For the trucks in the picture, the speed is limited by the manufacturer.
I really hate these trucks. Not for all the genuine reasons that everyone else does. I have a 1995 Geo Tracker. It might have 60 horsepower on a good day. It’s perfect for everything I need it for. Low horsepower vehicles are awesome. Buying a 700hp truck that’s limited at the ECU to 100mph, but you only drive it on 45mph roads, is such a waste. It’s like buying a million dollar house and sleeping in the garage.
Not to detract from the idea that trucks are dangerous (they most definitely are) but I’m not sure this is the best argument for this. An asshole in a truck doesn’t mean they necessarily will drive their truck down the sidewalk like what is common with assholes on two wheels. 4 wheels will do many other dangerous things. but assholes who ride their two wheels on sidewalks going top speed even at 15 without making room for pedestrians is a valid concern.
It’s also primarily an issue of lacking infrastructure. Two wheeled assholes wouldn’t be on the sidewalk if there was a bike lane, unless they’re huge two wheeled assholes.
100% this, the only time I ride my ebike on the sidewalk is when there is no bike lane or separate bike path. Cause if I have to choose between riding on a 45 mph road or the sidewalk I’m gonna pick the sidewalk and just go slower when pedestrians are around.
I unapologetically ride my bike on the sidewalks because I don't want to die. I'm careful not to hit anyone and would love for protected bike lanes to be put in everywhere
An asshole in a truck doesn’t mean they necessarily will drive their truck down the sidewalk like what is common with assholes on two wheels.
Not to defend irresponsible scooter use, but the ‘but scooters are more commonly a hazard to pedestrians’ argument could (and arguably should) be expanded to include trucks vs. cyclists.
I don’t always have bad interactions with motorists, but when I do it’s almost always some guy in a truck that feels entitled to drift over into the bike lane while I’m in it, or when there isn’t a bike lane, to overtake dangerously- if I have one thing I feel threatened by when I ride my bike, it’s not scooters, it’s badly-behaving motorists but mostly men in trucks.
If we’re going to use the ‘I feel threatened by scooters when I am a pedestrian’ measure to justify regulating them, what if I feel threatened by big truck drivers when I am a cyclist? Yeah this all ultimately boils down to inadequate infra so not everyone has a safe or appropriate place to be, and these are all real problems- it doesn’t make sense to me to decide one of them ought not to be addressed.
Instead of drafting new laws, administering fines, and criminalizing people who are just trying to get their fucking groceries home, how about spend that money on a second trail.
This is relevant because the greenbelts themselves and the false choice they create between housing and environmental preservation are all consequences of zoning for car dependency.
FWIW, I would also love to have a merged view for crossposted threads – or for entire similar communities, for that matter. I suspect somebody’s working on it, but it seems like one of those things where the details start getting really tricky once you get into it.
Look, if four posts over three communities by two people on ALL make your user experience unbearable and prompt you to complain, maybe it’s time to talk to someone and take some time off the internet…
In the meantime, while you’re complaining, would you mind asking the Iranians (?) to keep it down, they’re sPAmMiNg ALL right now, thanks luv
I love how any complaint on here has to have an insult-laden retort by a pedantic little pissant like you taking it to an extreme and detailing that it’s time to get off the Internet.
If only the world was full of more people like you, then we’d never need to have new features or upgrades. Look, if one complaint makes your user experience unbearable to the point that you feel the need to be an insufferable blowhard, maybe it’s time to talk to someone and take some time off the internet…
Some people got convinced that banning thermal personal vehicles was incompatible with the bigger picture goals. You can develop a 15min city and a public transport system while also banning thermal personal vehicles.
I don’t know what’s driving this misinformation campaign about electric vehicles “polluting more” or “polluting just as much” when it takes 5 minutes of googling to find 6 reputable sources disputing both these claims
Banning the sale of new thermal cars, motorcycles, vespas does help with climate change in the long run
Some people have taken it upon themselves to refuse some incremental improvements and it’s only leading to doing nothing
I agree with you here. This meme says “address” climate change like “EVs aren’t a perfect solution to climate change” as if that’s some big gotcha. They’re a meaningful, incremental improvement away from ICE vehicles.
Public transit and bikes are better, but electrifying everything is also a good thing.
My comment isn’t an attack on you nor your post. We’re just supplying context to a meme that isn’t entirely helpful to the environmental or fuckcar causes (shocking /s).
This is just an attempt to help people not walk away with the wrong message.
Banning the sale of new thermal cars, motorcycles, vespas does help with climate change in the long run
Friendly reminder that “thermal cars” and fossil-fuel cars aren’t necessarily the same thing. I have a car that runs on 100% biodiesel and is therefore carbon-neutral, for instance. Yes, it’s niche, but it does exist – and if we eliminated the need for the vast majority of cars by fixing our cities, then carbon-neutral ICE fuels might be able to meet a bigger fraction of the remaining need.
In that scenario electric or hydrogen cars would probably be better for global food supplies. Especially in a world of increasing food scarcity due to climate change, having poor people starve while rich people turn food into fuel for their cars doesn’t seem fair. You can put solar panels or wind turbines on barren land and not take up valuable arable land.
It’d be better then releasing more carbon and further exasperating the problems, but I think there are better solutions.
I think their might be a naming issue here. I was going by the wikipedia article for biodiesel which says it’s made directly from crops and it’s
Unlike the vegetable and waste oils used to fuel converted diesel engines
Which seems like what your talking about. It doesn’t seem to point to a name for that though, maybe just biofuel. It does say some biodiesel is made from waste oil but also that:
the available supply is drastically less than the amount of petroleum-based fuel that is burned for transportation and home heating in the world, this local solution could not scale to the current rate of consumption.
And that about half of current U.S production is from virgin oil feedstock. 10% of all grain is already used for biofuel, and that’s just to cover the bit of ethanol used for petrol, if we transitioned even a fraction of cars to full biofuel that number would go up by a lot.
There’s also still an opportunity cost with even the waste oil. If we have the capacity to collect and refine waste oils into fuel, then we can probably also just recycle it and refine it back to food standards.
I should have been more clear: yes, biodiesel can come from things that compete with food crops, but the biodiesel made from waste is the only kind I endorse.
(Fun fact: the kind I use in my car is made from chicken fat, a byproduct of all the chicken processing plants we have here in northern Georgia.)
It’s also possible to make synthetic gasoline, by the way, and I’m only endorsing making it from CO2 produced as a byproduct of something else (and, pointedly, not coal gasification or steam reforming of natural gas).
It does say some biodiesel is made from waste oil but also that…
…this local solution could not scale to the current rate of consumption.
That’s where this part of my comment came in:
if we eliminated the need for the vast majority of cars by fixing our cities, then carbon-neutral ICE fuels might be able to meet a bigger fraction of the remaining need
In Australia we have chip shops along the lonely roads through the desert. Some of them are so isolated there’s no mains electricity. Recently they became electric car accessible by attaching car charge stations to biodiesel generators. The waste oil from frying the chips powers the electric cars.
Bikes don’t work well in places like where I live when you can easily get 1-2 feet of snow in the winter. Or very icy roads. They definitely should be used more, but they aren’t a panacea.
Some nations that experience harsh winters have well maintained bicycle infrastructure year round. Access to effecient, maintained, and safe bicycle infrastructure is the biggest factor preventing or enabling cycling.
Biking in sub-zero temperatures when it isn’t even safe to be exposed outside for more than a few minutes (also happens here in the winter) is not a good idea either.
Again, I am all about bikes. I think bikes should be widely adopted. I would also never ride one in winter conditions here no matter how well the infrastructure is maintained. Have you ever seen a road plowed after there’s been a huge snowfall? Keeping a bike lane clear is not especially reasonable an expectation for a snowplow.
Most bike lanes get a differnet treatment creating a tightly packed snow surface to pedal on.
Safe bicycle infrastructure does not equal bicycle gutters. Bicycle gutters are unsafe on most roads even in the summer and were designed without winter maintaince as a consideration.
Skipping through the video, those look like roads dedicated to bicycles. Unless you repurpose an entire city to be bicycle only, which is a very unlikely scenario in most places in this world with harsh winters, that really doesn’t apply to the way snowplows usually work.
What do you think good, safe and dedicated bicycle infrastructure looks like? Cars and bicycles has vastly different needs and therefore should have differently built roadways.
When your city repaves its 4-6 lane roads, it has the choice to change some of those car lanes to bicycle/pedestrian/multiuse paths.
How do you think you build a good, safe and dedicated bicycle infrastructure in a city which has not been designed for it? There are roads here, like the one where my office is, that only have one access route. How do even get the delivery trucks in if you make that only road bike-only? And if you say “just build another road,” who is going to pay for that?
Also, almost every road here has two lanes, one in each direction.
No bike friendly city, and very few advocates for them, are suggesting to ban motor vehicles entirely. Rather, we can structure infrastrucrue to serve both, instead of just cars.
A 4 lane stroad can be turned into a two lane, limited access road with protected, separated bike lane and a median. This actually improves auto throughput, travel times, and emissions.
A 2 lane residential street can have restricted parking, narrower right of way, and wide rsidewalks. This naturally slows cars, making shared right of way safer for all.
A pedestrian zone can have moveable bollards, so that deliveries and mobility services can still access, whil keeping the street safe for people.
In all these cases, its not about bulldozing buildings, its about changing the way we use existing land.
How do you think you build a good, safe and dedicated bicycle infrastructure in a city which has not been designed for it?
The Netherlands did it. Just change construction requirements/guidelines, zoning, etc, get some biking activists, and wait 50 years. All of these problems have already been solved.
And to answer your specific question, I think they normally close off roads to regular cars but let delivery vehicles go through. In the short amount of time the vehicle is there, people just bike/walk around it. And they also make smaller delivery vehicles, including branded cargo bikes for when the situation fits.
No. Because infrastructure needs to be replaced every so often and after 50 years you’ll have gone through most of it. 50 years ago is around when the Netherlands switched from building car infrastructure to also building bike infrastructure.
Such a bike-only city just have to build heated underground tunnels for biking. If a New York subway style bike highway isn’t good enough., since wind chill and all that, instead build a city-wide roof over the first floor of all the buildings in the city to basically make that first floor a basement.
This is obviously an extreme answer, but if a city wanted to be bike-only, the only barrier is cost.
no city wants to do that, but they could. Stick Solar panels on the first floor roof and do the solar freaking roadways idea to heat up the tiles and avoid plowing (without needing to make them car-proof.)
I got myself all excited, I wish this was more than a modern fantasy.
Bike lanes cost less than car lanes. Bike-path-sized snowplows probably cost less than car-lane-sized ones, too.
Bike infrastructure only seems unaffordable for those who dishonestly see it as an add-on on top of car infrastructure, rather than correctly as a replacement for (some of) it.
Bike infrastructure only seems unaffordable for those who dishonestly see it as an add-on on top of car infrastructure, rather than correctly as a replacement for (some of) it.
Well sure, bike infrastructure is cheap if you take a road for cars, ban all cars, and declare it bike only.
But that’s so ridiculous it’s not worth mentioning.
Again, these problems have already been solved. Compress the snow on bike paths, and make a reliable public transport system for when its really too cold.
Biking in sub-zero temperatures when it isn’t even safe to be exposed outside for more than a few minutes (also happens here in the winter) is not a good idea either.
It’s funny how many of the same people making this sort of argument would happily go skiing in the exact same weather.
My family lives in a rural town of 1600, my wife works 800m from home and I commute 50km to the nearest city for work. Most days she walks to work for 7:30 or takes the ebike. I take our EV to arrive at 9am. My daughter takes the school bus , which arrives at my home at 8:17am.
There is a bus that comes to my town and goes to the city each day at 7AM and 8AM. Unfortunately, I cannot take the bus, or I would have to leave my daughter unattended. I don’t think I need to explain why taking my bike 120km a day round trip by the bike path won’t work.
By taking the EV, I make my life work and I save a good amount of CO2 in the process. My old hatchback would have burned 7.7l fuel to make the commute , or 7.7 * 19.6 lbs CO2 = 150lb CO2 per day. My EV gets 16kwh/100km generating between 3/4 lb and 5lb CO2 for the trip, based on local energy mix.
I think a mixture is the real solution. Public transport and human-powered transport such as bicycles should be encouraged as much as possible, but they cannot apply to every scenario. I have to drive about 10 miles down a 4-lane highway to an industrial park whose only access is that highway. Both my home and that industrial park are outside city limits. The nearest bus to me is 2 miles away and goes the opposite direction. Even with robust public transport in this area, it wouldn’t be economically justifiable to get a bus to go from anywhere near my semi-rural subdivision to that industrial park. Not enough people would ride that bus and it wouldn’t be safe to ride a bicycle there.
So I’m a case where I have to drive a car. I don’t like it. I wish I had another option. I would never drive again if I could, but right now I drive a car and the most eco-friendly car I could afford, which was a used Prius.
So people in this community can berate me if they want, but I’m pretty much out of options unless I do something drastic like quit my job and move. And “quit your job and move so you don’t need a car anymore” is not advice anyone should take. Maybe one day, I will be able to do that. I rode public transport all the time when I lived by the train in L.A. and I loved it. But I don’t live in L.A. anymore, I live in a small city in Indiana where public transport throughout the county, which is mostly farms outside city limits, is just not viable.
Your situation doesn’t reflect the majority’s situation, that’s what people need to understand, with better public transport it’s a very small minority that needs a car.
The meme makes a blanket statement forgetting about a big swath of rural people, falsely claiming that EVs don’t address climate change when the cold fact is that EVs do represent a way for people like me to contribute to the solution. A meme like this deserves a reminder like mine.
Or, I could make a small post so that one of our rural neighbours, driving an SUV, doesn’t read “EVs don’t solve climate change” and think to themselves “Hey, that’s true, may as well continue on with my SUV”.
In a way it does, if cars didn’t exist you would have found work closer to home and your environmental impact would be lower. Your situation exist because cars allow it to.
That’s a bad way to phrase it because it frames cars as technological innovation providing a benefit.
The reality, and the best way to phrase it, is different: his situation exists because massive government subsidies for car infrastructure allows it to. He’s not an enjoyer of modern convenience; he’s a welfare queen.
Thank god it’s not like that because I have a great job and a great life that was enabled by the freedom that my cars have given me. Y’all can get rid of your cars but I will always have one regardless of the law or society’s opinion. I’d build my own fucking car if you couldn’t buy one even.
Your situation doesn’t reflect the majority’s situation
In America this is an extremely common situation. Public transit is abysmal here. We need to build that up before we start removing car infrastructure.
Sure, you google me a snow clearing device that will clear plowed snow after a 2-foot snowfall away from a bike lane that abuts a bunch of parked cars on a narrow street and also doesn’t create a traffic hazard. Because that’s what we deal with in my town.
Yeah, you do see that bike lane is separated from the rest of the road by a concrete line so that plow can plow that area separately from the rest of the road, right?
Do you think maybe, just maybe, it’s possible that there isn’t a single solution for every city and town in the world and there are unique problems they can face which make things other cities can do untenable? Is that even a remote possibility? Or does it not apply to plowing snow?
First of all, cars have a much greater grip on the road in icy conditions. So they can handle things like black ice when riding a bicycle on it would be extremely dangerous.
But sure, every small city and town with harsh winters are beyond relevance.
Small cities and towns have a big problem solving things like black ice for cars. Hence the many accidents on days like that when people drive in those conditions. I know because I used to work for the local news station.
I thought I meant beyond relevance for urbanism, and by the way I mostly meant for this discussion about snow on bike lanes.
Guy who said “don’t put words in my mouth” literally 10 minutes ago
Small towns going bankrupt is a result of newer means of transportation concentrating centers of activity within a region.
If you can’t clean the ice for cars, cleaning it for bikes is cheaper. If you can’t do any, then don’t do any - you’ve got worse problems. Thus, irrelevant for this discussion.
You literally didn’t. You cut it off mid sentence.
It’s insane how you’ve moved the goalpost from “It’s impossible to clean snow off bike lanes” to “it’s impossible to clean snow off some bike lanes when the conditions of the bike lanes are very specific” to “it’s impossible to clean off bikelanes when the city is tiny and too broke to clean it off roads in the first place”
Guess what? Then don’t clean them. Discussion has been moved to a segment of the problem that is so small and uninteresting that and if you had been clear about your message in the first place, nobody would’ve needed to answer you
That’s another thing I never said. I never said impossible. And I have always been talking about where I live, not anywhere else. I made that very clear.
Neither do cars work well in those conditions.
If you clear and salt the bike paths in a timely manner, like we also expect for other roads, then bikes are a perfectly viable option even in winter.
You’re going to see a pivot in ICE vehicles. Full EVs are a pain in the ass for most and have too many issues. PHEV are what will become popular for folks with money over the next 5-10 years.
The issues are only with cheaper vehicles. If you’ve money to burn, then there are EVs now with both the range and performance to suit the middle class rich. Super charging stations of various types mean you can pump power in at a rate almost comparable to a petrol station.
PHEV will have their niche for a while, but that will shrink rapidly.
Infrastructure isn’t there, and if you don’t own a home on 240v its even more expensive. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to pull up and wait 30 extra minutes on top of my charge time if a charger isn’t free. PHEV will get most folks around on zero or very little gas and you leave behind any range anxiety or worries about finding a charger every single night. It’s doable on 120v breakers as well. Most the peers I know in the upper middle class range are all eyeing up PHEV and have little reason to go full EV. Hell, I’m going to buy an f150 and the only time I’ll need to fill it is because the gas is going to go stale or I’m towing.
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