Comment by radu_floricica | Hacker News Reader

Comment by radu_floricica | Hacker News Reader

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I've written in another comment that I'm very much in favor of cheap, small city EVs without all the safety features mandated in a modern car. I don't think we need a ton of iron to go shopping. But I also don't think it's practical to go all the way down to bikes - biggest velo vehicle might at most carry an adult, a child and groceries, while offering zero protection from the weather and very little safety, compared with the smallest and flimsiest hard-shell EV.

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.

I don’t believe anybody has ever suggested that bikes should cover everything.

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.

> 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...

This is a really good point. If we start adding bicycles to the US, more people will die. And we will need to have a greater percent of bicyclists than the Netherlands before the death rate starts to drop off. Having safe bicycle routes is a long way off.

Base rate and attribution fallacies.

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.

I agree.

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.

The bicyclists were quite likely killed by car drivers.

Versus if everyone had cars and perhaps more people would die in total.

And more people die in car accidents each year than in wars. You need to compare against the number of trips made and I suspect they are substantially greater for bicycles.

No way “most” people can use bikes for pretty much everything.

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.

The point is that within the boundaries of city life, it can absolutely work for most trips, provided the infrastructure is not completely car-centred.

Within the bounds of a childless, healthy, individual, who can work remote, living in a city that is well designed for bikes. Unfortunately this is a nearly negligible percentage of the existing population/infrastructure. There are many many decades of change, including universal rent control, required for the rest of us.

It's ironic that you ask where to park cargo bike while at the same time proposing EVs. Where do they park? Where do they drive? We are occupying massive amounts of land for car infrastructure completely covering it in concrete and thus contributing to urban heating. At the same time we have study upon study that shows that people are happier in places where they can walk/bike instead of driving.

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.

> At the same time we have study upon study that shows that people are happier in places where they can walk/bike instead of driving.

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.

Because vast amounts of public money has been spent and continues to be spent on cars that could save lives and prevent massive ecological harms were it spent on adequate transport technologies.

Tesla alone has received enough in subsidies from california to build a decent transit system for about a quarter of its population.

The infrastructure is not a problem at all. Just use the one you have. If it can serve traffic demand using cars, it can serve ten times the same traffic demand using bikes (slightly less when using cargo bikes). Stop the segregation fantasy where drivers are allowed to get away with pretending that all roads default to limited access. They don't. Roads where first built for walking, then for walking and various form of animal transportation, then for walking, animal and cycling. When cars entered the picture, all the other forms of road use technically did not go away, outside of the small set of limited access roads that came up a few decades later.

Yes that makes sense. Steam engines had to be larger to be more efficient so the best size for them was a locomotive.

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.

Our e-trike takes 2 kids, groceries, has full weather protection and brings joy to rider, occupants and many around. Protected bike lanes add the safety, but let's make no mistake, all the safety issues arise from motor vehicles.

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