micromobility - Ebikes, scooters, longboards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
Ebikes, bicycles, scooters, skateboards, longboards, eboards, motorcycles, skates, unicycles: Whatever floats your goat, this is all things micromobility!
"Transportation using lightweight vehicles such as bicycles or scooters, especially electric ones that may be borrowed as part of a self-service rental program in which people rent vehicles for short-term use within a town or city.
micromobility is seen as a potential solution to moving people more efficiently around cities"
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All vehicles benefit from momentum. Stopping and starting is huge energy suck, except in vehicles with braking recovery systems in which case it's only a less bad energy inefficiency. Braking energy capture is never 100% efficient.
This logic ("muh momentum!") can be used by every conveyance to justify rolling through stop signage.
There is a difference between a vehicle you have to power with your own muscles and a vehicle that you power by moving your big toe on the gas pedal. of course they all benefit from momentum, but I'd much rather have to come to a complete stop and then start up again in a car.
No sympathy for the environment, huh?
That latter article is talking about how many tons of CO2 could be reduced just by better optimizing traffic in the city so that fewer cars hit red lights.
No argument, getting rid of cars would have the biggest positive impact, but failing that, optimizing lights for cars, while not helping cyclist safety, would be a much better investment if we want to reduce pollution. Idaho stops for cyclists from the OP post would actually be detrimental to the environment based on the conclusions from the study: that allowing it makes drivers more cautious, implying more full stops, more time idling, and more CO2 produced per car trip.
Roundabouts.
As long as they are done correctly. I've seen many new roundabouts that are two lanes wide and allow people in the middle lane to turn out of the roundabout. Only the outer lane should turn out, otherwise there's essentially a stop sign because you never know what the other cars are going to do.
+100 on roundabouts. We have not nearly enough in the US, although they're becoming more popular. A little troublesome for cyclists, though, because cars never stop. It's a worst-case situation for bikes.
I live in Minneapolis, which is graced with 98 miles of bike lanes and 101 miles of off-street bikeways and trails. When industry turned from blue to more white collar last century, they tore out all of the old railway lines and converted it to paths. It's the most incredible bicycling in the US, bar none. "Share the road" isn't an issue, because you can get nearly anywhere in the greater metropolitan Twin Cities in dedicated bike paths, often without ever having to share a street with cars, except to cross.
I'm in a closed suburban neighborhood; within two miles are still farms and horses. Yet I can get on my bike, ride 5 blocks through the neighborhood (OK, with cars for that part), get on a Rail Line (they're still mostly named after the rail lines they used to be), ride to a park, through it, onto another line, and all the way up into the nearest town 5 miles away to an organic grocery store. I have to cross 1 road on that entire line, and along a road-ajacent bike path for a half mile. And I could ride all the way across the Cities to a suburb on the far side - 47 miles - on dedicated bike paths. Some of those are bike lanes, but still; I've lived here for 7 years now, and it still blows my mind. The network is truly incredible, and something to be proud of. Most of the native cyclists, from the online bitching I read, have no clue how good they have it.
Many cyclists here - the spandex & clip-shoe types, still ride on the road with the cars, even when there's a perfectly good, paved bike lane next to them; I chalk that up to basic Midwestern passive-aggressiveness, but I'll grant that maybe there's a good reason for it.
Anyway, that kind of strayed off the topic of round-abouts, but if you're a cyclist, Minneapolis is one of the best cities in the world in which to live.
I would love, love love to see more roundabouts here, there's a lot of inertia against them though.