The back wheel on my ebike is also a pain to get off. I found the trick was to use an adjustable wrench to wiggle the axle loose. And again to wiggle it back into place when reinstalling.

Also, the "more cars" on the photo (or even the "just as many cars" thing) doesn't necessarily mean worse (or better): Solely focusing on actively generated pollution, I would pick 3 EVs over 1 intcomb car. Adding the pollution caused by manufacturing them and their batteries definitely changes the equation, and I'm not an expert enough to say which is better or worse, but the posted image just focuses a bit too much on the sheer numbers of vehicles.

The best transportation system is a mixed transportation system

Just doesn't seem practical

I live in a town of 5000. It's a tourist town and has relatively good bus connections as well as a train line.

But if I want to go literally anywhere the buses are usually every 1.5h (more often directly to the capital but that one is either a 2h bus ride or goes there directly without inbetween stops) and the trains are every 2.5h.

Let's say I need to go to the hardware store. I can take the bus leaving in 40mins, walk 15 mins to the store, 15 mins back and then wait another 30-40 mins for the bus back.

Or I can take the train 10mins to a completely different town, switch trains (hopefully I got the one that has a connection on the other line) and take another 10 mins to the same spot the bus would drop me off. Then repeat the 30+min of going to the store and back. Take the train back to the other town. Hopefully catch the train on the line back home (or wait 2-3 hr for the next one).

Both the train and bus stations are about 10-15min walk from where I live. But any of those options take me at least 1hr of just commuting in best case scenario (no waiting or minimal waiting for bus/train).

Or I can take a car, get to the store in 10min find whatever I need and be back home in 30min from when I left.

For people living in small town is an obligation.

Broadly speaking, sure. But most people live in cities. The idea that we need an eight lane highway to accommodate the handful of people coming in from the desolate sand wastes of Bumblefuck, Nowhere is absurd.

The bulk of city traffic is city residents traveling between points in the city. They're your priority. They're the ones creating all the traffic

For people living in small town is an obligation

Car culture is actually making it an obligation.

This is highly variable depending on your country, area, town. I have lived car free all my life in Canada, in some small towns, and moved to a big city. It's entirely possible to live in a small town without a car depending on what you do and the size of the town, even with deficient public transit.

Most people live in urbanized areas and towns are just clusters of houses and people that could be served by transit. According to statista, more than 80% of Canada's population lives in an urban area. In fact, some of those towns were even created by transit, or already had transit, and now cars are an "obligation".

And if we are to compare with old numbers from 2012 for commuting distances in Canada, most people will drive less than 10-15 km to go to work, with the vast majority being less than 10 km. So the vast majority seems to gravitate within their town or urban cluster. The "obligation" is mostly made up by car culture, and people will happily defend it so they can justify having their own car. Nobody will be demanding transit and it will die.

There is however a spike for people commuting more than 30 km. And those can have a real obligation to use a car. They should switch to electric when it's going to be possible. Nobody wants to force them to give up their car, but they are in the minority, meaning cities, and even towns, should not be choking with cars.

In fact, nobody wants to force anybody to give up their car if they truly think it's an obligation. Just be aware that electric cars will obviously not solve congestion issues, will continue to pollute in certain other ways, will still be deadly, and are not an easy works for all fix.

Everyone benefits from having less cars on the roads and them being electric will not achieve that goal. It's not because a minority of people want or really need a car, that we can justify building whole towns, cities, and infrastructure for those cars.

Also, IIRC, having Hydrogen as a main fuel source would be pretty expensive in most places, as it would need to be produced in factory with high safety standards, and there is little demand for hydrogen, so these factories would live and duebwith the hydrogen car's useage. There are a few places where it's actually feasible because there are some factories that produce it, as a byproduct with otherwise little demand, so it's effectively treated as waste.

Hydrogen is a gas, you can use pipes to transport it. My city is currently building out hydrogen pipes for industrial users. It's a little annoying because they put the pipes under the bike lanes and the bike lanes aren't useable during construction.

Come to Slovenia, they do the same, just only once or twice per day 🙄

But you see, it's not buses or trains that do the same, it's limousines. It's the air of exclusivity that the self-driving car-manufacturers sell, people like to feel special and don't want to spend time with the riffraff, even if it means they themselves become serfs to the technology companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)

But air quality in towns with electric cars have cleaner air, whcih could reduce cancer

Full-size cars, yes, but I wish we the people now stopped the fossil-lobbied lawfare against microcars.

Renault Twizy, top speed 80km/h

Kyburz Plus, top speed 30km/h

• Gross weight ~10% of a typical electric car, so probably ~10% tyre dust too.
• For bikeways. If the plastic surface were designed to yield in a crash, a pedestrian could be safer hit by this than by a bare biker on a bare metal bike.
• Takes less space than a biker because a 4-wheeler can be steered more accurately than a naturally unstable bike needing wobble margins.
• Banned in many places through lawfare: https://xfwnofqagsnmdxuf.quora.com/Lawfare-against-tiny-cars-velomobiles

Yes and tire dust already makes up 78% of the microplastics in the ocean.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/tire-dust-makes-up-the-majority-of-ocean-microplastics-study-finds