• Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    Plot twist: as heavy cars keeps getting in the way of Amazon’s “cargo bikes”, they end up getting America to finally stop prioritizing cars in their city planning for residential and commercial areas.

    Then commerce starts to adapt and cities become slightly more walkable.

    Then Americans start buying smaller vehicles to travel to/from their cars.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    As long as they follow bike lane etiquette of the larger thing yielding to the smaller thing, I’d rather have these than full vans/trucks that park in the bike lanes anyway. At least locally there aren’t many corporate biking incentives so there isn’t much induced demand for biking infrastructure from businesses. Most small businesses hate it for taking up street parking. A lot of last-mile delivery with urban vans/trucks is a real cracking a walnut with a sledgehammer scenario, but they’re paying road taxes on those vehicles that they disproportionately destroy the roads with so we get roads. With this we get street conversions as pedestrianised cargo bike corridors.

    edit: It sucks this particular model costs like $10-15k though. A slightly smaller one at $5k would meet all of my urban driving needs and make a great microcamper.

  • Athena5898 [any]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    I kinda want one NGL. Don’t have bike infrastructure here so you need something that might scratch a truck if they hit you. Get a lot of hate on the trike I have because its not as easy to bully as a regular bike.

  • Formerlyfarman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 day ago

    This is actually very cool. The wheels seem too small for it to work in the real world. We tried building a similar concept a few years ago, smaller overall, with 3 bigger wheels, mostly to bring groceries from the town, didn’t work very well, road quality was too poor and it got stuck a lot. Too heavy. had to sell it.

    • Next they will allow for remote pedalling by wire and we will have Fifteen Million Credits irl


      ⓘ This user has been granted reprieve by death until completing unfinished business: making “a GOOD post, one for the angels!”.

    • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      Going by the 1968 vienna contract definition which is still in effect: yeah

      “any vehicle which has at least two wheels and is propelled solely by the muscular energy of the persons on that vehicle, in particular by means of pedals or hand-cranks.”

      caveat for the electric motor that only supports you pedaling and up to speeds of X with Watts of Y and all but yeah, that’s a bicycle.

      I don’t even think this is amazon skirting regulations, unless you up-end the entire system you can’t really define a bicycle any better. There should be more bicycles like this.