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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.
So muffle 'em?
Muffled scooters are still fucking loud.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I beg to differ!
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.
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:
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.)
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.
