I’ve already written one piece here about my visit to China—about minivans. Today I’m doing another one—about e-bikes and scooters!

One evening while we were taking a walk, someone on an e-bike or e-scooter passed us on the street. I just assumed it was someone getting somewhere. You see these vehicles in many U.S. cities too, and even sometimes in the suburbs. My wife, however, said he was out making rides to bars and restaurants to drive people home after they had been drinking. (I think he had a flashing light that identified him as a driver for one of these services.)

How do they drive people home, I asked, on the back of the scooter? Wouldn’t you just take a car home and get your car in the morning? I guess people do that? No, she explained, they stow their relatively small and possibly foldable e-bike in your trunk, drive your car home, and then when they arrive, they grab their bike and ride home or to the next customer.

Wow. I really can’t believe how obvious and yet non-obvious this is. It’s literally something I’ve never heard of or thought of before. The only solutions that I’ve ever thought about for that scenario are a designated driver or leaving your car overnight and retrieving it later. (Or, of course but unfortunately, the “solution” many people make of pretending they’re sober and risking their lives and others’.) This is one of those things where relying on the car obscures your imagination; it veils and psychologically conceals a whole way of life for you.

There are two elements to this that occur to me: one is some level of social trust, insurance, etc.—whatever it is that makes it possible for someone to let a stranger drive their car, and while they’re in it! That seems like something Americans might have a problem with. The other element is just cities—environments where distances are short enough that an e-bike is a meaningful way to shuttle people around.

Drunk driving, like a lot of things, is apparently strictly enforced and punished in China. In some places, my wife said, they stop and breathalyze every single motorist coming through a route. And it doesn’t take much. A 2023 article from a Chinese newspaper says, “In China, a driver is over the legal limit if the alcohol content in their bloodstream exceeds 20mg/100ml. If the alcohol content exceeds 80mg/100ml, they are considered to be drunk driving.” I’m not a math guy, but I’m pretty sure that lower number is extremely typical in America.

One of the things that really hits you when you start learning about cities and urbanism and transportation is the insanity of minimum parking requirements applying to restaurants that serve alcohol and even to bars. Our criminal justice system punishes a (dangerous and bad) behavior that our zoning and land use incentives and almost requires.

It’s never a good thing when the obvious and normative way of doing something is actually the wrong one. It’s a mismatch that bakes risk into what feels like neutral everyday life. It’s corrosive of the rule of law. I don’t think “do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” was advice to government bureaucrats and agencies.

I’ve written a few times here about child car seats and how car-oriented land use functions as a time tax on parents and families—all the distance, all the coming and going across town and back again to run all the errands or the after-school activities or what have you.

But another thing that car-dependent land use does is make drunk driving the easiest and most obvious choice—even the sort of officially recommended choice. Why else would bars be required to have parking lots? The sheer normalcy of this makes it feel…normal. But this American practice diverges from a lot of other countries, where drunk driving is less of a criminal justice issue because the built environment has helped design it out of everyday life.

That isn’t social engineering; it’s just plain old engineering. We could use that. And we could use that Uber/e-bike mashup too.

Related Reading:

Serendipity And Proximity

Parking Puts It On The Map

Techno-What?

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