[anthony_barker]

There was an MIT Phd student thesis I read 20 years ago that electric bikes (escooters) are the future transport for Taiwan.

Roll the clock ahead and ebikes (at least here in Paris) are taking over. Dedicated lanes, government subsidies, government lending system plus private systems (2 or 3) have pushed it into main stream.

[jillesvangurp]

Same in Berlin. During the lock-down, the city transformed quite a bit. Several roads first got temporary bike lanes (they sacrificed a lane for this) and then when that turned out to be popular they went ahead and made it permanent. Some uncharacteristically quick and pragmatic decision making actually happened.

And of course the entire city is crawling with rental scooters, e-bikes, etc. They are hugely popular. Also a lot of the delivery companies are using electric scooters and ebikes. The volume of all this new traffic is actually forcing the city to adapt.

Berlin still has a long way to catch up to the Netherlands (where I'm from), which has awesome bike infrastructure almost everywhere. But, it's a nice start.

There are still too many deadly accidents and quite a few of them are due to infrastructure lacking key safety measures. E.g. a common accident cause is trucks running over cyclists when turning right. The way to prevent that is having clearly marked bike lanes and some obstacles that force trucks to not cut corners, slow down, and check their mirrors.