Suburban areas are usually not linked to urban ones with corridors that support (e-)bikes, so you’d often need to literally construct a completely new set of bike-friendly routes to support them.
That electric motor decreases your delta with prevailing traffic substantially
People currently aren’t commuting in from suburbs on 30mph residential roads, they’re on 50-65mph highways. I live in the Bay Area, and there is not a good way to bike into the city currently from either the East Bay or from the North, both of which are where most of the actual suburban sprawl is. You’d literally have to get on BART if you’re in the East Bay, because the Bay Bridge doesn’t have bike or pedestrian pathways. And BART can’t handle that many more riders; it’s already a mess during rush hour.
stop building financially and environmentally unsustainable, ugly, unsafe cities
If your solution requires completely restructuring the way we build cities (how are you planning to change the ones already built), it’s not going to work in any meaningful timeframe. Our current model of city planning evolved over the past hundred years. We don’t have that long to move people to electrics.
Cities are not being designed the way they are (highly compact downtown area with majority of jobs) in order to cater to cars, they’re doing it to cater to businesses. Rather than trying to get people to commute in a better way, we should be focusing on what we’ve already seen deal the most damage to urban business: remote work. That has removed, and will continue to remove, far more cars from the road each day than e-bikes will.
Our current model of urban planning has only existed since the middle of the 20th century. Only really got started in around 1960s.
I think it’s important to point out that it is definitely under 100 years. On the scales of human urban policy it is the brand new experiment. And it is a disaster. And we’re still throwing bad money after good on it in huge quantities.
Cities are already remodeling themselves, small bits at a time, to start fixing these issues. There is no choice in the matter here. They have to do it or else they’re going to find themselves with roads full of potholes that they can’t afford to fix and failing water systems and all those other modern signs of decay growing worse and worse until they basically aren’t a town anymore. As someone in the Bay Area you should know this well, because that City both has some disastrous symptoms and is building policies to this effect.
Suburban areas are usually not linked to urban ones with corridors that support (e-)bikes, so you’d often need to literally construct a completely new set of bike-friendly routes to support them.
People currently aren’t commuting in from suburbs on 30mph residential roads, they’re on 50-65mph highways. I live in the Bay Area, and there is not a good way to bike into the city currently from either the East Bay or from the North, both of which are where most of the actual suburban sprawl is. You’d literally have to get on BART if you’re in the East Bay, because the Bay Bridge doesn’t have bike or pedestrian pathways. And BART can’t handle that many more riders; it’s already a mess during rush hour.
If your solution requires completely restructuring the way we build cities (how are you planning to change the ones already built), it’s not going to work in any meaningful timeframe. Our current model of city planning evolved over the past hundred years. We don’t have that long to move people to electrics.
Cities are not being designed the way they are (highly compact downtown area with majority of jobs) in order to cater to cars, they’re doing it to cater to businesses. Rather than trying to get people to commute in a better way, we should be focusing on what we’ve already seen deal the most damage to urban business: remote work. That has removed, and will continue to remove, far more cars from the road each day than e-bikes will.
Not a bike commute: no commute.
Our current model of urban planning has only existed since the middle of the 20th century. Only really got started in around 1960s.
I think it’s important to point out that it is definitely under 100 years. On the scales of human urban policy it is the brand new experiment. And it is a disaster. And we’re still throwing bad money after good on it in huge quantities.
Cities are already remodeling themselves, small bits at a time, to start fixing these issues. There is no choice in the matter here. They have to do it or else they’re going to find themselves with roads full of potholes that they can’t afford to fix and failing water systems and all those other modern signs of decay growing worse and worse until they basically aren’t a town anymore. As someone in the Bay Area you should know this well, because that City both has some disastrous symptoms and is building policies to this effect.