The James Beard Public Market, set to open next year on SW 6th and Alder (one block from Pioneer Square), is one of the most important steps yet in the revitalization of downtown Portland. With about 40 vendor spaces under one roof in the busy central city, planners must be mindful of how they’ll be restocked. After all, it would be embarrassing for Portland if a bunch of large trucks spewing toxic emissions were parked out front.
Good thing there’s another way: What if the market worked with the City and innovative local businesses to create a zero emission microhub that could serve the new market with electric cargo trikes and small electric trucks? That’s an idea currently being tossed around by a Dream Team of experts who hope their plan gains traction in time for opening day.
Franklin Jones, the CEO and founder of B-line Urban Delivery, tells BikePortland he’s shopping around a proposal to create a, “zero emissions logistics model” for the market. Jones is among a group that includes Portland Bureau of Transportation Urban Freight Coordinator Russ Brooks, James Beard Public Market Executive Director Jessica Elkan (who’s leading this proposal), and Honda Brand Strategist June Jashinski (I explain the Honda part below). These four have come together on a proposal they hope to present at a panel at the upcoming SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas in March.
Their presentation is titled, “Rethink Public Markets: Zero Emissions Delivery and Microhubs.” It’s currently one of dozens of panels being proposed for SXSW, which are chosen in part by a vote of the public. Here’s the presentation blurb:
“Picture a market bustling with people as they browse local products, and fresh Oregon produce. Public markets unite people from diverse backgrounds, but truck traffic often follows. This session explores a first-of-its-kind vision by the Portland Bureau of Transportation, B-line, James Beard Public Market, and Fastport to transform the way goods move from farm to vendor. By centralizing deliveries, and using eQuads for the last-mile, this model reimagines public markets, transportation, and urban spaces for communities, creating a model for a more human-first, zero-emissions future.”
Jones and PBOT are not newcomers to these concepts. B-line has operated in Portland since 2009 and Jones currently oversees a fleet of electric trikes that serve dozens of customers at his consolidation and distribution center in the central eastside. And the City of Portland has a long record of interest in electric, bike-powered delivery hubs. Since as early as 2021, the City has sought ways to dramatically reduce the number of large trucks downtown. Cargo bikes and micro-deliver hubs played a relatively prominent role in PBOT’s 2040 Freight Plan (adopted in 2023). And just earlier this year, PBOT wrapped up a demonstration project for a Zero Emission Delivery Zone downtown and issued a request for information (RFI) for a micro-delivery hub pilot that would be operated out of a city-owned parking garage.
Why is Honda involved in this? Turns out they’ve just debuted a new “Fastport” eQuad prototype that’s tailor-made for last-mile business deliveries. Fastport isn’t just a vehicle, Honda says it’s a “fleet-as-a-service” micromobility venture that comes with a turnkey system of software, swappable batteries, service, and more.
Jones and the folks behind the James Beard Public Market see their proposal as a chance to show the world that urban, zero emission delivery can be a reality. As of today, no contracts have been signed and no funding has been identified — although they’ve applied for a Portland Clean Energy Fund (PCEF) grant. Given the experiences and connections of this all-star team and all the excitement about the market, hopefully they can get make funding happen.
If you think this is a cool idea worthy of exploration, go over to the SXSW panel picker and vote for the presentation. You have until August 24th to show your support.
Thanks for reading.
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Is there a section for the AI food delivery robots, like what Georgia Tech and NCSU A&T already use? They are the cutest things, really! And quite efficient. They look like plastic boxes on wheels, quite mobile, they even learn to cross busy streets.
OSU has the Starship delivery robots and they are indeed the cutest things. My kids love seeing them, and honestly so do I.
I rode one when visiting my nephew at OSU and it tried to buck me off!
I would rather humans have jobs
Just wait till you see what AI is going to do to humanity.
Consisering the meager improvements from GPT-4 to GPT-5, likely not much.
When I first started programming in a real production environment (1987) my supervisor would give me specs and I’d code to them.
Yesterday (basicaly on a whim) I gave GPT-5 specs for a simple web app I’d been planning to write – 5 minutes later I had it up and running. 30 minutes later it was tweaked to my liking and deployed to the intranet for our folks to use.
Basically, the job I had 38 years ago no longer exists. I’m not sure how long it will take in other sectors, but jobs are going to be going away.
By 4 years, 4 months and 11 days from now I need to make my job vastly easier – the combination of formal CS education and decades of experience covering all aspects of our industry (ops, buying, regulatory and more) would be very difficult to replace.
Working with our ERP provider we’ll have an LLM interface to our backend data before then and I’ll be able to train our CEO and CFO (both bright guys who ask me lots of data driven questions) how to use it as a resource instead of me. Hopefully I’ll be able to get rid of my position entirely by simplifying the various tasks and shifting them to people who have capacity.
From 50 hours a week I intend to be down to 27 (3 9’s) by that time.
Cool, AI can spit out code others have written over the decades. Its not creating new code. It cant create something that hasnt already been created.
Not sure how this shows that AI, which has a tendency to make up facts and to be sycophantic is going to take massive amounts of jobs. Most of the jobs supposedly already taken by AI has far more likely been outsourced to third party companies in India and other such places.
Even if AI does take massive amounts of jobs, that just means this entire economic system will completely crumble since no one will have money to buy things anymore.
So cool, you might be working less, but the unhoused population will explode in numbers and people will be left to rot on the streets. AI under capitalism is an extremely terrible thing for the world and everyone should be opposed to it until we abolish the system that rewards greed and the worst anti-social behaviors for a system that puts the well being for all front and center.
Oh, I’m not saying it’s a good thing.
The evidence is clear that people, men in particular, will not do well with the upcoming changes.
Believing AI can’t do certain jobs because it can’t *now* is really short sighted, however.
In our organization there are quite a few jobs that will likely succumb to that – mostly attrition through retirement. We have an aging support staff.
Having helped write our AR, AP and Buying procedures I can see that staff shrinking with AI tools improving productivity.
Probably not to the extent that it does to programming, but who knows? In 2 hours today I started and completed a project I would have taken 8-10 hours to do pre GPT-5.
Again, its great that AI has made your job easier, but going from GPT-4 to GPT-5 has shown only a small improvement overall. AI has likely platued since its already been trained on all of the worlds data, and the majority of new data it gets is barely going to be expert level data.
And since AI has not shown any way towards profitability and the recoupment of the billions of dollars that have been invested in it, how much longer are investors going to burn through their cash to fund something that is only going to need exponentially more money?
I really dont think AI is going to be the massive job killer many think it will be. That will continue to be outsourcing to cheaper labor elsewhere.
In fact, it can. AI does not just regurgitate ingested snippets; it is capable of writing novel and unique code (or creating new and unique text and pictures), and the new agent modes reveal it can create plans and execute them, checking its progress and self-correcting along the way.
It’s far from perfect, and results are still quite mixed (including the sycophancy and hallucinations you noted, both of which are diminishing), but it is definitely capable of understanding complex problems and writing code it has never seen before.
Whether it puts large numbers of people out of work remains to be seen. My personal feeling is that it won’t, but it’s very hard to say. AI is a new thing in the world, and what its impact will be is very hard to gauge at this stage. It could be bad, and it could be great. Most likely it will be a mix of both. Rotary dial telephones, automatic elevators, and agricultural combines eliminated a lot of jobs, but society eventually recovered.
I have a casual acquaintance who’s also a developer and he said something very similar to what you said: he can have an LLM write software for him, and even write test scripts for him, and he just has to review the code. It’s reduced his workload to a fraction of what it used to be.
The tricky thing of course is that you still need an experienced developer for the last 5%, and apparently there aren’t going to be any more of those since LLMs make it kind of pointless to hire entry-level developers. I guess the current crop of experienced developers are guaranteed lifetime employment.
That job you had 38 years ago doesn’t even exist today without AI. Vomiting up a hello world React app or WordPress blog and tinkering with the theme isn’t a job for a software developer anymore because… We have react and WordPress.
I’m impressed with what AI does, but not impressed with it’s ability to do even basic aspects of a software dev job.
YES !!
VOTED !!
LOVE IT !!
LET’S DO IT !!
GO PORTLAND GO !!
PORTLAND IS WHAT WE MAKE IT !!
If Portland could pull off an 80-90% car-free downtown, it would be an engineering marvel, a top ten international destination, the “Paris or the Venice of the Western Hemisphere.” There would be global competition for professionals, designers and businesses to be a part of it.
This should be Portland’s 20 year plan, not 5% less traffic deaths.
I’ve seen numerous car-free downtowns, so bombed out that people avoid them. Akron Ohio, Camden NJ, Wilson NC…
The downtowns I’ve seen in the Netherlands and other parts of Europe don’t ban cars, but they do heavily regulate them and make sure they can’t go over 20 mph even when the drivers are drunk, or high, or on medications, or even having a medical emergency. The areas that are fully pedestrianized with hydraulic bollards are really small, no more than a few blocks of Ankeny in comparison, but packed with pedestrians; the larger downtown areas with apartments and offices do allow traffic, but they tend to be outside the touristy parts of the cities.
Nice example details. So, not 80-90% car-free? But significantly more thought and priority given to making it inviting for people outside of vehicles?
Most of the fully pedestrianized spaces I’ve seen are where the merchants and land owners voluntarily agree to do it, not at places where government imposes it on private land owners. Shopping malls, revitalized run-down downtowns in college communities (Charlottesville VA is still the classic example, but also Boulder and for a time Eugene), state capitol complexes, and of course college campuses everywhere. To do it in downtown Portland, y’all basically have to get an OK from all the major adjacent land owners, plus PBOT, the police, the fire bureau, and the usual busybody community groups. Just look at the fiasco of the NW diverters, think of how much more difficult it will be to get downtown land owners to agree on anything that restricts car driver’s free access over an area as large as say the Park Blocks.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I wouldn’t rely on your city government to carry it out either, it’s really up to the land owners to see the (economic) value in a fully pedestrianized space that’s larger than an alleyway or narrow street segment.
We’ll get change when enough people demand it. I am skeptical that enduring change can be imposed.
FWIW, 80-90% car free is not “fully pedestrianized” complete with banned cars. So that’s not really what was being discussed.
No, actually, we are on the same page. The “fully pedestrianized” spaces I’ve seen always have periodic delivery vehicles, police patrols (even European police drive cars), and the local overly privileged schmucks who happen to have the right key code to lower the bollards – it basically works out to 80-90% car free.
(It’s a lot like fat-free milk in the USA – in order for fat-soluble vitamins A & D to be added to milk, any fat level up to 0.60% is allowed to be marketed as “skim”, “fat-free”, or “nonfat” – even though the milk technically has fat in it. I have had totally fat-free milk in Europe, but without any added vitamins of course.)
You forgot Disneyland.
Portland has the right mix of residential density potential, car free access from surrounding urban areas and size to do what other US cities have not. Not to mention that the type of technology and general advancement of small electric vehicles, like what is mentioned in this article, have come a long way. It would be great to surpass those European cities, so that people in online forums in Europe could complain about their elected officials spending tax-payer money on trips to Portland.
It would love to see some smart people sit down and plan how far we could go at eliminating car travel in the central city. Maybe it’s not 80%, but more like 75%.
Right, but how would you go about implementing it while dealing with the same evil forces of darkness that tried to cancel a simple set of minor diverters in NW Portland?
When I lived in the Portland downtown area (Goose Hollow 1997-2006) I participated in numerous planning exercises that tried various schemes for making downtown more pedestrian-friendly, none of which ever actually got implemented. That’s the problem with Portland (and pretty much all other US cities as well), it has lots of meetings with people who mean really well, but come up rather short on actually doing anything to anything else.
I appreciate that you are willing to argue the pessimistic side of this. I know there have been a ton of great plans that haven’t gone anywhere and some eleventh hour losses that are frustrating. But, I think our successes have come from being tied to a greater vision that many Portlanders are capable of understanding, which is rare in the US. This story shows a success that is tied to that vision, which still exists because of people putting in countless hours of public process and advocacy that feel like they were pointless.
The “dark forces” or sleazy BS artists like Zimmerman succeed when they are able to separate an improvement from the larger connected plan that it is a part of. They turn incrementalism on itself. They lure the bike lane into an alleyway, away from its freinds and club it over the head. The neighborhood just asking for this one small change that means a lot to them for walkability and community becomes “well, what’s the big deal removing the planters will only are a small improvement.” What are a few more crashes a year when something vague and ominous like public safety can be evoked.
You’re absolutely correct about the private sector needing to be excited and on board. That’s why the language of PBOT and bike advocacy sometimes falls short. “25% modal share by 20-whatever” means nothing to the hotel manager that lives in LO. Walkability, bikeability, safe streets are exciting for a handful of people who live what this means every day, but meaningless to a lot of people. A real large scale vision of what a car free-ish downtown Portland could look like with all of the economic benefits and the “landing on the moon” level of accomplishment for a thriving US city is compelling. A list of crosswalks is not.
Nothing changes until it changes.
I agree, and I have seen very large pedestrianized commercial areas in the US in both large cities and small ones, at a far larger scale than Portland has ever done (for example in Charlotte NC, in DC, and in Hartford CT), but again they were with the cooperation of corporate land owners, rather than the opposition that Portland always seems to generate. Maybe campaigners for change need to form alliances with developers and realtors, towards common goals?
The Green Loop is a great example of this- a solid, lofty concept, but a lack of detail and no commitment to realize the vision. They won’t even show a functional concept- the concept they are proposing is full of fatal flaws. This will surely get watered down a thousand time during the hundreds of separate projects needed to get it built. We need much, much stronger and more clear visions for our future that include clear, strong, measurable metrics for success.
I’m not overly familiar with Akron, but it is not an example of a car free downtown in the slightest. Ditto for Camden. Maybe they were cities that tried out a car-free street here or there, but the issues of urban decline in both cases have far, far more to do with US industrial policy than anything else.
https://trec.pdx.edu/news/psu-transportation-students-envision-living-streets-car-free-corridors-downtown-portland?
SW Harvey Milk & SW Oak (Burnside Wedge) could be car free pretty soon….
so may other streets to look at for car free spaces!!
James Beard Market will be at 610 SW Alder, 1 block from Pioneer Square
1 block from Morrison, Yamhill, 5th, 6th, Transit Mall
Portland’s 20 year plan should just be to not utterly squander the level of prosperity they have been granted in the last 20, and just provide quality services to their residents for two decades. A city that is doing so poorly at attracting visitors that hotel rooms cost the same as they did six years ago (a 40% inflation adjusted reduction in hotel rates) should not be shooting for the moon, they should be focused on bread and butter governance.
To think this council, where half the members openly hate capitalism, or the next 5 could pull off becoming just a top 10 destination on the west coast is hilarious.
Well, what built Portland’s economy over the last 20 years was a unique drive to innovate and develop an identity that is embraced and loved by many but is constantly targeted and whined about. The fear of that whining and internal sabotage from old guard dinosaurs has definitely slowed our roll.
The Portland economy will suffer tremendously if the vision is complacency or “maintaining the status quo.” I would also say that if we had a council that wasn’t economically savvy enough to see the flaws in our current economy, i.e., “capitalism” then we are really going to deteriorate quickly, as national and international exploitation of local systems becomes more efficient.
Because of our size and limited number of international economic powerhouses, Portland has to be bold and focus on a solid local economy base with an identity that draws people here to experience the joy of being in a city that is not trying to pin you under a truck every 100 ft.
“Keep Portland Weird” is literally the status quo, there was a moment it was endearing, but that’s definitely over.
“Keep Portland Weird” is and has always been an outsider’s trope, much like all of the “Portland is dying” BS that far removed from the real people who have done and are doing amazing creative things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Portland_Weird
Ah yes, Terry Currier such an outsider.
Regardless, much much worse to the success of Portland and the region as a whole are the pollyanna folks that think with enough coffee and 25 more pizza joints Portland will be back as long as nobody talks about the reality of the headwinds rationally.
Yes, it is a term that characterizes how Portland is perceived from the outside. The “weird” is normal and intuitive to the people doing the things that appear weird. The term when used by people in Portland who are supportive is meant to allow space for things that seem weird when viewed through the eyes of a typical American experience. It is used by Portlander’s but it still is an outsider’s cliche, like many of the Portlandia skits.
The term now is probably more popular for people who only are interested in complaining.
Sounds cool. But the long list of local and state failures in novel experiments (such as Homeless Services Supportive Tax, PCEF, Preschool for “All”, Psychedelic mushroom therapy, Drug Decriminalization, Deflection program, Etc) make me doubtful this will succeed. It seems Portland is more about costly performative optics rather than effective policy and successful innovation.
Angus, every one of your comments plays the exact same note. You’ve made your point and if you continue to share information that clearly pushes a singular agenda (Portland is terrible and dying, etc.) I will not push your comments through. It’s not that you are making this point, it’s that you do it on every single post whether it’s relevant or not. I hope you understand.
I read Angus’s comment to be that this particular innovation will fail like many others have failed due to them being performative.
It is not stating that Portland is terrible or dying which Angus does not mention and his comment is relevant to your post about a new innovation planned.
Your critique thus seems pretextual for what is really viewpoint based censorship.
It could be that some people don’t think that Portland is terrible, do think that it is dying, and out of concern for Portland, which they actually like, voice this opinion.
Perhaps both of you could be right?
Hi donel,
Call it what you want. It’s annoying that every single comment Angus writes makes essentially the same point. Stop trying to say I don’t think someone is entitled to their opinion. That is hilarious given how loosely I’ve moderated 100s of thousands of comments on every opinion imaginable. I just want Angus to consider how their argument would be more persuasive if they didn’t always beat the same drum.
Jonathan, appreciate your response — and I hear you on wanting more variety in the conversation. But I’d suggest that pointing out consistent patterns in policy outcomes isn’t “beating the same drum” so much as staying engaged with the real-world results of what’s being tried.
Plenty of folks share glowing optimism on here without being asked to shift gears. Offering a more sceptical view shouldn’t be seen as derailing the discussion — especially when it’s relevant to the post.
I comment because I care about where things are headed, not because I think Portland is beyond hope. Bit of back-and-forth is healthy, no?
“being performative” is not an argument for why it will fail. His argument is that Portland is terrible and this will fail.
Why will this fail? Specifically? This is just specious reasoning, there is nothing to it.
The list of other “failures” (not actually failures) illustrates the point. He’s just saying “I don’t like these things, therefore themis new thing will fail.” Repeat ad nauseum.
Can we not layer on Utopian fantasies to this idea please. After 30 years, this idea is now coming to fruition. Why? Because the odds against its success are long for multi-casual reasons. Let’s give JBM a chance to stand on its feet first, then we can chase eco-dream nonsense.
One of the tragic side effects of riding a bike everyday is the constant renewal of optimism and reimagining of a community and built environment that has adopted modern technology and intelligence. Being a good cynical Portlander that imitates pragmatism by being fatalistic is hard when positive feelings keep creeping in. Sorry that the idea of a successful downtown threatens the existence of the new James Beard Market.
Many great ideas start out being labeled “utopian fantasies”–including at one time the James Beard Public Market, no doubt.
Luckily people pursue those utopian fantasies anyway.
Much better than the dystopian fantasies that occupy the minds of some many of us.
It is only half funded and required donated space to get off the ground, it is still firmly in the “utopian fantasy” stage.
Not true. The project bought a $3.1M building in 2 months and has raised more 2/3 of its $25M fundraising goal since then.
Closing downtown to car traffic is a utopian fantasy. Opening a public market is not.
It’s hilarious for people to say that eliminating cars from a small portion of the city would be a utopia, but then say that it is too hard. Wouldn’t utopia be worth this small sacrifice?
If it was this easy to create a utopia, we would have achieved a utopian society a long time ago.
But, I guess, utopian isn’t being used appropriately here, rather it is a pejorative meant to bring about the intellectual heat death of the comment thread, which seems to be a life goal of 15% of Bike Portland commenters.
I agree opening a public market here is not a utopian fantasy. Closing downtown to car traffic may or may not be, but that’s quite a leap beyond the zero-emissions delivery hub at the market that the article is about, and anything in my comment.
You didn’t say anything about any particular utopian fantasy, but closing the city to cars is one that has been mentioned by others, and pops up from time-to-time, so it seemed a relevant part of the Bike Portland zeitgeist. That was my contribution to the conversation, not yours, and I didn’t intend to attribute that idea to you. My apologies if that was unclear.
You did say that opening the James Beard Public Market was once a utopian fantasy (before you said it wasn’t), so maybe we just disagree on what that term means.
No, I never said opening the market was a utopian fantasy. I said
That means I have no doubt it got labeled a utopian fantasy by some people. It doesn’t mean I thought it was one.
Comment of the week
Thanks. I got to know Victor Steinbrueck pretty well (he was a lot older than me!) the “Man who saved Seattle’s Pike Place Market” (and has a park there named after him). He was viewed as crazy at first, and plans were already well underway to replace it with new urban renewal buildings, because the market was seen as an obsolete eyesore. Obviously he prevailed.
Just one well-known example of a great idea (which happened to be a public market) that was viewed as fantasy at the outset.
Not that long ago, a site for a James Beard Market was the west end of the Morrison Bridge parking lots. The market structure proposed was a pretentious row of A-shaped glassed-roofs and glass walls that would quickly become filthy with air pollution and impose upon market-goers hectic traffic exiting/entering the Morrison Bridge. Oh, some people just fawned over this stupid idea like it was ordained by God or the even greater God Ai.
Electric vehicles with toxic rare-earth batteries have far higher embedded carbon than similarly-sized gas-burning vehicles.
The added weight of toxic rare earth EV batteries causes far more pollution that gas-burning tail pipes due to the immense toxic particular pollution that sloughs off tires and break pads.
Electric vehicles are far, far more expensive than equivalent gas-burning vehicles.
EV batteries have very limited number of charge cycles resulting in accumulation of toxic rare earths in landfills and the need to replace EVs thus increasing embedded carbon.
Toxic EV battery mining (e.g. lithium and sodium) is far worse for the environment and than petroleum and alloy metal mining.
Example of gas-powered cargo trike only $900:
Your facts appear to be wrong.
There are no rare earths used in batteries, they are mostly lithium and cobalt . They are used in some common types of electric motors. Electric motor are reliable and last for many times longer than do equivalent internal combustion engines. Compare how long electric trains last vs diesel locomotives for a relevant example.
https://www.batterypowertips.com/rare-earths-and-evs-its-not-about-batteries-faq/
Re the claim that “the added weight of … batteries causes more pollution that gas-burning tail pipes due to … toxic particular pollution [from] tires and brake pads.”
They are different pollution. Air pollution goes everywhere. Tire and brake pad dust is localized, and depends on choices. For a light goods vehicle, the battery weight will be small compared to the loads carried, unlike in a passenger car like a Tesla.
Re: “lithium and sodium mining is far worse for the environment and than petroleum and alloy metal mining.” Petroleum mining causes oil spills around the world and huge leaks of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas. Lithium mining impacts are limited to a few places which are sparsely inhabited deserts.
Re: “Electric vehicles are far more expensive than equivalent gas-burning vehicles.” They are talking about using e-trikes instead of diesel trucks, not equivalent sized vehicles.
Instead of the e-bike revolution with its dirty high-embedded CO2e batteries on aluminum frames (!) we should advocate for the steel-frame gas moped revolution! Steel and gasoline are real!
(It’s amazing to me that my original post was not obviously identifiable as sarcasm.)
PS: I forgot a bunch of the other reasons EVs are bad according to people on bike portland: electricity is generated via coal so EVs are worse than driving a hybrid/gas-burning car, gas costs money and discourages driving, electric vehicles are driven more than gas vehicles, EVs are only for the rich (a smidge of truth here) etc.
Sarcasm is tough to detect for some people, and even for neuro-normies is not obvious when so many posters spout exactly the line of misleading facts and faulty reasoning as their idea of truth. Maybe there should be a standard way to tell the sarcasm-challenged that the poster is not serious?
I’m not even “sarcasm challenged”, that is just a series of stupid arguments people actually make sometimes on this website (all of them, I think), and I forgot who has what actual opinions. I thought this was a rare Soren miss.
Also EVs actually emit far less brake dust than gas vehicles (most of their stopping power is done by their motors).
Some people here will find any reason at all to oppose EVs because their hatred for cars surpasses their fear of climate change.
I think many people here aren’t really afraid of climate change — the belief in “science” or “climate change” is often more theoretical or just a matter of sociopolitical identification rather than a visceral understanding of the ever-increasing suffering and death baked into our climate system.
To add to Joseph’s correct arguments, what do you mean embedded carbon? If that is the carbon in manufacturing the battery etc? If so, that doesn’t matter. That’s not the problem we’re trying to solve r.e. climate change. The embedded emissions are dwarfed by the tailpipe the emissions of an ICE. Even IF your energy comes from fossil fuels (ours is a mix, so that’s not the case here), a power plant is a much more efficient use of fossil fuels for energy production than individual little vehicle engines.
There are things that make EVs more or less of a benefit, but there is no universe where an ICE is better for climate change.
my post was sarcasm and intentionally absurd.
I thought the photo of the toxic-lithium-free e-bike adjacent trike made that clear.
Toxic-sodium-free too!
Unfortunately, the oceans have become polluted with so much sodium that the water is literally undrinkable.
Facepalm. You got me.
I didn’t understand what the picture was showing.
Wait, have you done this kind of post sarcastically before? Or was it someone else on here? I remember being so perplexed, and I recalled it was “soren.”
I do not have strong feelings about James Beard Market and I think it’s slightly hilarious that this much thought is going to into delivery (but I guess why not?).
But I do want to say that the Honda quad delivery bike looks rad! The marketing says it’s suitable for a bike lane- if so, I could imagine a class of similar vehicles with equal weather protection, but with smaller footprint and drive train.
Like, how neat would it be to be riding a bike to work, but not having to wear rain paints? I used to wish that my bike had some kind of protection from the elements, before I realized it must get really hot in a fully sealed bike-vehicle.
The Honda one looks like it has enough ventilation, as well as an electric motor to keep effort level lower.
People driving small electric cars in the bike lane? Sounds downright utopian!
I’ve passed the B-line delivery bikes on the Hawthorne Bridge and around downtown many times and didn’t feel inconvenienced or threatened in the slightest.
Same here, but B-line vehicles are still uncommon enough that it’s rarely a problem. You were broadening the conversation to include personal motorized Honda-quad size commuting vehicles which would presumably be more common than B-line vehicles currently are.
Maybe you could convince me it makes sense to open bike lanes to low-powered cars/quads, but I until then I think there should be space reserved for bikes (and in this context, I don’t consider motorized 2-wheeled vehicles capable of doing 25 uphill without pedaling to be bikes).
At the very least, there should be some broad public discussion on the question before we do it. I think there is still some consensus on who bike lanes are for, but the lines are growing increasingly blurry.
1) you don’t need (hard shelled) rain pants to commute in the rain.
2) look up velomobiles (and then ask yourself where you’d park one)