28MPH is 48 km/h. That’s wayyy to much.

And please, with some automatic speed limiter that reads and observes road signs and basic traffic laws.

Power is irrelevant. Pedestrian crash severity = speed² × shape impacting human head

And in bikes, power and if existant, motorization is what determines speed.

What you want is apparently a light motorcycle or moped or vespa-like motorized scooter. You do not really power it by muscles, you need a really heavy and powerful battery, it will be much more expensive, you need a helmet, you need a license plate, you can’t service it yourself, you really ought to wear heavy protective gear if you don’t want to lose much of your skin in an accident or fall, you can’t ride it in the winter because it is too cold, you need to use the road because you need far better overview at crossings. All these restrictions are written in blood.

Oh and on a 10 mile commute your speed advantage will be minimal in most cases.

The amazing thing about bicycles is that they hit a unique sweet spot of parameters and design constraints which simply is not accessible for motor vehicles. Mopeds have evolved multiple times from the (wrong) idea that you can have a fast bicycle by adding a motor, without changing fundamentally what it is.

And I forgot to say, all these safety regulations are written in blood.

Yeah companies don’t like any regulation. If it were as they dream we would still live in asbestos-poisoned buildings and have electric appliances that for lack of safety regularly kill small children.

What does this industry wants? Bikes where granny can go with 50 km/h on a bike path without a helmet?

The whole industry is worried, but it’s not about one company. With motors like these, we are moving further and further away from bicycles, and as an industry, we risk e-bikes being regulated by the EU. So far, e-bikes have been treated the same as bicycles in the EU. And we as the ZIV want to protect this status. To achieve this, we need to clarify the gray areas in regulation that define what is and what is not a bicycle. And two values are important here: performance and the ratio between rider power and motor power.

In this respect, DJI achieves values with the Avinox motor with 1000 watts and 800 percent muscle gain that did not exist before.

As I said, it’s not just about one specific brand. It’s about everyone pushing the performance values upwards. And the EU could look at this and ask: What are you actually doing here with your Newton meter power assistance factor race? Unlike the e-bike, the S-pedelec with a cut-off speed of 45 km/h is considered a moped in the L1 class and is subject to type approval. The type approval defines the assistance factor 4 for the S-pedelec.

And now the e-bike manufacturers are launching e-bikes that do not require type approval with a factor of 8 on the market.

Note that there is some confusing terminology: “eBike” as a common (but wrong) term means a bicycle with assistance electric power which is limited to 25 km/h in speed. The proper term for this is “Pedelec”. In difference to this, “S-Pedelec” means a light motorcycle which in Germany can go with up to 45 km/h, needs insurance, license plate, strict technical certification, helmet - and cannot, of course, use bicycle paths and cycle lanes.

And without surveillance and that surveillance capitalism that only helps fascists and people from Pinochet to Duterte to Trump to do human right violations. Europe has data protection because it has human rights, and it has human rights because our history has taught bitter lessons about totalitarism. We need a way forward - not back.

This does not surprise me.

I do not have a car, never had one. But what I can contribute is that I often come in to work thinking “that was such a nice ride on the bike” and in 35 years I never ever had a coworker telling me “this mornings drive to here was really pleasant fun”.

Now, I am a software developer, physicist and engineer living in Munich and in my new workplace, all my colleagues come in by bike.

All this suggests that there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth’s power systems, in every sense of the word “power,” offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other well; when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up. This energy is impossible to hoard and difficult to fight wars over.

Because somebody asked for the original link:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment

Was two weeks ago in David Attenborough’s ‘Ocean’ with my gf. We are both im our fifties and we left the theater shocked and almost crying. It showed all the beauty of life on earth. Our blue planet. And then underwater pictures of dragnet fishing. It’s so brutal that I don’t have the desire to ever eat seafish again.

Also, I have so much respect for Attenborough. He is 99 years old now and carries on. So much love for this earth. And so fierce.

It is a signpost where America is in history. Here the timetable:

July 1969: Under President Nixon, the first humans, coming from the US, step on the moon’s surface and plant an American flag before being brought back safely.

July 2025: Under President Trump, forces plant a flag in a river abruptly flooded due to climate change, after over 120 people have died and over 160 are still missing and most probably dead.

I’m much more in favour of good insulation rather than AC. Mostly because it consumes a huge amount of energy and it can contribute to UHI.

I think it is not as either-or as many commenters seem to perceive it. AC is needed specifically for extended very hot periods to bring temperatures down when it stays hot during the night. These are still rare in Western Europe.

Conversely, better insulation will drastically lower the power demand and energy costs of AC, and will also reduce the time it is needed at all. Insulation is also a mandatory requirement for heat pumps which we absolutely need in Central, Western and Eastern Europe if we don’t want to give up an Climate change and accept that our civilization will die.

I think for the short-term it might be better for European cities to provide safe AC-cooled spaces im walkable distances - this is faster to deploy and cheaper than retrofit all housing. The most endangered people are old citizens and many of them don’t have that much spare money.

Insulation will also help Europe to survive better if we have an AMOC collapse which could bring all of more cold, dry, and hot extremes.

Plus if AC and heat pumps are combined and integrated, soil heat exchangers can be used to reduce heating of the surrounding neighborhood which is another problem of AC.

Ftr, Uranium is not renewable

And Russian Uranium even less so … which is what much if Europe uses.

The thing is… nuclear is even more expensive than battery capacity combined with smart power management.

Others have said it would hurt businesses in the congestion zone. The report, however, says pedestrian activity inside the zone was up 8.4% in May, compared with the same period last year, while outside the zone only saw an increase of 2.7%.

The same can be seen in Paris: Reducing car traffic is good for businesses and shops. The whole discussion on cars in cities reminds the discussion on smoking in public spaces. The only interest group which actually had an advantage from it was the tabacco industry.

BTW it is a question of time not if, but when the electric grid in an Eastern European or Mediterranean country fails and this can cause far more deaths - I speak of hundreds of thousands - if it hits people depending on air conditioning. A big power failure in Italy or Greece and people would be fried alive.

This is also why we need solar power, it is far better matched to that peak demand. (Plus it kills fossil electricity by undercutting it in cost, which is a nice-to-have since we are at war with fossil power now - either we kill it, or it will kill us).

The 2003 European heatwave has been estimated to have killed more than 70,000 people.

A lot of heat deaths are not obvious, people might die days later because of circulatory problems or many other symptoms (I remember that heat can cause kidney failure, for example).

These deaths can only later be identified as excess deaths from mortality statistics. Germany had a “small” heat wave in summer 2020, and it killed more people than Corona in this summer (not to be confounded with the following years).

Stalin had “Prawda”, which means “Truth”, and it would never report on things that don’t exist. And the US have “Truth Social”.