Scooters and bikes are not viable when it’s literally freezing outside, especially with bad weather conditions. Unless there is transportation literally right out of my door, I would sooner keep my eyes on the road and drive myself. Trains and buses don’t stop at the gas station on my way into work to grab my drink for the day, and if they do, they aren’t waiting for me. If I need to run some errands, like go to the doctor or run to the hardware store, that is significantly less convenient with public transportation. I just got 4 bags of softener salt the other day that totaled 160 lbs. Not a chance I would try to lug that on a bike or carry it on and off a bus or train. I’m not saying I wouldn’t use it sometimes, and have in cities like Minneapolis and New York, but I was visiting and either didn’t have a car or wasn’t in condition to drive so worked around it. Again, they can coexist , but fighting electric vehicles of all things is a dumb fight.
I live in Canada. I rode my scooter to work all winter (including in -14 celsius weather) without issue thanks to good bike infrastructure that gets plowed promptly. Quite a few cyclists in my city do the same, as it’s actually not nearly as bad as you might imagine it, provided your city actually cares about bike infrastructure. It was actually pretty fun.
For more, there are cargo ebikes or even just renting a car for the occasions that you do need to carry heavy stuff. And for most average people, we don’t lug around 160 lbs on a daily basis.
My point in all of this is not that we should make a car-free society. It’s that our focus on “oh, let’s just switch to EVs and change absolutely nothing else in society!” is misguided. Sure, there are certain things cars can do that won’t be replaced, at least not any time soon, but plenty of places in the world already thrive with much fewer cars and much more micomobility and public transit.
![[meme] Trains are 100000x easier to electrify and automate than cars, so why does everyone keep talking about electric and driverless cars?](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/11c37658-7c32-4cc2-b12c-6ced348bd09d.png){kind=link}
Scooters and bikes are not viable when it’s literally freezing outside, especially with bad weather conditions. Unless there is transportation literally right out of my door, I would sooner keep my eyes on the road and drive myself. Trains and buses don’t stop at the gas station on my way into work to grab my drink for the day, and if they do, they aren’t waiting for me. If I need to run some errands, like go to the doctor or run to the hardware store, that is significantly less convenient with public transportation. I just got 4 bags of softener salt the other day that totaled 160 lbs. Not a chance I would try to lug that on a bike or carry it on and off a bus or train. I’m not saying I wouldn’t use it sometimes, and have in cities like Minneapolis and New York, but I was visiting and either didn’t have a car or wasn’t in condition to drive so worked around it. Again, they can coexist , but fighting electric vehicles of all things is a dumb fight.
I live in Canada. I rode my scooter to work all winter (including in -14 celsius weather) without issue thanks to good bike infrastructure that gets plowed promptly. Quite a few cyclists in my city do the same, as it’s actually not nearly as bad as you might imagine it, provided your city actually cares about bike infrastructure. It was actually pretty fun.
For more, there are cargo ebikes or even just renting a car for the occasions that you do need to carry heavy stuff. And for most average people, we don’t lug around 160 lbs on a daily basis.
My point in all of this is not that we should make a car-free society. It’s that our focus on “oh, let’s just switch to EVs and change absolutely nothing else in society!” is misguided. Sure, there are certain things cars can do that won’t be replaced, at least not any time soon, but plenty of places in the world already thrive with much fewer cars and much more micomobility and public transit.