cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16133154
Link to original Tweet: https://x.com/DavidZipper/status/1795048724021862898
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Elijah Orlandi makes deliveries for Grubhub in the evening after his 9-to-5 job.
“There are scenarios where people have the right to be upset,” said Orlandi, who lives in the Bronx and has been making e-bike deliveries for Grubhub — in addition to his 9-to-5 job — since October. He has seen e-bike riders “swerving in between cars and all that kind of stuff.” But Orlandi is also hoping for compassion. “People got to understand, we’re working,” he said. Delivery apps, he noted, keep track of how quickly workers make their drop-offs — and ding them if they take too long. “Sometimes you’ll be going somewhere and Grubhub will send you another order, and then no matter what you do, you’re going to be late,” he said. “So that’s why you’ll see a lot of people rushing.”
Surely the problem here this dude's e-bike. Not that people need to do gig job on top of 9-5 work day, unaffordable rent, inflation, and exploitative gig economy platform
Yeah I was reading that and I’m like… ok so what does this have to do with an e-bike? This is just a condemnation of the gig economy. One can only assume that they are implying that none of these problems would exist if this dude was using a car, but they’d actually be 10x worse if he was
How dare he zip past the congestion with a low-density vehicle instead of contributing to it, wasting fuel (whatever type) and making things worse for everyone like a proper, respectable, carbrained citizen?
Almost as bad as subways, I tell you! Those bastards take a whole chunk of people past the traffic at once, the audacity 😤
Sarcasm aside, I do think people need this angle pointed out to them: Low-density transport options for those where they make sense help those for whom it doesn't. The more short-range traffic happens on bikes, in busses and (light) rail, the more space there will be on the streets.
"Teens are dying on bikes" - it's because of a bike of it's because of a fucking truck that weighs like 300 bikes?
First New York Times came for the Palestinians. And I didn't speak out because I was not a Palestinian.
Then they came for my e-bike and there was no one left to speak for me.
The NYTimes has always been the US empire's paper of record. You won't find a US-backed war or coup they didn't support.
I wonder if it has anything g to do with all the advertisements for luxury cars in every edition of the paper... :-/ Cheers for the post.
With ICE, you control the population by controlling the oil. Like rest of the world has to eat up price raise without much retaliation, what else you're going to do, you have to work and you depend on oil. But since China is the major producer of batteries and EVs, the nations that dictate the policies are losing that control.
So US does what it does best, propagandize the masses. Mass produced solar panels are bad, EVs are unreliable, e-bikes are a menace.
The world powers will turn the world to ruins if it serves their interests.
America held the printing press invention dear to the heart. It was the best way to manufacture and distribute propaganda.
News is a profit driven industry and it's written by the sponsors. This is as true for NYT as it is for Alex Jones. The sooner people realize this the sooner we can dig ourselves out of this whole mess.
Well yeah, NYT is profit driven, there's no nefarious intent.
Yes, this is why all news should be treated as "Trust but verify". And if that verification consistently turns up as bunk, that's a bad news.
Problem is nearly everybody is bad news. It's always either lying through omission, single-sided story telling, assumed guilt, or just straight up misinformation.
If a news story comes along that could interfere with the profit of the owners of the NYT, what do you think their intent would be?
The companies hawking e-cars have much larger advertising accounts with NYT than those hawking e-bikes.
In Rio de Janeiro happened something like this. An old woman and a children were walking on the bike lane and an ebike crashed to them and killed the old woman. A city councilperson hurried up to make a law banning e-bikes from bike lanes, saying that they should use the car infrastructure, but the Mayor vetoed the project.
Having an ebike in New York is what having a car in any other major American city is supposed to work like (but can’t because car-centric infrastructure is terrible city design)
Nothing is more than 30 minutes from me. There’s parking everywhere. Only requires low cost infrastructure to be usable. Traffic jams are infrequent and short-lived. Ownership and fuel costs are low. Environmentally friendly. Quiet. Great for recreation. Is very safe for the user and pedestrians.
I live in São Paulo and have everything on a 30-40 minutes ride, but because my bike insurance demands a proper bike rack or the policy is null, I have a lot of problems with the parking part. Like supermarkets, bakeries, pharmacies and others always have 2-5 cars parking space, but is extremely rare finding one of those with a proper bike rack.
Is bike theft not a major issue in New York It's the main thing keeping me from getting one. Bikes get stolen so frequently that I prefer my 100 buck bike, much more easily replaced.
Not as major as most news outlets make it out to be. I try not to lock my bike outside if I can avoid it, but I can lock it indoors both at work and at my apartment
Yeah I should say, I'm not worried about theft as a phenomenon, I just wouldn't have an electric bike outside considering I don't earn enough to lose something like that. Theft is a tragic symptom but I also prefer not to be affected by it lol
But smart, having inside places is cool. Most places I go and bike to wouldn't have that
Yet, electric trains are a better alternative to most people's transport.
I skimmed the picture first, and thought you were talking about escooters which are terrible, ebikes are great though.
escooters which are terrible
That's a bit of a stretch. They aren't great, but they're still better than a car, and a lot of the disadvantage is because of poor infrastructure and lack of courtesy by a lot of e-scooter riders. One of those is easier to fix than the other.
E-bikes are way better than e-scooters, though, and I'd say e-bikes are more versatile.
There are two kinds of escooters, the rentable, and personal.
The rentable escooter are absolute shit, they are scattered over cities, making is difficult for disabled people to get by, they promote use without helmets which increase severity and frequency of accidents, they also are driven recklessly.
The personal escooters are mostly fine, people drive them less recklessly, often wear helmets and in general take better care of them.
Both types are bad in that they move people away from existing public transport lowering demand meaning that public transport gets less money which lowers the quallity and again moves people away from public transport.
Ebikes doesn't have that direct cause and affect as they mostly replace cars, ebikes also tend to have less severe accidents as the result of the combination of larger wheels with better banace, a better riding possition with a lower center of gravity again improving balance
There's a lack of infrastructure to accommodate rental scooters which cause the problems you mentioned. Having safe places to ride (i.e bike lanes) and designated places to park them would solve these issues. I could also argue that cars do all the same things.
Reducing demand for public transport is a good thing in a developed city. You want there to be more space for people that aren't going to choose micromobility, which is much cheaper for a city to provide more capacity for.
I'd be interested to see some research into your theory of ebikes replacing more car journeys and escooters replacing more public transport journeys.
I agree with your points on why ebikes are safer, but scooters are also more compact and therefore easier to transport and store when not riding, and the safety issue is really solved by having safe places to ride. Having the choice available is important because different people have different priorities and preferences.
Thr lack of infrastructure for rental scooters is intentional though. It makes their overhead non-existent while making their scooters the city's problem. The Netherlands figured out how to do bike rentals decades ago, but just leaving a bike/scooter wherever is a menace to the community. People used to keave them in my yard or the middle of the sidewalk until my town banned them. Personal scooters are fine, but Bird and Lime are terrible.
Bike rental in the Netherlands is great for certain uses but not for others. You can't use the OV-fiets as a tourist, and you generally have to take them back to where you got them from.
Docked systems are better, and you can remove most of the cost of the docks by doing the "dockless docks" where you just have to return them to designated areas. This can work for both bikes and scooters.
Companies like bird & lime take advantage of the lack of regulations, but there's clearly a demand. Cities can take advantage of this by regulating, providing infrastructure, and charging the companies to operate, things already done for cars.
