Image description:
Text: Amazon’s electric cargo bikes have arrived in DC.
Image: A four-wheeled vehicle that appears to be a cross between a bicycle, a go-cart, and a mini-truck
Response text from high t alpha shemale @gluetaster: that’s not a cargo bike man that’s a loopholemobile
The shit us Americans will do to not just fucking use Kei trucks like the rest of the world.
A lot of it has to do with well-intentioned but stupid regulation.
The auto companies in the 2000s started calling everything a truck in order to get around fuel economy standards, so in 2008 the EPA announced that beginning in model year 2012, standards would be based on vehicle footprint instead of vehicle classification.
Notice how all the small trucks stopped being made after 2011? It’s because small cargo vehicles suddenly had to somehow have better fuel economy than a sedan.
It’s also why trucks have gotten stupidly big over the last 15 years. As standards increase, they can just make the footprint bigger.
We have blacks picking cotton for free in the prison-industrial complex of the deep south and parts of the midwest. As Americans we have this thing for slavery and subservience. The optics of things. I guess at some unconscious level we just want to see the rickshaw come back in some big, highly visible way.
Kei trucks can’t legally travel in bike lanes.
and bicycles have ~ $0 registration overhead wherever they are operated.
This…