Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Your vision is too small. What do you think the biggest problem is for deploying transit to suburbs? The last mile problem. You can have a train to the suburbs, but people still then need to drive from the train station to their home. With an e-bike, that solves this problem.
Sure, you can cite some hypermiler that commutes 2 hours across rural land between cities, but now you're just masturbating to edge cases, the equivalent of someone that justifies buying a giant truck because they move a couch once a year.
E-bikes solve the last mile problem of transit. Look at how trains and bikes actually work in countries like the Netherlands. People tend to bike to the train station, ride the train, then take a bike to their destination. With an e-bike, your train stops only needs to be within a couple of miles of both your start and destination. E-bikes make solve the problem of the incompatibility of low-density suburbs and transit.
How am I going to bring home groceries for my family of 4 on an E-Bike?
I do groceries for 2 people once a week with a bus and my legs. With an e-bike and a cargo trailer it would be trivial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_bike
You get an electric cargo bike. The idea only sounds terrifying, no? But that's because you're imagining riding the thing with your kids through car traffic. If you have the infrastructure to make it practical to run errands with vehicles like this, without sharing paths with cars? Just other vehicles of similar size and speed? Suddenly it's much more sensible.
I used to do something like what you're describing. I would drive my car to a light rail station then take the train into the city to work. I suppose what you're talking about is just replacing the car with an e-bike. That's fine, but I don't see a huge difference in this scenario between an e-bike and an electric car, especially since I wasn't just driving to the light rail station, I was also driving to the grocery store and to restaurants and to the houses of friends and family, etc.
Now, if I had lived in the city nearer to my work, and to stores, and restaurants, and shops, etc, an e-bike would have made a lot more sense.
Most people in suburbia have a stores within a reasonable e-bike distance of them. And yes, there isn't a ton of difference between the e-bike and an electric car in that context. Which is the entire point! The difference is that one costs a minimum of $30k, while the other can be had for less than $1k. And for the resources to build one electric car, we can build dozens of e-bikes.
That's true, yet I still think many people will opt to spend the additional money for a car. They're covered and climate controlled, and they offer more passenger and cargo capacity. In the Netherlands, which you mentioned as an example of a country with high e-bike adoption, there are still millions of cars. I'm sure there are fewer cars than there otherwise would have been, but cars are still very much in the transportation mix. Not a bad thing, necessarily. I definitely think it has reduced car dependency - cars are no longer as much of a necessity - but cars are not eliminated.