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Comment by johnea | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really sure where in the US people live that makes them think transportation can be replaced by a bike.

I live in San Diego, the climate is great, but there is no way a person can travel any farther than their neighborhood on a bike.

The main impediment at this point is the outrageous price of EVs in the US.

In China cheap EVs are readily available, trade policies are preventing their import into the US.

Bikes, "e" or otherwise are a great way to get around the neighborhood, but most people are not able to restrict their travel to a 10 mile radius. And weather as well as traffic safety are serious mitigations of bike transport.

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And that is a long standing failure in urban planning in the US. Cities that don't support walking/biking/public transit stupid, but just accepted as the norm here.

The whole I-10 thing in LA right now cracks me up. Like they are begging people "please take the bus/train, don't drive", because 1 road closed. Imagine if the bus/train was already preferred because the infrastructure was so much better. Imagine if all the haste/special orders they used to fix the road, they consistently used that to build/expand public transit and walking/biking instead.

The damage is so deep that it feels irreversible at this point, like the US will be doomed to cars and traffic forever. If it took NL like 30-50 years starting in the 70s to reverse course, were looking at a century+ here if we were to start now, which were not.

> The damage is so deep that it feels irreversible at this point, like the US will be doomed to cars and traffic forever.

There's lots of energy to change things, but you need to find the right city. It will still take 50 years to even approach the level of Amsterdam, but here in Boston I live car-free and the bike infrastructure is getting better every year. Right now the problem is density: solving the car problem ultimately means building dense housing.

Or perhaps it means building less-dense light commercial?

I'm not a big fan of the perspective that our only solution to the current housing issues are to package humans in quarters whose main selling point over chicken coops is that your feces don't fall on the heads of your downstairs neighbors.

the idea that there is either the zero-density of single family homes, versus giant apartments that are skyscrapers with thin ceilings and walls, is a false choice due to the US’s bad urban planning.

there are a lot of density options between everywhere USA and Manhattan - row homes for example - that would give a pleasant middle ground and still massively improve density and walkability

This is needlessly hyperbolic. You don't need to cram humans into a SimCity arcology to achieve sustainable levels of density. Hell, you don't even need skyscrapers, which are foolishly inefficient in any case. 3- to 6-story mixed-use development is all it takes (when I say "build housing" I'm only referring to the most pressing crisis, not suggesting that housing should be zoned separately).

Now that the US made that choice, more density and more walkability has to necessarily come at the expense of drivers. Some of whom can handle it and some of whom who largely can't afford to restructure their lives around super dense and super expensive urban cores.

I bought an ebike about 2 years ago and it's been awesome. I started by using it mostly for grocery runs (in-neighborhood) and other small errands. But soon I was using it in an inter-neighborhood way, using dedicated bike infrastructure and bikelanes to range further out across the city and to commute for the limited days I go to the office.

It's not a silver bullet for all the trips I might take in my car but it's getting pretty damn close... and this is in rainy seattle.

Certainly where I grew up on the kitsap peninsula it would be less useful unless I had lived closer to the 'downtown' of my small town/rural complex. All of us kids, of course, had bikes and we'd use them to make trips to friends houses or whatever within probably a mile or two radius, but the grocery store / retail core was more on the order of 10m away .. more doable with an ebike for sure, but hard to justify to 'pop down to the grocery store for a forgotten item'.

To be fair, San Diego seems like it was designed specifically to be hostile to non-car travel, especially around the valleys and passes between the hills.

Downtown/GasLamp are totally viable with just an e-bike (and probably over into Coronado), bus as soon as you have to leave that area, I'd agree, non-viable.

I haven't worked or lived in any other city quite that brutally bad for bikes though?

San diego coastal neighborhoods are fine. I saw a lot of bikes and cargo ebikes going to the ralphs in pacific beach. The whole greater mission bay area seems pretty idyllic from a biking perspective tbh.

A core, dense walkable and expensive area (where a bike might be viable) surrounded by miles and miles of cheaper suburban sprawl (where it's not) is how every major American city is structured. I live next to commuter rail in a mid-sized city that I try to take advantage of, but if the option of a car was completely taken off the table for me it would make so much of my life more difficult by at least an order of magnitude.

I also live in San Diego, and have gone between Pacific Beach, La Jolla, Clairemont, Mission Valley, Downtown, and even as far as La Mesa or National City via e-bike (sometimes also using the trolley / light rail).

Is it convenient? No. Is it outright impossible? Absolutely not.

Work can, should, and is being done by the city to improve bike safety, and that’s a crucial factor that should be supported more. e-bikes are surprisingly capable at navigating the clusterfuck of US urban planning, however, so I suspect with effort we can massively improve and make this more viable. (This also includes densifying neighborhoods so you don’t have to cross the city for something you need).

also, Pacific Beach, La Jolla, UTC, Downtown/Gaslamp, Hillcrest/North Park are all pretty dense neighborhoods - so I suspect despite our major flaws, we have the capability to improve car alternatives pretty well. Much better than a lot of places with zero dense areas.

Well the article did start off talking on a world stage....

Every town and city across the planet is be different, some more amenable, some less so. We have ebikes and it replaces over summer some car trips, it's not a wholesale replacement for cars and (I personally) think they shouldn't be touted as that - that's fighting a loosing battle!

In the town I'm in ~55'000 people, there's a big uptake of ebikes particularly summer it's just mad. E.g. going to the market, or a cafe, or pub... so I would hazard a guess that the replacement journeys in summer time drop traffic 5%, maybe 10%.

I've lived in Toronto which probably fairly similar to a number of US cities and that would have been amazing to get around on ebike (outside of winter time).

Plenty of places in the Northeast are potentially great for this. I live in a suburb of Philly, there's a train station into Philly a mile away, a major shopping center also about a mile away, a downtown area with lots of shops and restaurants, and two neighboring towns with similar downtowns. The schools are within easy walking or biking distance. The infrastructure is pretty hostile but the distances are perfectly reasonable for cycling.

Many places in Europe are very bike-friendly. I used to commute 10km one way daily in pre-WFH time, it was very enjoyable except maybe 1-2 cold months.

You can ride a bike for short trips and take a car for long trips or when you don't like the weather and you still reduce your demand for oil.

You are forgetting about the other coast. A 10 mile Radius will get you almost anywhere you want to go in a NE metro

If you didn't have to commute to work, how often do you really need to leave your neighborhood though?

I guess you have to start by defining neighborhood. I consider the half a square mile area of houses that I walk my dog in to be my neighborhood. By that definition I leave my neighborhood probably 10 times a day.

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