I am thinking about starting a series on how cycling is transforming Europe, and how ebikes are playing a big role. In a number of countries ebike sales have grown larger than the sales of regular bikes. One of the episodes I want to do is how Finland is expanding cycling, even in their bitter cold winters. For one thing, they have dedicated bike lanes, with at least a curb between them and the cars. Those lanes get plowed. In sunny, warm, Italy, Milan is going to spend a lot of money to transform their city in less than 20 years. Milan has long had a problem with pollution, and space. This will reduce pollution, noise, carbon emissions, congestion, and more. Netherlands has done all that, but they took 40 or 50 years, Milan wants to cut the time to build it in half. You just don't see progress like that in America. Point is, you can bike anywhere, if you build safe cycling there. And it's not expensive. Americans spend astonishing amounts on roads and bridges. The money needed to make cycling safe is a tiny fraction of that, and saves a ton of money in the long run.
It's not just a simple matter of getting on a bicycle. Cities need to be planned and laid out for bicycles, and it's not just a simple matter of taking a city that already exists and creating a few bicycle paths. The paths need to be constructed away from car traffic, and the entire layout of the city needs to be more open, avoiding "walls of houses" that are too long, and residential and commercial spaces need to be closer together. Many European cities were designed and built before cars existed. People aren't going to like to hear this but if you find out about the history in the US, a big part of why the middle class moved out away from the cities and moved into the suburbs had to do with racial diversity and rising crime rates in the cities. Many progressives seem to have naive and unrealistic expectations about how to address these issues to go back to how city living was before. (Like "Oh, we'll just make all schools good, and then families won't need to flee to better schools in the suburbs)
Bike paths that meet Dutch standards can be done along with traffic. It's not hard, or expensive. The Dutch have been doing this for close to half a century. We won't want to take that long, but you have to do it in stages, and that spreads out the costs. As I will point out later, the costs are really not that bad, and the savings are massive.. This is why things are going to change. It can be for the better, or for the worse, that's up to you: And this is about what it can be like when you do:
It occurs to me that this brings up topics that don't usually get much attention. So it's time to mention Jane Jacobs.. "Conservatives and libertarians are often puzzled by the way low tax, limited government states like Kansas fail to prosper but California seems to do everything to hinder prosperity short of Maoism but produces millionaires by the dozen. For Jacobs the answer is clear: California has import-replacing cities and Kansas has none." https://marketurbanism.com/2017/04/...ies-and-the-wealth-of-nations-by-jane-jacobs/ Cities and the Wealth of Nations is short, and easy to read. If you had the day off, you could finish it in a day. There's not a single number in it, but it's one of the best introductory books of economics. After it came out, it was often used as the first book in introductory economics classes. It's not dry. Get a copy from your library, you won't regret it. https://www.amazon.com/Cities-Wealth-Nations-Principles-Economic/dp/0394729110
As you know I'm a fan of recumbent cycles and I have fabricated several and I still do ride them sometimes but I'm getting lazy and started driving but with the cost of gas I'm seriously considering getting a beach cruiser and putting one of those two-stroke motor kits on it and using it to get back and forth to 4 miles to work when the weather is good. I have an e-bike in my shed it's loan to me by the landlord and it's nice and everything it's a 20-in with 4-in diameter tires. But it seems to me like a cell phone, when it's new the batteries hold up great but about six or seven months down the line the batteries aren't holding up so great. So if I'm going to motorize something I'm going to go with good old gasoline. A gallon of gas on a 49cc bicycle motor will go a long ways
I've put 3 years on the battery on my ebike. It's lost about 10% of it's oomph. You could get a ebike motor kit and use 2 batteries. Larger and dual batteries are catching on in the ebike world. Just don't put a 49c motor under your butt...
You're right I should probably get the 80cc motor kit, or is it a 60 I don't know but I know they have a bigger one Been considering trying to build a motorized recumbent but the frame design would have to be radically altered. Have a very sturdy fabricated rear cargo rack on my current recumbent which a motor could conceivably sit on top of but the center of gravity of the motor would be behind the rear axle and that would be no good. I would have to really alter the top tube design of the frame to get the motor in front of the center of gravity of my hips anyways. I go ahead and use a 6 horsepower 4-stroke Briggs & Stratton type motor, of course with that much motor I would consider a small to medium type of dirt bike wheel for the rear wheel. I wouldn't gear it for a whole lot of top speed but torque in off road conditions.... Could you imagine the torque that thing would have with a 212cc 6 horse? It would be a beast. Hell even if gas was to shoot the 10 dollars a gallon it still be really reasonable to operate. I wonder what the street usually legalities would be? Everyone used to ride those motorized beach cruisers around here but I guess about 5 years ago they passed a law where you have to have at least a driver's license to operate one. Suddenly you see very few of them because most people that had them probably had DUIs or did not have a license for some other reason.
It's going way off topic here, but for anyone who was confused about what Jacobs was talking about, she meant that high population centers can have more localized specialization of labor, and so therefore can produce goods and services more efficiently and do not have to import them from other areas. Meaning that Kansas cannot competitively produce everything consumers there buy, and so therefore ends up not maintaining a good balance of trade and wealth is slowly drained away. It is only a theory from this one economist. I could of course elaborate much more, but this is not the thread to have that discussion in. It may be contrary to intuitive reason, but the reason bigger city areas can (under this theory) produce things more cheaply is that in terms of money, 85% of things in most modern regional economies (in developed places) are services rather than actual shippable products.
This doesn't work in many American cities. In many American cities that are overcrowded and have too much automotive traffic on the roads, people do not want to ride bicycles anywhere near the roads, due to the noise and air pollution. When you are riding a bicycle, it is an athletic activity and a person breathes in more air, so localized air pollution becomes a bigger factor in that situation. It can even be dangerous to ride in a bicycle lane next to a very busy road. The lanes would probably need to be kept separate from the roads. This involves some thoughtfulness and design creativity. It is more complicated than many people might imagine. The paths going through the city could alternate between bicycle paths and roads to keep the two separate. The paths would need to be maintained in a more open grid layout than the roads would be. Otherwise it just will not be too inconvenient to travel by bicycle if the travel distance between two points becomes too long. Perhaps all the bicycle paths could be kept at a little bit lower of an elevation. That way they could go in underpath bridges under roads more easily without having to make too much of a change in elevation each time. There will also need to be some buffer space around the bicycle path so that it is not too narrow.
Theres a CC limit to what requires a liscence and registration. 50 is the most common (thus the popularity of the 49cc motor). Watch that you're not placing yourself into regulatory margins by making your motor bigger ...i wonder if 2x 49cc motors is a legit loophole
I was also considering fabricating a small trailer for my 15 ft canoe to tow behind a car I'm fixing to get ( instead of lashing it on the roof of my minivan)....... Of course It would probably have to have turn signals and brake lights and get a tag and to do that I'm sure it would have to be inspected and pass certain regulations. If I was to build a franken bike I would probably just use it to tool around the dirt roads in the county around where I live
Sometimes you can just use a orange triangle to designate something as 'farm equipment' and then you can drive almost anything anywhere (except the freeway) as long as it has flashers. It may require that you have some sort of agricultural business liscense or something. And it might only be in certain states... not sure. But I've seen some really odd things on the road with orange triangles that I'm relatively certain were never inspected by anyone. I knew a kid years ago that started driving his dads jeep to school at 14 using the orange triangle trick. It worked for him.
For sure. This is a big citrus area and when harvest time comes they use a big diesel vehicle with a hydraulic arm known as a goat, to dump the big black buckets that they leave at the end of the rows when they harvest that the pickers dump their orange bags into. Then the goat takes its load and puts it into the semi trailer. You will see these goats going down the highway from time to time and they have no tag and no lights. But yes most of the time you would need at least an orange triangle I'm sure
If I lived in a big city, I would bike (If I could tolerate living in a big city...). If I'm going somewhere in my little town of 1500 people, I just walk. Everything is afew minutes away. If I go anywhere else, its 10 miles away minimum. Aint no one got time for biking that...
That's why I started with Paris. It's crowded, and used to be dangerous on a bike; and they're turning it around. If it's happening all over Europe, there's no magic saying it can't happen here. The real problem is the politics.
A website I have not looked at in years so I don't know if it's even still up but it should be, that may be of interest to the op. Called "crazy guy on a bike" a forum of cycle tourist and also other reference materials . People from all over the globe post about their travels.
