France Is Giving 4,000 Euros To People Who Trade In Their Car For an E-Bike (theverge.com) 202
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: France's government increased the size of the subsidy it offers to people who trade in their gas-powered cars for electric bikes to as much as 4,000 euros (approx. $3,976) per person, according to The Times. The money is meant to incentivize people to ditch their polluting modes of transportation in favor of cleaner, more environmentally friendly alternatives. People who live in low-income households in low-emission urban zones that trade in their cars are eligible for the full 4,000-euro subsidy to put toward the purchase of an e-bike. (Traditional, non-motorized bikes also qualify for the incentive.) French citizens from higher income brackets can claim smaller subsidies.
The subsidy, which was first introduced last year, was recently increased after officials determined that more needed to be done to catch up to bike-loving rivals like the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. The French government has said it wants 9 percent of the country to switch to bicycles by 2024, compared with only 3 percent now. The Netherlands boasts a huge 27 percent in this area. [...] But France isn't just spending money on individual incentives. Emmanuel Macron's government also said it would invest 250 million euros to make the city of Paris entirely bikeable. And the city's mayor, Anne Hidalgo, won reelection last year on a promise to add another 130 kilometers (over 80 miles) of bike-safe pathways over the next five years.
The subsidy, which was first introduced last year, was recently increased after officials determined that more needed to be done to catch up to bike-loving rivals like the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. The French government has said it wants 9 percent of the country to switch to bicycles by 2024, compared with only 3 percent now. The Netherlands boasts a huge 27 percent in this area. [...] But France isn't just spending money on individual incentives. Emmanuel Macron's government also said it would invest 250 million euros to make the city of Paris entirely bikeable. And the city's mayor, Anne Hidalgo, won reelection last year on a promise to add another 130 kilometers (over 80 miles) of bike-safe pathways over the next five years.
low-income to get an trade in?? what about just se (Score:2)
low-income to get an trade in?? what about just selling your car for more with out an income rules?
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Buy a 500 Euro heap of rust, trade for 4k scooter, sell it for 2k and you can fuel your car another day.
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Buy a 500 Euro heap of rust, trade for 4k scooter, sell it for 2k and you can fuel your car another day.
I doubt the article listed every rule in their trade-in program. A credit limit based on the value of car traded in (such as not having a credit greater than the trade in value) is likely.
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Re:low-income to get an trade in?? what about just (Score:5, Insightful)
There wasn't a minimum for Cash for Clunkers in the US - It was done that way to get those polluting rusty shitboxes off the road (the vehicle had to be destroyed as part of the tradein process). Since this has a similar goal (stop driving your rusty shitbox, and drive a scooter) I would highly doubt they look at the value of the tradein. No one is going to trade in a car they can sell for more than the trade credit anyway.
Cash for Clunkers was a horrible program that destroyed perfectly good used cars while driving up the cost of the remaining ones.
It subsidizes wealthy people buying new cars while making it harder for poorer people to afford the used cars they rely on.
It is an economic trick in that it incentivizes people to accelerate their purchases of new cars during the program period. This makes the economy look better temporarily before the purchases drop like a rock at program end.
It is also of questionable environmental value because there is a substantial environmental benefit to extending the life of an existing car rather than manufacturing a new one.
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If economics were the only benefit then CARS program was a massive billion dollar disaster. It did briefly stimulate purchases of newer cars, as anticipated. But the goal was to remove inefficient and polluting cars from the used market. And a side effect was they were partially replaced by newer cars with improved safety features.
The program did make used cars more expensive, which does harm the poor significantly. It might have been smarter to exchange one bad mode of transportation with another mode. Bet
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It is also of questionable environmental value because there is a substantial environmental benefit to extending the life of an existing car rather than manufacturing a new one.
If both vehicles are of the same environmental footprint, absolutely. But that wasn't the purpose of the program. While it failed to stimulate the economy in any meaningful way there are multiple analyses out there which show that clunkers had an average MPG of ~15 while their replacement vehicles had an average MPG of ~27. The new cars very much did have an environmental benefit. The open question unanswered is, what proportion of people would have bought the new car anyway. When they compared it to a cont
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It is also of questionable environmental value because there is a substantial environmental benefit to extending the life of an existing car rather than manufacturing a new one.
If both vehicles are of the same environmental footprint, absolutely. But that wasn't the purpose of the program. While it failed to stimulate the economy in any meaningful way there are multiple analyses out there which show that clunkers had an average MPG of ~15 while their replacement vehicles had an average MPG of ~27. The new cars very much did have an environmental benefit. The open question unanswered is, what proportion of people would have bought the new car anyway. When they compared it to a control group (Canadian market) over the time the answer was below 50%.
So yes it did actually get dirty pieces of shit of the road which would otherwise still be operational, and no despite what you say that is not a good thing. There was nothing "perfectly good" about the cars which were destroyed. At best they could be described as "operational". At worst they could be described "health and safety hazard"
Found an interesting report that attempted to take the full life cycle into account: https://iopscience.iop.org/art... [iop.org]
"CARS had a moderately positive impact on emissions, causing
a one-time reduction in life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of
about 4.4 million metric tons, or just under 0.4%of total annual
US light-duty vehicle emissions [34]. This assessment takes
into account the full life cycle impact of the program, from
vehicle manufacturing and disposal to use-phase combustion
and upstream fuel cycle emissi
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It subsidizes wealthy people buying new cars while making it harder for poorer people to afford the used cars they rely on.
Perhaps you want at least try to read the summary and comprehend it.
I bold some words out for you:
France
FRANCE
FF RR AA NN CC EE
The article is not about some yahoo rednecks that _rely_ on a car. But bout people who do not rely on a car but use it anyway, because they are to lazy to shift to a bike.
Or do you think some one who relies on a car is going to trade it in for an e-Bike?
Brains,
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"Perfectly good" except that they were creating tons of pollution and were expensive to maintain.
More than 75% of a junk car is recycled at a much lower cost than making new materials.
You are making major assumptions here. The pollution created is a function of the miles driven.
Expensive to maintain is irrelevant and unknowable anyway. I have a 1999 RX300 with 335,000 miles, costs me very little to maintain.
Here, from the Guardian, certainly not a right-wing publication: https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
What's the carbon footprint of a new car?
Making a new car creates as much carbon pollution as driving it, so it's often better to keep your old banger on the road than to upgrade to a g
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90% of used junk cars is recycled at much lower environmental cost.
Yes, it's true that if you don't drive it, it doesn't create much pollution.... so, put it in a museum.... and don't drive it.
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90% of used junk cars is recycled at much lower environmental cost.
Yes, it's true that if you don't drive it, it doesn't create much pollution.... so, put it in a museum.... and don't drive it.
I guess reading the article was too much trouble.
You jumped from 75% recycling to 90% in your two posts, which shows you actually have no idea what you are talking about.
And you have no ability to understand that poorer people need transportation they can afford too. A car in a museum does them no good.
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Found another reference:
Almost all the parts of a car or any other auto can be recovered, with a recycling rate greater than 90% for a typical vehicle.
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/... [thebalancesmb.com]
Try to keep up. (You could do your own research rather than just making stuff up.)
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Found another reference:
Almost all the parts of a car or any other auto can be recovered, with a recycling rate greater than 90% for a typical vehicle.
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/... [thebalancesmb.com]
Try to keep up. (You could do your own research rather than just making stuff up.)
"Recycled" is about not needing to mine the raw materials. It does not represent "carbon free".
It does save on reducing the extraction and mining aspects of producing the raw materials but the manufacturing process is fundamentally the same.
And you wouldn't need to do the recycling or the manufacturing if you extended the service life of the vehicle you already have
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"The whole idea that we need these massive motors is dumb. We might have to go slightly slower up hills without them, but so what? That saves fuel too."
Most of the people who have these genuinely don't need them. But the exceptions are still plentiful with thousands of people hauling fifth wheels and the like and they do need them. Forget hills, it is about mountains and long hauls.
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Good that classic polluters were destroyed.
Ever been to a classic car show? The pollution when they drive those things gags you. Instant lung cancer.
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Not much of an incentive then as you are either break even or lose money. Everyone would just go with option C of selling their car to someone else or option D of keeping their car.
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Not much of an incentive then as you are either break even or lose money. Everyone would just go with option C of selling their car to someone else or option D of keeping their car.
This isn't cash for clunkers. You get to keep the money from your trade-in AND get up to $4k.
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Then what difference does the value of the vehicle make? Limit the credits to one or two per person to limit dump diving and call it a day.
Otherwise you are simply giving money to those who don't need it and can afford to have nice cars while excluding those who struggle to keep a beater running to reach their four part-time jobs. Further those more valuable vehicles are probably more fuel efficient.
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We've had this for old diesel cars/vans and 2-stroke mopeds/scooters in The Netherlands, and to qualify, you would have to have owned these at least a year before the announcement, for precisely this reason, i'm assuming...
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I expect there is some minimum ownership term to prevent that.
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Why? A rusty shitbox off the road is a rusty shitbox off the road.
I assume there's some rule that it must be road legal/taxed or something like that but apart from that, bring them in... the rustier and shitter the better.
Re:low-income to get an trade in?? what about just (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, if all you have is an open air bicycle to shop, go to work, etc...you're SOL on bad weather days, no?
Re:low-income to get an trade in?? what about just (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know how much France has in the ways of American style suburbs but I imagine this is going to be more attractive to people who are closer to the metro areas with access to public transit systems and live close to their common travel destinations. Nice thing about this being an incentive program is people can make that decision whether they want te money or keep their car. People with a 30 minute driving commute are not giving up their car.
When I had to stay in Denmark for a few weeks the rain didn't seem to stop most people from riding their bikes, they just dressed for the weather. I think the fact that hundreds or thousands of people are biking in the bad weather makes it more tolerable than being the one guy ploughing down the side of a rainy road.
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It's all relative but it sounds like with your assumedly large backpack a scooter won't work on your backpacking adventure. If you lived in a metro area where your frequent stops are just a couple km away? Probably makes sense
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Well of course. When I had a compact car I wasn't picking up sheets of plywood on the regular, it's a matter cost/benefit and how often one needs to carry things like that.
If I lived in a denser metro with more shops within walking and biking distance I would probably be more inclined to do more frequent and smaller trips to manage with something like an e-bike and maybe when I need larger things I try and bundle more together to justify a rental or delivery option, it's all very down to the individual sit
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When I had to stay in Denmark for a few weeks the rain didn't seem to stop most people from riding their bikes
If they did that then nobody would ever go outdoors in Denmark.
they just dressed for the weather.
Yep. There's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes.
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Because those arguments have worked SO WELL with motorcycles you wanting to recycle them?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Weather radar (Score:2)
With ubiquitous access to weather radar data, I delay my visit to the supermarket when it is raining.
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do you not own waterproof trousers, or rubber pants as Americans call them?
I've cycled through the driving rain plenty. It's fine with appropriate clothing.
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No, and I don't know any average person that does own such items of clothing.
The only exception I can think of, are waterproof overalls, called "waders" that duck hunters often wear while out hunting.
But for every day life.
Nope, never really ever heard of such items till you just brought it up.
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Sounds like a lot more trouble and PITA with little to no reward for my efforts in my every day life.
I guess if you're living extremely urban, stacked on top of each other like rats in high rises, it works for you.
But of anyone that doesn't want to share walls with noisy neighbors (or yourself being a noisy neighbor), and like to have a yard to entertain in (crawfish boils, firing up the wood burning smoker for BBQ fun....se
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Err...never heard of a workplace with changing rooms, showers, etc...they pretty much expect me to be ready to work when I show up...dressed, shaved, etc.
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Hmm...500ft is a bit over 1.6 football fields.
I don't think I've ever had to park THAT far away...?!?
On rainy days, I park as close as I can, at the grocery store tops maybe I park 100ft or so...which is a quick jaunt inside with an umbrella. I get in, my food in a cart and if still raining, well, I get out with umbrella and quickly load from cart into trunk o
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I just measured the distance from the Wal-Mart entrance to the end of the parking lot nearest that entrance, and it's 646 feet.
That means a taxi so you don't have to walk up to 646 feet to the door and back.
I agree, up to 646 feet each way between your car and the entrance is a lot of walking!
Now if the city wo
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Well, there's your first problem...shopping at Wally World...haha.
I rarely if ever go to a walmart, ugh, especially not for food, horrible quality meats, etc.
But even the few I've gone to, I've never seen one where you'd have to park 2 football fields distance to get from car to door on each trip??
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You let meat sit in the fridge for a whole week?
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The suburbs in America are awful: they cannot financially sustain themselves because they have spread the expressive infrastructure over a vast area.
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So, in France, it never rains, gets really fscking cold?
Do you guys not have cloths in America? I mean ... we should work on that problem first and foremost as I can't imagine that is pleasant for anyone involved, even onlookers.
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What the hell am I going to do with a cloth?
And the price of e-bikes is suddenly 4,000 euros? (Score:2)
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The purpose of this subsidy is also to compensate for the car value -- the money one could instead get from selling the car.
If all the subsidy goes in the bike purchase, that would mean asking people to trade their car for a bike with nothing more: that wouldn't work.
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A quality e-bike is already around that price. It's hard to find a name brand one worth buying for less. Even the Chinese e-bikes worth owning start around $2000.
Outcome (Score:2)
E-bike vendors will offer old cars to prospective buyers for just 1000€, so they can get the subsidy while keeping their own car.
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It appears the rebate is capped at 40% of the value of your trade-in. So you need to trade in a car worth $10,000 to get the full $4,000 rebate.
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If I crash my car for drunk driving (Score:2)
and the court takes my drivers licence so I have to cycle permanently can I still get the money?
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I suppose that you are asking for a friend, aren't you?
To compensate for the cost? (Score:2)
Re:To compensate for the cost? (Score:5, Informative)
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It costs 50 cents to charge your old ebike? Would you care to explain your numbers, because as a fellow Canadian I think that's an insanely high cost.
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Petrol in France currently costs USD $5.54/g
I think the e-bikes are coming out well ahead in terms of cost of ownership.
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5.54$USD per gram? What?
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yes i totally meant g for gram since we commonly measure our gasoline in grams. thank you for understanding and not at all being a pedant
Just what France needs: (Score:2)
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Unskilled, untrained people operating an electric moped on public streets.
Surely an improvement on them driving a car like they do now.
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Seriously, in the US everyday we hand the keys for 3-ton death machines over to literal 17 year olds and we're gonna act like some ebikes are the public safety menace?
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They are not electric mopeds. EU e-bikes top out at 25 km/h (16 mph), and you must turn the pedals to make the engine go. It is a bicycle with aid, not a moped.
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It is a bicycle with aid, not a moped.
Fun fact: the original meaning of the motor-pedaler (moped [wikipedia.org] for short) was a bicycle with aid. I predict that history will repeat itself and ebike pedals will become vestigial and then lost. We'll probably still call them ebikes and people will consider them different than a bicycle with aid.
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In the US it doesn't matter if it has pedals, what matters is not being able to accelerate over 25 MPH. So if you have a scooter that can do 45 mph, but it's artificially limited, then you can pretend it's a bicycle and ride it on paths which permit e-bikes (not all do.)
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As opposed to the current situation of unskilled, untrained people operating motor vehicles on public streets. Have you ever seen cars in France? They're all beat to shit to the point you think they come out of the factory that way.
Because an e-bike is a 1-1 substitute for a car. (Score:2)
Not.
Sure , if you're a single hipster living in the middle of a city no problem, maybe you don't even need the bike and can just walk or take public transport everywhere. But if you have a family or need to move stuff about - perhaps you have a small business - or need to visit somewhere beyond the range of an e-bike then its no contest.
Also 2 wheelers arn't much fun in the pouring rain and are lethal in the snow.
You must be new (Score:2)
to Slashdot.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Not sure what thats supposed to prove. It substitutes for a car over short distances in dry weather on the flat with a small load. And good luck to those kids if one of those antiques gets hit by a vehicle.
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Who is saying they are equal and is this program forcing anyone to do anything? This program is all carrot.
You answered your own question. People who live in the city (which is like 60% of the human population) can think about switching and probably make it work. Family people and small businesses probably not.
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Even people in cities sometimes have to travel outside them now and then. Yes, rental, but sometimes thats just not convenient.
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Again, good thing nobody in this case is forcing them to give up their car. People can decide for themselves.
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Good News: France believes in passenger rail, and has some really nice trains that go pretty fast, and the stations are right in the middle of the city, which you can ride your bicycle to! And, most trains allow you to bring your bike with you so you can use it to get from the destination station to your journey's end!
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Not.
Indeed not. For some people, it is actually a better alternative. Traffic jams are not funny, and the costs of parking have risen to extremes in densely populated cities.
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Also 2 wheelers arn't much fun in the pouring rain and are lethal in the snow.
I share your sentiments about rain, but I live in a pretty dry climate so I'm always underprepared when it does dump.
I ride my bike on snow and don't find it much of a problem. It's like driving on snow, just be smooth and cautious.
Refrozen ice can be nasty, but studded bicycle tires are available and work great.
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Of course it is. You just don't think so because your city is designed to only be navigable by car.
But if you have a family
I had a party last weekend. A friend of mine showed up with his wife and 3 young kids, one a toddler. They came on ebikes.
or need to move stuff about
There are cars parked in the street which you can unlock with apps. They cost a small fraction to use than actually owning and registering them. If you need to move stuff about then get one and move stuff about. It's not difficult. But there's no requirement to actually own a car just becau
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Yeah! If a solution doesn't meet 100% of everyone's needs and every single edge-case for the remainder of human civilization it's fucking GARBAGE and shouldn't even be tried, right!? I mean, there's probably some guy that needs to move pianos around daily, how's he going to do that with an e-bike that he volunteered to turn his car in for?
You know this is a volunteer program, right? And that if it doesn't make sense for an individual, that individual can choose to not do it?
Short (Score:2)
As a matter of principle, I am sick of shortage-aping behaviors.
I'd rather grow green/renewable energy production so everybody can tool around in a giant car with AC blasting so hard you need a winter coat.
The future is power. With enough power you can do almost anything.
Grow that shit instead of this participatory virtue signalling dance.
This has shades of Jimmy Carter in the 1970s saying only lower AC to 76, so you just sweat a little bit, or raise to 68 in winter, so you freeze just a little bit.
Screw t
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I'd rather grow green/renewable energy production so everybody can tool around in a giant car with AC blasting so hard you need a winter coat.
If we had done that a long time ago, it would have been fine. But now it's too late for that shit. We cannot build renewables fast enough to solve this problem without some austerity measures that, by and large, we are not implementing. Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye, because nobody is taking this shit seriously.
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I have seen thousands in total.
Plant them. Somewhere. Anywhere. Make so many of the damn things that we put them on every roof, in every field, on every roadside.
Plant them by the square kilometer. Or square mile if you really must.
Sunny areas around cities should not be empty of solar panels.
Avery Brooks: Where are the flying cars? (Score:3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Maybe I'm just old, broken and jaded. I have a lot of medical issues that would prevent me from risking riding an e-bike. One fall and the fused vertebrae in my spine or the pins holding various parts together would land me back in the hospital for a while. Sure, when I was a younger man, I'd ride 30 miles, run 2 a day, but those days are behind me. At least in the words of Socrates:
Which I've done in spades, to the point of breaking my own body.
That being said though, it just seems incredibly dystopian to me to have people trade in their cars for e-bikes. I grew up in an age right after the moon landings. I sat in a school auditorium watching the first teacher in space blow up. Granted it's a terrible tragedy, but overall the outlook for the future wasn't so bleak. I think the futurism of the 70's-80's-90's was much better than it is today. I feel like as a world society, we've stalled. Where is our flying cars? Where is our robot assistants? Where is our space travel?
Wrapping this up with Avery Brooks, Deep Space 9 did have a pretty accurate prediction for San Francisco's dystopian future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
We can do better than E-Bikes.
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Homeless People Have No Way to Charge Them (Score:2)
A subsidy to electric e-bike makers (Score:2)
These subsides don't work very well because this make sellers increase the prices because there's more demand and people have more money to spend.
Besides, due the supply chain problems and the slowdown of new car production, used car prices are increasing, and people are postponing buying a new car, so people can cet money simply selling the used car. Just checked and a MY 2009 Fiat Panda with 80000 km is selling at 4000 euro, when the s
Ebikes are fine for personal transportation (Score:2)
...if you want to go slowly over short distances
But what about cargo?
This is also the problem with public transportation
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For personal shopping, I order in bulk and it gets delivered. Once every week or two. Generic stuff, like milk, water, detergent, etc. I can do this all online too, so no need for me to actually go out and get it. Delivery for lots of things in nearly ubiquitous. Major shops do click and collect from their entire catalog.
For small personal shopping, including fresh stuff, I can carry it.
For other types of cargo, one can normally participate in a car sharing schemes. Mine cost me 1000 zorkmids, which is ref
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When I was 19 I carried an 8' Xmas tree on a subway-surface trolley, and then the Broad St. subway in Philly.
Get out of the exurbs, monkey boy.
As I know the French (Score:2)
Everybody will take the 4000, sell the car to their mother for 1€ and continue as is.
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I had a bike but someone stole it 12 hours later.