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I’m now a few days into using an electric cargo bike (a Tern GSD) as my primary form of transportation. It’s…awesome.
I'll be dumping notes on the whole experience into this thread: joys, obstacles, tricks, rationales, questions, mistakes, details, discoveries…everything. Just a big old ongoing data dump. My hope is the notes here end up being useful to others.
Many posts to follow over time. If this is •not• useful to you, no worries! Mute the hashtag: #BikeDiary
Lots more to follow. 
#BikeDiary A bit on the rationale:
Many reasons, but the big one is the climate. I have a venerable ~20yo stick shift Honda Civic. It won't last forever. When it stops running, what replaces it?
The Civic gets 25-35mpg. I drive it ~4000 mi/yr. Casual research & quick estimation suggests suggests that the sunk carbon cost of just •manufacturing• a car is approx the same as driving the old Civid for another •decade•. Replacing the Civic with •any• car — even an EV! — has a massive climate cost.
#BikeDiary It seems like the best thing I can do for the climate here is to keep driving my gas-powered Civic while working to make it so that when it finally dies, I'm barely using it and don't feel like I need to replace it.
In short: the goal of this cargo bike adventure is to move from a two-car family to a one-car family.
@inthehands Academic question: how many miles can you drive the Civic before it exceeds the GHG involved in making/shipping the bike?
@cxj I don’t know. My casual research suggested that the sunk carbon cost of the bike is so much lower than a car that I didn’t need to get too specific.