This is also the case in Denmark, which I visited last week. Even in a cold, wet November, there were bicycles everywhere. I saw hundreds and hundreds of bikes parked in very large outdoor covered bike racks in downtown Copenhagen. You can easily bring them on the subways, and they even have metal guides/tracks to easily wheel bikes up and down the subway stairways.
People transported their small children on bicycles as well, in small buggies attached to the bikes.
I wasn’t actually aware that Denmark was so bike-friendly before my visit. I was supremely jealous.
Yeah, that’s the sort of thing I was referring to when I said “or the numbers are based on something other than the physical limitations”.
As an all-season bicycle commuter, I know exactly the looks you’re talking about. One thing that a lot of people don’t get is that, while there are winter conditions that are unsafe on a bike, they’re not the same conditions as what’s unsafe in a car. A lot of time when I’m out in the winter, I’m getting better traction and control than the cars around me. On the other hand, sometimes there are times that trying to go out on the roads would be a guaranteed wipeout for me, but that car drivers wouldn’t even notice.
I am a little curious about the OP: @Reply, you say you’d be interested in owning one of these ELF vehicles. What’s your use case for it?
I live in a pretty small town, as in being able to bike from one end to the other in maybe 20-30 min. I have studs on my mountain bike and they do the job, but the wind isn’t the most comfortable even with a thick coat and face coverings. Something semi enclosed would be nice, that’s all!
I live with my partner and previously had two regular cars, but we recently downsized to one. Doing so was the right choice, but having a second vehicle that’s slightly bigger than a bike while being cheaper than a car would be nice. It could be an ELF, one of its competitors, a golf cart, an electric cargo bike, or maybe even just my two feet and shoes if I weren’t so lazy
In another thread, someone suggested a used Nissan Leaf EV too, and that is only a few thousand dollars more than this would be new. Just considering all possibilities.
TLDR I just wish I / we had more variety in transportation options for small town commutes. Something bigger than a bike but smaller than a car. The Smart cars are perfect but they don’t seem to be sold here anymore.
I’m surprised that they don’t make scooters that can have optional shells. For instance, Vespa could design their scooters so that you could have a removable shell. When the weather is nice, it’s a regular Vespa. When it’s cold or rainy, put the shell on and get some protection. There have been actual scooters with shells, like this BMW C1:
That’s really nice, but would probably be very costly to bring to market these days. Instead, it seems like regular scooters could be designed in a way such that an optional enclosure can be put on when needed.
Yeah, it doesn’t seem like it’d be too hard to add an aftermarket canopy to something like that Simple Glide. Wouldn’t even be too hard to DIY one: You’d just need some PVC or something for a frame, and some clear vinyl sheeting stretched over it.
I suspect there are crashworthiness regulatory issues that prevent these things as factory options. And perhaps even prevent a cottage industry of aftermarket mods.
I see vids of scooters with windshield/ roof combos all the time. Toodling around Thailand, China, India, etc. They’re also flimsy and collapse whenever the scooter has a collision with [whatever].
I speculate that these things fall into a crack in our regulations where it can’t be done cost effectively, or at all. And even setting aside the current insanity in DC, there is not a constituency pushing to modernize the motor vehicle design regs to allow for innovative flavors of vehicles blurring the lines between cars & motorcycles & bicycles.
One challenge with adding a shell to current scooters is that the front rotates when you turn. Notice the BMW C1 has a fixed frame to where steering doesn’t cause the front of the scooter to rotate. If a modern scooter had the front fixed to the frame, it would be pretty simple to have a removable canopy since it could be mounted to fixed locations on the front.
I’m sure crashworthiness of the canopy could be an issue, but considering that you basically have no protection on a scooter, it doesn’t seem like a canopy would be all that problematic. Sure, it may break if you crash, but so will your body when it’s totally exposed on the scooter.
e.g. If at the time the regs were written, the legal definition of “roof” is expansive, but everybody was thinking about the kind on a car, and so the regs require that all roofs be roll-over safe, well that’s a problem for a scooter roof also required to be rollover safe.
It’s certainly logically possible to rewrite the regs so “roof” means the kind on a car, not on a scooter. But until there’s a political constituency pushing to change that, there it sits.
That’s a completely made up example, but the larger point stands. Regs contain rigid definitions that were (mostly) pretty darn sensible when written. But they don’t auto-update as technology or culture changes. They get updated by the regulator when somebody, manufacturer lobby or customer lobby or whatever, leans on the regulator and/or Congress to demand an update.
So far this particular wheel isn’t squeaking real loud. It sure could. But it isn’t yet.
One thing I’d wonder about, regarding the windshield/windows on the ELF, as well as on those scooters, is the glass fogging up in cold and wet weather.
Unless it has a defroster/defogger (which I kind of doubt, given the extra weight, and extra load it’d put on the batteries), taking it out in the kind of weather conditions for which @Reply really wants the protection from the elements would, I imagine, lead to fogged-up windows pretty rapidly.
If the thing is open air, I think both sides of the glass will be at ambient temp. No fogging then. If you’d stored it in a warm garage or house vestibule then took it out into the cold, it’d do just your glasses do.
But yeah, if the compartment had, say, zip-up clear plastic side panels to keep almost all the wind & rain out and there’s a person in a parka breathing in there, real quickly the windows would fog up. Especially if said person was pedaling, not just sitting there sedately shivering.
Yeah, a fully-enclosed cabin, with a human inside and cold outside, would fog up pretty quick. Especially for a cabin not much bigger than the size of the human. Come to think of it, that’s probably the reason why this thing isn’t fully-enclosed.
I moved (progressively) in 2017 from a car to an electric scooter (those kick-scooters) … people are still amazed that I ride some 15 miles of distance (x2) with those to business meetings (in a suit if must be) - it takes me the same amount of time from door-to-door than using the car … then (without me prompting), I ALWAYS hear reasons why it would not work for them … it is like the amen in church.
same here … if you do NOT want to move into that vehicle, there are 100s of reasons to NOT do … If you are more adventorous and inclined, you just go and try it out and if it fits your needs shell out an amount that is way lower than other trad. vehicle cost.
Concerning the BMW C1 (a historic failure) - their bet was on “no crash helmet needed”, as the person was strapped into the vehicle with a 4point harness, and they could show that the driver’s head would not touch the soil in a fall … but it did not legally turn out that way … besideds, it was a (IIRC) 125cc underpowered vehicle … def. worth revisiting it now with e-solutions available.
Maybe, but Amsterdam (or more appropriately, The Netherlands as a whole) in 1970 was in basically the same place as the USA is now with low single-digit cycling mode share and cars infesting every last bit of space they could possibly find. That happened a lot faster than in the US though, basically entirely after WWII whereas in the US it had been going on since the 1900s and 1910s. The meteoric rise is dead children caused a backlash amongst the Dutch, and policy changes brought cycling back over the last 50 years.
In the US, road deaths were (and still are) reframed as “just the cost of doing business” as it were. In the 1920s automobile lobbying groups like AAA and others invented “crimes” like jaywalking and they reframed collisions as “accidents” where blame was shifted away from the driver to the victim or to nebulous supposedly uncontrollable factors, whereas before then they were referred to in the media as “motor killings.” Unfortunately the propaganda worked here, and few Americans can even conceive of a street as being anything other than a place for cars and nothing else.
Even in Denmark, when they proposed making Copenhagen’s main shopping street Strøget pedestrian-only in the 1960s in the face of increasing automobile traffic, there was backlash and a lot of pearl-clutching. They said “we’re not Italians, we don’t stroll or hang out in plazas, this will never work, what about lost business, hurr durr, rabble rabble”. It turned out to be one of the most successful pedestrianized streets in the world. I will grant that Copenhagen also has a robust public transportation network to feed pedestrians into and out of their downtown, which is something that most US cities don’t have, and why most downtown pedestrian malls here never worked out.
In the USA, the critical thing is “Density, density, density”. They (mostly) have it; we (mostly) don’t.
To be sure, had the relative timing of WWII and the rise of the automobile and suburbia been different, all of the USA other than abject ruralia / wilderness might look like the 5 boroughs of NYC do today.
But path dependence is a real thing and the USA can only start to change today from where it is today.
Even Europe doesn’t look like that, and there’s plenty of suburban areas, they’re just better connected and not as low-density as you tend to find in the US. Modern subdivisions in California are actually rather dense by suburban standards, the problem is that they’re isolated from one another with deliberately few or no connections between each other that would allow someone to walk or bike, or not take a miles-long detour by car. Even in the US many people’s daily needs (shopping, groceries, school, recreation) are within an easily bikeable distance, even if the work commute is not, but there’s no actual pathway to do so (literally and figuratively).
Even in the US, we see some small successes here and there, usually in mid-sized blueish-purplish towns that have enough money, enough active people, and a responsive city council or county government.
In the past decade or so, I’ve seen a lot of bike trail growth in towns like Eureka, CA; Ft. Collins and Boulder, CO; Bend, OR; Santa Cruz, CA; Bellingham, WA; etc. Usually they’re driven by small transit advocacy groups and local would-be bike commuters. Rails-to-trails is a big push too.
It’s harder in big cities, but even then, Portland, Chicago, Seattle, Denver, etc. are adding bike lanes and thoroughfares here and there, along with facilitating mix-mode transportation (like bringing your bike onto a bus/subway).
Even the ride-hailing apps like Lyft were experimenting with that, charting you a route that might start with a Lyft to the station, taking a subway most of the way, and then finishing with a Divvy rental bike.
