on public transport.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com