Roody

It won't do much good to delete it now that it's been quoted.

It's unusual to see you on this forum. Why the sudden interest? Are things slow in P&R? You must have some good five year predictions!

tandempower

I was responding to your prediction about etrikes in what I thought was an analytically sophisticated way. I think it's worth noting that there is a culture of negativity devoted not only to impeding progress of alternatives, but also to milking money out of them in the process of killing them off. It's like we used to be killers until we realized we could be vampires in the process of killing. Disturbing, I know, but it's just amazing how impossible it is for rational technological progress to take place because of the huge majority of people who much prefer to spend their money on inefficient technologies for the sake of traditions, comfort, etc. Fast-forward to the next war and you'll suddenly see all these innovative ideas being touted in hopes of creating peace once again, but of course by the time war starts it's too late and it takes years to get back a culture of hope in progress, which we arguably had briefly following the last war, but have now lost due to too much stimulus bringing back the economic status quo.

cooker

So do you think e-trike commuting will be a thing in less than 4 years (based on my original prediction over a year ago)?

tandempower

What I've learned about predictions is that the moment you give up hope on a prediction coming true, you may be surprised all of the sudden. There were a number of small/narrow vehicles developed before gas prices went down, and many seemed to have quite a lot of potential. Likewise, bike/trike taxis were popular around the time of one of the last political conventions, so there is a potential for those to re-emerge in motorized and non-motorized models.

It is strange how these technologies emerge and disappear. Maybe the conspiracy theorists who believe the patents get bought up just to suppress them and control the market are right. There seems to be a conspiracy to protect conspiracies from being found out and put on the table for public scrutiny.

cooker

I predict the carless apartment towers in Austin will get built and will be part of a trend of downtown living including families.
https://www.bikeforums.net/living-car...complexes.html

Roody

I think it has more to do with gasoline prices than with a conspiracy. The CEO of Toyota in North America was saying this on Charlie Rose last night. He said there's a very strong correlation between the price of gas and the sales of electric vehicles and hybrids. I suspect the same is true of non-motor alternatives like bikes and pedicabs and even public transit. When gas is expensive, people want alternatives. When it's cheap, they prefer their nasty cars.

So my prediction is that LCF popularity will track with gas prices over the next 5 years. I have no idea what gas prices will do, but neither does the CEO of Toyota--and he's got a lot more riding on it than I do!

tandempower

The more inelastic oil/fuel demand, the more oil/fuel cartels profit from promoting oil/fuel dependency. So in a world where all vehicles burn oil/fuel, the price of gas can be lowered to tempt people into using more of it, which creates habits and patterns of behavior and economic activity that have momentum. Then, as the fuel prices are raised, that momentum causes revenues to rise with them.

Now what's changed is that more alternatives are developing that will allow any rise in oil/fuel prices to be met with shifts in demand. People could buy EVs or go LCF, for example, and they wouldn't need to buy as much fuel at the higher price. This makes the oil market more erratic, because they can't use high prices to build up capital reserves that can be used to subsidize fuel prices in order to drive up demand (momentum).

My concern is with deforestation/reforestation and with the human freedom to LCF, however, so all these business issues only concern me to the extent they support or undermine those causes. When more trees are removed to pave dedicated bus lanes, for example, I cringe and wonder what it would take to plant trees between all the lanes. When densification/infill development takes place, I see the benefit for walkability/bikablity, but I cringe at the loss of trees and green space.

Generally, I understand that changes don't happen overnight and there's a slow economic evolution to greater LCF and more environmentally-friendly economy, but I can't help thinking purely in terms of nature growing more trees if they were simply allowed to root, and humans getting around more car-free if they were simply driven by necessity to live that way.

cooker

Can you turn that into a five year prediction? We will all reduce our oil habits due to harm recognition, or we will all get sucked deeper into it due to vendor manipulation?

tandempower

Hard to say. Maybe everything will just keep getting tighter financially as investors lose certainty about getting returns on investments by hiking future future prices after establishing demand. There will be resistance from union/growth proponents, however, and idk whether they will win and force such a level of investment that will keep things more or less the same; or whether they will lose out and per capita purchasing power will generally decline, causing more people to LCF because it affords them a higher standard of living than if they wasted money on driving.

In fact, you could look at the difficulty of making a solid prediction as further evidence that investment will tighten. Investors can bet on certainty whether it's optimism or pessimism. What causes them to become risk-aversive is lack of certainty. Ironically, this also creates some certainty that markets will decline, but we may also be reaching a point where markets are kept artificially inflated purely for the sake of drawing in negative investments for the sake of cashing in on the lending of stocks to short sell. Markets may just be going completely haywire and who knows what it looks like when they really fail. It may just look like they're functioning normally, because people have taken them over as a marketing tool for soliciting investments to cannibalize.

Seattle Forrest

People by and large prefer their cars even when gas is not cheap, they just eventually reach a breaking point where they can't justify their preference.

I've seen bike shops running ads showing signs with gas prices. "You need a bike so you don't have to pay for this."

StarBiker

He also said that Electric's were a small part of the market. They were going with hydrogen over large batteries.
Electrics are not that feasible until you get a consensus on what works best.
Toyota sure has made a bundle off of the Prius, and why I have no idea. Great marketing.
And Lentz also acknowledged the #1 selling vehicle in the US, which has been the #1 selling vehicle for a long time. The Ford F 150.
Again, well off people aren't cycling around to get to work. Especially in 90 Degree summer weather.
They drive some where to get away from all the whackies, and cycle some place like the C&O Canal, NCR........for fun, and relaxation.
Climate is nearly as big as affluence, and in these threads it surprises me how little it's mentioned.

Robert C

I was commuting on my e-trike for a while, until I broke the frame. The e-trike was significantly more of a white knuckle experience, in comparison with my conventional e-bike . . . it might have something to do with how I was riding it (that, in turn, might have something to do with the broken frame).

Now I am back on my e-bike for commuting. As far as five years of change, which is not closer to four years, I don't expect to see much change. However, when I started here, I was the only teacher riding a bike to school; now there are three teachers riding bicycles.

tandempower

I think that's true of everything, which is also why prices are nudged up gradually instead of raising them all of the sudden. You don't make money by losing customers for charging them more, but by keeping them while charging them more.

It's a good marketing idea since people pay attention to gas price signs. It just reminds people that there's a way to get around without even dealing with gas, period.

Roody

Wasn't that an interesting interview? It interested me that automotive bigwigs think about some of the same things that we talk about on this carfree forum, and they struggle as we do thinking about what the world will be like in five or more years!

cooker

Okay it was only a year and 7 months, and Amazon made their first autonomous drone delivery near Cambridge England - as I predicted it is in a rural area: Amazon Prime Air's First Delivery Captured On Video | Fortune.com. At the same time a 7-11 convenience store has been doing a small scale local pilot project and has made 77 deliveries to customers near its location in Reno, Nevada. However that one looks to be more of a novelty project.

Roody

You're a freekin' fortune teller!!!

tandempower

Wait until the autonomous surface drone-droids fill up the bike lanes with deliveries! It also occurred to me that bike lanes may be good as a moving loading system from autonomous taxis and buses that don't need to stop because they have no driver. You could summon an autonomous moving platform that picks you up on the sidewalk, accelerates in the bike lane, and then docks to the side of a taxi or bus. Once the docking connection is secure, the gate opens and you step across into an already-moving vehicle. When you approach your destination, another drone can pick you up and decelerate in the bike lane as well. Autonomous vehicles have so much potential.

cooker

I hope not, as that would wreck the bike lane for cyclists.

I-Like-To-Bike

Especially for those with a vivid imagination!

Walter S

Is that a five year prediction? If so I hope I'm correct in giving it very low odds.

fietsbob

The Don is kept in power with an even smaller Minority support due to mass incarceration of any opponents speaking out against him in the past 4 years.

Ekdog

Are you referring to Trump? If so, do you really think this is appropriate for the LCF forum?

Rollfast

I'll probably be dead in five years but I'm definitely not going for a bicycle hearse when a Cadillac is to be had.

Machka 

I do hope this doesn't happen ... it would be extremely disappointing if it did! It's the last thing we cyclists need.

Rollfast

Now I really want a Lamborghini Miura.


Or at least a Honda Shadow.