Ah ok, haha yeah sorry, I’m over here in belligerent burger land, terminology is a bit different… along with … a lot of other things.
Yeah, our “truck”/suv culture is… just actually insane.
Many common US “trucks” are literally as large as WW2 medium tanks. Its fucking nonsense.
Also yes, delivery vans, utility vehicles that are van-like… yeah I think those generally make sense as well.
With mopeds / motorcycles … Yeah, small vehicle with no driver/rider encompassing frame around it + high speed = dangerous.
But… mopeds are incredibly popular in eastern asia, many other parts of the world a lot of other parts of the world because they are small, cheap, and if you have a traffic law paradigm and road system that accomodates them, they totally make sense.
Motorcycles… have more effective maximum range though. Higher sustainable top speeds.
Theyre a bit more popular in south america, which generally has less medium/long distance mass transit.
Cheaper than cars, but they can actually drive a significant distance.
The US is also really really spread out, in lots of places. We built our cities so you have to drive everywhere within them, and also between them, because we generally hate mass transit that is medium or long distance.
And the wild thing is, in the US, right now?
I can get a decent, gasoline powered, starter motorcycle, which is street legal, for about the same price, or even cheaper, than an e-bicycle, which has ~60% the top speed, maybe ~20% the overall range.
Really, a decent starter motorcycle is more like half or a third the cost of an e-bike that… could possibly, maybe get me from place to place in a spread out US city, that is 50% parking lot by land use.
And bicycles are not street legal in the US, the way that cars and motorcycles are.
They get shunted into their own sort of ruleaet governing where they can be ridden, which is highly variable and not standardized from city to city.
Practically speaking, our bicycle infrastructre is either non existant, or designed by insane people, basically. I tried, I really tried to do the bicyclist thing in a lefty, US major city that was supposedly all about bike infrastructure for a time.
Nope. I’d feel much safer in that city, on a motorcycle, on the actual main streets, just moving more slowly, following the road laws of basically juat being a very small car, being cautious…, than I would on a bicycle, where…
… you get insane little unprotected nonsense lanes that are sometimes on the shoulder of a road, sometimes they weave into the middle of a street at an intersection, sometimes there’s some kind of shunted off specific bike path through a block or two, or most of the time there’s just no bike lane at all, but its illegal for you to ride them on a sidewalk… if there even is a sidewalk.
Incredible mess, and if an SUV going 45 mph t-bones a bicyclist crossing an intersection, or just doesn’t see them and does a lower speed turn into them… they’re basically as dead of injured as a motorcyclist in the same position… though motorcyclists tend to wear full head encompassing helmets.
Anyway, in the US, having a one or two hour commute to work in the morning, and a one or two hour commute back home, via some kind of motor vehicle, on a highway system… is pretty common.
Some vehicle has to exist that can make that distance, but is also affordable… unless/untill we actually build medium/long range mass transit.
Motorcycles can do that.
So could kei vehicles, maybe, kind of… they generally can’t maintain US highway speeds, and honestly, they’d get pretty obliterated in a collision with a US “truck” or SUV, and their suspensions / ground clearance also can’t really handle the shitty state of US roads and potholes, caused by those “trucks” and SUVs.
I’m rambling at this point, but … some new kind of personal vehicle paradigm is going to have to exist in the US soon… because cars are simply now unaffordable to the average person, we’re too broke, car prices are too high, soo many people are in massive debt for their cars.
We’re either gonna need cheaper vehicles that can go fast and can go a significant distance… or we’re basically just gonna collapse as a society.
We’re extremely car centric, and people can’t afford cars anymore.
I don’t know how to solve that problem in a ‘good’ way, motorcycle is the best I can come up with.
Luckily major european countries that have well designed streets publish a lot of their found research, it just has to start being adopted in the more car-centric places.
The US as an example is pretty far gone, but if the major cities went fully in the correct direction, it probably would only take a few decades to look completely different (amsterdam is decent proof of this).
While I agree with you in theory, in practice, no, we could not transform that fast, to a significant degree, unless we first basically had something like a Maoist genocide of current landowners, burned all the existing building and land use codes, and started over.
More than just the whole… rich people have way too much control over society thing…
The amount of NIMBYism in the US is insane.
(Not In My BackYard)
Every single element of every city’s zoning laws and building regulations are designed to benefit existing property owners and existing properties, as they currently are.
We would have to dismantle a whole lot of that to actually change the fundamental street grid system.
… The problem is complex not so much in technical, engineering, how do we actually do this kinds of ways… but in the way of: there are way too many powerful groups and actors that will fuck up every stage of any process that is attempting to change anything about urban design.
I guess you could say our governance structures are as gridlocked as the actual streets are.
Ah ok, haha yeah sorry, I’m over here in belligerent burger land, terminology is a bit different… along with … a lot of other things.
Yeah, our “truck”/suv culture is… just actually insane.
Many common US “trucks” are literally as large as WW2 medium tanks. Its fucking nonsense.
Also yes, delivery vans, utility vehicles that are van-like… yeah I think those generally make sense as well.
With mopeds / motorcycles … Yeah, small vehicle with no driver/rider encompassing frame around it + high speed = dangerous.
But… mopeds are incredibly popular in eastern asia, many other parts of the world a lot of other parts of the world because they are small, cheap, and if you have a traffic law paradigm and road system that accomodates them, they totally make sense.
Motorcycles… have more effective maximum range though. Higher sustainable top speeds.
Theyre a bit more popular in south america, which generally has less medium/long distance mass transit.
Cheaper than cars, but they can actually drive a significant distance.
The US is also really really spread out, in lots of places. We built our cities so you have to drive everywhere within them, and also between them, because we generally hate mass transit that is medium or long distance.
And the wild thing is, in the US, right now?
I can get a decent, gasoline powered, starter motorcycle, which is street legal, for about the same price, or even cheaper, than an e-bicycle, which has ~60% the top speed, maybe ~20% the overall range.
Really, a decent starter motorcycle is more like half or a third the cost of an e-bike that… could possibly, maybe get me from place to place in a spread out US city, that is 50% parking lot by land use.
And bicycles are not street legal in the US, the way that cars and motorcycles are.
They get shunted into their own sort of ruleaet governing where they can be ridden, which is highly variable and not standardized from city to city.
Practically speaking, our bicycle infrastructre is either non existant, or designed by insane people, basically. I tried, I really tried to do the bicyclist thing in a lefty, US major city that was supposedly all about bike infrastructure for a time.
Nope. I’d feel much safer in that city, on a motorcycle, on the actual main streets, just moving more slowly, following the road laws of basically juat being a very small car, being cautious…, than I would on a bicycle, where…
… you get insane little unprotected nonsense lanes that are sometimes on the shoulder of a road, sometimes they weave into the middle of a street at an intersection, sometimes there’s some kind of shunted off specific bike path through a block or two, or most of the time there’s just no bike lane at all, but its illegal for you to ride them on a sidewalk… if there even is a sidewalk.
Incredible mess, and if an SUV going 45 mph t-bones a bicyclist crossing an intersection, or just doesn’t see them and does a lower speed turn into them… they’re basically as dead of injured as a motorcyclist in the same position… though motorcyclists tend to wear full head encompassing helmets.
Anyway, in the US, having a one or two hour commute to work in the morning, and a one or two hour commute back home, via some kind of motor vehicle, on a highway system… is pretty common.
Some vehicle has to exist that can make that distance, but is also affordable… unless/untill we actually build medium/long range mass transit.
Motorcycles can do that.
So could kei vehicles, maybe, kind of… they generally can’t maintain US highway speeds, and honestly, they’d get pretty obliterated in a collision with a US “truck” or SUV, and their suspensions / ground clearance also can’t really handle the shitty state of US roads and potholes, caused by those “trucks” and SUVs.
I’m rambling at this point, but … some new kind of personal vehicle paradigm is going to have to exist in the US soon… because cars are simply now unaffordable to the average person, we’re too broke, car prices are too high, soo many people are in massive debt for their cars.
We’re either gonna need cheaper vehicles that can go fast and can go a significant distance… or we’re basically just gonna collapse as a society.
We’re extremely car centric, and people can’t afford cars anymore.
I don’t know how to solve that problem in a ‘good’ way, motorcycle is the best I can come up with.
Luckily major european countries that have well designed streets publish a lot of their found research, it just has to start being adopted in the more car-centric places.
The US as an example is pretty far gone, but if the major cities went fully in the correct direction, it probably would only take a few decades to look completely different (amsterdam is decent proof of this).
While I agree with you in theory, in practice, no, we could not transform that fast, to a significant degree, unless we first basically had something like a Maoist genocide of current landowners, burned all the existing building and land use codes, and started over.
More than just the whole… rich people have way too much control over society thing…
The amount of NIMBYism in the US is insane.
(Not In My BackYard)
Every single element of every city’s zoning laws and building regulations are designed to benefit existing property owners and existing properties, as they currently are.
We would have to dismantle a whole lot of that to actually change the fundamental street grid system.
… The problem is complex not so much in technical, engineering, how do we actually do this kinds of ways… but in the way of: there are way too many powerful groups and actors that will fuck up every stage of any process that is attempting to change anything about urban design.
I guess you could say our governance structures are as gridlocked as the actual streets are.
That’s true, reading your comment reminded me of SUBURBIA!!! Definitely not easy to fix that.
Certainly a good place to start with better zoning as you say.