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this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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micromobility - Ebikes, scooters, longboards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
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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"
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That makes sense. Biking feels more real than driving. Like you’re actually part of a place. I’ve had huge mental benefits from switching to biking and walking for my groceries when I can
I feel like it’s not spoken about enough. There’s something fundamentally weird and off about driving around town in a car. You don’t really see it until you stop using a car for a while and then get back into one … it’s a weird experience … more weird IMO than flying on a passenger jet.
Also the deep frustrations built into the experience. Traffic, stop lights, navigating obstacles, bad drivers, pedestrians etc, while in a car that is relatively big, sometimes too big for its environment and that naturally wants to go much much faster than is often practical or safe. It can really be maddening. We talk about road rage in terms of how crazy some people must be, when in reality it’s obviously the experience of driving that’s like being forced to play an unenjoyable video game … all the time.
In retrospect I think the future will look weirdly on the idea that we all did this all the time and how stressful it must have been to do something that takes up so much of our time and to do something so dangerous everyday.
Yeah exactly. Taking mass transit like trains and planes is mindless and communal and you can pay attention to or ignore what you’re passing. Driving leaves you having to pay a little attention to it, but only a little and you’re in control but not like “I can stop and enjoy the sights or easily duck out for a breather level of in control. And yeah that really gets to the point of it, cars are extremely anti social. You’re left outside the experience of community with them.
And you’re exactly right. It’s low level stress. To do anything or go anywhere and it has a ton of perks but they’re all relative to how many people drive. If society is built around an assumption of cars, bus service is at best decent but inconvenient and restrictive with no sympathy to transit related issues. If you’re one of the few drivers it’s just way faster because the roads let you do it. But for every perk there’s cost and it compounds across all of us until our cities are filled with parking lots and we don’t know our neighbors’ faces
To respond to you and the sibling comment about actually enjoying cars … the low level stress also includes the possibility of becoming high level stress.
Experience driving was brought up, and so it’s worth asking who here has experienced or seen what bad accidents look like. I’ve seen a fair few, some horrific, been a passenger when someone was hit (they were fine fortunately) and myself have accidentally run over my own cat (they survived but their leg was never the same … though in the moment I could only imagine the worst). It builds up over time as you realise how fundamentally dangerous these things are especially once you realise that there are naive pets and children around, or that more than many things in our lives, death is a single mistake away.
I think off driving like having to navigate an obstacle course and if you mess up once you're financially screwed. driving is such a hassle, and everyone kinda knows it. why do people like to do big ass grocery hauls if it's supposedly so convenient to drive? because it's actually a pain in the ass. the only fun driving is rural/road drip driving and that's a whole other story
Yep yep yep.
I could not relate less to what you just said. I thoroughly enjoy driving. One of the contributin reasons to why I stopped bike commuting was that my truck just sat unused in the carage all day and I missed driving. To me this sound more like that you're perhaps not very experienced driver and you find it stressful due to how much concentration it requires. This is not the case for me. Just like when riding my mountain bike I don't really think about how to operate the bike. I don't even think of me being on the bike but rather the bike just being an extension of me. I get the same feeling when driving a car. Driving a boat on the other hand I do find stressful and I'm quite sure the reason is that I only do it a handful of times a year so I'm not 100% confident in my skills.
Do you thoroughly enjoy sitting in traffic and terrible drivers trying to crash into you? That's what he's referring to.
Traffic and bad drivers are part of driving like flat tires, noisy brakes and broken chains are part of cycling. That's not what I enjoy about it but it's part of the deal that I'm willing to accept.
I don't pop 3 tires and break a chain everytime I bike and yet everytime I drive to work I have to sit in traffic and deal with jackasses..... I'm curious about how you feel they're similar.
Have you considered the possibility that not everyone lives in a densely populated urban centre like Toronto? My city has population of 120k people. Traffic is virtually unheard of here.
That makes a lot of sense. I was going initially reply with “do you live in a small city” but didn’t want to make it personal or anything.
Nah ... driven (and ridden motorbikes) plenty.
It can be plenty of fun on the open road or when doing it with friends and cruising around. But the moment there's traffic and the density of an actual city ... nah, there's something off about it for me. I only tend to notice it once I stop driving around for a while and then get back in a car. I don't mind driving, but there's something there for me.
I like driving when I am not in a rush and not dealing with traffic...so basically never while commuting. I don't mind driving to a friend's place, or a long road trip, but bike commuting is superior for me. I don't need to make weird sweeping assumptions since you said you live in a small city, but commuting traffic is a nightmare on many coastal cities and major metros, so it is probably not a lack of experience so much as you're commuting in an area unlike most major metros.
I actually work from home now, but I bike commuted for over a decade, including for a couple years a one way ride of 22 miles. No matter how tired I was in the morning or how I didn't feel like getting on the bike, I'd always feel better once I started going, vs a car which studies have shown saps your energy. Also, there is something magical about biking over a highway and seeing standstill traffic that you'd be in as you toodle along without having to stop.
Plus the calculus I always did was that by turning an irregular 45-75 minute commute into a guaranteed 93 minute commute meant I was spending at most an extra hour and a half to get 3 hours worth of a workout. That frees up so much time for leisure and means you don't have to workout basically at all.
If bike was faster I'd probably favour it over a car. That however was not the case for me. My commute is 15 minutes by car and 30 by bike.
this. it's a mentally taxing to constantly pay attention to make sure I'm not gonna crash.
You put into words what I've been feeling every time I'm on a bike.
My wife asked me to drive her somewhere last night, and I hated it. Sitting felt uncomfortable, being boxed in was unpleasant, having no connection to the real world other than from a metal and glass box sucks. And this was just a short trip across town, had it been in traffic, I would have sent her off in an Uber. LOL
When I ride my bike, even through a small subdivision or quiet downtown streets, I'm able to hear the world around me, smell the wonderful meals being cooked or laundry being dried. And I can feel the ground beneath me and wind on my face as I glide along. Pure joy.
Exactly. And even when I tune out on my bike I am moving an easily comprehensible distance at a comprehensible speed under my own power. And for public transport it feels like a feature of the location “this spot takes you to any of these spots” much like “this spot lets you borrow books for a few weeks”. For cars you have to kinda isolate, tune out, and become traffic.
I find it also wakes me up and I feel alert even without caffeine by the time I get to work. Plus apart from when drivers can't follow a fucking line and drive in the bike lane, which is almost every day, traffic can get fucked on the way home.
That's funny because I find that i usually feel like I am about to die and need a shower, 5 gallons of drinking water, and a nap to recover. I'm guessing that where you live that it's it's not 35C/95F and 95% humidity for 4 months of the year?
Mostly rain, sometimes snow. Summer is a bit poop but the morning ride in is cool and downhill and being stuck in traffic in my car with broken ac is definitely harder than the breeze when I get moving on the return. The forest trail is nice in the summer too.
It's a fat ebike though and with huge ass easy drive on the cassette so if I'm totally wrecked I can do the return 90% throttle with a bit of pedalling just at the steepest part. If the summer is abnormally bad I'll use the lighter bike but usually I just swap between studded winter tires and the silly looking road tires
the fact that you can just stop wherever whenever on a bike is nice, versus having to find a place to park a car, which is a little annoying to frustratingly difficult.