My ebike was basically a mobility aid for me and I didn’t even realise fully at the time.
I have a congenial hip deformity that made walking as a kid challenging, it was worsened by an autoimmune condition and in my late teens I slowly lost the ability to walk. By 22 I was a full time forearm crutches user, and at 23 a part time wheelchair user.
I was 100% reliant on accessible public transport to do anything. I could occasionally afford a taxi, but it was a rare occasion. It made finding work really difficult. When I was 24 I had surgery to remove a bunch of adhesions and scar tissue among some other things, and afterwards started an intensive two year physical therapy rehab program.
It got to the point where I could walk about 500m without any aid, and I could cycle about 1km on a standard bike. It was a huge increase to me previous range of zero, and it included the local shops and a second bus stop with additional routes so I was wrapped.
But then I got an ebike, and suddenly my range went from 1.5km to 21.5km, I could lazily pedal 20km and let the motor take me, though in reality I can turn the motor down and lazily ride 30-40km.
Over time, this lazy riding in addition to my PT meant I was working harder without feeling like I was, my walking range was growing too because my leg strength and my endurance was growing from lazily cycling so much. Suddenly I was doing 20,000 steps a day in addition to a casual 15km ride to work. Last year I set a goal to jog for 10 minutes, and nailed it before June, setting myself the goal of a 5km by Christmas, I went over, but ran my first ever 5km on January 4th. Having never ran before, not even as a child.
All thanks to my ebike.
Which I could only use because I have semi decent bike infrastructure in my area, and ebikes are legal.
To add to this, one time when I visited a German town, the tour guide, a somewhat elderly guy, chose to walk his bike everywhere he went - odd choice, but he said it was useful for him to have something to lean on when he’s not riding.
Make me a climate controlled hyper-efficient one seat vehicle thats safe and I’d be so there.
Where I live, only the enthusiasts and the ones who live really close to work only have like 40 non-contiguous days a year that they can reasonably commute in anything but a car without showing up soaked with rain, sweat, or frozen boogers.
I’d love to give up my car. I work from home. I legit only need it two days a week to pick up my kid from preschool. Even when I commuted I hated that I had to take 4 empty seats and 3000 pounds with me.
Even to take the train (whose schedule is now completely incompatible with anybody’s work schedule unless they work within walking distance of a train stop thanks to a wildly underfunded subway/bus/streetcar infrastructure), I still have to drive that pile of metal to the train station, and that’s too far to reasonably walk, and too dark to safely bike thanks to poorly lit winding roads and non-existent bike lanes.
The whole system is fucked, but even scooters and unicycles aren’t filling that niche. And they won’t until they can at least protect you from the elements in some capacity, and provide some modicum of safety against every idiot with a drivers license and a pavement princess they can’t see past the hood on.
Requiring CDLs for these huge monstrosities would finally put pressure on automakers to return to more reasonable car bodies and it would make sure that people who have to drive big vehicles at least are qualified to do so. Traffic tickets should also scale with the size of the vehicle since a speeding Range Rover presents different risks to the public than a speeding Smart Car.
Real investment in walkable cities and suburbs is the harder solution but the better one. If you could walk your kid to preschool that eliminates a car trip. Walking exposes you to the elements, but walking speed doesn’t amplify rain, cold, or heat like biking does. Zoning laws should allow a preschool, a grocery store, a pharmacy, a community space, and a hardware store to exist within easy walking distance for you. Bike paths should connect you to the next community. Miles of uninterrupted residential-only zoning is choking our planet.
You did kind of cite the actual issue, the one we want to fix, right in your complaint. A well-funded subway/bus infrastructure tends to suit most people’s needs, such that the short trip to take one of these dinky ebikes/e-unicycles to the train station (or, taking a frequent bus on its route) would rarely be so uncomfortable. The key here is that climate-controlling an individualized vehicle is going to be inefficient no matter what.
The environment will always be a potential concern. If you live in a rainy area, but vacuum-seal yourself into your hamster ball before heading to work, you’ll still need an umbrella after depositing your hamster ball into the Ball Collective before going into the office building. From my point of view, it seems like you’re pushing the “problems” into the wrong domain of concern, and also kind of pretending cars solve that issue 100% - which they don’t.
I’ll give up climate control as long as there’s decent protection from wind and rain and some level of safety.
Carrying an umbrella for a walk a couple of blocks is no big deal. Carrying an umbrella for 10 miles while traveling 15MPH is a bit much. Especially when you’re traveling against frigid winds.
And safety. Until cars are out of the picture almost entirely, any two-wheeled vehicle that has to share space with them is almost entirely out of the picture.
Yeah, in case it’s not clear, I’m definitely not suggesting carrying an umbrella in one hand on a bike; or sharing a 4-lane road with Son Unaliving Vehicles.
Rainy days would basically be when a bus is a better option, if not a straight walk to a train station.
![[meme] There is no one-size-fits-all solution to transportation](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0bfe1df9-1b6b-414f-88b3-4e7d57514682.webp){kind=link}
That’s basically what the new scooters and unicycles are, though sometimes I worry about their safety compared to bikes.
My ebike was basically a mobility aid for me and I didn’t even realise fully at the time.
I have a congenial hip deformity that made walking as a kid challenging, it was worsened by an autoimmune condition and in my late teens I slowly lost the ability to walk. By 22 I was a full time forearm crutches user, and at 23 a part time wheelchair user.
I was 100% reliant on accessible public transport to do anything. I could occasionally afford a taxi, but it was a rare occasion. It made finding work really difficult. When I was 24 I had surgery to remove a bunch of adhesions and scar tissue among some other things, and afterwards started an intensive two year physical therapy rehab program.
It got to the point where I could walk about 500m without any aid, and I could cycle about 1km on a standard bike. It was a huge increase to me previous range of zero, and it included the local shops and a second bus stop with additional routes so I was wrapped.
But then I got an ebike, and suddenly my range went from 1.5km to 21.5km, I could lazily pedal 20km and let the motor take me, though in reality I can turn the motor down and lazily ride 30-40km.
Over time, this lazy riding in addition to my PT meant I was working harder without feeling like I was, my walking range was growing too because my leg strength and my endurance was growing from lazily cycling so much. Suddenly I was doing 20,000 steps a day in addition to a casual 15km ride to work. Last year I set a goal to jog for 10 minutes, and nailed it before June, setting myself the goal of a 5km by Christmas, I went over, but ran my first ever 5km on January 4th. Having never ran before, not even as a child.
All thanks to my ebike.
Which I could only use because I have semi decent bike infrastructure in my area, and ebikes are legal.
To add to this, one time when I visited a German town, the tour guide, a somewhat elderly guy, chose to walk his bike everywhere he went - odd choice, but he said it was useful for him to have something to lean on when he’s not riding.
Make me a climate controlled hyper-efficient one seat vehicle thats safe and I’d be so there.
Where I live, only the enthusiasts and the ones who live really close to work only have like 40 non-contiguous days a year that they can reasonably commute in anything but a car without showing up soaked with rain, sweat, or frozen boogers.
I’d love to give up my car. I work from home. I legit only need it two days a week to pick up my kid from preschool. Even when I commuted I hated that I had to take 4 empty seats and 3000 pounds with me.
Even to take the train (whose schedule is now completely incompatible with anybody’s work schedule unless they work within walking distance of a train stop thanks to a wildly underfunded subway/bus/streetcar infrastructure), I still have to drive that pile of metal to the train station, and that’s too far to reasonably walk, and too dark to safely bike thanks to poorly lit winding roads and non-existent bike lanes.
The whole system is fucked, but even scooters and unicycles aren’t filling that niche. And they won’t until they can at least protect you from the elements in some capacity, and provide some modicum of safety against every idiot with a drivers license and a pavement princess they can’t see past the hood on.
Requiring CDLs for these huge monstrosities would finally put pressure on automakers to return to more reasonable car bodies and it would make sure that people who have to drive big vehicles at least are qualified to do so. Traffic tickets should also scale with the size of the vehicle since a speeding Range Rover presents different risks to the public than a speeding Smart Car.
Real investment in walkable cities and suburbs is the harder solution but the better one. If you could walk your kid to preschool that eliminates a car trip. Walking exposes you to the elements, but walking speed doesn’t amplify rain, cold, or heat like biking does. Zoning laws should allow a preschool, a grocery store, a pharmacy, a community space, and a hardware store to exist within easy walking distance for you. Bike paths should connect you to the next community. Miles of uninterrupted residential-only zoning is choking our planet.
You did kind of cite the actual issue, the one we want to fix, right in your complaint. A well-funded subway/bus infrastructure tends to suit most people’s needs, such that the short trip to take one of these dinky ebikes/e-unicycles to the train station (or, taking a frequent bus on its route) would rarely be so uncomfortable. The key here is that climate-controlling an individualized vehicle is going to be inefficient no matter what.
The environment will always be a potential concern. If you live in a rainy area, but vacuum-seal yourself into your hamster ball before heading to work, you’ll still need an umbrella after depositing your hamster ball into the Ball Collective before going into the office building. From my point of view, it seems like you’re pushing the “problems” into the wrong domain of concern, and also kind of pretending cars solve that issue 100% - which they don’t.
I’ll give up climate control as long as there’s decent protection from wind and rain and some level of safety.
Carrying an umbrella for a walk a couple of blocks is no big deal. Carrying an umbrella for 10 miles while traveling 15MPH is a bit much. Especially when you’re traveling against frigid winds.
And safety. Until cars are out of the picture almost entirely, any two-wheeled vehicle that has to share space with them is almost entirely out of the picture.
Yeah, in case it’s not clear, I’m definitely not suggesting carrying an umbrella in one hand on a bike; or sharing a 4-lane road with Son Unaliving Vehicles.
Rainy days would basically be when a bus is a better option, if not a straight walk to a train station.