this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Solarpunk Travel
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I think it is a weirdly important time to imagine the future of electric bicycles.
We like to imagine hover cars, spaceships, jet packs blah blah blah… what about a far future e-bike that can be peddled by a person, is light enough to pick up and carry a reasonable distance and also has a battery big enough to go 1000 miles on a charge? An assumption of almost every sci-fi is that humans figure out how to make immensely powerful engines and store huge amounts of energy in small devices and yet the most obvious application, electric bicycles, is always ignored.
Landing on an alien planet with a group of people and need to make a camp? Make dirt biking trails and boom you have a transportation system that is extremely low maintenance and simple to maintain. Is there some kind of obstacle like a river? Bicycles are easy to carry to the other side of the obstacle were you can get back on.
Are we in a far future post apocalypse but with advanced technology? Literally everybody is going to be riding around electric bicycles.
What makes electric bicycles such a weirdly invisible technology in media is they don’t seem futuristic like a segway or electric unicycle. They just look like a gravel bicycle with a battery strapped to them… but that is what makes the electric bicycle paradoxically such a sure bet for being used absolutely everywhere in the future no matter which direction things go. We already perfected the mountain bike design, the road bike design, the gravel bicycle design…. it’s like we spent the 20th century developing the perfect chassis for an electric motor and battery meant to transport a single person and some cargo and now we are finally getting around to dropping the electric motor and battery in.
Less futuristic cities with flying car traffic, more solar punk futures with electric bicycles having replaced the vast majority of personal transit on lightly developed planets, large space stations ships and…. just about everywhere else too.
You're right, it's a no brainer. And to add: It's a very common critic of all post apocalyptic scenarios that noone considers to use bikes which are rugged enough to be used especially in such circumstances.
In The Stand, one of the characters rode a motorcycle but then stopped because he kept having visions of crashing and dying alone in a ditch (there was also a bunch of other psychological trauma involved). He walks for hundreds of miles after ditching his motorcycle and then one day he suddenly stops and thinks "why the fuck haven't I been riding a bicycle?!" And then just laughs at himself.
That is hilarious, it is definitely easy to forget bicycles are anything more than toys, we were all raised in car-brained societies to basically see them as children’s toys (not that children have anywhere to ride them Stranger Things style in the modern hellscape of car infrastructure that is aggressively hostile towards children riding bicycles).
@dumpsterlid @ProdigalFrog Moondust would be heck on the bearings, though.
You've got a point but for 1000 miles you're gonna want something more like a proper electric motorbike because you need speed and with the comes harder engineering requirements and desire for amenities you don't need on a run-around-town ebike
I mean, I am not suggesting the purpose of an 1000 mile range e-bike is to be the best vehicle to carry someone 1000 miles, rather I chose an absurdly high number to suggest an electric bicycle that basically has infinite charge for what you are using it for. True if you are just cruising long distances a more dirt bike/motorcycle construction makes sense, but then you have a heavy ass vehicle you can’t carry over obstacles.
@dumpsterlid @ProdigalFrog in the alien river scenario, with enough energy density it would be pretty easy to just jump over it
Yeah but if you are going to jump an alien river then you have to wear a cool outfit while you do it.
It's because in most of those sort of scenarios, we've got unlimited clean energy. If that's the case, pedalling doesn't make sense except for exercise. There are ebikes now that have a throttle alongside the pedal assist, so the size and weight of the bike is already low. Add the battery efficiency to get the 1,000 mile charge, and you can use the throttle to get everywhere. You'll get there faster too. If bikes show up in sci fi, they're likely to be electric motorbikes.
In a future with clean flying cars, especially the post scarcity future, the vast majority of the current problems with cars are gone. You just book a self flying car to take you to your destination and back, and it goes to another customer when you're done. In a Star Trek type future, you just beam there and back. For the most part, people don't care about travelling, they just want to be at their destination. If there's a hand wavy sci fi way around it, people will take it.
The problems that bikes and ebikes solve at the moment tend to be solved in futuristic stories, or in post apocalyptic stories, they don't matter. Why bother worrying about pollution when you're in a nuclear winter?
In the real world, ebikes are great, but in futuristic stories, they generally don't matter.
Exercise is incredibly important though? An electric bicycle having peddles that maybe helps you charge up the battery a little bit if you push extra hard makes perfect sense.
Maybe the pedals aren’t needed but especially in terms of a bicycle being used in harsh conditions having a pedal system as a backup just seems like a silly thing to forego.
The only reason this statement doesn’t seem absurd on the face of it is that we all live in car brained cultures where getting anywhere is a miserable process of sitting in traffic on endless concrete highways and stroads. This is an absurd statement though make no mistake, people love traveling, people love moving when it is pleasant to move. I don’t disagree that a lot of sci-fi is incredibly shortsighted and doesn’t understand this fundamental thing about humans, but really this is a thing even children understand about humans.
The thing is, whether we get Star Trek transporters and hover cars or we get an apocalypse with scarce resources, in either future, electric bicycles will be everywhere. If we can just teleport where we want to go like Star Trek than practically the only form of transportation people use will be electric bicycles because it is a pleasant and simple thing to ride a bicycle for an errand or to commute a small distance. If we live in an apocalypse, guess what everybody is riding bicycles there aren’t going to be cars and motorcycles and oil (you think making an electric battery in the apocalypse is hard, try drilling for oil) or even big heavy electric cars.
This is where your thinking really misses the mark, in futuristic settings “solving” the problem of transportation would actually lead to even more widespread depression, isolation and mental health/quality of life issues than everybody driving around in cars already creates (which is a LOT). There would be an immediate pressing need to reproduce the human experience of travel, and the easiest way to do that is to jump on a bicycle.