How Paris Kicked Out the Cars

You can fit a lot more electric bikes on a road than electric cars... Their charging demands are far less as well. Seems kinda inevitable as humans evolve...

 

i love it, will smoking be next?

 

Meh.
That's those crazy French for you.
This has much more to do with population density and a 17th century road system than anything else.

Cars have a lifecycle of about 12 years and 150,000 miles, AND they're something like 90+% recycled.
BUT...they do take up a lot more space than bikes, which last for a few years and are much more likely to be landfill fodder (or thrown into the Seine by outraged pedestrians!)

We'll see....

 

if you've ever walked through a major metropolis recently, the idea of less cars is exciting.
everything comes with a cost

 

Oh yeah, you don't need a car they say... Just walk... They already telling me I have to use a revolver instead of an assault rifle too. What's next? Telling me I have to eat fake meat instead of enslaved animals? [parody]

 

A 130 years ago New York city built giant conveyor belts...

 

I've found bikes (plain bike bikes, anyway) to be more durable than that. I understand aluminum frames will inevitably fail eventually (but hasn't happened to me yet), but a cromoly frame may just keep going as long as you feel like putting tires and chains and now and then bearings on it, and those don't usually cost as much as car parts (though the prices on boutique bike parts often strike me as kind of obscene ... not really a boutique bike person).

Haven't jumped into an e-bike yet....

 

Studies have found that E-Bike riders get way more exercise then regular bike riders because they see traveling long distances as more fun than hard work and just barely pedaling for a long time is more exercise than pedaling a lot for a short period of time.

 

I got 5 years out of an e-bike kit before it lost its e and had to be reverted back to a regular bike.

And that was back when they were new and underbuilt. The current designs are much more durable.

 

Didn't read the article, but weren't bicycles the dominant means of transportation in major cities in China not too long ago?

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

A trip to Beijing in 2005. The traffic was not bad but, like London, the cities had no freeways inside the city proper. So a lot of stoplights to get through town in a city bigger than NYC, LA and DC combined.

Buick LaSabers were about the only American car and were the desirable taxi, almost no Japanese cars, some German vehicles and plenty of cheap Chinese cars with no ac or pollution controls.

 

I've never been there. But from what I read... you have to go back a decade or two from your visit to get to China's bicycle dynasty.

https://macropolo.org/analysis/the-rise-fall-and-restoration-of-the-kingdom-of-bicycles/

 

Back in my day, it was all bikes. In the early 1990s, in Beijing and Tianjin, there were almost no cars. Everyone had a bike. When you got to shopping areas or restaurant areas, there were these huge bike parking lots, where you'd pay 1 or 2 fen (around 1/10 or 2/10 of a US cent) to park your bike. Major roads had a four-lane divided dual-carriageway section for cars, buses and trucks in the middle, with separate, kerbed-off, cycling lanes as wide as a car lane at either side. Cars were rare in Beijing, and vanishingly rare in Tianjin: I knew one person in Tianjin who owned a car. Most cars were SAIC-VW Santanas (VWs made in China), or Russian cars like Ladas and Volgas, and they tended to be owned by companies or government departments rather than by individuals.

These days, in both cities, the roads are almost as full of cars as they are in Sydney. But more and more of the cars are EVs: far more than you'd see in the US, Australia or Europe. There are proper, full-sized EVs, and also a lot of electric micro-cars.

But over the past six or seven-years, app-driven bikes and then app-driven e-bikes have become very common. There are huge swarms of them parked outside every metro station.

It's not just cars that killed privately-owned bikes: public transport did too. In the early 90s in Beijing there were only two subway lines; now there are 24.

 

And then they tried it in Tempe. (msn news link to article about car-free neighborhood in Arizona)

Part of me thinks this is crazy, but then I recall that desert climates are the only places I truly enjoyed riding my bicycles.

 

i don't mind bicycles being displaces by public trans, and electric cars are certainly better than gassers.
but too many cars is still a problem in cities, and detracts from quality of life.
ev bikes make me nervous. they are dangerously operated and put pedestrians in harms way unless they are in a bike lane

 

My...my.
THIS thread is aging well....

E-Bikes Are Convenient. They Can Also Cause Fatal Fires. - The New York Times
Maryland officials say electric scooter caused house fire that displaced 12 people | Fox News

 

I saw this at Costco earlier this week:
\

Bob Wilson

 

Scooters have been a 'new' thing that cities have been dealing with for well over 100 years now.
In the other oughts they were called 'Autopeds' and were both electric and gassers - an outgrowth of the Velocipede - or first human powered cycles.
Of course, it was immediately apparent in those days that equine, biped and scooter based transportation would have to yield to automobiles, because cities MUST city.
Some appendectical remains of that standards struggle crop up every now and again when horrible governance leads to energy price spikes.
I remember defending, in this forum, a fellow employee who owned an e-scooter about 10 years ago.
He used it to commute to work and he used to charge it in our equipment spaces on the first floor near a rear entrance.
The scooter itself was pretty horrible.
It was one of those dirt-cheap razor knock-offs, red in color and festooned with some sort of 'prancing dragon' label and probably used AGM cells with a dodgy charging circuit.

Anyway, of course somebody complained.
It wasn't one of the tobacco spitting 4x4 drivers who had to spend $55 every other day to commute to work, but rather one of our leftist Union wactivists who thought it was unfair for a person to charge their personal transportation appliance on the company dime.

This led me to point out that the particular outraged employee had a personal heater under her desk cranking out 1500w of heat energy unencumbered by a timer or the use of the ON/OFF switch.
This device that had, literally, caused an electrical issue resulting in a smoke alarm activation. I knew this because I myself caught incoming hate mail for occasionally unplugging the aforementioned heater in the small hours of the night when responding to a call-out.
This in addition to the usual collection of cube-shaped dorm fridges, coffee makers, and other gear necessary for the normal operation of office spaces across the nation led the folks in the head-shed to look the other way while the red dragon was feeding itself.

This incident inspired me to get a proactive dispensation to charge a personal BEV or PHEV at work should I ever find myself foolish enough to be buying one while early adopters are still paying for the developmental costs.
My current commute is under 3 miles so I have zero incentive to get very much of an e-anything, although one of the 2008 'shovel ready' jobs in my community was to have allowed for a bridge expansion project for the US Highway that I use for my 5-minute commute.
They actually broke ground on this project recently promising me the future ability to cycle (or use a geezer quad) from home and hearth into the downtown area with its parks, shopps, and....my office.

SO....there might be an e-bike in my future....AND I already have permission and the ability to charge it