this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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Electric Vehicles
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It's annoying how the world, especially North America, is designed around vehicles that "can fit at lest three people" but are most frequently driven by a single person.
I love my ebike, and don't own a car, but even for short trips things would be more convenient with a car. The roads are designed for cars. Parking is designed for cars. Laws protect cars far more than bikes.
Maybe that will change. What happened in the Netherlands since the 1970s gives me hope. But, right now it's sad how the switch away from the gas-powered car seems to be toward electric cars rather than bikes, ebikes and mass transit.
I live in Atlanta, which ain't exactly the poster-child for bike-friendliness. But even here, at least in my part of town, it actually is getting to the point where short trips are genuinely more convenient on a bike. Dropping the kids off at school definitely is because I don't have to wait in line, and any destination downtown is best reached on a bike because I don't have to pay for parking. Going to the grocery store isn't quite better by bike, but the margin is close enough that I bike anyway.
Parking is one of those things that could be improved for biking. I really hate most of the bike racks that most places use, and if you get a bad one it can take a significant amount of time to lock up your bike. And, a big reason why locking up a bike takes a while is that bike theft isn't really treated seriously. IMO if bike theft were taken more seriously you wouldn't need to make sure you had an excellent lock and had your front wheel secured, etc. Thieves would be much less willing to take the risk of stealing one, so a simple chain would be enough to discourage most thieves.
I feel like excessive parking for cars is a much worse problem than inadequate parking for bikes. But yes, parking for bikes could be better (and very easily, too).
Any vehicle I have must fit at least 3 people, because at any time I must be able to move myself + the 2 kids. I could get a little 2-seater runabout for 90% of my driving (or maybe a motorcycle or something similar), but then I would have to have another vehicle, at additional license costs, interest costs, storage costs, and then have to guess which one I will need by the end of the day at the start, consistently every time. Because of this, every vehicle I own must be able to do every thing I can conceivably need to do in a given day.
From what I can tell, this condition exists for a plurality of drivers in the driving-centric parts of the US, and so became the standard because it's the minimum for those people.