Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to Yamis,
To trasform Auckland into some kind of cycling oasis would cost about 20 squizilliontrillion dollars and the money would probably be better spent on ejukashun or something like that.
It's not all-or-nothing. Money spent making cycling safer or more convenient does work well before the squazillion mark is reached. Particularly dangerous stretches should be a priority.
biggest risk on footpaths would be driveways, wouldn't it?
Only place I've ever had a serious accident - car pulled out of driveway in front of me. I was going too fast. I pitched right over the bonnet, lucky not to break my neck or smash my head open. It was my fault.
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to nzlemming,
Having lived in Auckland and Wellington, this made me LOL :-D
Wellington does have a big edge on the headwinds. But it's all close together, man, you can't call me soft.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to WH,
I've come to suspect that a lot of our problems come from the fact that we are so competitive - it's not how much we have that counts, its where we stand in the hierarchy that matters.
Word. Especially since one of the easiest ways to maintain position is to keep others down.
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I'll also note I purchased cheap electric bikes - the most expensive one was $300. There are far, far more expensive ones that might be a heck of a lot better - with modern battery types, brushless motors that have regenerative braking, and built with very light materials. But I have to honestly say that the idea of buying a weak electric bike that would cost me more than a late model high powered motorbike doesn't appeal. To me, the only point of the electric bike is to "go Chinese" and take advantage of the fact that cheap components can generate a low effort riding solution with high reliability and tiny ongoing costs. Forking out $5000 for a bike doesn't make sense when that's 2500 liters of petrol at up to 50km/liter on a cheap scooter. This probably explains why shops that sell both kinds of bikes seem to successfully convert just about everyone to a petrol solution after they've actually done the numbers. In Auckland. Flat cities may have different experiences.
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Of course, electric scooters help a lot with the summer heat - I wonder if they're making an appearance in at least some of NZ's flatter cities?
Heh, don't get me started. Too late!
I have owned 3 electric bikes, one was more of a bike, the other more of a scooter. One was entirely a scooter. All were sourced from outside of Auckland - one I collected from flat Tauranga, the other was in Palmerston North. The scooter was sent from Christchurch. The bulk of the bikes of this type for sale were in Christchurch when I was looking. I soon learned why.
Basically, I'd say that actual ranges were short of touted ranges by a factor of 3-4, in Auckland. Since those ranges were not great in the first place, this made them vehicles of very limited use. A big part of the appeal of that kind of vehicle is that it can reduce the pedaling exertion on hills, which dominate Auckland. But if you don't assist them substantially on hills they die really, really fast. So a big part of the point of them was lost - I ended up reaching my destination as hot and tired as if I'd just ridden a pushbike, but at least a pushbike doesn't get heavier and heavier the more depleted it gets. Nor does it have so many points of failure.
The scooter-only was an outright bust - when an electric battery dies on you, you can't just roll it to a station to fill up. You have to push the bastard all the way home, or drive back to collect it. It was also such an odd device that mechanical trouble could not be repaired. I ended up putting it out in an inorganic collection, it was that useless. It was very low-end, so I'd expect that if you paid a lot more for a decent one, with a lot of batteries, you'd get a different experience. It could be more powerful, with a higher top speed, and/or a greater range.
The scooter with pedals was somewhat better. It was touted as a Chinese delivery bike, had headlights, indicator, brake light, horn, basket, rear carrier frames, and a back seat. It even had a key, and an alarm, with a remote. Supposedly it had a 50km range on full speed mode, and the economy mode claimed 90km. In practice, I got 15km out of it in Auckland, with a bit of pedaling on hills. Not really much use except for local trips. It had a brushless motor so it was really, really quiet.
The best one was basically a motorized mountain bike - as a bike it was actually nicely designed for pedaling. It had a heavy frame, presumably that kept the cost right down, but since it carried it's own weight and mine it didn't feel heavy, until depleted (at which point it was less of a dead weight than either of the scooters, on account of proper pedals and gearing, but still a damned heavy bike). I used that bike a lot. But in the end, my own fitness and willingness to ride rapidly overtook the capacity of the bike, and I have found that a simple bike without a motor to be a much more useful option around Auckland.
I'd believe that they would have been all much more useful in a flat city. But the same also goes for a common-or-garden pushbike - even old grannies can ride for 30 km along the flat, coasting along at, say 12km/h. But hills make a massive difference.
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to James Butler,
I wouldn’t break the road code for extra awesome, but I would for extra safety.
Rock on!
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to James Butler,
Yeah, nah, you see "it feels awesome" seems like the wrong reason to me.
I'm always at loggerheads with some people over the right to weigh in how awesome something feels as a very good reason to do it, despite some risks. Tell me that "it feels awesome" isn't at least some of the reason you ride a pushbike at all. Tell me that your enjoyment of a downhill isn't merely a calculus of reduced effort counterbalanced by the horror of the increased risk, but also some kind of thrill at the way a pushbike handles better the faster it goes, and how you can reach into it with your ki, instead of beating it down with your muscles, and it responds under you more like a horse than like your own legs, a powerful feeling of freedom and potential. Your perception is forced to reach outwards, your eyes move further ahead into the middle distance, instead of staring at the road in front of you. The bike becomes an extension of you, and you feel the road rushing beneath you without having to watch it.
I feel that, anyway, it's something I look forward to.
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to Russell Brown,
I agree, it's a horribly bad bit of transport engineering along an absolutely perfectly cycling route, one of the very best ones the city has to offer in terms of being flat and scenic for almost 10km. The footpath cycling lane has been a joke for as long as I can remember, badly in need of a rethink.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
First you have to move to some economic form where unemployment and accompanying poverty are bugs, not features.
Yes, poverty is the bug. Unemployment is inevitable. In fact, it should actually be desirable, the very thing that shows that production is more than sufficient. We get more and more desperate to invent work every year. We have to manufacture demand. But when crunch time comes, it's amazing how fast manufactured demand disappears and the economy relying on it crumbles to nothing.
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Beyond some pretty obvious stuff, like not running red lights ffs, it's stupid and lethal.
Yes, depending what you mean, this can be true. Running a red light in a car usually means being the last one through, trying to enter the intersection before the light goes red, and failing. Considering that other cars will jump the gun, or hit the change to green running, or simply sauce off hard at the change, this is bad enough in a car. On a bike, which is going slower and will be in the middle of the intersection longer, and has no protection, it's suicidal.
But after the cars have all gone, and you're sitting at the lights waiting with no-one around, or watching pedestrians crossing in front, then slipping through is technically "running a red light" but poses no danger to anyone. In fact, it gets you away from the main danger, which is the cars behind you that will most likely impatiently out-accelerate you at the change. Sometimes, on a light that is only tripped by a heavy weight on a sensor, it's the only way you can turn at all.
So it's a bit more contextual than it is with cars, whose road rules are strictly enforced because of different assumptions about their abilities and the dangers they pose. For instance, the rule that you may not pass on the left is never obeyed. On a motorbike, it is obeyed a lot of the time, because a motorbike has sufficient horsepower to keep up with traffic, so there is no time lost to sitting in traffic that the cars aren't also losing. For them, passing on the left is a lot like "cheating", and does righteously inspire some antipathy in motorists, and can pull a ticket from a cop. On a pushbike, you're actually a PITA to motorists, if you sit in the middle of the lane 40 cars back from the lights and then accelerate using the 150 watts of power your legs can maybe generate, to a top speed of say 30kmh over perhaps 30 seconds. A car can get to that speed in seconds because it could have 100 __kilo_watts of power to draw upon, despite only being perhaps 20 times the weight of the bike+rider. It costs the motorists nothing if you pass them on the left, they will surely pass you again once the lights change, but it costs you, the cyclist, a lot of time.
That you risk your life a little bit is a calculated risk to add onto the already calculated risk of getting onto a pushbike in the first place minus the calculated risk of not overtaking on the left, which isn't insignificant.
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