The Citroën Ami and the future of urban transportation
TLDR; the author likes this tiny city car, but doesn’t like that it fundamentally competes not with other cars, but with biking and transit. For the sake of climate and city life, society should be moving the other direction (away from cars towards bikes and transit).<p>I don’t disagree with the authors take on where we want cities to go. However I do not share the concern that this tiny car makes the problem worse.<p>My reasoning is, the battle to reduce the role of cars in cities is fundamentally cultural, at least in democratic societies.<p>I think the rising number of “in-between” mobility options like this is a huge asset in the culture shift. Forget about the weather, the infrastructure, etc. The bigger problem is ability and laziness.<p>Modern cities are simply too big for walking across in a time-efficient manner. But as most people have noticed, assuming one can safely bike, the bicycle enormously improves the radius that a person can conveniently access without the space consumption of a car.<p>But what I think idealists, especially young idealists, really have a hard time relating to, is what a small percentage of humans can really get around by bike as their primary mode.<p>Adults over 30 represent the bulk of the population, and a very large percentage of these folks (including myself) are physically limited either by health condition, by age, by injury, or even just by being very out of shape. A person in that condition may smile at the bike lanes and think they look like fun, but also sadly think to themselves “I could never do that.”<p>As long as this large and politically dominant chunk of the population feels excluded, going bike-first isn’t going to happen.<p>But this is where e-bikes, scooters, and “quadricycles” like the Ami are so valuable. Anyone who depends on driving could drive one of those. And shifting to smaller, lighter, slower vehicles improves safety for everyone else. It also reduces the demand for things like giant parking lots that so wreck the urban fabric.<p>I think anything that creates more options in the middle make the transition easier to accept and embrace. And anything that makes more people feel welcome and included in the shift away from car-centric cities helps reduce opposition and make the next increment of change politically feasible.<p>I know it isn’t as exciting or glamorous as jumping all the way to the final destination in one go, but incremental steps like this are generally how true progress happens. So I, for one, am excited about the Ami, and the general rise in micro-mobility options it represents.