Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

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I'm as much of a transportation alternatives fan as anyone, but when I got to the "Cars vs Public Transit" I just rolled my eyes a bit. Modern ebikes cost a few thousand dollars, and are so absurdly cheaper than cars, they pay for themselves within a single year.

Average Annual Cost of Car Ownership:

$9,282: https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/average-annual-cost-...

$5,264: https://www.move.org/average-cost-owning-a-car/#data

$11,756 the first year, $7517 the fifth year, $5914 the tenth year: https://www.caranddriver.com/research/a31267529/cost-of-car-...

Cost of a top-of-the line cargo bike:

$6,499.00 (Dual battery, 1,000Wh), Bosch dual-battery system (500/1000 Wh) for a range of up to 206 km (128 mi): https://www.ternbicycles.com/us/bikes/472/gsd-s10-lx

If you live within 20m of where you work, and cargo-centric ebike will suffice (or farther if you can charge it at work). You can take kids to school on one, you can go grocery shopping on one, you effectively do every single trip in a modern city.

For the few things you can't do, the occasional cost of short term car rentals are drops in a bucket.

The point I'm trying to make is this. Yes, public transit is important, yes we need to make our cities interconnected with trains. However, if we want to create a functional system for transit alternatives... we can do it literally today, by creating network of low-car/car-free streets for ebike traffic.

This doesn't work so well as to warrant an 'eye-roll' for a large portion of the world, where it would be ridiculous to expect people to be riding ebikes long distances, for half the year or more. In my city, people would think you were insane if you tried riding more than than a few Kms with any regularity during the winter, since it often hits -45 C (-49 f), generally with significant snow and slush on the ground. It's also not exactly trivial to make such a huge change to layouts of cities' traffic flows.

Edit: As a point of illustration that I'm not overstating the issue, my city actually has a thriving e/bike rental market for 5-6 months/year and for the other part of the year, the rentals literally disappear and you can't find a single one until part way through spring season.

Aside from the triviality that the cities with highest rates of cycle commuting all have snowy winters (Denmark, Sweden, Norway), a city where people regularly commute in -45C will really not matter if people are walk+transit or cycling. -45C is not normal.

If you're riding at any decent speed, say 20 mph (32kph), think about the additional windchill that adds: -30C becomes ~-46C, if you're blessed enough to not have existing cross or head winds.

Base -30C temp is pretty normal here during the winter (3+ weeks worth before winter even started this year). Granted, in my city at least, we would have to do a much better job clearing/sanding your proposed bike roads than we do our regular roads to maintain that speed on a bike with any sort of safety. In any case, it's a helluva lot easier/more comfortable and less risky to bundle up and trundle to the train/bus station, than to risk additional frostbite from that windchill or wipeouts due to reduced stability of bikes on ice for any significant time. Again, assuming you could convince everyone else who has money for a car to abandon their cars and convert enough roads to dedicated bikeways, and build the infrastructure to safely store a bunch of $3,000-$7,000 ebikes.

Beyond all that, ebikes don't solve a lot of problems if you have a family of any significant size. If I have to buy, maintain, and secure 5 ebikes (and get my kids good with and prepped for riding in the cold and snow), public transit or even a car start looking much, much better.

I realize that most people don't live as far north as I do, but there are many millions who do and my whole point was that it's not eye rollingly obvious that ebikes are the immediate solution for everyone.

I do find it curious that the only neighbourhoods in my own city where use of bikes for that sort of thing (grocery shopping, taking kids to school etc.) is common are typically fairly well-off ones. I'm wondering if part of the reason is that those in poorer neighbourhoods are too worried about having a bike stolen? (it would certainly worry me!). Obviously part of it is also lack of investment in decent bike-friendly infrastructure. But I suspect it may be partly cultural - esp. in areas where there's a significant number of recent immigrants who might think of bicycles as something people would only use to get around on in the poorer countries they came from.

It's always hard to gauge why large groups of people don't do things. I think one of the main issues is just getting it into peoples minds that $6,000 is a reasonable amount to spend on a bicycle:

"But you could buy a used car for that much"

is the common refrain I hear. Yes, you could buy a cheap car for that much, and then immediately have to dump in at least $80 a tank for fuel.

The concept of using a bicycle instead of a car is just so foreign, that I think most American without active inter-cultural experience, say, living in a foreign country or at least multiple areas of the US, are not going to really understand how that would even work without having it spelled out for them line by line. Unfortunately, I fear that the people most likely to fall into a cultural homogeneity are low income, for exactly the reason that uprooting oneself is expensive.

When I go line-by-line explaining how car-free or low-car life is wildly less expensive than normal commuting, the main reply is... "Yea, that's stupid. Nobody is going to do that." I hear this in San Francisco, where anyone can trivially walk down to the wiggle and watch literally thousands of people every day commuting by bicycle.

At this point, it seems most people won't actually approach the subject rationally. People don't do it because it seems mentally ridiculous to them, and honestly, once I can get people out on a bike, they suddenly think that it's actually a really nice way to commute.

I mean isn’t it stupid to expect bike usage given the layout/organization of most of our cities?

No, obviously. If you live within 20 miles of where you work, and ebike is a perfectly sensible way to commute.

> I think one of the main issues is just getting it into peoples minds that $6,000 is a reasonable amount to spend on a bicycle

Not sure I agree, given that you can buy a perfectly serviceable 2nd hand e-bike for a good deal less, though if you want something capable of carrying kids/groceries etc., you're still looking at a considerable outlay if you have very limited savings (3k seems to be a pretty standard ask for good condition ones). Still, you can get new e-trikes with reasonable carrying capacity for well under 2k, and a lot cheaper still if you're fit enough to power it yourself :)

FWIW, I don't personally go largely car-free for any sort of financial reason - I just much prefer getting around by bike than car, and as long as there's access to a car when needed it's basically never an issue.

The math is obvious. If it's $6K vs nothing, I agree with you, but that's not what we're discussing. It's $6K vs minimum $5K/year. Asking people to ride a bike shouldn't be treated like a "craigslist purchase." Car replacements are serious pieces of machinery.

100% agree with the bike policy thing.

And you don't even need an e-bike in most situations.

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