cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16133154
Link to original Tweet: https://x.com/DavidZipper/status/1795048724021862898
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“Teens are dying on bikes” - it’s because of a bike of it’s because of a fucking truck that weighs like 300 bikes?
Douches driving big trucks doesn’t preclude teens from doing stupid shit on ebikes. You don’t have to pick a side, you can recognize that there are multiple problems that need to be addressed.
@EatATaco @Moonrise2473 teens do stupid shit without ebikes. And them using one doesn’t increase the danger to non users by much.
Cars and trucks do.
And you can recognize that there are multiple problems with different severity and need to be adressed from most severe to lowest severe.
Well since we can’t ban cars, the most severe problem, then I guess we can’t do anything. Good job defending the status quo I guess.
Your list of ideas what we actually can do is pretty short, we obviously need to spread more information. Good to know, thanks.
Sure, but I’m responding to a comment that is suggesting they aren’t a problem. We don’t have to turn a blind eye to all other problems just because we think one is biggest.
First New York Times came for the Palestinians. And I didn’t speak out because I was not a Palestinian.
Then they came for my e-bike and there was no one left to speak for me.
The NYTimes has always been the US empire’s paper of record. You won’t find a US-backed war or coup they didn’t support.
With ICE, you control the population by controlling the oil. Like rest of the world has to eat up price raise without much retaliation, what else you’re going to do, you have to work and you depend on oil. But since China is the major producer of batteries and EVs, the nations that dictate the policies are losing that control.
So US does what it does best, propagandize the masses. Mass produced solar panels are bad, EVs are unreliable, e-bikes are a menace.
The world powers will turn the world to ruins if it serves their interests.
To be fair electric cars are still cars. Fuck them.
God how do you get out of bed every day.
America held the printing press invention dear to the heart. It was the best way to manufacture and distribute propaganda.
News is a profit driven industry and it’s written by the sponsors. This is as true for NYT as it is for Alex Jones. The sooner people realize this the sooner we can dig ourselves out of this whole mess.
Well yeah, NYT is profit driven, there’s no nefarious intent.
Yes, this is why all news should be treated as “Trust but verify”. And if that verification consistently turns up as bunk, that’s a bad news.
Problem is nearly everybody is bad news. It’s always either lying through omission, single-sided story telling, assumed guilt, or just straight up misinformation.
I wonder if it has anything g to do with all the advertisements for luxury cars in every edition of the paper… :-/ Cheers for the post.
Ebikes will be banned in most of North America in 5 years, calling it now :/
We can still build our own!
the fuck? how do you hate on e-bikes but are okay with e-cars?
Genocide deniers and enablers also happen to be in the pocket of the regime that wants us all wasting our lives in traffic when we are not working to make them rich.
In Rio de Janeiro happened something like this. An old woman and a children were walking on the bike lane and an ebike crashed to them and killed the old woman. A city councilperson hurried up to make a law banning e-bikes from bike lanes, saying that they should use the car infrastructure, but the Mayor vetoed the project.
The voice of fascism.
Nothing fascist about this, the article is just plain stupid and pushing a shitty agenda. Calling everything fascist removes the word’s meaning and impact.
The NYT is a fascist rag for so many god damn reasons, this is just another one.
I skimmed the picture first, and thought you were talking about escooters which are terrible, ebikes are great though.
Why do you think escooters are terrible?
I think that e-bikes and e-scooters are misrepresented by few a-holes who makes motorbikes from them.
Yes when you brake the law and are going 30 km/h in a bike lane you are a-hole but most of them are ok.
Many e-scooters IME are driven by idiots with a DUI. And they’re exploiting a loophole that lets you drive on the roads at road speeds even if you’ve lost your license for drunk driving.
E-bikes are awesome though!
Here (in EU) I know lots of people who use them legitimately, but no one checks for removal of speed limiter.
Now at least they have to have insurance so it may decrease the number of a-holes because it is easy to check.
escooters which are terrible
That’s a bit of a stretch. They aren’t great, but they’re still better than a car, and a lot of the disadvantage is because of poor infrastructure and lack of courtesy by a lot of e-scooter riders. One of those is easier to fix than the other.
E-bikes are way better than e-scooters, though, and I’d say e-bikes are more versatile.
There are two kinds of escooters, the rentable, and personal.
The rentable escooter are absolute shit, they are scattered over cities, making is difficult for disabled people to get by, they promote use without helmets which increase severity and frequency of accidents, they also are driven recklessly.
The personal escooters are mostly fine, people drive them less recklessly, often wear helmets and in general take better care of them.
Both types are bad in that they move people away from existing public transport lowering demand meaning that public transport gets less money which lowers the quallity and again moves people away from public transport.
Ebikes doesn’t have that direct cause and affect as they mostly replace cars, ebikes also tend to have less severe accidents as the result of the combination of larger wheels with better banace, a better riding possition with a lower center of gravity again improving balance
There’s a lack of infrastructure to accommodate rental scooters which cause the problems you mentioned. Having safe places to ride (i.e bike lanes) and designated places to park them would solve these issues. I could also argue that cars do all the same things.
Reducing demand for public transport is a good thing in a developed city. You want there to be more space for people that aren’t going to choose micromobility, which is much cheaper for a city to provide more capacity for.
I’d be interested to see some research into your theory of ebikes replacing more car journeys and escooters replacing more public transport journeys.
I agree with your points on why ebikes are safer, but scooters are also more compact and therefore easier to transport and store when not riding, and the safety issue is really solved by having safe places to ride. Having the choice available is important because different people have different priorities and preferences.
Thr lack of infrastructure for rental scooters is intentional though. It makes their overhead non-existent while making their scooters the city’s problem. The Netherlands figured out how to do bike rentals decades ago, but just leaving a bike/scooter wherever is a menace to the community. People used to keave them in my yard or the middle of the sidewalk until my town banned them. Personal scooters are fine, but Bird and Lime are terrible.
Bike rental in the Netherlands is great for certain uses but not for others. You can’t use the OV-fiets as a tourist, and you generally have to take them back to where you got them from.
Docked systems are better, and you can remove most of the cost of the docks by doing the “dockless docks” where you just have to return them to designated areas. This can work for both bikes and scooters.
Companies like bird & lime take advantage of the lack of regulations, but there’s clearly a demand. Cities can take advantage of this by regulating, providing infrastructure, and charging the companies to operate, things already done for cars.
I live in Taipei and it’s also pretty dense and even tho we have one of the best transit systems, an escooter is much better for the last leg of the trip.
And now the incentive for the public transport company to improve last mile service is gone.
Why would you expect public transport to take you the last step?
Why would you not have a bus stop within walking distance of your destination?
That seems like a groundless distinction.
I just posted a comment about my reasons for making the distinction in this thread.
EDIT, why is this being downvoted? I get that you may disagree with my viewpoints, downvote them if you must, but this is simply a comment letting a user know that I posted an explanation.
Your distinctions are invalid.
My city has rental bikes that work similarly to rental escooters. Are they now bad?
People here use helmets with them, same for rental scooters, which have designated parking areas here, same as bikes.
Neither moves people away from transit. They are a last mile vehicle that people use to get to and from transit hubs, or to do short trips that would take longer to do by transit.
Not to mention that this is a stupid argument. Multimodal transit is the highest form of public transit. Only idiots want to replace all private vehicle ownership with public systems or all cars with mass transit. The greatest transit capacity is achieved when deploying all modes simultaneously.
Your distinctions are based on how something happens to be utilized around your local area, and the etiquette that has (or rather hasn’t) developed around using a given vehicle.
There is nothing about electric scooters that stops them from being used in an equally reasonable manner as any other mode of travel.
Your problem is with local norms and people. Not the vehicle type.
If the rentable bikes are just scattered throughout the city with no regard for pedestrians or traffic, then yes, they are bad.
If that doesn’t happen, then no, they are fine.
Here in Stockholm the transit authority has noticed a shift from public transport toward escooters, it seems to have stabalized for now, but that could easily change.
Our healthcare system has also noticed a big uptick in patients who has had their jaw smashed, all from escooter accidents, people have been run down and have been injured by escooter drivers, some has even died.
I am happy that it works for you, but in my experience rentable escooters is just plain dumb.
Yet, electric trains are a better alternative to most people’s transport.
There’s definitely no bias at all here /s
Dude fuck e-bikes too, one of my closest friends was killed on one of those things, I hate cars too (especially the panel van that killed him), but let’s not pretend e-bikes are in anyway safe
A van would have killed him on a regular bike too?
Sounds like the problem wasn’t the e-bike.
Usually vans don’t ride on sidewalks.
Bicycles aren’t supposed to be on sidewalks either, that’s how pedestrians get hit.
The problem is motorist thinking they own the fucking road.
And motorists thinking they own the sidewalk.
If the panel van hit and killed them, it would have killed them:
- Walking
- Scootering
- Biking
- Roller Blading
- Anything that isn’t a metal box on wheels
Fair enough
I’m sorry about your friend but ebikes are so much safer than cars.
Can we not criticize cars and also irresponsible e-bike riders.
Both should follow traffic laws and yield to peds.
I’m sorry for your loss. It’s worth considering that we are very conditioned to passive language with these events, but your friend was not “hit on his e-bike”, he was killed by the van driver. He was not at fault, the van was.
What, the NYT is demonizing bicycles?
Oh, wait.
E-bikes.
Right.
Because I guess pedaling is too hard for people that live in one of the flattest cities in the world.
Because I guess pedaling is too hard for people that live in one of the flattest cities in the world.
Some people, yeah. They might have a longer distance to ride, they might have disability, or just not be that fit. There’s no problem with that.
I used to do 14 miles one way in Chicago, year ‘round. (I stopped because I moved to Georgia, and now my commute involves about 2000’ of elevation difference, which is likely around 4000’ of elevation change.) If you’re not fit, well, that’s a pretty good reason to start riding then, isn’t it? NYC also has a fantastic public transit system, one of, if not the best in the US, and it’s readily accessible by people with disabilities. Much more so than an electric bicycle.
New York’s public transport is heavily focused on getting people in and out of Manhattan. If you’re going between the other boroughs it can be very lacking. A bike can save you a lot of time in certain cases.
If you’re not fit, an ebike is a great way to get started because it allows you to start cycling for your commute before you’re at the fitness level needed.
In my experience in Chicago, a bike was almost always faster than public transit, period. Even before I was fit, when it was painful to ride my bike in to school, it was faster than the train during rush hour.
If you’re not fit […]
…Then riding an e-bike isn’t going to make you fit, because you aren’t going to pedal it. An e-bike isn’t going to make you fit, any more than my Triumph Speed Triple is making me fit. Sure, I’m still on two wheels, but I’m not getting any physical fitness out of it.
I was–briefly–a personal trainer. I saw a lot of people avoiding putting in the work using almost every excuse they could. People that tried to ease themselves into getting fit were still going easy months later. The only people that made progress were the people willing to do the work, even when it was difficult and uncomfortable. For myself, I don’t like making excuses for people that won’t put in the effort, and that’s pretty much everyone that uses e-bikes. If you want a motorcycle, just do that, pay for insurance, and obey the rules of the road, rather than riding on sidewalks and bike paths while putting in zero effort.
The term ebike generally refers to a bike with pedal assist, not an electric motorcycle. Pedal assist means you are still exercising and you can set the level of assist you want.
Many–most of the ones that I see in Atlanta–do not require any pedaling at all. They’re functionally speed-controlled electric motorcycles that people ride on sidewalks.
So no, most people aren’t exercising, any more than they’re exercising on electric scooters.
Again, you’re talking about something different. I’m talking about electric pedal assist bicycles (often called an ebike), not electric mopeds.
@HelixDab2 @mondoman712 you’re wrong. An actual ebike, with assist rather than a throttle really does get you to exercise because you are pedalling, but you’re not adversely affected when going uphill. It’s cycling, it burns calories, but it doesn’t have the tiring bits.
Why are you gatekeeping? Some people only want transportation, not a workout. Ebikes are infinitely better than cars in every way.
Why are you gatekeeping cars then? Some people only want transportation where they don’t get soaked in the rain, or cold in the winter.
Do I really need to repeat every reason why cars suck?. Just check everything else in this community.
Relevant for this conversion is that driving a car is far less exercise than even an ebike, and that generally people riding any kind of bikes creates a positive feedback loop where others feel more comfortable, cities build infrastructure, ect.
All those same things apply when you compare actual bicycles to e-bike though. An e-bike is a half-measure, at best.
Let’s say that for the same journey, an ebike is a half as much exercise as a pedal bike(or whatever you want, the actual number isn’t important). A car journey is 0 exercise, it’s infinitely worse. Going from a car journey to an ebike journey is infinite times more exercise, going from an ebike journey to a pedal bike is twice as much exercise.
By gatekeeping you’re stopping people from making smaller improvements because they aren’t going all the way