this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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micromobility - Ebikes, scooters, longboards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
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Ebikes, bicycles, scooters, longboards, unicycles: Whatever floats your goat, this is all things micromobility!
"Transportation using lightweight vehicles such as bicycles or scooters, especially electric ones that may be borrowed as part of a self-service rental program in which people rent vehicles for short-term use within a town or city.
micromobility is seen as a potential solution to moving people more efficiently around cities"
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Hmm. That math sounds like it would be pretty okay for charging a phone, or saving up the energy over time to use as an emergency backup - assuming you are in an area with usually reliable power and short outages.
What’s the actual benefit there though? It costs about $0.001 to charge a cell phone, or about 10 charges per penny(if you’re somewhere that has pennies). UPS, and portable battery packs are already a thing, and the cost to charge them is a heck of a lot less than the cost of adding a dynamo to an exercise bike.
Honestly, even if the argument is some niche case like being able to power some emergency system in an off-grid setup or power outage, you’re probably much better off just putting up a small scale solar system. Another way to look at it: a food calorie costs about $0.05 on average, or $43/kWh, compared to $0.15/kWh for electricity through a utility. That’s a lot of food that needs to be stored to give a person the energy to run that bike.
This kind of thing just doesn’t make sense financially or environmentally. If the idea is to promote sustainability, this has the exact opposite effect of using resources to build something that’s never going to produce as much energy as it took to build in the first place. Even if a person is going to be using a stationary bike either way, the system needed to capture and store that energy isn’t going to ever going to capture as much energy as was spent to make it.
I don't think there is a financial, environmental, or logical reason for this thing to exist. It would come down to "it's neat" or "it motivates me" or some excuse like that. I would not advocate for people to get one, I can just see how someone would smugly refer to it as an upgrade from their Peleton.