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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
I’m starting to have the same feeling about personal jets.
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.
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.
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.
