this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Solarpunk Travel

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Community for those focused on sustainable travel. Our society's current levels of energy intensive and frequent travel are not compatible with life on a finite planet. We advocate for long-term slow travel to see the world, and low energy local travel to deeply experience your community. Green washing free zone.

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How bad are electric bikes for the environment? (Spoiler, they can actually be better than regular bikes!) (www.youtube.com)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It's because in most of those sort of scenarios, we've got unlimited clean energy. If that's the case, pedalling doesn't make sense except for exercise. There are ebikes now that have a throttle alongside the pedal assist, so the size and weight of the bike is already low. Add the battery efficiency to get the 1,000 mile charge, and you can use the throttle to get everywhere. You'll get there faster too. If bikes show up in sci fi, they're likely to be electric motorbikes.

In a future with clean flying cars, especially the post scarcity future, the vast majority of the current problems with cars are gone. You just book a self flying car to take you to your destination and back, and it goes to another customer when you're done. In a Star Trek type future, you just beam there and back. For the most part, people don't care about travelling, they just want to be at their destination. If there's a hand wavy sci fi way around it, people will take it.

The problems that bikes and ebikes solve at the moment tend to be solved in futuristic stories, or in post apocalyptic stories, they don't matter. Why bother worrying about pollution when you're in a nuclear winter?

In the real world, ebikes are great, but in futuristic stories, they generally don't matter.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

If that’s the case, pedalling doesn’t make sense except for exercise.

Exercise is incredibly important though? An electric bicycle having peddles that maybe helps you charge up the battery a little bit if you push extra hard makes perfect sense.

Maybe the pedals aren’t needed but especially in terms of a bicycle being used in harsh conditions having a pedal system as a backup just seems like a silly thing to forego.

For the most part, people don’t care about travelling, they just want to be at their destination.

The only reason this statement doesn’t seem absurd on the face of it is that we all live in car brained cultures where getting anywhere is a miserable process of sitting in traffic on endless concrete highways and stroads. This is an absurd statement though make no mistake, people love traveling, people love moving when it is pleasant to move. I don’t disagree that a lot of sci-fi is incredibly shortsighted and doesn’t understand this fundamental thing about humans, but really this is a thing even children understand about humans.

The thing is, whether we get Star Trek transporters and hover cars or we get an apocalypse with scarce resources, in either future, electric bicycles will be everywhere. If we can just teleport where we want to go like Star Trek than practically the only form of transportation people use will be electric bicycles because it is a pleasant and simple thing to ride a bicycle for an errand or to commute a small distance. If we live in an apocalypse, guess what everybody is riding bicycles there aren’t going to be cars and motorcycles and oil (you think making an electric battery in the apocalypse is hard, try drilling for oil) or even big heavy electric cars.

The problems that bikes and ebikes solve at the moment tend to be solved in futuristic stories, or in post apocalyptic stories, they don’t matter.

This is where your thinking really misses the mark, in futuristic settings “solving” the problem of transportation would actually lead to even more widespread depression, isolation and mental health/quality of life issues than everybody driving around in cars already creates (which is a LOT). There would be an immediate pressing need to reproduce the human experience of travel, and the easiest way to do that is to jump on a bicycle.