Instead of just electrifying vehicles, cities should be investing in alternative methods of transportation. This article is by the Scientific Foresight Unit of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS), a EU’s own think tank.
Hopefully some of the people sitting in parliament will read this. In many cities we still have to fight for bicycle infrastructure. Car centric city designs should really start going out of fashion
The worst is when they install bike infrastructure that will just randomly end and dump you onto a busy street, and then complain no one is using the fancy new bike lanes…
Have some of these here. Absolutely wild, that the bike lane ends where it would become useful: Before a traffic light, so that you have to take part in the traffic jam of cars.
But what am I even talking about. Traffic lights per se are an anti-pattern of city design.
Traffic lights per se are an anti-pattern of city design.
It’s a pro and a con. Cars waiting is a good thing. Car drivers chose cars for convenience so anything that makes them inconvenient is a positive factor to getting them out of cars. I’m in a place where bicycles can turn right on red but cars cannot. And there are cycle paths through woods and fields and niche trafficlight-free places cars cannot go.
I love traffic jams because cyclists are immune to them and car drivers can only sit in frustration as they get passed by cyclists.
A couple intersections are still fucked up though, where cyclists might have to wait for ~2-3 differently timed lights to cross an intersection. Luckly red light running is not generally enforced against cyclists.
Car drivers chose cars for convenience so anything that makes them inconvenient is a positive factor to getting them out of cars.
That’s the wrong way. Bike should be made more convenient. But artificial worsening is no good thing.
That doesn’t work. Making cycling more convenient is only noticed by cyclists. Car drivers see the inconvenience of pedaling. To them it’s harder work to move slower. You can’t offset that in any material way that’s noticed by car drivers from the comfort of their loungy cars as extensions of their living room.
This is why I did not transition from car to bicycle. I needed a mass transit middle step. Mass transit includes the notable convenience of being chauffeured around, not having to look for parking, maintenance free. Then after getting accustomed to waiting for the tram and being locked to the public transport schedule, cycling becomes a viable upgrade from public transport (no waiting and more autonomy).
I agree on everything, but the conclusion that they are a pro and a con.
Under the constraint, that the same rules apply to bicycles and cars and they are enforced, then traffic lights are definitely an anti-pattern.
Under the assumption, that the alternative would be that pedestrians and cyclicsts would have always the right of way over cars in an urban environment, they would be neutral.
But are they ever a good thing? I see where you are coming from with this: Traffic lights make cars wait. But they are installed to optimise car-flow, in the first place. So, if they were not there, cars would wait longer, because they are inherently inefficient vehicles that would clogg up intersections immediatly and consequentially bring car-flow to a total halt. Hence, every traffic not participating in car-flow would drastically accelerate if traffic lights were abolished.
I think the top purpose is safety and from there it’s an attempt at optimization. Or perhaps those priorities are flipped. But if you consider Europe which largely favors traffic circles over lights, that’s probably the optimum for keeping cars moving. If I were a selfish car driver in the US, I would want probably ~70% of the traffic lights at all the low-flow intersections to be replaced with traffic circles.
I suppose it won’t be long before this discussion becomes moot. People on their tablets in self-driving cars won’t care whether the car is moving or not.
Oh yea, here they painted the gutter red and called it a day. One such red gutter directs you right into a busy 6 way intersection and just ends there, it’s unofficially called the suicide lane.
Well obviously you can’t put bike infrastructure in places with high traffic. There is too much traffic and all that traffic stuck in traffic it is better if it’s stuck in 2 lanes or 3. Bike lanes work on quiet roads and out in the countryside. But in cities it would mean that the bikes go much faster than cars which doesn’t make any sense because cars go faster than bikes.
It’s just a waste of money. What is need is road widening. Or you know where that metro line is that doesn’t connect to the other metro line. If we dig a tunnel between those lines we will have a super fast and efficient way to transfer cars from the traffic on one side of the city to the traffic on the other side.
The current plan where I live, is to chuck the bicycles on the footpath with pedestrians.
Heyyy, we tried that! Yeah, went about as well as you can expect.
Only thing is that electrifying vehicles is a little easier than rebuilding a city (or part of it). And it don’t need to be a really old part, even a 60/70 years old city zone is relatively hard to convert. Not to speak of even older zones.
But yes, newly build zone of city should be designed with this in mind.
In my (over 1,000 year old) city, blocking several streets with bollards and massively reducing street parking worked just fine so far. As did curbing traffic coming in, with longer “red” phases at traffic lights for cars entering, when sensors detect too many cars in the city.
The “smart” traffic lights idea is very interesting, never heard of it. Which country is that?
Germany (city of Potsdam)
smart lights come in other forms:
- If you are speeding, the next light detects it and nearly guarantees you get a red light
- If you are not speeding, your license plate is read and entered into a lottery where you can win money from the pool of money collected by traffic violations.
I don’t recall which country implemented what, but IIRC Canada, Sweden and Spain each had one of the above two systems.
If you are not speeding, your license plate is read and entered into a lottery where you can win money from the pool of money collected by traffic violations.
That’s the most dystopian and borderline insane thing I’ve read for some time.
There is a quite good opt-out procedure: cycle.
But how do I participate in the lottery as cyclist, pedestrian or as a resident?
We also have restricted access to the center of the city (the infamous Area C and Area B) even stricter but so far they are not working that well simply because they created them but not added the necessary alternatives (public transportation first and foremost).
Where I lived when I was younger, to be able to have a neighborhood that is not that dependent on cars (back at the time it was not, everything you need was at a 5 minute walk) they basically levelled the neighborhood and rebuild it, and it was relatively new (post WWII), a thing that is not an option in older area (center).
The way of your city (or of Milano) are also appliable only to big cities where everything you need is present, where I currently live I need a car for a number of reasons, because my small town has not all what I can need, for example the only way to go to the train station I use is by car since it is too distant to walk to (or I can choose the other one and hope to use less than 1.5 hours for a 20 minute train travel), and there is not a public transportation system.
Maybe I am naive but I think that people would discard the car (or use it a lot less) if for the day by day they have an alternative, so when I said it would be easier I should have added the missing implicit (for me) part “in the short term”.
You want I don’t own/use a car in 5 years from now ? Fine, where are the construction sites for the railroads and the other public transportation system I will need to use ? Because I can stop using the car in a month, but you cannot build a railroad in a month.
Just take lanes away from cars
It’s a good move but note that car drivers are extremely clingy to their convenience. They protest violently and burn tires under the threat of pedestrianizing a road. The hostility they bring to the slightest possibility of a perceived drop in their convenience is unmatched. The car lobby is BIG and the politicians themselves are in that car-driving demographic.
I understand the sentiment, but that could cause more issues than it solves. Cars then would be forced to compete for space with bicycle again,only this time on all bicycle roads. Or houses could not have car access at all, if you’d narrow the streets.
Cars then would be forced to compete for space with bicycle again,only this time on all bicycle roads.
Why? The other person said: “Take lanes away from cars”. There wouldn’t be any cars on that lane.
Huh, somehow misread that as “take all lanes away”
There are some model projects of super blocks which are already very promising. They change the nature of car use inside a neighborhood by making pass-through traffic impossible and limiting parking space to only residents as well as making roads very narrow all the while being mixed use. It makes driving faster than 10km/h pretty hard, all the while still keeping it possible for people who really need it.
It’s called a “woonerf”, we’ve had them since the seventies.
Yaeh ok, but what are the issues you were announcing before talking about the benefits?
Is it easier or is it just shifting the cost? We’re talking thousands of cars needing electrification in any given city, at let’s say they get it to an average of $35k each.
Picking a random city, let’s say Cincinnati. They already have some infrastructure but it’s largely car dependent. They have 148k households, of which 44.1% have one car, 25.2% have two, 6.8% have three, and 2.4% have four. So roughly 65k + 75k + 30k + 14k = 184k cars * 35k each or minimum 6.4 billion to electrify them all.
I don’t know how much good public transit costs, but I have to imagine $6.4b can buy a fair amount of it.
You anyway need a new car every 15 years. So no additional costs.
Actually it really isn’t easier to keep things car-oriented because building a city so there is enough room for cars is fundamentally impossible.
I beg to differ!
The point is not to build (or reshape) a city to have enough room for cars, but to build (or reshape) a city so that you don’t need to have (or to use so often) a car for the day by day.
But yes, you can. Our cities are basically build this way, the only problem is that they are build with much lower number of cars in mind.
I mean sure, you can absolutely build a city to have enough room for cars for 10 rich assholes and everyone else can deal with the fact that the city is built to cater to those rich assholes instead of the majority of its inhabitants but I think it was pretty much implied by my statement that a car-oriented city would be the kind that has enough room for all its inhabitants and visitors to use cars and that is fundamentally impossible since cities have a lot of people and cars need huge amounts of space per user.
Isaac Asimov decades ago imagined a future where nuclear plants provided infinite clean energy, and still people in his cities moved on foot, on large systems of conveyors.
The conveyors imagined by Asimov and Heinlein have got to be the dumbest things they ever thought of. I love those guys and generally they had interesting ideas but this one… wow.
In Paris Montparnasse just after 2000, they had a speed conveyor, like at the airport but accelerating up to (IIRC) 11km/h (and decelerating at the end ofc). Wild times!
They lowered the speed as I guess too many people fell. It wasn’t really intuitive as the handrail didn’t accelerate at the same way so you had nothing to hold onto. I don’t know what happened with the project.
It was called the TGV, Tapis Grand Vitesse mimicking the TGV for Train Grand Vitesse (the French speed trains acronym).
I mean, I don’t think conveyors are a good solution, but it’s telling that someone so long ago already rejected cars as a viable transportation method.
In Paris Montparnasse they had a speed conveyor, like at the airport but accelerating up to (IIRC) 11km/h (and decelerating at the end ofc). Wild times!
They lowered the speed as I guess too many people fell. It wasn’t really intuitive as the handrail didn’t accelerate at the same way so you had nothing to hold onto.
78% of microplastics in the ocean come from car tires. EVs are heavier, and produce more microplastics. 10-20 bikes can fit in one car parking space. Bicycles and trains are hundreds of times more efficient than cars in terms of energy and space… And bike crashes don’t kill over a million people per year globally.
It’s kind of obvious. We can have a future worth living in, or we can have cars, but we can’t have both.
What happens with bikes when it rains, or there is a heat wave, or intense cold? I assume these are solved problems where bike culture is common but haven’t seen much discussion about it.
Biking is as common in the Netherlands as high winds and rain. I ride in the rain all the time. You wear a jacket. Same with cold, except you wear a bigger jacket. Biking in the snow is common in Finland. I’ve biked in freezing rain. It’s not always super pleasant, but is a small amount of discomfort really worth destroying our cities and our planet to prevent?
I don’t have a great answer for heat since it’s not something we deal with here (as much). Cycling requires less energy than walking, so if you’re not biking hard you can keep as cool or cooler than walking. Where mass transit exists, use that if you really need to get around… And, honestly, you should generally stay inside during dangerous heat anyway.
Kids, pets, and elderly folks regularly die in cars during normal summers. Things are only going to get hotter and we’re going to need to adapt our culture around that.
Bicycles and trains are hundreds of times more efficient than cars in terms of energy and space…
A fast train like TGV, ICE or Shinkansen needs 10 kWh per passenger per 100 km. This includes infrastructure like heated railway switches, train stations, etc.
This is not much more energy efficient than an electric car.
And bike crashes don’t kill over a million people per year globally.
Compare the passenger-kilometers done by car and by bike.
Those trains are not comparable to cars, they’re comparable to airplanes. The metros and light rails that are intended to replace cars are overwhelmingly more efficient per potential passenger. Comparing a vehicle that is usually run near capacity with a vehicle that almost never has more than one passenger is obtuseness almost to the point of deception.
Bikes don’t replace cars. Bikes+trains replace cars. For comparable miles traveled, cars are insanely dangerous. It is utterly unhinged to argue that bikes and cars are equally safe but for the miles traveled, especially as higher bumper heights and decreased visibility are driving pedestrian deaths from cars through the roof.
And none of these touch the fact that cars simply don’t fit in cities. You also completely ignored the literal tons of carcinogenic and heavy metal laden microplastics from tires that end up in our oceans. Every human being carrying around multiple tons of metal with them can’t possibly be efficient. Large heavy machinery constantly interacting with soft swishy humans can’t possibly ever be safe.
Arguing otherwise requires either an epic level of car brain worm or a pay check from the auto industry. I don’t know which is worse: people desperately trying to ignore obviously reality, or people willing to sell out their fellow humans and even their future for a few more years of something that was never a good idea to begin with.
Those [fast] trains are not comparable to cars, they’re comparable to airplanes. The metros and light rails that are intended to replace cars are overwhelmingly more efficient per potential passenger.
Local public transport needs about twice as much energy than high-speed trains.
Comparing a vehicle [train] that is usually run near capacity
The average capacity utilization is more like 20%. See the source above or https://www.zeit.de/mobilitaet/2019-02/nahverkehr-oepnv-bus-bahn-zahlen-preise-statistik
Every human being carrying around multiple tons of metal with them can’t possibly be efficient.
Explain to me how a train with 2 metric tonnes per passenger can be efficient?
I was prepared to read your arguments and even thought to myself I might have to reevaluate some preconceived notions I had.
But even the links and statistics you cited show cars as much more inefficient than buses, trains, trams, and metros.
Are you able to cite something that’s not locked behind a pay wall?
None of these three links is behind a pay wall. (You have to accept the GDPR-banner thou.)
In optimal cases, measuring only movement and not taking in to account wasted movement, some EVs can match the efficiency of some trains while moving point to point (assuming none of that movement is wasted). But we know there are some inefficiencies and externalities that decrease that efficiency. Let’s see if we can fix them.
Parking is the biggest problem with everyone having a car. Looking for parking is necessarily wasted.
How much traffic stems from cruising for parking? Table 1 summarizes the results of 22 studies of cruising in 15 cities on four continents, dating back to 1927. According to these findings, cruising for parking accounted for between 8 and 74 percent of traffic in the areas studied, and the average time to find a curb space ranged between 3.5 and 15.4 minutes. On average, 34 percent of cars were cruising, and the average time it took to find a space was eight minutes.
https://transfersmagazine.org/magazine-article/issue-4/how-much-traffic-is-cruising-for-parking/
Holy fuck! That’s a HUGE amount of waste in a good scenario. Crazy, like 95% of the time cars are parked anyway. This is just insanely poor design. Let’s fix that. OK, so the first thing we need to do is find some way to share those vehicles. This would also fix the problem where people keep buying larger and more inefficient EV trucks. How can we do that? Maybe we could have some kind of car share program or something, like lyft and Uber. Oh yeah, those are super inefficient actually and really abusive to their employees. We really need some kind of automated system, like some kind of robotaxi to avoid that car parking problem. OK, so let’s make a fleet of autonomous taxis that drive around the city based on some kind of optimized pattern. Great, now we’ve eliminated (or at least limited) the parking problem.
But you know, it would be easier to share these taxis if we didn’t go door to door. Like, maybe we could have well defined routes for these autonomous taxis. Autonomous driving technology is actually really awful and gets confused really easily. It’s much easier to travel specific routes anyway. Great, now we have a bunch of cars that travel specific routes so people can share the cars. We drop some inefficacy by not having every car go door to door as well. Excellent.
OK, but now every taxi has a computer on board. They all have to keep track of each other’s movements. We’re definitely losing some efficiency here. Let’s combine some of them. We could cut a few of them up and weld the passenger compartments together to make long taxis. Then we could physically connect a few of the long taxis together so they can have centralized control. Great.
There’s still a lot of starting and stopping though to pick everyone up. What if we shared the getting on and getting off time. What if we made some kind of shared taxi stop and then everyone who wanted to get on or off could just wait at the stop and get on and off at the same time. Can’t really argue that that wouldn’t be better.
You know, if we have these shared routes and shared stops I bet we could get rid of even more of the complexity by just putting the whole thing on a track and getting rid of the whole steering controls. That would take less computers, so it would be more efficient. Oh wow, if we have a track we could also get rid of those heavy metal microplastic spewing tires. OK, so now we’ve got big metal taxis that are linked together and travel on a track with metal wheels.
I wonder if we could take better advantage of that shared entry and exit stations by running on some kind of schedule. Then a bunch of people could gather together and all get on our off at the same time instead of having to individually call for taxis when it’s convenient for them.
Oh, wait, every single one is still carrying it’s own battery. It’s way more efficient to move electricity itself than moving batteries. Since we’re already running on a track, we can take the batteries out and have some kind of central power delivery via maybe overhead cables or something.
OK, so we’ve made EVs more efficient by making them shared, getting rid of wasted space, eliminating some of the excess from trips, running them on a schedule and a track, making specific stops, and taking out all the extra battery weight. Let’s take a look…
Huh. Interesting.
I wonder if we could like… put it in some kind of underground tube and maybe electrify the rails for power delivery instead. You know, to get rid of the problem of it getting stuck in traffic…
Huh. Cool. I guess I accidentally did an Adam Something.
You go back and tell me which of these proposed efficiency improvements actually reduces efficiency and we’ll talk.
Parking is the biggest problem with everyone having a car.
Parking is a problem only in cities. 20% of the population lives rural.
But you know, it would be easier to share these taxis if we didn’t go door to door. Like, maybe we could have well defined routes for these autonomous taxis. … It’s much easier to travel specific routes anyway.
Better than predefined routes is aggregated ride sharing like MOIA. Which is essentially a big taxi.
We drop some inefficacy by not having every car go door to door as well. Excellent.
Excellent? Sort of inconvenient, people have to walk to the nearest station. Especially with groceries. And impractical for the elderly, disabled and small children.
if we have a track we could also get rid of those heavy metal microplastic spewing tires.
Why is particulate matter in trains stations so high?
You go back and tell me which of these proposed efficiency improvements actually reduces efficiency and we’ll talk.
If everything is so efficient, why on earth needs a tram 15 kWh per passenger per 100 km?
Parking is a problem only in cities. 20% of the population lives rural.
I was specifically talking about cities. I’m glad we can agree that 80% of people should not own cars. Let’s talk about the rest.
As someone who grew up in actually rural areas, I need to point out that there are two types of “rural.” There’s farm land and there’s suburbs. Suburbs are a parasite that kills cities. They drain city resources without having a high enough density to pay for those resources with their taxes. They fill cities with cars and they don’t produce anything of value. Suburbs must be destroyed.
Farmers actually do something useful. They, and the communities that support them, should be treated like full citizens instead of as a second class. This means they also deserve the same infrastructure, bike lanes and train stations, as cities. There are some trade offs to living in rural areas. Things do take longer and are harder to get to. You have to do a lot of things yourself.
When I was growing up we drove our trash to the dump because we didn’t have garbage service. Personal vehicles sometimes make sense here, but absolutely not giant trucks to haul some milk and eggs. Motorcycles and kei cars are more than enough in most cases. Even for kei cars you should have to justify it purchasing it by providing you live in a rural area and to have a truck should require a commercial license.
But people who just want to use rural areas to defend their use of cars in cities often don’t realize how many people in rural areas can’t drive. They don’t know the absolute hell of being completely isolated and reliant on a parent to do anything. They don’t know how hard it can be to take care of someone who’s disabled or elderly, who relies on a caretaker to get to every appointment or activity. Functional infrastructure would significantly improve the lives of a lot of rural people, and cars often get in the way of that. You will grow old and you will be part of that group. Do you want to be trapped? With functional infrastructure, elderly people can use mobility scooters or microcars safely in bike lanes.
Rural areas don’t have to be car centric. There’s nothing innate about rural areas the forces people to rely on cars for everything. They’re designed that way. They can be designed differently.
Excellent? Sort of inconvenient, people have to walk to the nearest station. Especially with groceries. And impractical for the elderly, disabled and small children.
The elderly are often not safe to drive, so your solution is not more convenient. It’s to trap them at home or have them risk killing someone. A functional city that’s not designed around cars makes it easy to get groceries by other means, more convenient means that don’t involve the potential of accidentally murdering someone. There aren’t really any places in Amsterdam, for example, where you’re more than a few minutes bike ride from one or a half-dozen grocery stores.
It can be inconvenient to walk to a station, but it’s far more inconvenient to not be able to walk or bike anywhere because your whole city is just roads and parking lots. Cars kill cities by decreasing density below the point where commerce is sustainable. Go look at a picture of Huston if you want to see what happens when you let cars win.
If everything is so efficient, why on earth needs a tram 15 kWh per passenger per 100 km?
As opposed to 20 for EVs? Even cherry picked numbers beat cars. Oh and why are those numbers even that bad? Cars. Cars decrease demand for transit. The London metro is 4.4.
And that 20 kWh per 100p-km doesn’t take in to account manufacturing, shipping, and disposal or any consumables like…uh… tires, which are a petroleum product. Well tuned vehicles operate more efficiently, which is why personal vehicles can never be as efficient as well used mass transit.
There’s a fundamental limit on the efficiency of large scale transit and it’s realized by mass transit. Any possible improvemnt that could be made for individual transit could just as easily be applied back to mass transit for a higher efficiency.
Your ride sharing example highlights the same thing again. That’s actually pretty similar to the last mile soliton for Sound Transit in Seattle. They send a van to pick people up and drop them off at transit stops, which reduces the justification for personal cars even more.
Trains reduce road traffic so much that normal lane road is enough, when without trains a city needs multiple laned roads that jam up regularly regardless how many lanes there are. Train systems get more efficient and waiting times smaller when more people use them. The opposite with car based transit systems
Yeah where did you get these energy numbers for the train? But you can use regenerative energy surces and since train wheels are mostly made of metal there is almost no microplastic produced.
I dont think you can kill as many people with bikes than you can with a car.
All in all some weak ass counter arguments.
Only German and Swiss sources, sorry for that. But should not differ much to other countries.
- https://www.energie-gedanken.ch/2019/ein-elektroauto-verbraucht-gleich-viel-energie-wie-die-eisenbahn/
- https://www.elektroauto-news.net/news/wie-umweltfreundlich-ist-die-bahn-eigentlich
- https://www.airliners.de/energieverbrauch-bahn-flugzeug-apropos/36592
- https://m.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/klima/klimabilanz-der-bahn-noch-eine-unbequeme-wahrheit-1488587.html
But you can use regenerative energy surces
Same with electric cars.
I dont think you can kill as many people with bikes than you can with a car.
If bikes would drive the same annual passenger-kilometers, they would.
If bikes would drive the same annual passenger-kilometers, they would.
This is insanely deceptive.
This could only possibly be true if cars continued to be used at the same rate. The vast majority of deaths involving cycling are from cyclists being killed by cars. If people traveled as many miles by bike as by car today, cycling deaths would be practically eliminated because there would be no cars to murder them.
You’re right that 60% of all accidents of bikes are with cars. And of these 75% are caused by cars. Link So with less cars and better infrastructure bike-accidents could be cut in half and deadly accidents nearly eliminated.
Glad that you accept trains as not much more energy efficient than cars.
100% of car involved crashes involve cars. That’s just tautology. Even in acknowledging the fact that you completely misrepresented or just outright lied with your data, you’re can’t seem to help continuing to blame the victim.
I haven’t accepted trains are more efficient than cars because they aren’t. I refuted you elsewhere. It’s kind of self-apparent when you’re not paid to believe something else.
I’m starting to have the same feeling about personal jets.
No hatred against minotories please!
No conclusions without adequate data, please. ;-)
I’m just suggesting that giving them pedal powered planes, like the Gossamer Albatross, might help, but may not solve all our problems.
A recent study found that a single unmuffled scooter driving through Paris at 3am can wake up 10,000 people.
So sure, scooters have low CO₂ emission but I would like to see a ban on non-electric scooters for their sound emissions, at least during certain hours.
The European Union should push electric motor scooters and allow them 55 km/h (kph). Gas-driven motor scooters are only allowed 45 km/h. They should be discouraged by higher taxes as they are in Asia.
Why did you write “kph” if you are aware of the correct “km/h”?
Better now?
Thank you, yes
So muffle 'em?
And what, only wake up 8,000 people instead? I’ve never heard an unmuffled one, but those little 50 cc fuckers are screaming loud in the high pitch frequencies - a perfect recipe for wakefulness. I often wake up when one of those assholes drives within a block of me at night. It doesn’t even have to traverse my street.
Even if it wakes 5,000 people, who then take 1 hr on avg to return to sleep, 5,000 man hours per scooter per day of lost sleep has to have a measurable loss of productivity and even quality of life.
Muffled scooters are still fucking loud.
Related fun fact: most of the noise cars produce at highway speeds is from tire noise, not from engines.
The related fun fact to that would be that high-pitched sounds are more annoying and perceived to be louder than low frequency sounds with the same db.
I’m sure my sleep is more disrupted living in a city with an occasional 2-stroke engine screaming by than it would be if I lived next to a highway with that relatively constant and relatively distant ambient tire noise.
The scooters they mention in the article are the e-scooters you ride standing up in the bike lane. Not mopeds.
I also think mopeds are a good replacement to cars, much more appropriate for 1-2 people in urban areas. But it needs to be the quieter models. The two-stroke-engine ones are just really too loud for a city. (and they burn motor oil as well as gas)
The scooters they mention in the article are the e-scooters you ride standing up in the bike lane.
No they are not. That makes no sense. Stand-up e-scooters are relatively quiet. Quotes from the article (emphasis added):
“worst of all, the high-pitched wail of motor scooters that speed by every few seconds.”
“Motorcycles and scooters — often with their exhaust systems illegally modified to boost noise and power”
“The noise can be ear-splitting,”
Obviously you would not describe a stand-up scooter as ear-splitting or capable of waking someone up. They’re talking about gas small gas combustion engines, most of which are the worst variety on scooters: 2-stroke.
Or if you meant the OP’s article is talking about e-scooters, that article actually covered both:
“Weight rates are usually over 10 times more favourable for the average motorbike or scooter and, of course, even better for lighter vehicles such as electric bicycles or kick-scooters.”
My reaction was to the idea that motor scooters are more favorable by a factor of 10 due to the weight – which is true, but my criteria is more complex than just ecocide-avoidance… I want my sleep too!
True, I was talking about OP’s article but you’re also right that they mention both. I was thinking of the mentioned ban of scooters in Paris, this one only refers to the stand up e-scooters.
They banned e-scooters in Paris? I’ve not heard that. Was it just the rentals or all e-scooters?
The article I referenced said Paris is banning noisy scooters, which would be motor scooters.
EVs vs alternative transport is a false dilemma. It’s pretty obvious to me that they should do both.
Every car we have should be electric, but we need to have a lot fewer of them.
Yes, I agree. Need much more cycling, walking infra. And public transport
I have wondered about the impact of all these massive cars. It’s interesting that they impact both traffic and energy, although obvious if you think about it.
The high level of European industry specialisation in producing high quality ICEs accounts for its leading position in the market. However, electric vehicles do not require the same level of know-how, opening the door to other players. China became the top global car exporter in 2023, exporting mostly to Europe and Asia.
Okay, fine. But so what? There is no way that the world is going to continue to use ICEs in the long run. You could say “German auto manufacturers have a comfortable, entrenched position, so we want to defer transition away from ICEs for a year”, but you’re not going to hold things there.
The EU automotive sector has traditionally excelled at producing vehicles with internal combustion engines (ICEs). The sector accounts for around 8 % of the EU’s gross domestic product (GDP) and for 12.9 million direct and indirect jobs. However, the green transition, digitalisation and global competition have fundamentally altered its business model.
Yeah, technology changes over time.
Promoting electric cars may lead to market distortions that run counter to European industrial interests. While complementary measures such as those contemplated in the critical raw materials act take effect, and besides the obvious move towards public transport, one way to allow the EU car industry to adapt while still reducing CO2 emissions could be to limit the size, weight and engine capacity of urban vehicles.
Learn to make electric vehicles, Germany. If you want to ban outside competition to the European market, then straight-up ban outside competition to the European market. Sitting on ICEs has to be the most ridiculous way to do industrial protectionism one can imagine.
You knew that this was coming down the road for ages. Every industry needs to deal with technological change, whether it’s farmers shifting from oxen to tractors or the post office dealing with the shift to telecommunications or farriers dealing with the shift from horses to cars.
China also dominates production of almost every raw material, technology and component used to make electric vehicles.
That’s not because China is mining everything, but because it’s dominant in processing. If you want to bone up on processing, go for it. Germany’s had a history in the chemical industry too. BASF is the largest chemical company in the world today.
The dependency is also unnerving German and other European car manufacturers, whose home markets are now threatened by good-quality Chinese cars and China’s control of the processing of lithium.
Concern is so great that the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has launched an anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese imports, amid fears that big manufacturers including Volkswagen and BMW will have trouble matching the supply of electric cars from China.
But lithium does not, in the main, come from China, so how has Beijing achieved such a commanding position? Was Europe asleep at the wheel?
Lithium supplies are dominated by five countries, with the bulk of the mineral mined in Australia and Chile, but it is China that has taken the raw material and become the dominant supplier of refined lithium.
“They are now the global hub. This gives them economic leverage – or, to put it more bluntly, the means of economic coercion,” says one EU source.
Hell, even if it were mining, Germany has far higher known per-capita lithium reserves than China does; just isn’t mining it.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lithium-reserves-by-country
Total lithium reserves in megatons:
China: 5.10
Germany: 2.70
Europe as a whole has comparable lithium reserves even in absolute terms.
