Yup, private carriages are the only option for your occasional weekly or monthly tasks.
I guess its also just outright impossible to just allow for mixed zoning that'd allow for daily grocery shopping as well.
And I'm saying this while owning... let me count... 4 bikes, one of which is electric. And I absolutely love Uber electric scooters.
But no matter how I try to get creative, I just can't think of a way where you can have bike infrastructure covering everything. Too many pieces missing. Where would you park all those cargo bikes near train stations? And again, what do you do in winter with two kids?
Small city EVs on the other hand require no new infrastructure, zero major investments, are a fraction of the cost of a car, are non-polluting, and do 90% of what a normal car does. And when going on holiday - yes, you can take the train, which is what I'm actually doing btw.
All they need is a very small regulatory change. Allow no-highway cars with speed limits and none of the safety features of modern cars. Just do that.
People have pointed out that most people can use bikes for pretty much everything, but obviously there will be a need for the occasional car. Some people will need to use cars more, other less. But if you make the simple mindset change of first planning to bike there and then falling back to the car if you deem it infeasible, we’re already most of the way.
Most of the safety concerns for bikes disappear as soon as a certain amount of bikers are in the streets and the infrastructure isn’t actively hostile to them.
Even in the Netherlands, bicycles was the most dangerous mode of transportation in 2021, with 207 fatalities. Cars came in second with 175 deaths.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/523310/netherlands-numbe...
When a car kills a cyclist it's not the bicycle being dangerous, and you can't compare numbers directly without normalizing by some metric (hours, km, trips). Although in the latter fallacy I believe correcting it will make bikes look worse.
Also keep in mind people of all ages are allowed to ride bikes, which is luckily not the case for cars. This source does say elderly and children are more likely to be part of cycling accidents (not necessarily fatal) https://www.veiligheid.nl/kennisaanbod/infographic/infograph...
Also driving under influence is (hopefully) much more prevalent in case of cyclists.
Hence, car drivers switching their transportation mode to bikes don't have the same risks as the entire cycling population.
I get what you are advocating for. I have had several periods in my life where I used a bike as my primary form of transportation. But it only works well in a pretty narrow set of circumstances.
Small EVs are the type of cars that are needed the least. They are a car for those cases where you essentially did not need a car.
People prefer living in places they can dress in t-shirts and shorts. But trying to dress in a t-shirt in the snow won't make you happy.
It's true that all else being equal, a walkable city is the best. But we don't have that, and we're not likely to have it soon. All we can do is work on a solution for today and tomorrow. And I really don't see OP's original point of trying to skip EVs.
Tesla alone has received enough in subsidies from california to build a decent transit system for about a quarter of its population.
Internal combustion engines are sized at a point where they are profitable and efficient.
Electric motors allow us to make terribly small cars, and their small batteries will mean even more efficiency improvements. Combined with self driving abilities and we no longer need to own our own car…just hop on the city infrastructure and get driven to your destination.
In fact if we make it small and light enough you could suspend the car from a metal rail and now have an extra lane up in the roadway above the regular traffic. And then you can add another metal rail layer…and another. And you no longer need intersections because the rails can dip down or up to cross each other. So the biggest source of traffic latency (stoplights) and bandwidth limitations (not enough road surface area) will be eliminated.
Eventually we may build entire city blocks pre-fabricated with vertical and horizontal elevators inside, so you no longer need your own vehicle to navigate. Heating costs will be proportional to the external surface area and not to the volume enclosed by the building.
I live in a small/midsize city with relatively ok public transit for its size and the only places I ever take it is to downtown or the airport - places where parking logistics are terrible and it's easy to get to on public transport. Anywhere else (like going to the store or work) and getting there takes hours without a car. Living in areas that have better connections or better walkability triples my housing cost, so I own a car and drive. Cities need to be significantly more dense for more trains to make sense, but that density means clearing out all of the less dense buildings and building new. That's extremely costly and doesn't actually help the environment because of the massive amount of carbon needed to fix that everywhere.