Wired posits: 'are e-bikes doomed ?'

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Well we here on the EBR forum would laugh at that one.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...BBAB&usg=AOvVaw327XQqhUNNsP2opCtWkXeK&ampcf=1

But the article has a point about ebike and scooter share companies. Those firms could really mess it up for the rest of us who own ebikes, as politicians are getting a bad taste of things like littered side walks, brakes not working, and scooter related injuries piling up in ER's everywhere.

I'm not worried about ebike ownership continuing to grow. One could get concerned though about onerous regulations making it less pleasant or inconvenient. If anything, fewer restrictions that create more interest and more ebike use, and helping to reduce the number of cars on roads, could be a welcome societal relief to congestion and expensive road maintenance.

The whole 'micromobility' meme the article gets into, is a bit overblown though, with all sorts of fantasies about where this all could go. How about for once, we keep life and technology simple - These are just bikes. You ride them and enjoy them.
 
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I think in my area, the concern has been more if the “eye sore” issue of them being dumped everywhere than anything else.

Luckily the city I live in is extremely bike friendly and is even having public meetings on how they can win even more awards for being bike friendly. The focus on the rentals has never been about the “electric” part but, about people just leaving them everywhere. Hopefully, any legislation that may come will be able to understand the difference between commercial responsibility (which by the way, I am completely for the rentals. I enjoy seeing all the tourists out enjoying them and I do believe most try to be reasonable) and the private owners.

I do think the companies that have the rentals need to do a better job of holder their users accountable AND responding to citizen concerns.
 
My opinion is that Lime, Bird and Lyft's shared bike programs will go bankrupt in the USA. There is no infrastructure for safe bike or scooter commuting. Biking will remain at best a recreational activity on the USA.

With dockless mobility, nothing prevents jerks from keeping the scooter/bike in their house, so only they can access it. Nothing prevents other jerks from throwing them into rivers and up into trees. Nothing prevents thieves from cannibalizing scooters for the battery packs.

Oh well, Chicago starts a scooter progrm this week. Lots of scooters but only in designated neighborhoods. If you try to ride into areas where scooters are not yet allowed, like downtown, , they shut off. We will see how wrong I am about human nature.
 
I felt that it is difficult to get from the criticism of ride share in that article to e-bikes being "doomed". In my opinion the whole dockless rideshare play is unlikely to work as a business anywhere, much less in the United States.

... Biking will remain at best a recreational activity on the USA.

The United States is a large and diverse country. I can't see how you can make such a sweeping generalization. Some cities (Portland, OR) do seem to be getting quite a bit of traction developing pretty good bike infra. I personally suspect it will come down to math:
  • Bicycles cost less to operate on a per-mile basis than cars do. When you factor in things like insurance and parking the cost difference is quite dramatic.
  • For a given amount of dollars spent on transportation infrastructure, you can move more people per dollar by developing bike infra than motor vehicle infra.
  • "Bikey" towns and cities are perceived as having a higher quality-of-life, which translates into higher property values which translates into higher property tax revenues.
  • Most (around 60 percent) vehicle trips in the USA are less than six miles, which is right in the sweet spot where a bicycle or an e-bike makes sense.
 
Scooters and electric skate boards are starting to earn bad reputations where I live, mainly for pedestrians. I encounter scooters laying down right in the middle of the bike paths from time to time too.
 
I think the competitors are paying bums to destroy their competitors share bikes and scooters. That's the dog-eat-dog capitalism we seem to want in this country.

I believe in a moderately regulated free market because you can't even play a sport without rules. The problem is common sense is rare and greed makes CEOs think they deserve 300X higher pay then their employees even when they had nothing to do with the founding of the company (they took no entrepreneurial risks that deserve high rewards in some cases). We have a public sector that seems to have completely forgot that the private sector and tax payers are their customers. We have allowed politicians to divide us all into right and left when virtually every large scale successful policy is formed in the complexity of the middle - far left wants lazy bums to get free money and far right wants to ignore corporate executives retiring as $billionaires while their workers need assistance to buy food. We all need to wake up as the scooter and bike share programs are just a good example of how we have run amok (not because the business is wrong but because we want everything to fail).
 
Bike shares do work right now in a cities with cycling infrastructure. Vancouver has well over 1500 bikes available and plenty of places to ride them. They would not get used if the only places to ride them were still devoted solely to the car.
 
Bike shares do work right now in a cities with cycling infrastructure. Vancouver has well over 1500 bikes available and plenty of places to ride them. They would not get used if the only places to ride them were still devoted solely to the car.

I think Canada still has some sense of social responsibility that the average US citizen has lost. They will not leave a scooter in the middle of the sidewalk or throw it off a bridge because they don't like them.
 
I think Canada still has some sense of social responsibility that the average US citizen has lost. They will not leave a scooter in the middle of the sidewalk or throw it off a bridge because they don't like them.
OH yes we are the same here my friend ...This week somebody stole the egg from a Dali scupture. It was a worthless act of vandalism....the egg is worthless on its own. Also I almost forgot that my kids friend who works as a bike tour guide said that last week a guy on the tour stopped at an ATM on the sidewalk and when he turned around the bike was gone. Human nature crosses borders.
 
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Our buses are now equipped with thick glass security doors, so the bus driver can seal off the front of the bus when under attack. People are attacking the drivers for being asked to pay for their ride, stop smoking, turn down the music, stop HOLLERING, etc.
 
The morals, common sense ...those are only symptoms,but deeper beneath the surface is a corupt system of politicians+CEO’s+mass media (violent movies/news/negativity) + Destruction of health by many big companies.
This system generates many bad issues in many people, good and not so good. I used to think that is the people fault but rarely it is , is way at the top of the pyramid where this planning and destruction is actively organized.
When people are actively being poisoned (bad water, unhealthy air, bad foods, over medications) , have their minds sickened (social media/ negative news) , their values/self worth destroyed( many lost jobs/ economic situations) the blame is elsewhere.
 
The morals, common sense ...those are only symptoms,but deeper beneath the surface is a corupt system of politicians+CEO’s+mass media (violent movies/news/negativity) + Destruction of health by many big companies.
This system generates many bad issues in many people, good and not so good. I used to think that is the people fault but rarely it is , is way at the top of the pyramid where this planning and destruction is actively organized.
When people are actively being poisoned (bad water, unhealthy air, bad foods, over medications) , have their minds sickened (social media/ negative news) , their values/self worth destroyed( many lost jobs/ economic situations) the blame is elsewhere.

Don't be such a wuss.

Yeah, yeah, times are tough. But if you take a quick look at human history right now in 2019 and in one of the wealthy democracies (where i suspect you live) is about the best possible deal anyone could even imagine. Even for the many people in this country where things kind of suck for them they are considerably better off in a material sense and have far greater personal freedoms than nearly anyone in this very country had 200 years ago.

Remember that if you want that great future with flying cars and moon colonies you need to work for it.
 
Yes many things have gotten better here throughout the last 50-100 years but we can do even better in all areas. Why not ?
Is very complicated b/c US also has quite a big population.
 
We are all DOOMED Mr Coffee ...aghhhh!!!
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