ok then

What you've been failing to consider, which I think I may have been taking as read to my detriment, is that the way our cities are organized plays a big role in determining which mode of shipping is more effective. The denser of a center you have, the more businesses you have concentrated in one place, the more you need capacity and the less you need flexibility. That inverts as things get more spread out and stuff needs to get to more different places. When you have a city organized around its rail infrastructure rather than a sprawling car-dependent mess, that rail infrastructure absolutely kills at supplying the place, significantly reducing the severity of the last-mile problem.

I will also note that even the most anti-car places still rightfully allow for delivery vehicles, and neither I nor I think any other person who doesn't like cars would begrudge that. I personally just think that pretty much any shipping done by big rig when it could be done by rail is a missed opportunity.

Here are a few additional links for you to consider:

Trucking is heavily subsidized

The interstates are increasingly a metaphorical financial albatross around our collective neck

The places that are connected by and organized around rail are invariably the most economically productive areas of any city

Saying dense urbanism with plentiful public housing is a "communist fantasy" is literally too dumb to dignify with a response.

Meet me in Vienna and I'll buy you a beer.

I agree, we should throw him in prison for the rest of his life.

The modern state of Israel exists because a bunch of Christian doomsdayers thought that it existing would make Jesus come back and end the world, and post-WWII seemed like the perfect time to redraw some borders with no consideration for the people already living there. That's the death cult you're talking about.

And I know Judaism views Israel as its ancestral homeland. It's not like the Jews have no claim to it whatsoever. Additionally, I understand that post-WWII genuinely was a great time to give the Jewish people some reparations. But you're acting like they've been there the whole time and no one else also has a claim to it, and you're further acting like after the European Christian death cult moved them in there (again, to try and make Jesus come back and end the world), they didn't then spend the next 70 years viciously subjugating the Palestinians who'd actually been living there for ages.

MLK Jr. said that a riot is the last voice of the unheard. That's not true about every riot, but if you have been aware of the geopolitics of this region of the world for more than like a month? and are not being a disingenuous shitbag, then this is the exact type of riot he was talking about. I know you have a lot of trouble with the not being a disingenuous shitbag part, but fortunately it seems like most people here also recognize that.

it does have a very funny name though

I have up to 4 kids at a time in my vehicle along with an often substantial amount of their stuff ( school backpacks / sports equipment ). It is not uncommon to stop for groceries already loaded with passengers and gear. What model of eBike should I get?

That's a valid question, and it's one that anybody who advocates for better urbanism, like I do, needs to be able to address. Fortunately, there are multiple answers.

The most direct answer to your question on its face is that you could get a bakfiets, or what the English-speaking world calls a cargo bike/cargo ebike. These are available from brands like Orbea, Aventon, Tern, Co-Op, Specialized (that's Specialized with a big S), and more, they have been showcased as potential car replacements capable of carrying people and large amounts of stuff on Youtube channels like GCN, Not Just Bikes, Oh The Urbanity, Propel, Shifter, and others, and some specialized (that's specialized with a small S) models have even been deployed as low-footprint urban delivery vehicles in so far highly successful trials by companies like UPS and FedEx.

However, to address the frankly incredibly frustrating assumption underlying your question, neither I nor the vast majority of other urbanism advocates will actually try to take away your car, even if we were given dictator-like control, because I for one am not interested in controlling people, I'm interested in having multiple viable choices for how to get around. You would still be able to have your car. Driving it in the city center would be inconvenient and expensive enough that you wouldn't want to do it, but it'd be trivially easy to get there by transit or cargo bike instead. Plus, while the drive to your work would be largely unaffected, that road wouldn't be the only way to get there, either. Speaking of which,

Also, I work 50 km from home and commute on a road that was made primarily to provide large trucks faster access to the port. It is a road along the river. In addition to the huge, fast moving vehicles, it has no artificial lighting and is away from building that might help with that ( so pitch black at times and also prone to significant fog ). Please recommend something safe.

This is a systemic problem, not a you problem. As such, you shouldn't be expected to take responsibility for solving it, least of all by just protecting yourself. You mention a port: most ports have existed for longer than cars have been the dominant urban species, and as such, that road you describe might have either replaced or run parallel to a railway that would have also gotten you there. The fact that that railway is no longer a viable option for you means that an option has been taken away from you, and that's what you should actually be angry about. That, and the lack of artificial lighting on said road. Allow me to refer you to the second half of my earlier comment:

Of course, this does also require development patterns to support it, i.e. roads that aren’t fucking death traps for anyone outside a car and stuff being close enough together that you can actually get to it in a reasonable amount of time, but hey, there are also non-car-related reasons we should be doing those things too.

Emphasis added. Anyway:

Now, not everyone has my situation.

Yes. Hi, it's me.

That said, I am sure MANY people ( in North America at least ) have needs that require cars today. Our culture and infrastructure has been designed around it and changing that is a bigger problem than migrating to electric vehicles.

That is exactly the problem I'm talking about. They have those needs because our infrastructure has been built to create them, and that causes far more harm than just switching to EVs will ever solve. EVs are like trying to wallpaper over the hole in the Titanic: better than doing literally nothing, but won't actually fix anything.

Shared ownership or shared fleets is one middle ground.

Sounds like communism to me.

Autonomous cars would help but that timeline is uncertain.

Adam Something has a thing he does where he takes some kind of pie-in-the-sky techbro gadgetbahn idea, like AVs, and gradually addresses all the design flaws with it until he's invented trains again, then ends with his catchphrase "just build a regular fucking train." And I think that's where I'm going to leave off.

I ride my gravel bike anywhere from 5 to 25 miles before work, depending on how early I get out the door and whether or not my bike is broken. 1. I get around by bike, so the 5 is the bare minimum and 25 is for when I get out the door with two hours to spare and can really get down and dirty with some dirt, and 2. I literally broke my crankset on Thursday while trail riding before work.

Weirdly, off the bike, the latte describes me the best, right down to the unexpected tattoo, but I actually drink water most frequently.

Right, but the specific break I had also isn't one I commonly associate with Hollowtech. I know that has its own issues.

Unfortunately it wasn't anything dramatic looking. At first blush, even after Ashton took the crankset apart and showed it to me, it didn't really look like anything was amiss, other than there not being any way to fix the axle and the crank head back together again. A trained eye would have probably immediately spotted the evidence of a failed weld, but nothing really jumped out at me until he pointed it out. Even the manner in which it broke was pretty anticlimactic: I noticed something weird when my chain started rubbing on the front derailleur after I cleared that drop, and I couldn't shift into the big ring, so I got off to look at it and then realized the crank/spider was loose.

Jesus, that's gnarly. I hope he recovered.

and you know when i'm down to just my socks, what time it is

yes, i know, i was doing that. i know how to spell "putting."

Just because tech is used to scam idiots doesn’t mean tech is bad.

i mean, sure, not intrinsically, but i have yet to see this technology used to do much of anything else. compared to the massive downsides it poses for things like energy use and the problems associated with the financialization of everything, the lack of material benefits seems like a pretty good reason to steer clear of the whole business.

if your claims were true and not pure unfounded speculation, then one would expect some meaningful evidence to that effect to have emerged in the past 15+ years with the trillions that have been dumped into the sector.