> The e-scooters that clutter up pavements may seem like a new thing, but a hundred years ago, there were already people zooming around London on powered scooters.
The problem is that we've given so much space to automobiles that there's no room for anything else (bikes, scooters, etc). Pedestrians have been given a sliver only because drivers need to walk between parking and their destination. This is true even in cities where the majority of people don't even drive!
Probably cause modern logistics, especially last mile logistics, is dependent on trucks/delivery vans/etc. So even though folks in a local area might like to walk around, their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network.
I think Bacerlona hits a good compromise. The city has the concept of a superblock, which is a few city blocks grouped into one calm zone. Most car traffic stays on the streets around the outside, the perimeter of the superblock. Inside, driving is restricted and only at low speeds where allowed, so people and bikes get the space. So deliveries and residents can still but only slowly.
That’s far from the only example - many cities in Asia follow a similar model.
I live in Vancouver, and we have plenty of both roads and bike lanes. Its not hard to fit a bike lane that's usually 1/4th the width of a lane onto a road or allow bikes to share with cars on smaller roads. We have trucks and vans and lots of deliveries too. The reason most cities are oriented around cars is because we designed them that way and it's difficult to change - there's no logistical constraint, its just politics and cost.
> their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network.
A road network isn't the only solution. In the early 20th century, for example, there was a separate narrow-gauge tunnel network beneath Chicago dedicated to freight. Deliveries were made directly to businesses via subbasements or elevator shafts. The network had stations at rail and ship terminals for accepting freight arriving from outside the city. At its height in 1929, the network had 150 locomotives pulling 10 to 15 cars per train.
This is neat but also seems like an insane solution to the problem of “I don’t like seeing service trucks”. How many such tunnels and elevators would it take to supply the buildings in a typical city’s downtown area?
I wonder how many people such an automated freight system would kill per year, compared to cars in the same cities. Once we have some numbers, you would probably reconsider the use of "insane" there.
Sure. In 2022, 672 pedestrians were killed by large trucks. How many of those do you believe happened in say New York City? And how many of those do you think you could eliminate with this hypothetical tunnel system? And how much will this hypothetical tunnel system cost?
New York has about 300 pedestrian deaths total from all vehicles every year. So my guesstimate is that if you eliminated all of the trucks from New York City, you might save 50 lives a year, max. I would also guesstimate that it would probably cost well north of $50 billion to create this tunnel system to connect all of the major buildings in New York City. So we’re looking at about $1 billion per life saved. I bet you could save more than one life per billion if you put that money somewhere more useful.
> What do you think, ready to imagine such a comparison?
What are you intending to accomplish with your snarky and condescending tone?
Smaller trucks. Japan makes due with one-lane alleys. (Not one in each direction. One. Deliveries and vehicular traffic are so uncommon, and the tightness of the space so inconducive to speeding, that it's safe for trucks and cars to go down them in whichever direction they need to.)
London is edging in that direction with the introduction of "low traffic neighbourhoods". Basically this involves preventing vehicles using them as a through route, by limiting some connections to only emergency vehicles.
The problem is that it's also annoying for residents as it means the allowed entry/exit routes aren't necessarily in the direction you need to go. Does Barcelona have a smarter method?
My city has been making efforts to stymie traffic flow to encourage less driving. I almost never drive but it's still annoying as crap when what used to be a 20 min drive is now 40+ because of how slow the first/last mile is now.
When I'm not driving I do enjoy it, so I understand that it's a tradeoff and I can't have it both ways. That doesn't make me not irritated when behind the wheel though.
That's unevenly distributed. Lots of people in London do walk or use public transport, but you still need many delivery drivers, tradespeople, etc and it doesn't make sense for them all to live outside the city. And people who don't usually drive occasionally need to use a vehicle, and then it's more stressful because you aren't used to having to know where the vehicular entrances are. It's too simplistic to just make provision for the majority and assume that it doesn't matter what the second order effects are.
So if you make it safe and pleasant for everybody who doesn't need a truck as part of their job, then the remaining roads are available for the small minority that "must" use them.
But maybe rethink whether they "need" to and whether said vehicles must live in dense residential neighborhoods.
There is still pushback. I live in Toronto and when central businesses are canvassed about streetscape changes they overwhelmingly are against removing parking, access for cars, etc. They assume that 90% of their customers drive to them, but it turns out that it is closer to 10% for most of them.
It’s about actively blocking police and other emergency vehicles while allowing a new class of problem vehicles, illegal e-motorbikes, to pass unimpeded.
As a motorist, the war on cars (and milking of motorists for tax revenue) would be less infuriating if we didn’t have the rising broad-daylight lawlessness of illegal e-bikes and scooters doing 30mph+ with no pedaling, no tax, and no insurance. Often with corporate branding in the form of Deliveroo or Just Eat bags. Sometimes balaclava-clad and engaging in dodgier activities.
(Would be in favour of regulating and policing these bikes and scooters rather than outright prohibition, but the UK government chooses to stick to prohibition and very inconsistent policing)
> Probably cause modern logistics, especially last mile logistics, is dependent on trucks/delivery vans/etc. So even though folks in a local area might like to walk around, their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network.
Totally. Banning automobiles is usually a bad idea, especially for residential zones. Years ago, I remember seeing a presentation about redeveloping a bad public housing block that was built in the 1960s with no auto-access (the assumption being poor people don't have cars), but it turns out that it meant they couldn't even get pizza.
At least in New York City and outside the U.S., I regularly see pizzas being delivered frequently by bicycle, moped, and motorcycle. I also see deliveries being done with small trucks (Kei style) and vans that fit in alleyways.
Some number of the people at the time likely noticed the lapse and thought to themselves "good, this will make it inconvenient for them to get a car that lets them easily get far from their designated area on a whim" so they kept their mouths shut.
There's still room for a lot more, but plenty of space has been taken away from automobiles precisely for bikes, scooters, etc. It's trending in the right direction. Especially now that bike lanes are increasingly being designed with parking between the bike land and vehicle lanes.
The same case was in Italy, and calendars of Vespa were awesome back in the 70s ''Piaggio (maker of Vespa) had had its Pontedera (Italy) factory (where they used to make bomber planes) bombed during the conflict.
Italy had it’s aircraft industry restricted to a great extent as part of the ceasefire agreement with the allies. Enrico Piaggio, son of the founder of the company Rinaldo Piaggio, decided to leave the aeronautical field behind and address the people’s need for an economic mode of transport.
The idea was to make a scooter utilitarian and appealing enough to the masses. Till that time, scooters were mainly used by the military for quick on-ground transportation (you might have seen this in some Call of Duty games).
So, two Piaggio engineers, Renzo Spolti and Vittorio Casini, took to their whiteboard and designed the first-ever Vespa, or maybe not quite. Mr. Piaggio was disappointed with the initial scooter. The scooter was named Paperino, and looking at the photo, you can understand Mr. Piaggios disappointment.' https://www.vespalicious.com/gallery/
For real. Loads of places in the UK are in desperate need of wider paths. Some probably haven't changed for 100 years except for making them narrower with stupid full height advertising screens (a travesty and civic vandalism by the councils)
I'm sure they went away because it's a fad or the costs/benefits don't balance, not because there is no space for them. This is evident by the fact that we have scooters in abundance now!
Despite city dwellers hating on cars and wanting complete streets, cars are poised to win even bigger when self driving becomes widespread.
Our roads and highways will metamorphose into logistics corridors and optimal public transit systems.
Everything will be delivered same hour. The cost of this will drop and entire new business models will be built on top of the "direct to you" model.
Self-driving cars will replace public transit. They connect every destination on demand. Short hops, cross-country long-haul. Waymo alikes will become cheaper than the city bus.
Van life will accelerate. People will live in their automated vans and SUVs. They'll become luxury and status items for knowledge workers who are constantly conveying themselves coast to coast, from cozy fire pits by the sea to hidden mountain getaways. Life in America will become one of constant travel, because we can take our life with us without lifting a finger. People will have large home bases in the affordable suburbs - possibly one on each coast. They'll wine and dine in the city, then be off to hike the next day.
Life will turn into adventure and it'll be accessible to almost everyone. Rich, poor. Young, old. Busy, retired.
Nobody will lift a finger for any of this.
We're going to want more roads.
Bikes don't stand a chance. They're inequitable. Old people, pregnant people, sick people, and children are all left out. They suck in the rain and the snow. You can't move anything of size or scale.
> Bikes don't stand a chance. They're inequitable. Old people, pregnant people, sick people, and children are all left out. They suck in the rain and the snow. You can't move anything of size or scale.
I would invite you to come and have a look in the Netherlands. It’s very common for octogenarians to cycle. My wife cycled up to the day of the birth of our daughter. Children have more independence because they can cycle to football practice on their own. Bike lanes are great for mobility scooters. It rains here, a lot! And it snows. I picked up our Christmas tree with our cargo bike. When I need to transport anything larger I will book a carshare, which are dotted around our neighbourhood.
European weather is still mild relative to the US. It will be so long as the Gulf Stream doesn't shut down.
Americans are fatter and less healthy.
Americans are busy and work longer and harder. ("Work hard, play hard.")
Americans buy more stuff. Big stuff. Lots of stuff. Frequently. (This is actually a superpower of our consumer economy.)
We have invested hundreds of trillions of dollars in our infrastructure. We might be able to put in a bike land here or there in a majorly dense city or two, but we're not changing all of this.
And more than anything else, America is fucking huge.
I know you Europeans love your model, but it doesn't apply to us. The proponents in the US trying to make it happen misunderstand the fundamental differences.
Just five years ago I would have said you were selling a monorail fantasy or sight to the blind to us. And an unfortunate few in the US were lapping it up as something we could actually do.
Now that self driving is finally arriving, what I'm saying is that our future is even brighter than most countries. We have the road infra to really make this magic.
I can wake up one day, make my coffee, hop into my car with my wife, and through no effort of my own, wind up at a mountain resort. No security checkpoints. No hassle packing. No screaming babies. We can listen to music, read, cuddle. It's our own space taking us wherever we want at complete and total leisure, affordably, comfortably, privately. We can even detour for food or whatever.
It's going to be pure magic. As big a revolution as the internet was.
> I know you Europeans love your model, but it doesn't apply to us.
lol. You're what we call "carbrained".
Explain how the climate of the coastal West coast is unsuitable for year-round bicycling. Much of it is nicer than the Netherlands and has several times the population.
I don't think this is a crazy take, but it is missing two big factors that self driving maximalists often ignore.
First is the cost of driving. A reasonable rule of thumb is $0.50/mile all in (i.e. including depreciation, repairs, gas, etc) -- you can get down to half that pretty easily and maybe a little lower, but especially if you're spending tons of time in this car you're probably going to want a nice comfy one, which will cost more and depreciate faster. So, these trips you're imagining everyone taking constantly are not going to be accessible to most people. Cars are already the second biggest expense in most Americans' budgets, one which scales with mileage, and which self driving would only increase (have to pay for the lidar, on-device compute, whatever remote service handled edge cases, etc).
The second thing your predictions miss is geometry. Despite the decades of predictions about self-driving cars being able to run safely at much higher speeds and with much tighter tolerances than human-run cars, the tyranny of geometry and stopping distances (which actually won't change much even with millisecond reaction times) means that throughput of car lanes is unlikely to change much (though we could all imagine top-down infrastructural changes helping this a lot, eg coordinated self driving cars and smart roads, those seem unlikely to land anytime soon given American political inclinations). Imagine how spaced-out people are on the highway -- in each lane, 1.6 people (average car occupancy) every football field (300 feet -- safe stopping distance at 70mph). If you're trying to go anywhere more densely packed than that -- e.g., a city, a restaurant, a ball game -- you're going to start to run into capacity constraints. Mass transit, walking, and cycling all can manage an order of magnitude higher throughput.
So while I think your prediction -- that self driving cars will increase demand for road space -- is right, the valence that takes for me is much more negative. The wealthy will be able to take up way more space on the road (e.g., one car each dropping off each kid at each extra curricular activity), condemning the poor to even worse traffic (especially the poor who cannot afford a self driving vehicle, who will not even be able to play candy crush while they're waiting in this traffic). People will continue to suburbanize and atomize, demanding their governments pay for bigger and bigger roads and suburbs, despoiling more of the areas you'd like to hike in, with debt that will keep rolling over to the next generation. Bikes and peds will continue to be marginalized as the norm for how far apart people live will continue to grow, making it even more impossible and dangerous to get anywhere without a car. I hope I'm wrong but this is how mass motorization played out the first time, in the post-war period, and if anything our society is less prepared now to oppose the inequitable, race-to-the-bottom, socialize-your-externalities results of that phase of development.
You really think the idea of anything like bumper to bumper traffic existed more than a hundred years ago? Everything before 2000s (though surely car traffic existed in the 1900s) seems like a dramatization.
The number of horses in London was causing problems at the end of the 19th century - they don't scale well when you need to provide stables, food and of course leave piles of dung everywhere.
I would think in some places there was bumper to bumper for short distances. I would expect in parts of NYC it existed. I think it was in the 1920s when traffic lights started to appear.
My father was gifted a pair of these for his 50th birthday, would have been 1989, in London.
Little ICE scooters. They were a lot of fun and not very safe. We had drunk guests damaging themselves in the street.
They became toys for my brothers and I, who had plenty of accidents but learnt to ride them reasonably.
The engines didn’t idle particularly well and had no gears. You had to pull start, hop on and go quickly while reving just enough to idle without it moving. It took practice. You could push start too with some practice, especially once warm.
Lots of fun, but mileage wouldn’t have been great for serious use and refilling a pain at a regular petrol station. Might have been 2-stroke, I can’t remember. Tiny engine, closer to a strimmer than lawnmower.
Huge fun though for just bombing around on as a tween and young teen.
It's interesting that the engines are roughly the same as the 4 stroke china girl engines you can get for bikes and scooters today, a 155cc and 191cc model.
I wonder if it was a weight/size to power tradeoff, or convention that stuck - was there a targeted engineering reason behind the similarity in size, or have enough things stayed similar in the world of standard parts and sizes that we still have roughly the same engine sizes?
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First off, the price: £36 was much more than "£1,600 in today’s money". A railway clerk made £2 12 0 in a week in 1917, (less than £10/month if I did the shillings and all that properly), which makes the scooter price the equivalent of 3.5 months, which is £7,000 at the lowest end of today's London North Eastern Railway salary range. The fact that the picture has Lady something in it, suggests it was more of an upper-class thingy.
Second, the scooter may not be new, the cluttering certainly is. Look at that empty street!
I wonder how we'll deal with the inability to tell what's true or not in the coming years. Even without full deepfakes.. just a gradual hypothetical restoration turning subtle hallucination in many many places.
Does anyone remember the 1980s PBS show Newtons Apple? A segment on that show was called "Newtons Lemons" and would show an old newsreel from I'm guessing from the 1940s or 1950s. Each one would feature some sort of "futuristic" gadget, and invariably it would be something that never panned out and I had never heard of as a kid. I distinctly remember one of these featuring basically a scooter with a small gas motor and the narrator talking about great it would be for commuting to work when we can all own these. By my recollection, it looked very much like escooters of today, just gas.
When escooters became a thing, I looked for this newsreel for a while and never found it. Anyone else remember this?
Did someone actually think scooters were new? We had them growing up, I thought it was common knowledge the only thing novel about e-bikes and e-scooters were the lithium ion batteries and electric motors giving adequate runtime and performance.
You could drive a moped on city streets before you turned 16 which got a lot of teenagers in my hometown to work and sports in the summer when their parents couldn’t.
But they were slow, noisy, and smelly compared to a modern ebike.
I’ve seen the original of the main photo before which is the only reason I know that two-stroke ICE engine powered standup scooters like that existed.
So, yes. Things do get invented so it’s not surprising. Luggage with wheels is a pretty recent invention considering when luggage and wheels were invented.
Boy I had a liminal moment looking at these photos and videos - this all could easily have been a fun AI media project. In fact, I think the first photo used outpainting (“street background expanded” reads the subtitle).
I’m enjoying my last year or so of visual media trust, as ephemeral as that is in reality.
I’m sorry but this article‘s headline/thesis is atrocious. The headline strongly implies there were e-scooters back then; there weren’t. Second, London’s pavements weren’t cluttered with autopeds; or if they were, there’s no evidence offered. Third, why expand the image with AI? The original is fine.
I do appreciate the dive back into history, but ianvisits.co.uk (which I usually like) can do much better.
> The e-scooters that clutter up pavements may seem like a new thing, but a hundred years ago, there were already people zooming around London on powered scooters.
The problem is that we've given so much space to automobiles that there's no room for anything else (bikes, scooters, etc). Pedestrians have been given a sliver only because drivers need to walk between parking and their destination. This is true even in cities where the majority of people don't even drive!
Probably cause modern logistics, especially last mile logistics, is dependent on trucks/delivery vans/etc. So even though folks in a local area might like to walk around, their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network.
I think Bacerlona hits a good compromise. The city has the concept of a superblock, which is a few city blocks grouped into one calm zone. Most car traffic stays on the streets around the outside, the perimeter of the superblock. Inside, driving is restricted and only at low speeds where allowed, so people and bikes get the space. So deliveries and residents can still but only slowly.
That’s far from the only example - many cities in Asia follow a similar model.
I live in Vancouver, and we have plenty of both roads and bike lanes. Its not hard to fit a bike lane that's usually 1/4th the width of a lane onto a road or allow bikes to share with cars on smaller roads. We have trucks and vans and lots of deliveries too. The reason most cities are oriented around cars is because we designed them that way and it's difficult to change - there's no logistical constraint, its just politics and cost.
> their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network.
A road network isn't the only solution. In the early 20th century, for example, there was a separate narrow-gauge tunnel network beneath Chicago dedicated to freight. Deliveries were made directly to businesses via subbasements or elevator shafts. The network had stations at rail and ship terminals for accepting freight arriving from outside the city. At its height in 1929, the network had 150 locomotives pulling 10 to 15 cars per train.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company
This is neat but also seems like an insane solution to the problem of “I don’t like seeing service trucks”. How many such tunnels and elevators would it take to supply the buildings in a typical city’s downtown area?
And what else could we do with that investment?
I would argue the ammount of space in cities wasted on cars and their infrastructure is totally insane.
And again, the conversation here is about delivery trucks, not cars.
Eliminating cars doesn’t eliminate the need for infrastructure for moving goods.
they are no longer needed though with last mile delivery robots being introduced that can use the same elevator and stairs as humans
I wonder how many people such an automated freight system would kill per year, compared to cars in the same cities. Once we have some numbers, you would probably reconsider the use of "insane" there.
The context here is not cars but delivery trucks.
The tunnels in question also did not transport pedestrians and were essentially focused on coal delivery and ash removal.
Sure, let's restrict statistics to any automobile used to transport merchandise. What do you think, ready to imagine such a comparison?
Sure. In 2022, 672 pedestrians were killed by large trucks. How many of those do you believe happened in say New York City? And how many of those do you think you could eliminate with this hypothetical tunnel system? And how much will this hypothetical tunnel system cost?
New York has about 300 pedestrian deaths total from all vehicles every year. So my guesstimate is that if you eliminated all of the trucks from New York City, you might save 50 lives a year, max. I would also guesstimate that it would probably cost well north of $50 billion to create this tunnel system to connect all of the major buildings in New York City. So we’re looking at about $1 billion per life saved. I bet you could save more than one life per billion if you put that money somewhere more useful.
> What do you think, ready to imagine such a comparison?
What are you intending to accomplish with your snarky and condescending tone?
Smaller trucks. Japan makes due with one-lane alleys. (Not one in each direction. One. Deliveries and vehicular traffic are so uncommon, and the tightness of the space so inconducive to speeding, that it's safe for trucks and cars to go down them in whichever direction they need to.)
Makes do not due. A common error that seems to be increasing.
Probably meant "make do", as in, able to manage with limited means available.
London is edging in that direction with the introduction of "low traffic neighbourhoods". Basically this involves preventing vehicles using them as a through route, by limiting some connections to only emergency vehicles. The problem is that it's also annoying for residents as it means the allowed entry/exit routes aren't necessarily in the direction you need to go. Does Barcelona have a smarter method?
Isn’t the presumption that residents walk/bike/transit far more often than drive?
My city has been making efforts to stymie traffic flow to encourage less driving. I almost never drive but it's still annoying as crap when what used to be a 20 min drive is now 40+ because of how slow the first/last mile is now.
When I'm not driving I do enjoy it, so I understand that it's a tradeoff and I can't have it both ways. That doesn't make me not irritated when behind the wheel though.
That's unevenly distributed. Lots of people in London do walk or use public transport, but you still need many delivery drivers, tradespeople, etc and it doesn't make sense for them all to live outside the city. And people who don't usually drive occasionally need to use a vehicle, and then it's more stressful because you aren't used to having to know where the vehicular entrances are. It's too simplistic to just make provision for the majority and assume that it doesn't matter what the second order effects are.
So if you make it safe and pleasant for everybody who doesn't need a truck as part of their job, then the remaining roads are available for the small minority that "must" use them.
But maybe rethink whether they "need" to and whether said vehicles must live in dense residential neighborhoods.
https://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/window-washers-...
https://www.velove.se/
> and then it's more stressful because you aren't used to having to know where the vehicular entrances are
“I rarely drive and so I am stressed when I do” is not an issue that needs to be solved.
There is still pushback. I live in Toronto and when central businesses are canvassed about streetscape changes they overwhelmingly are against removing parking, access for cars, etc. They assume that 90% of their customers drive to them, but it turns out that it is closer to 10% for most of them.
In the most central (and expensive) parts of London - “Zone 1”, where all the famous landmarks are - that is indeed a safe assumption.
But go to a less central area, like Hendon and you’re still very much within London, but every street is lined on both sides with parked cars.
LTNs and pedestrianised areas are great for criminals on illegal high-powered e-bikes. Purpose-built getaway routes.
I'm not that convinced pedestrianised areas make it easier for them. At least you can spot the thieves if bikes are not supposed to be there.
lol. People will try to paint anything they don’t like as bad because criminals can also use it.
It’s about actively blocking police and other emergency vehicles while allowing a new class of problem vehicles, illegal e-motorbikes, to pass unimpeded.
As a motorist, the war on cars (and milking of motorists for tax revenue) would be less infuriating if we didn’t have the rising broad-daylight lawlessness of illegal e-bikes and scooters doing 30mph+ with no pedaling, no tax, and no insurance. Often with corporate branding in the form of Deliveroo or Just Eat bags. Sometimes balaclava-clad and engaging in dodgier activities.
(Would be in favour of regulating and policing these bikes and scooters rather than outright prohibition, but the UK government chooses to stick to prohibition and very inconsistent policing)
> Probably cause modern logistics, especially last mile logistics, is dependent on trucks/delivery vans/etc. So even though folks in a local area might like to walk around, their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network.
Totally. Banning automobiles is usually a bad idea, especially for residential zones. Years ago, I remember seeing a presentation about redeveloping a bad public housing block that was built in the 1960s with no auto-access (the assumption being poor people don't have cars), but it turns out that it meant they couldn't even get pizza.
At least in New York City and outside the U.S., I regularly see pizzas being delivered frequently by bicycle, moped, and motorcycle. I also see deliveries being done with small trucks (Kei style) and vans that fit in alleyways.
>the assumption being poor people don't have cars
Some number of the people at the time likely noticed the lapse and thought to themselves "good, this will make it inconvenient for them to get a car that lets them easily get far from their designated area on a whim" so they kept their mouths shut.
> This is true even in cities where the majority of people don't even drive!
I dunno... in New York City there are an awful lot of bike lanes now:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7355559,-73.9921499,13z/data...
There's still room for a lot more, but plenty of space has been taken away from automobiles precisely for bikes, scooters, etc. It's trending in the right direction. Especially now that bike lanes are increasingly being designed with parking between the bike land and vehicle lanes.
Per capita that's table scraps.
I don't even know what that means.
Residential streets with little traffic don't even need bike lines. But many of the busiest avenues have them.
NYC could always do better, but there's nothing "table scraps" here? It's massively improved my cycling experience. And it gets better every year.
The same case was in Italy, and calendars of Vespa were awesome back in the 70s ''Piaggio (maker of Vespa) had had its Pontedera (Italy) factory (where they used to make bomber planes) bombed during the conflict. Italy had it’s aircraft industry restricted to a great extent as part of the ceasefire agreement with the allies. Enrico Piaggio, son of the founder of the company Rinaldo Piaggio, decided to leave the aeronautical field behind and address the people’s need for an economic mode of transport. The idea was to make a scooter utilitarian and appealing enough to the masses. Till that time, scooters were mainly used by the military for quick on-ground transportation (you might have seen this in some Call of Duty games). So, two Piaggio engineers, Renzo Spolti and Vittorio Casini, took to their whiteboard and designed the first-ever Vespa, or maybe not quite. Mr. Piaggio was disappointed with the initial scooter. The scooter was named Paperino, and looking at the photo, you can understand Mr. Piaggios disappointment.' https://www.vespalicious.com/gallery/
Problem isn't the cars. Stop buying uselessly oversized SUVs, and trucks in case of muricans.
A Fiat 500/Panda is perfectly fine in cities.
In central London the cars are restricted quite a bit. In places like Soho and Oxford St they are more cluttered with pedestrians than cars.
For real. Loads of places in the UK are in desperate need of wider paths. Some probably haven't changed for 100 years except for making them narrower with stupid full height advertising screens (a travesty and civic vandalism by the councils)
I'm sure they went away because it's a fad or the costs/benefits don't balance, not because there is no space for them. This is evident by the fact that we have scooters in abundance now!
Despite city dwellers hating on cars and wanting complete streets, cars are poised to win even bigger when self driving becomes widespread.
Our roads and highways will metamorphose into logistics corridors and optimal public transit systems.
Everything will be delivered same hour. The cost of this will drop and entire new business models will be built on top of the "direct to you" model.
Self-driving cars will replace public transit. They connect every destination on demand. Short hops, cross-country long-haul. Waymo alikes will become cheaper than the city bus.
Van life will accelerate. People will live in their automated vans and SUVs. They'll become luxury and status items for knowledge workers who are constantly conveying themselves coast to coast, from cozy fire pits by the sea to hidden mountain getaways. Life in America will become one of constant travel, because we can take our life with us without lifting a finger. People will have large home bases in the affordable suburbs - possibly one on each coast. They'll wine and dine in the city, then be off to hike the next day.
Life will turn into adventure and it'll be accessible to almost everyone. Rich, poor. Young, old. Busy, retired.
Nobody will lift a finger for any of this.
We're going to want more roads.
Bikes don't stand a chance. They're inequitable. Old people, pregnant people, sick people, and children are all left out. They suck in the rain and the snow. You can't move anything of size or scale.
Automated self driving cars will win.
> Bikes don't stand a chance. They're inequitable. Old people, pregnant people, sick people, and children are all left out. They suck in the rain and the snow. You can't move anything of size or scale.
I would invite you to come and have a look in the Netherlands. It’s very common for octogenarians to cycle. My wife cycled up to the day of the birth of our daughter. Children have more independence because they can cycle to football practice on their own. Bike lanes are great for mobility scooters. It rains here, a lot! And it snows. I picked up our Christmas tree with our cargo bike. When I need to transport anything larger I will book a carshare, which are dotted around our neighbourhood.
And the result? People are happy and healthy.
European weather is still mild relative to the US. It will be so long as the Gulf Stream doesn't shut down.
Americans are fatter and less healthy.
Americans are busy and work longer and harder. ("Work hard, play hard.")
Americans buy more stuff. Big stuff. Lots of stuff. Frequently. (This is actually a superpower of our consumer economy.)
We have invested hundreds of trillions of dollars in our infrastructure. We might be able to put in a bike land here or there in a majorly dense city or two, but we're not changing all of this.
And more than anything else, America is fucking huge.
I know you Europeans love your model, but it doesn't apply to us. The proponents in the US trying to make it happen misunderstand the fundamental differences.
Just five years ago I would have said you were selling a monorail fantasy or sight to the blind to us. And an unfortunate few in the US were lapping it up as something we could actually do.
Now that self driving is finally arriving, what I'm saying is that our future is even brighter than most countries. We have the road infra to really make this magic.
I can wake up one day, make my coffee, hop into my car with my wife, and through no effort of my own, wind up at a mountain resort. No security checkpoints. No hassle packing. No screaming babies. We can listen to music, read, cuddle. It's our own space taking us wherever we want at complete and total leisure, affordably, comfortably, privately. We can even detour for food or whatever.
It's going to be pure magic. As big a revolution as the internet was.
> I know you Europeans love your model, but it doesn't apply to us.
lol. You're what we call "carbrained".
Explain how the climate of the coastal West coast is unsuitable for year-round bicycling. Much of it is nicer than the Netherlands and has several times the population.
It’s not about the climate. Cities are just too big.
I don't think this is a crazy take, but it is missing two big factors that self driving maximalists often ignore.
First is the cost of driving. A reasonable rule of thumb is $0.50/mile all in (i.e. including depreciation, repairs, gas, etc) -- you can get down to half that pretty easily and maybe a little lower, but especially if you're spending tons of time in this car you're probably going to want a nice comfy one, which will cost more and depreciate faster. So, these trips you're imagining everyone taking constantly are not going to be accessible to most people. Cars are already the second biggest expense in most Americans' budgets, one which scales with mileage, and which self driving would only increase (have to pay for the lidar, on-device compute, whatever remote service handled edge cases, etc).
The second thing your predictions miss is geometry. Despite the decades of predictions about self-driving cars being able to run safely at much higher speeds and with much tighter tolerances than human-run cars, the tyranny of geometry and stopping distances (which actually won't change much even with millisecond reaction times) means that throughput of car lanes is unlikely to change much (though we could all imagine top-down infrastructural changes helping this a lot, eg coordinated self driving cars and smart roads, those seem unlikely to land anytime soon given American political inclinations). Imagine how spaced-out people are on the highway -- in each lane, 1.6 people (average car occupancy) every football field (300 feet -- safe stopping distance at 70mph). If you're trying to go anywhere more densely packed than that -- e.g., a city, a restaurant, a ball game -- you're going to start to run into capacity constraints. Mass transit, walking, and cycling all can manage an order of magnitude higher throughput.
So while I think your prediction -- that self driving cars will increase demand for road space -- is right, the valence that takes for me is much more negative. The wealthy will be able to take up way more space on the road (e.g., one car each dropping off each kid at each extra curricular activity), condemning the poor to even worse traffic (especially the poor who cannot afford a self driving vehicle, who will not even be able to play candy crush while they're waiting in this traffic). People will continue to suburbanize and atomize, demanding their governments pay for bigger and bigger roads and suburbs, despoiling more of the areas you'd like to hike in, with debt that will keep rolling over to the next generation. Bikes and peds will continue to be marginalized as the norm for how far apart people live will continue to grow, making it even more impossible and dangerous to get anywhere without a car. I hope I'm wrong but this is how mass motorization played out the first time, in the post-war period, and if anything our society is less prepared now to oppose the inequitable, race-to-the-bottom, socialize-your-externalities results of that phase of development.
But this has been true every hundred years or so as technology changes and those that are building infrastructure know nothing else.
2000s : Damn these cars clogging up the road!
1900s : Damn these buggies clogging up the road!
1800s : Damn these carriages clogging up the road!
1700s : Damn these horses clogging up the road!
1600s : Damn these " " " " "
100BC : Damn these romans clogging up the road!
You really think the idea of anything like bumper to bumper traffic existed more than a hundred years ago? Everything before 2000s (though surely car traffic existed in the 1900s) seems like a dramatization.
How pedestrian.
Cities like NYC, London, Paris, LA, Chicago, Denver, Seattle all had traffic problems with cars in 1925.
In 1825 it was carriages and horse and buggy leaving horse manure all over the cobblestone or pavers.
In 1725 it was horses and heavy hooves turning the dirt road into mud and clay muck.
In 1625 it was much the same.
We had a large population centralized in cities long before the Industrial Revolution.
My point is there’s always some person complaining about the X on the road (as if their presence on the road isn’t somehow the opposite).
https://www.history101.nyc/5th-avenue-street-scene-1925
The number of horses in London was causing problems at the end of the 19th century - they don't scale well when you need to provide stables, food and of course leave piles of dung everywhere.
100 years ago was 1925 :)
I would think in some places there was bumper to bumper for short distances. I would expect in parts of NYC it existed. I think it was in the 1920s when traffic lights started to appear.
But 110 years ago, I agree with you on this.
My father was gifted a pair of these for his 50th birthday, would have been 1989, in London.
Little ICE scooters. They were a lot of fun and not very safe. We had drunk guests damaging themselves in the street.
They became toys for my brothers and I, who had plenty of accidents but learnt to ride them reasonably.
The engines didn’t idle particularly well and had no gears. You had to pull start, hop on and go quickly while reving just enough to idle without it moving. It took practice. You could push start too with some practice, especially once warm.
Lots of fun, but mileage wouldn’t have been great for serious use and refilling a pain at a regular petrol station. Might have been 2-stroke, I can’t remember. Tiny engine, closer to a strimmer than lawnmower.
Huge fun though for just bombing around on as a tween and young teen.
Must have been two stroke, 4 stroke motors are too large and heavy for an application like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped
It's interesting that the engines are roughly the same as the 4 stroke china girl engines you can get for bikes and scooters today, a 155cc and 191cc model.
I wonder if it was a weight/size to power tradeoff, or convention that stuck - was there a targeted engineering reason behind the similarity in size, or have enough things stayed similar in the world of standard parts and sizes that we still have roughly the same engine sizes?
Neat article.
God every website is such garbage these days. 1 second timer, full page pop up. Geolocation logging to sell to advertisers... I'm just not gonna read the article. It's a shame cause it looks interesting
I googled Autoped and found this site about the topic. Much cleaner.
https://horizonmicromobility.com/blogs/micromobility-blog/hi...
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First off, the price: £36 was much more than "£1,600 in today’s money". A railway clerk made £2 12 0 in a week in 1917, (less than £10/month if I did the shillings and all that properly), which makes the scooter price the equivalent of 3.5 months, which is £7,000 at the lowest end of today's London North Eastern Railway salary range. The fact that the picture has Lady something in it, suggests it was more of an upper-class thingy.
Second, the scooter may not be new, the cluttering certainly is. Look at that empty street!
Agreed - though street is AI generated from a close up image but it’s unknowns better it was actually empty or not :(
>"(street background expanded)"
As in... expanded using generative AI? (The perspective on the lamps is really off unless they're different size lamps)
Yes, using AI as per the filename "backgroundexpandedusingai" [0], it seems to be an expanded version of this pic from Wikipedia [1] (but blurrier).
[0] https://8400e186.delivery.rocketcdn.me/articles/wp-content/u...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscilla_Norman#/media/File:L...
Looks like the whole thing was run through AI, details on her face and scooter changed too.
And an oil drop on the street below the engine has disappeared.
I hate this. Why not show us the actual photo. Infuriating
Technically they do, just split into chunks interleaved with AI generated background. Original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscilla_Norman#/media/File:L...
>just split into chunks interleaved with AI
That would be relatively benign, the other possibility is that the whole thing was encoded and then decoded through some neural representation.
I wonder how we'll deal with the inability to tell what's true or not in the coming years. Even without full deepfakes.. just a gradual hypothetical restoration turning subtle hallucination in many many places.
Does anyone remember the 1980s PBS show Newtons Apple? A segment on that show was called "Newtons Lemons" and would show an old newsreel from I'm guessing from the 1940s or 1950s. Each one would feature some sort of "futuristic" gadget, and invariably it would be something that never panned out and I had never heard of as a kid. I distinctly remember one of these featuring basically a scooter with a small gas motor and the narrator talking about great it would be for commuting to work when we can all own these. By my recollection, it looked very much like escooters of today, just gas.
When escooters became a thing, I looked for this newsreel for a while and never found it. Anyone else remember this?
I also like to point out that we had electric powered food delivery services in London from 1932.
And the delivery drivers were probably paid more than they are now…
The food was probably healthier too
Did someone actually think scooters were new? We had them growing up, I thought it was common knowledge the only thing novel about e-bikes and e-scooters were the lithium ion batteries and electric motors giving adequate runtime and performance.
You could drive a moped on city streets before you turned 16 which got a lot of teenagers in my hometown to work and sports in the summer when their parents couldn’t.
But they were slow, noisy, and smelly compared to a modern ebike.
I’ve seen the original of the main photo before which is the only reason I know that two-stroke ICE engine powered standup scooters like that existed.
So, yes. Things do get invented so it’s not surprising. Luggage with wheels is a pretty recent invention considering when luggage and wheels were invented.
Boy I had a liminal moment looking at these photos and videos - this all could easily have been a fun AI media project. In fact, I think the first photo used outpainting (“street background expanded” reads the subtitle).
I’m enjoying my last year or so of visual media trust, as ephemeral as that is in reality.
No way that’s a 15 inch wheel.
Wikipedia says 10 inches [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped
Much like the motion picture industry, there are hardly any original ideas anymore.
I’m sorry but this article‘s headline/thesis is atrocious. The headline strongly implies there were e-scooters back then; there weren’t. Second, London’s pavements weren’t cluttered with autopeds; or if they were, there’s no evidence offered. Third, why expand the image with AI? The original is fine.
I do appreciate the dive back into history, but ianvisits.co.uk (which I usually like) can do much better.
These are ICE and not electric.