micromobility - Ebikes, scooters, longboards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
Ebikes, bicycles, scooters, skateboards, longboards, eboards, motorcycles, skates, unicycles: Whatever floats your goat, this is all things micromobility!
"Transportation using lightweight vehicles such as bicycles or scooters, especially electric ones that may be borrowed as part of a self-service rental program in which people rent vehicles for short-term use within a town or city.
micromobility is seen as a potential solution to moving people more efficiently around cities"
Feel free to also check out
It's a little sad that we need to actually say this, but:
Don't be an asshole or you will be permanently banned.
Respectful debate is totally OK, criticizing a product is fine, but being verbally abusive will not be tolerated.
Focus on discussing the idea, not attacking the person.
view the rest of the comments
Eh, a motorbike isn't going to be as comfy as a car with an AC regardless of whether it's electric or gas powered. Vented gear and lighter colors can help a lot in the summer, but they don't look as cool and people would rather scorch in black gear and be almost invisible at night apparently.
I've seen a much greater adoption of EVs in my area once the range started becoming decent enough, along with the prices and the greater availability of charging stations. And I figure the same will happen with motorbikes. Electric scooters are already super popular in the city. They're cheap, they allow you to skip traffic, and the range is decent enough for short commutes. Once there's bigger motorbikes with a decent enough range and decent prices, people will buy them as well.
There's something that bothers me about the whole EV transition thing which is how polluting the transition itself is - if I have a newish gas powered car, that took a lot of resources to build, am I really saving the environment by buying a new EV, which will cost even more resources? Ideally, it would be people with really old very polluting cars switching to EVs - but because of the cost of EVs, I notice it's mostly people with bigger purchasing power switching to EVs - people who often already had fairly new and efficient gas vehicles which could keep running for a little longer without as much harm to the environment. I have a not that old medium CC four-stroke motorbike, with a low fuel consumption and supposedly fairly low pollutant output. Even if a decent alternative EV exists and I switch to it, how long do I have to ride the EV before the polution benefits of the EV in comparison to my current bike outweigh the pollution cost of building it in the first place?
There have been a bunch of studies on this over the years, with different conclusions depending on the bounds of the question. For example, does the car you get rid of actually leave the market, are you replacing a beater or a decent car, what sort of car is replacing it (hybrid, plug-in hybrid, standard range EV, long range EV). I think (without double checking the actual studies) that the answer is that if you replace an ICE car with a standard range EV, and keep it for like 10 years, you are better off.
The shame is that the studies always force a particular perspective onto the question: should you replace one car with another? I would bet that the best solution is to keep the ICE car, but get an electric motorcycle or moped, and use that for every situation possible, and save the ICE car for rare situations that actually need the range or size.
EV manufacturers love to promote their vehicles as "better for the environment", but they are really only "better" than ICE cars.
The unfortunate thing in your case is that apparently motorcycles are worse than cars in terms of emissions. Yes, the fuel efficiency is higher, but cars have better combustion and catalytic converters, so they produce less of the really potent greenhouse gases than motorcycles. I only learned that recently.
You raise some good points. I find that it's hard to find information on the topic as a whole because a lot of sources have fairly big biases - either pro or anti EVs - which often times aren't very transparent. And also because you usually have to dig deep to find an example that fits your situation. For example, on the topic of your last paragraph, when comparing cars to motorcycles, what's a "car"? Are we talking about a two seat Clio or a four seat family wagon? It gets even worse with motorcycles given the big variety of engine configurations.
Some years ago I read something similar to your last point - that in general, motorcycles produce a fair amount more greenhouse gases than an average car. More recently I've come upon an article that tested different motorcycles with different CCs and engine configurations and the results were a lot more nuanced. They mentioned that 2 stroke motorcycles were basically awful in terms of how much greenhouse gases they released. 4 stroke motorcycles, on the other hand, were comparable to a small car. Small and medium CC 4 stroke motorcycles would win out against the average car in terms of emissions, whereas bigger CC 4 stroke motorcycles would emit slightly more greenhouse gases than the average car.