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Gainesville needs to prepare for boom in e-bikes
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Gainesville wants to organize for increase in e-bikes
The younger girl zipped alongside thirteenth Road on a rental e-scooter, grocery luggage precariously swinging from the steering deal with.
On the sidewalk, after all. You’ve acquired to be suicidal to get on thirteenth with out first folding your self right into a metal cocoon.
Then just a little bump, and her groceries had been strewn throughout the sidewalk.
Improper EV for the job, I assumed.
Pay attention, everyone’s speaking about EVs now.
President Joe Biden raves about Ford’s humongous new e-pickup. We even give tax breaks to Tesla patrons. And I hear the long run have to be electrical if we’re going to cease kicking the carbon can down the street.
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Enjoyable reality: The world’s best-selling EVs are … ta da! … electric-assisted bicycles. Even in autoAmerica.
“Individuals purchased e-bikes at a price of a couple of each minute all through 2020,” experiences Electrek. “E-bikes even outsold electrical vehicles by greater than two to at least one within the U.S.”
No shock. E-bikes are reasonably priced, helpful for city commutes and are available in quite a lot of types … even e-SUV bikes that may tote groceries, children and the household canine.
I’ve acquired nothing in opposition to e-scooters. And I don’t purchase the argument that they’re a menace to public security. Quick drivers who can’t cease when a scooter — or a toddler — will get of their means are the menace.
However e-bikes are coming. And Gainesville’s not prepared for them.
“Truthfully, it’s an rising mode at this level,” says Malissa McCreedy, the town’s mobility director. “We don’t have numerous knowledge but about how or why or when persons are utilizing them. As they turn into extra prevalent we now have to start out defining their place.”
One “place” e-bikes don’t belong is on the sidewalk. A few of them can go as much as 30 mph, which is unhealthy for pedestrians.
However I continuously see e-bikes on the sidewalks as a result of their house owners are afraid to journey on the road.
And who can blame them?
So whereas we’re all attempting to stake out our correct place within the multi-modal combine, right here’s a number of concepts to assist make Gainesville safer for people. Whether or not they’re on scooters, e-bikes, trikes, unicycles, curler skates or pogo-sticks.
• Protected bike lanes.
Town has miles of on-street bike lanes. However thus far just a few blocks of them — only in the near past put in on fifteenth Road north of the College of Florida — are separated from visitors by bodily limitations. Different cities are discovering methods to make protected bike lanes which can be each cheap and engaging. Gainesville’s objective needs to be to ultimately separate all of its bike lanes from visitors.
• Off-street paths are higher nonetheless, and the recognition of the path system snaking outward from Depot Park speaks for itself. Town ought to use a few of its American Rescue Plan {dollars} to fund a greenway grasp plan that envisions an increasing city path community.
• Sluggish the vehicles! By any and each means potential.
This needs to be job No. 1, as a result of velocity kills. And it might probably’t be only a Gainesville crucial.
UF is surrounded by harmful state highways. I can’t consider our “flagship” lacks the affect (the need, perhaps) to nudge the Florida Division of Transportation towards extra life-saving street designs.
And don’t get me began on the county’s ridiculously over-designed Northwest sixteenth Avenue speedway. Has Alachua County even heard of Imaginative and prescient Zero?
The EVs are coming, Gainesville. And numerous them, perhaps most of them, will roll in on simply two wheels.
Let’s be prepared for them.
Ron Cunningham is former editorial web page editor of The Solar. Learn his weblog at www.floridavelocipede.com. E mail him at ron@freegnv.com.
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