My desktop is from 2012, so 13 years old so far, but is still very capable at any task I throw at it. It was originally a high-end workstation, but by 2020 was worth so little that I got it for free from someone moving out of town. Last year, upgrading the CPU to the top of the line part that fit the motherboard socket cost $17 (versus an original MSRP of $2300), and upgrading it to 128GB of RAM cost $40.
When even top-of-the-line older hardware is nearly free, it makes little sense to optimize for bottom-of-the-line older hardware.
It does very well on any modern internet task, as well as playing modern video games with a few-year-old used graphics card.
Nearly all large cities today are large cities because they historically were one, leading to economies of scale in infrastructure and agglomeration economies in the production and exchange of goods and services. Ease of sea access is not a major determinant of a city's growth & prosperity today.
Many cities historically grew around ports due to the labor intensity of break-bulk shipping and the difficulty and expense of overland goods transport but modern container ports require relatively few employees and can easily move freight intermodally. The old piers in London and Hamburg and New York and San Francisco and their adjacent factories have all been redeveloped, and the working container ports have all relocated away from the city center to places where rail & highway access is easier, to places like Newark, Oakland, and Felixstowe.
The car market in the US is pretty much designed to rip off people who fear minivan stigma & instead buy extortionately-priced pickup trucks that often don't even have a big enough bed to carry plywood or drywall.
There are plenty of things that people would be happy to do with cheap urban space in deep/narrow apartment conversions in post-WWII office buildings. I'd enjoy having a workshop and lots of bicycle parking.
The problem is that the current owners of these buildings, as well as their creditors, made plans based on these buildings being expensive urban space. The same is true of city governments, which often have budgets dependent on city center commercial space paying a lot of property taxes. It will take years, and likely lawsuits and ownership changes, for people to accept that prices for these buildings are unlikely to recover.
Delivery-oriented ebikes like the Arrow models in NYC use very large battery packs, and some deliveristas carry a second battery on a rear rack. My impression is that, as deliveristas have moved to working for apps rather than specific restaurants over the past few years, the expected delivery radius has expanded, which drove a lot of the range issues that have lead to widespread adoption of gray-market motorcycles with no plates.
Said unlicensed mopeds are current subject to widespread seizure in NYC, so it does seem like ebikes are coming back.
One major delivery-oriented ebike importer, 'Fly Ebike', has gotten a model UL certified.
Martin Kleppmann is an advisor to the Bluesky distributed social network, which has an open protocol and open source code that one can browse, run, and connect to as a supplement to the book if one desires:
https://github.com/bluesky-social
I have a Shimano middrive bike that weighs 50lbs that I purchased on closeout for $1500. It rides like a nice, albeit heavy, bike with the motor turned off.
I don't think there has been any sort of reliable survey on the quantity of ebikes in NYC, and 65,000 is likely to be extremely low. There is no registration or point-of-sale reporting requirement.
There are also large quantities of unregistered electric and gasoline mopeds and motorcycles, many of which are also labeled as ebikes by either their manufacturers/importers or public authorities when involved in an incident.
One can purchase custom-made ebike batteries in NYC from shops similar to the one in this article, often with substantially worse finishing/packaging quality and unknown BMS quality. And said batteries are often run hard in delivery service in 4-season conditions, including exposure to temperatures well below freezing and salty slush spray, then charged via chargers and cords of unknown quality plugged into what are often pre-WWII electrical systems.
The FDNY is appropriately raiding custom battery shops in NYC, since there doesn't seem to be an appropriate regulatory system yet for custom-manufacturing this sort of energy storage device in a dense urban environment yet:
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2024/02/09/queens-biz-...
I live, in many ways, by the standards of 90 years ago— apartment in a 1907 tenement house (a new law tenement, much better than the old law kind!), no laundry machine, clothing often bought used & which I often repair myself, most transportation on foot or on train/bike for longer distances. I have nicer electronics, of course, but that doesn't consume a big percentage of my income.
But there's no easy way to opt for a four-hour workday, which I would prefer— instead, I save most of my income.
Housing costs are a basket of the cost of the housing unit itself and land costs. Regulation limiting how densely housing may be built atop land, when this limit is lower than the number of housing units demanded, is what causes the Red Queen's race dynamic.
2000kg+ EVs still have substantial lifecycle carbon footprints even if their local emissions are much lower than a gasoline car. They are certainly useful for 200 mile trips, especially with a group of people, with well-developed road networks & underdeveloped transit networks, but the relative development/utility of different transport networks is a political choice. And 200 mile trips are a small percentage of trips — most are short & local (with the specific radius of local generally depending on a locale's land use regulations).
The massive state, federal, and local bureaucracies shaping the public & private realm to always guarantee easy parking for automobiles & a network of high-throughput roadways between them yet only occasionally & reluctantly doing the same for other modes of transportation. Note that guaranteeing easy parking for automobiles also results in destinations being so far apart that other modes of transport usually become impractical.
It was very good to be able visit my 98-year-old grandmother at Christmastime (and I did a lot to be able to do so safely last year) — at this age, there can't be many left.