> You'd be hard pressed to come up with a shopping load that won't fit on a cargo bike.

There's a side effect of car prevalence and land use in the US: everyone can be "expected" to have a car, so grocery shops tend to locate in places further away with cheaper land, which make it more convenient to make big shops, which require a car...

I find that most Americans are not comfortable or even familiar with "I'll pop into the shop to buy milk a block away". Some neighborhoods in cities don't have local grocery shops. So if you're used to that built environment your first thought is "I can't fit a month's worth of food in a cargo bike, let alone ride for 10 miles!?"

But if you propose letting a grocery shop in the neighborhood people think "parking, traffic and noise are gonna be terrible!"

Yeah, I didn't want to get that far into it. For example, today I visited a store, my favourite coffee shop, a pharmacy, and two grocery stores in the span of a little more than an hour. I didn't even cycle, I just walked. The first store was 10 mins away from home.

And that's an abnormal trip for me, I usually just pop into a grocery store on my walk home from work. If all I wanted to buy was milk, the overhead would be 5 mins.

I lived that "grocery store a block away" lifestyle and I still preferred to drive to get groceries.

Not because I'm lazy, but because the nearby grocery store often cost more than double for the same items.

And it was a grocery store, not a convenience store. Convenience stores were even worse.

Imo, you are no longer talking about cycling once you're talking about ebikes and other motorized vehicles.

You're talking about convincing people to buy worse cars.

Motorbikes and mopeds and scooters already exist and people largely don't choose them over cars. Changing it to "electric scooter" or ebike doesn't suddenly make it more appealing.

And you certainly lose the "it's better for physical fitness and health" aspect once you're talking about motorized vehicles.

> And you certainly lose the "it's better for physical fitness and health" aspect once you're talking about motorized vehicles.

> Because electric bikes are less physically demanding on joints and muscles, they not only bring in riders who might otherwise be inactive, but they also offer the opportunity for people to ride longer periods of time and go greater distances. That leads to more folks using e-bikes as an option for commuting or running errands. Although users won’t find themselves doing the sort of vigorous physical activity uphill mountain biking or even hot yoga entails, e-bike use has been shown to deliver the sort of moderate physical activity most doctors recommend.

https://www.peopleforbikes.org/news/the-health-benefits-of-e...

The exercise provided by ebikes when all things are equal is lower than regular bikes, but all things are not equal as people with ebikes tend to ride more day to day (on aggregate).

This depends on legislation, but in a lot of countries ebikes that don't require pedaling are illegal. From personal experience, riding on an ebike still provides plenty of exercise, certainly more than the literally zero that you get when driving.

In any case, I only brought up ebikes in the context of arduous journeys. Most people will not travel by ebike, they're too expensive.

It's not about trying to persuade people in car-dependent places to go against the grain and bike everywhere. Rather, a network of bike infrastructure should be built, making biking a viable choice. In time biking would become normalized, nobody would need to be explicitly persuaded. After all, Americans don't drive everywhere because they've been convinced to, they do it because the ever-present car infrastructure makes it the most convenient option.

My car is a lot less effort that my ebike. And the car is faster as well. I ride my ebike for the trips too long for the acoustic bike, but there are still a lot of trips not in reasonable ebike range that I make.

Hell, my motorcycle was enough of a hassle compared to my car to forgo riding it often. Wearing gear, packing my lunch and everything else for a days work into saddlebags, and dealing with the weather was a pain compared to just hopping in my car. It would be worse on a bicycle. At least in a car I can listen to a podcast without feeling like I'm making a tradeoff with safety.

Sounds great, that's pretty much the goal - limiting car trips to the ones that actually require a car.