> dies
So for people criticising with rain, wind, snow, and groceries - none of these are nearly the issues you think they are, and there are a wide variety of bike configurations and gear that address these challenges.
The real issue is having to share the road with cars. I’ve just had too many close calls, and the growth of self-driving vehicles makes me more nervous to be on the road than ever.
Because of cars I hate being on the road whether in a car or on a bike, and every car that passes by automatically makes me tense up these days. I hope a new Carrington event makes all of them useless.
Yes, weather is just a matter of gear, and these days the wet and cold weather gear is amazing. The best bike gear isn’t cheap, but it’s much cheaper than the typical repair on a car when something breaks. Panniers are an easy way to carry a lot of groceries with minimal effort. If someone has a huge family there are also cargo bike options. But, of course, with modern American cities, there might not be a grocery store in a reasonable biking range. There used to be mom-and pop grocery stores all over the place. And, in Europe it’s pretty common for there to be a small grocery store within a 5 minute walk of your house.
But, North American roads are designed only for cars. Bicyclists and commuters pay taxes to maintain roads, but the roads are built for cars and trucks. To really feel safe on a bike, you need separated bike lanes. You build those, and people will use them.
In many places in North America, a bike lane is merely a thin strip of pavement that’s centimetres from passing cars, and in the door zone of parked cars. Even in good weather that’s dangerous. In bad weather it’s truly awful. But, people still use those bike lanes. In fact, some people even bike and share the road with cars where the bike lanes don’t exist. That should be a clue that people are dedicated to cycling, and if you built actual good bicycle infrastructure, a lot of people would use it.
Snow and rain, but mostly snow.
Hills. I’m 60, and not getting younger, my knees are going.
Some people just can’t. But, when I could, I did.
I love the deluge of people trying to convince you to use a bike anyway. I’m getting old and live where it can hit -20° or worse, with snow and ice. Cold is almost half the year. There’s no fucking way I’d ride a bike for almost two hours each way in the cold when I have to go into the office, over a nice heated 18 minute car ride. Plus every day I bring a bag to and from the office, and some days 2-3 bags of stuff I pick up to bring home. I keto on that here or when I was on Reddit and some asshole will inevitably be like “YOU CAN HANDLE THE COLD AND ICE AND FOUR HOURS OUT KF YOUR DAY UR JUST WEAK” and those people are bad people I don’t like.
ride a bike for almost two hours each way … [or a] 18 minute car ride.
That’s the problem we want to fix.
I am SOOOOO with you when it comes to that sentiment. I shouldn’t have a 18 minute car ride that’s also a two hour bike ride. That’s fucked up.
Also family and groceries.
I wouldn’t ask my 9YO on a bike at 7:30 am on winter to go to school everyday. Also no family trips. The place we go to the most is on the other side of mountains 3 hours away by car.
Groceries would have to be more regular. I currently fill the car and go like once a month or month and a half
I wouldn’t ask my 9YO on a bike at 7:30 am on winter to go to school everyday
Why not? In a lot of the world that’s pretty normal.
When I was a kid I walked 30-40 minutes to and from school in the winter. I would have preferred to bike, but they didn’t clear the bike lanes. In places in Europe they make plowing the bike lanes a priority, so everybody can count on being able to commute by bike.
The place we go to the most is on the other side of mountains 3 hours away by car.
You shouldn’t have to rely on a car to get somewhere that’s that far away. It’s more reasonable to take a train to get that kind of distance.
Groceries would have to be more regular. I currently fill the car and go like once a month or month and a half
Do you not like fresh food? Do you ever eat fruit or vegetables? Or meat that hasn’t been frozen?
You’re aware that families in europe go on family trips by taking the train across the mountains? That’s part of the problem, you americans don’t like to think far beyond your horizon (cars). Or maybe you just can’t imagine what a city would look like that is built for pedestrians and public transportation.
I’m from Latin america. There is a single train that goes through my city and has only a few stops. I’d love to take the train. It just doesn’t take me where I need to go. Heck I’ve been looking for an excuse to take one for months
I know this might sound pedantic by I will try to write with love. 90% of the world population buy groceries weekly or more often. Many European countries buy fresh food on the daily. Yes, from the grocery downstairs, or across the road. Car centric urban design fucked you up. It’s built for the car, not for human beings. Your perception and expectations are completely out of wack with normal human existence.
For example, Costco style mega stores are not a thing in almost all of the world. No, no one needs a 3 year supply of mustard for a family of 4. Most businesses don’t need a heavy duty truck, why would a middle class family need one just to get to the school and office. You don’t need a 4x4 for the two trips a year you take to the mountains, on an asphalt road.
It’s all bizarre, it is all out of proportion. But it is not a personal failure, oil corporations and car manufacturers created this weird mar on the planet that is suburban sprawl and car dependent infrastructure. We just live with the consequences.
Have you thought about getting an ebike instead? My old folks got a pair and it completely changed the game for them
Telling Grandma/grandpa to use an ebike in the snow or in lethal wet bulb temperatures isn’t a real solution. It’s great that it worked for your folks but it cannot work for mine.
The air can be so saturated with water that you cannot evaporate sweat which is the primary way your body sheds heat.
It is unsafe for anyone, let alone the elderly, to travel in these conditions unless you have a vehicle with climate control.
You don’t even have to be old. Ebikes are car replacements and can tow children, groceries, and furniture with ease. They flatten hills, get you to work on time and without sweat, and significantly extend the realistic travel radius around your home/work/last transit stop. Expect to pay pennies to recharge it, rather than two or three figures for a full tank of gas.
Any fitness benefits you get are just a cherry on top. Ebikes just make it so much easier to skip the car trips in your village or city.
“tow furniture with ease” is complete bullshit lmao
Wheels with spikes work pretty well if it comes to hard packed snow and ice. Normal mointainbike wheels work well enough for me in the snow though, I was always just a bit careful and nothing ever happened so far.
Plus, as we’ve seen, it is much easier to escape the secret police on a bike
Unless the secret police have bikes as well!
It’s one of those things where people imagine they’re going to go on a big road trip… someday. Some may have done this when they were younger and imagine they’ll do it again because they aren’t too old for that yet.
But the reality is having to plan to go places in specific routes at specific times to avoid traffic, sitting bumper to bumper in gridlock cursing out all of the idiot drivers all around you, while constantly being stressed one of the most expensive things you own might get damaged. Then voting for someone to fix the problem of all of the other idiots on the road because you’re the only one that isn’t an idiot… but you definitely are one of the idiot drivers.
But maybe this weekend you’ll take a road trip and enjoy the freedom. Well not this weekend, you’re too exhausted from commuting 15 hours this week to be able to get up before sunrise to beat the cottage country traffic. But next weekend you’ll enjoy that freedom for sure!
This doesn’t work if you have any distance to go. I spent 8 years without a car, and I’ll never do that again. I love my bike, but no.
Motorbike.
Vroom
Because you lived in a car centric shit hole with no backbone rail.
Fucking car brain infrastructure blindness is so reliable. Like you can’t see the massive constant costs of car infra, you think the roads never need repair and fuel just fucking appears, engine repairs aren’t orders of magnitude more expensive than anything else, and there’s no opportunity cost to other modes of transit, but laying an inch of track or cutting bike trails is just so fucking expensive. You are the problem with the world. You are why we have climate change. You are why everything is so fucking shit and everything everyone owns spies on all of us.
Please stop. Please just fucking stop. You can’t see shit, your experiences are not valid, your instincts are the products of ad campaigns, and you are reliably aggressively spectacularly incorrect in harmful ways. Please stop having opinions, stop voting, stop speaking on any topic you are hostile to the concept of understanding.
If you’re determined to never think or observe, please defer in matters of reality to those who at least try.
This is some high tier deranged posting.
Nice.
Cool. Tell me what I’m wrong about and how.
You know how LLMs have a context window and use it to predict the next word? This guy’s brain works like that, but with a context of emotion instead of words, and it can only store 3 tokens.
Removed by mod
They have 5,297 comments within the last 5 months.
That’s 35 comments a day for like the past half year.
I browse at work and am chronically online but shit, that’s still a crazy amount.
That’s… really something. Their posts are unhinged.
Their mod log really says a lot lol
Oh I would love to read that—is there an easy way for me to see that? I only use Voyager, so I’m a bit of a noob here.
schizo-posts
No need to add the ableism in there.
Yeah that’s fair, didn’t mean to be like that but a mod didn’t like it and deleted it so I can’t edit. Just used to using old internet slang, and I often forget there’s places here that really don’t like that kinda thing—my apologies.
Dude that is some insane response there.
How so?
I feel this comment in my bones.
deleted by creator
That’s… What you have trains for. If you have proper public transit, that need is covered. Oh, and you can get shit done while you’re on the train. Or sleep. Or relax.
That’s what made me an ebike evangelist. Someone on hexbear once described cars as using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. Most of my car trips were a walnut. >50km, but Colorado’s topography and weather made biking so miserable that I’d drive 2km to a grocery instead of biking. Adding a motor changed everything for distances like that. No matter how windy is I have a tailwind, no matter how steep it is the landscape is flattened. I ride home after a 10 hour shift in 35C heat doing hundreds of squats and it’s refreshing. For longer distances I still need my car but trips like that are so infrequent that I could rent a better car as-needed and still save money.
I mean on average I drive anywhere from 100 to 400 mi a day for what I do for work. And then my trips that I take can average 8 to 10 hours or more. And those are done several times a month as well. I went from going absolutely nowhere because I didn’t own a car and I only relied on bus train and bike to doing about 60 to 70,000 mi a year.
That’s a really extreme outlier case similar to why I still own my car, living in the American West and wanting a road trip vehicle. Hopefully you can find a job that doesn’t keep you sedentary for that long. A 400mi drive hurts like hell.
No I could easily have a job like that, I run my own company and I have freedom to do whatever I want to now and it is so much better than when I was sitting in an office staring out a window all day long. That was a slow death. 400 mi for me is nothing it’s literally a day’s work. Hell even within the city that I live in there’s days like last Friday where I drove almost 400 miles in a single day.
This doesn’t work if you have any distance to go.
Many parts of the world don’t require people to go more than at most 10km for almost any reason, ever. I assume you’re American, in which case you’re totally right. Broken country designed only for cars.
I mean it’s not really that it’s a shit country designed only for cars. It’s also a rather huge country that you can travel quite a ways to get to whatever you’re needing to do.
Other huge countries have trains for this.
I mean we have trains also but just like those countries also have cars and infrastructure we also have cars and infrastructure. The amount of time it takes for a train to go from point a to point b is quite often much longer than what it takes for a car to get to point a to point b. They’re oftentimes where I work 3 to 400 mi away in a single day I can literally get up in the morning drive out there do a job complete it and drive back and be back at my house by that evening. There is no way on a train I could get up make it out there with all of my tools completed job and make it back to my house at any time in a single day.
I mean we have trains also
No, we really don’t. We used to, and then automotive companies bought our country, killed all the passenger trains, and redesigned every city to require cars.
Yes, the idea that America has trains I think really betrays that this user doesn’t really know any other type of infrastructure than broken car-centric bullshit. Not blaming them, that’s just what you get in America.
I mean we have trains also but just like those countries also have cars and infrastructure we also have cars and infrastructure. The amount of time it takes for a train to go from point a to point b is quite often much longer than what it takes for a car to get to point a to point b.
Not actually correct with high speed rail. Also, you’re talking about a work vehicle which is obviously a different category from a commuter vehicle and not at all the subject of this post.
Okay… fine argument.
But… inexpensive?
Really?
I spent 100 euros on my current bike
50 for a second-hand bike at the bike shop 50 for a cargo rack
They can be. Don’t need to be expensive, and anyone with hands can work on them, even on the go. Parts readily available.
They can be really expensive, but the world is full of used bicycles that cost almost nothing. Sometimes literally nothing.
replacing my stolen bike with a free bike I just found sitting around outside.
My wife and I find bikes for free all the time, especially kid’s bikes. People just leave them by their trash cans for pickup. Can’t even sell them they’re so common. Guy at the flea market gave her a nice purple adult bike last Saturday.
Same bikes from Walmart? Oh hell no.
It’s important to consider cost/value holistically instead of just the upfront dollar amount. $1500~ for a cargo ebike is an intimidating number that I wouldn’t have imagined paying for a bike five years ago. It’s replacing a car which costs me $1500~ per year in registration and insurance premiums. My yearly fuel costs on the bike are less than refueling my car once, and I was doing that biweekly. Any repair on my bike is a few hundred dollars at most, doable at home without expensive tools, while repairing the fender on my car cost $2000 and spiked the insurance rate. I never need to take a taxi or use our inefficient public transit, and the time I spend on it is really fun because the motor cuts out all the shitty parts of biking. It’s inexpensive in the larger sense that it makes travel time rewarding instead of passive or punishing, on top of the boots theory of poverty where my cheap car becomes expensive when I have to actually use it and then replace all the shit on it. My ebike is inexpensive because it makes the rest of my life inexpensive and gives me my time back.
It’s important to consider cost/value holistically instead of just the upfront dollar amount.
That’s great and all - but only for those who can afford the upfront amount, isn’t it?
I can’t afford the upfront amount either so I just paid in installments, the monthly payments being cheaper than my car insurance. My upfront cost was like $100, the cost of taking an uber three times.
I wish I could still ride a bike. I walk for most of my errands and just enjoying the local nature trails, but bike seats are agony after both a bike accident 40 years ago (thrown 10 feet after an RV sideswiped me) and catastrophic car accident 11 years ago. Both made my existing lower back issues far more urgent and exceptionally painful before getting on a bike.
Is there any kind of rehab you can do? One thing I’ve found with modern medicine is that they focus on getting someone healed until they can do basic things like sit and walk, which allows them to sit in an office, and sit in a car. But, they don’t address the other needs someone might have, like if they’re a dancer, or a martial artist, or a cyclist.
I’ve had some severe injuries over the years, and they basically called my rehab done when I could sit, stand and walk. But, on my own I’ve worked on my range of motion and strength to do more than just those basics.
Oh noooooo
So sorry
Is sitting on seats hard as well? I imagine it probably is so some kind of recumbent trike, besides being very expensive, wouldn’t be a way to get you back riding…
In which case I’m glad you’re able to enjoy those trails even in spite of the tragedies!
I had to get a recumbent due to pain issues with a regular upright bicycle seat. I’ve owned a couple of them over the past 20 years or so, and they’re great.
💪
I’ve had scoliosis since before those accidents, so it’s a whole host of back issues. Sitting sucks, but is ameliorated by a quality cushion (a very thick memory foam pad I’ve had for a while now). I can’t sit on benches or hard seats for any length of time at this point.
Have you looked into recumbent bikes? A lot of people around here use them and they seem wonderful. Really relaxed posture with a comfortable chair-seat, hand or foot controls, motors that take them to 32kmh with a throttle. That or an e-trike are my plan if my health fails me.
It’s a great idea honestly.
I’m happy with my long old man walks, but love the idea of being able to do more without a car!
I love walking too but it sucks with groceries. Unfortunately I don’t know them well enough to point you toward a specific model, but a local bike shop should be able to get you something that’d negate that back pain at least as well as a car seat does if not better. I love seeing mobility-limited people zip past me on the trail.
Hell yeah!
Anyone getting out into nature, even the citified version most of us can manage, is on the right track.
I’ve heard full suspension bikes enable some people who have back pain. Might be worth giving it a shot, depending on your pain levels.
I honestly love walking, despite my screwed up back and panoply of other issues. I can mostly manage without a car for anything but large shopping at this point. And since kids and grandkids moved out, most shopping is reasonable and amenable to backpack or cart.
Switching from a car to a cargo ebike was the best purchase I’ve ever made. I can get anywhere in the city as fast as driving, but now my commute is along nature trails and parks instead of an asphalt desert lined with animal corpses and driver memorials. I feel more connected to the local ecosystems and community, getting to watch the seasons unfold at my own pace. If I leave the house I’m exercising and can control the level of exertion. The pedal assist simultaneously feels like I’m a 6 year-old and a world-class athlete, while the throttle makes it a quiet moped I can ride on any surface. My fuel costs amount to $20 a year in electricity and I can easily do any normal repair myself for the 15-80,000km the components will last. By the time expensive electrical repairs become a threat I can get a current year replacement on Upway for less than the cost of most car repairs.
The stress, risk, and cost of driving used to make me dread having to do it. Commuting was the worst part of my day and now it’s a super liberating and enriching experience. I love watching cargo ebike usage take off locally and the urbanism that follows it.
Debating between a cargo ebike or a commuter one for hauling my ass 15km to work and my kid to various activities. Two bikes isn’t in the budget, and groceries are a short walk I wouldn’t bother getting the bike out for.
https://upway.co/products/aventon-abound-sr-ufp78
I’d buy this exact bike or monitor their feed for the LR/longrack version. Of all the budget brands, Aventon is your best compromise between price/quality/support network. I have an Aventon Abound LR and it’s great even at full price. It fits 6 bags of groceries on the back (60kg max load), feels really stable and agile, and it has a good suite of antitheft features like an electronic lock and GPS tracking/geofencing. I haven’t had an issue with it in almost 2000km of riding and have only upgraded the tyres to something with more traction. Aventon also has the best ecosystem of accessories unless you spend twice as much for a Tern (which I’m currently planning), so you can get a great child seat and orbiter that fits a cargo tub.
I also own a commuter bike but never feel the need to take that out over the cargo bike, even if it has better features like a mid-drive motor and belt drive. They’re both limited to the same speed and 32kmh is the perfect balance between safe/fast, so you don’t gain some performance advantage from a lighter bike. The lower centre of gravity on the cargo bike makes it much easier to control at that speed, especially with a full load shifting around, and the step-through design makes it super easy to get on/off of. Wider/smaller tyres make it feel safer over sketchy terrain too. It’s a perfect utilitarian electric donkey.
No kidding. I’ve felt that mid drive would be the best for an ebike just off of where the force is coming from and that bigger tires would be more efficient
A mid-drive is better on paper but in practice it just feels slightly more responsive than a rear-hub does. On cargo ebikes that’s a $1000 difference and the real upgrade you get from that is a Bosch motor that will last 80k km. That’s one of the things making me look at Tern GSD models ($3500-4000 used), but it isn’t necessary at all and doesn’t add to the experience.
Larger tyres might also be more efficient on paper, but you’re trading off accessibility and safety. The motor means you’re already going as fast as you can pedal on a normal bike. There’s nothing to gain there from any tyre size. With a kid or cargo you want maximum stability and control over the bike. A small tyre makes it easy to stand at a stoplight, walk it over ice, and load/unload without tipping. Wide ones absorb a lot of shock, handle uneven sidewalks better, and keep you from slipping. I’d only buy a cargo bike with 20" tyres and don’t notice any kind of performance gain from my commuter bike’s 28" ones.
edit: Also with a kid you’ll be going slower than the 32kmh class 2 limit of a cargo ebike or 45kmh class 3 limit that I don’t consider bike components safe beyond. 24kmh is what I’d consider a safe speed for trail riding with a child or full cargo load because the most important factor there is your ability to stop safely. The level of exertion there is equivalent to casually pedaling at 8kmh on a normal bike.
Debating between a cargo ebike or a commuter one
You can attach so much to carry shit on a commuter bike, plus you get the benefit of being able to take most of it off when you don’t need it.
I’ve been riding what would probably be classified as a gravel bike these days, but it’s literally the bike my parents bought for me in middle school (and they bought it used), and here I am some 10-20 years later (I really can’t remember) riding it daily and hauling my own kids to and from their school on it. I think the bike was originally manufactured around the turn of the century, but it’s been a heck of a workhorse for the entire time I’ve been riding it, and it survived several years of being completely neglected and not ridden too!
I have a trailer I found at a garage sale for $20 to haul the kids in and I clip a fake milk crate onto the cargo rack using some rope and carabineers when I need to carry stuff. In the longer term I want to get proper paniers (they sell ones big enough to carry a full weeks worth of groceries in) for easier stuff hauling and an actual ebike would be nice. My oldest is getting a bit too big for the trailer so I’m also eying up a trailercycle for her for the next season and considering options there.
Anyways back on topic, a cargo bike has the benefit of everything having a spot from the get-go, but the downside is you are always riding a cargo bike whether you’re hauling people and stuff or not, meanwhile a commuter bike you can toss a trailer hitch on and hook up any bike trailer or you can clip all sorts of stuff to a rear rack then remove whatever you don’t need for the given trip
I spent most of my “young adulthood” without a car, and in 30s when I finally got one I realized quite quickly it’s fucking frustrating sitting in traffic for almost the same time it’d take me to commute with analog bike that 40km - or less time with a train+bike combo.
Been to office only once with car this summer, and it was just miserable experience, only gets me angry and frustrated
It’s less disability-friendly than a car, can’t carry cargo, and can’t transport passengers. You try to have a suburban family with just bicycles - especially if one of the kids has balance issues from early childhood onward. It’s not possible. The automobile is viewed as the ultimate symbol of freedom because it can serve multiple roles and has a massive variability in speed.
Nonsense, you can absolutely have standard cargo bikes like this:
Or cargo bikes with gunner seats mounted in them
And there are recumbent and adaptive ebikes and normal bikes too, for people with disabilities or balance issues. Heck, you can even attach trailers to virtually any standard bike, and many different trailer options exist, from pet carriers to cargo, to food service to fully adult men.
Bikes shouldn’t be going above 28mph anyways. We have high speed rail if someone wants to do 150mph through a city.
Cars are definitely the present, but they absolutely don’t need to be the future.
“you try to have a suburban family with just bicycles”
Almost like those suburbs were designed around cars at the exclusion of all other transport
Almost like those suburbs were designed around cars at the exclusion of all other transport
Absolutely true, but it’s still where we are.
With this mentality that’s also where you’ll be in 20 years.
Change starts small.
“Less disability friendly than a car”
I completely disagree but it’s debatable.
What kind of handicap can allow you to drive but not bike ? Bike are extremely adaptable to any kind of handicap, to the point that they can basically be turned into an electric wheelchair.
can’t carry cargo
I disagree again, it does carry way less cargo but can still carry cargo.
can’t transport passengers
Why do we need to carry passagers ? Because a lot of people (child, elderly people, people without license) cannot drive and because car are expensive. If everyone can use a bike and the bike are so cheap that you can have a few aroumd for guests it greatly reduces the need for carrying assengers.
And you can still carry passagers on a bike, the best example is longtails bike that can carry an adult or several kids as passagers.
kid with balance issue
Longtail and tricycles.
Cars are amazing pieces of technology, they do have unique capabilities like doing unscheduled, flexible long distance drive, or carry a lot of cargo at once.
But for a lot of the daily living a bike (and proper bike infrastructure) would be way better suited to the situation.
I want to add my experience to this :
I’m disabled, on a good day I just get tired pretty fast. On a bad day even walking hurt and I need to rest every 15 min or so. I can’t drive because I have narcolepsia.
You would think that I would love getting around car but I don’t. When everything is made for car I need to walk a lot more even if someone drives me because parkings tend to not have a lot of benches and everything is farther because parking take space. It also makes crossing street horrible because I have to wait a long time for cars to stop.
If everything is bike friendly dedicated transport is faster and can afford to stop exactly where I need it and when I need it. I can take the bus, tram or train if something is too far, and I can stop when I need because bus stop have benches. On top of that everything is closser together since there little or no parking so a 15 min walk get me to more places. If i need to take a lot of grocerie I can just take a chariot, the only downside is sometimes there is noisy kids in the bus but this is solved by noise canceling headphones.
I know this is my experience ( which is obviously not universal ) and public transit / bikes are not a silver bullet that fixes everything mobility wise but earing the “bike centric infrastructure is ableist” rant feels downright insulting when it’s the thing that allow me to not depend on friends driving me.
E-bikes are great for people with disabilities who can balance and the elderly. I see old people zipping along on e-bikes a lot here in LA. For everyone else, public transit or para transit is often a better option than a car. A car that can accommodate a wheelchair or disabled driver is usually expensive.
Adult tricycles are great for people with balance issues.
Ebike trikes are a thing too.
The main reason wheelchair-accessible vehicles (usually a minivan) are so expensive is because no major manufacturers construct them in the factory. So you’re paying for the original vehicle, plus a third party to remove the middle seats (what happens to them, I’d like to know!) cut the sides and lower the floor, adding sections to the doors and rerouting the wiring, install a ramp and “kneeling” capabilities, plus tiedowns and in some cases special controls for driving. Also the driver’s and front passenger seats are set into removable raised platforms. The automatic doors have become standard but used to also be part of the conversion. If the body were constructed with these differences from the start, perhaps in a dedicated factory, the savings would be considerable.
The savings are even greater if you take public transit, which is much roomier than any van and has no associated fuel/repair costs that you’re responsible for. It sucks everywhere doesn’t have such options.
Even places with otherwise-decent public transportation often don’t have adequate disability-accessible public transportation. In fact it’s often the longest-established systems that are the worst for disabilities.
That’s part of why I’m so thrilled with LA transit! I’ve literally never seen anywhere better for people with disabilities on the general public transit (as opposed to paratransit). In other cities I know bus drivers will tend to skip stops with a wheelchair user waiting because it slows them down. Here in LA the driver will get up, make sure they’re secured if they need it, and double check what stop they’re getting off on so they don’t get stranded. And I see a lot more wheelchair users just out going about their day here than I did in other cities, which I don’t think is a coincidence.
It was a huge deal for us the first time we flew back into LAX and there were accessible taxis at the taxi stand. In the old days there were like 2 vans for the whole city and we’d wait hours. Of course LAX is fucked right now but it’s temporary and there’s still lots of the cabs, because they’ve realized they’re also great for hauling luggage. The Metro stations also seem pretty accessible although we haven’t had much occasion to use them. Maybe once they finish the Westwood station.
Not everywhere has public transit. Also, the people with families can’t spend 2 hours each way getting to work. I’m for bikes and public transit, it’s just not the answer to everything. You’re comments are being naive about this.
Thanks for emphasizing the last part of my comment: it sucks everywhere doesn’t have such options. Good public transit isn’t going to take 2 hours each way, and it sucks transit isn’t decent everywhere.
Seattle’s transit is getting better, but it’s still a long haul. If you live in a suburb and your work is in Seattle, but not close to the transit, you’re in for a slog.
There are 3 wheel trikes that help with some disabilities and balance issues, you absolutely can carry cargo with a bike and while you can’t carry a family of 4 on a single bike you can on 2 bikes. I literally can’t imagine being a contrarian about freaking bicycles.
less disability-friendly
Trikes exist, and some even have a bench seat and storage behind the driver
can’t carry cargo
The humble milk crate begs to differ. Also you can buy a cargo trailer if you need to haul more than a panier’s or a milk crate’s worth of stuff
can’t transport passengers
Hook up a trailer. They start at just $100 on Amazon or get one from a garage sale or local buy/sell listings or even the local bike shop might have used ones. The one I use for all of the kids school pickups and dropoffs I got at a garage sale for $20 and it’s also got space for cargo as well as children
You try to have a suburban family with just bicycles - especially if one of the kids has balance issues from early childhood onward
Mom and dad each ride a normal grownup bike, then each kid rides what’s appropriate for their age, needs and abilities, whether that’s a trailercycle, riding in a trailer, their own bike or even a trike
The automobile is viewed as the ultimate symbol of freedom because it can serve multiple roles and has a massive variability in speed.
Ehhh. Cars are great at what they do, but they’re expensive as fuck to own and completely suck when too many people want to drive to/from/through the same place.
Honestly in the car dependant hellscape that is America I think the best possible balance is one car and a family of bikes for every family. You can usually take bikes on the bus, bikes don’t require any meaningful amount of fuel (ebikes take like one laptop’s worth of energy to charge) and they’re freaking fun to ride as well as being good for fitness and mental health. But you also have the car for longer trips or trips on roads that you can’t safely/legally bike on. Bikes are freaking awesome, and you can throw so many attachments onto them to make them carry just about anything
The barriers to mobility are the giant, dangerous roads and parking lots between everything that car dependency requires. Cycleable/walkable places with good public transit are easier to get around for everyone with or without a car, regardless of disabilities.
Also, disabilities exclude more people from being able to drive than from walking/cycleing/using public transit. Not to mention people excluded from driving due to age. Or finances. Or not being able to get a license due to lack of English literacy. Or not having a permanent address. Or people that just would prefer to not drive. All these people deserve the right to be able to get around, and car dependency denies them that right.
This is true but not entirely.
My parents have mobility issues so we modified some Schwinn tricycles with 1200W motors and they can zip around our city on those all day long with no issues.
As far as kids go, I have 4 and we cycle everywhere we need within our city. I manage this by using bicycle trailers and having my kids ride their own bikes when they wish to. A cargo bike and trailer combination would allow me to tow 4 kids without issue though that gets limited as the kids get bigger.
On the topic of bike trailers, my cargo trailer has always ensured I can carry plenty of cargo with my bike when needed. It was actually instrumental when we moved earlier this year as the move was around 2-3 miles and even towing crates to the new house I could beat our vans while giving whichever van I would’ve ridden in the ability to carry two more crates itself.
The biggest limitation with bike trailers (at least the type I use) is how the weight affects the bicycle. Too much weight over the hitch and the front wheel of the bicycle becomes unweighted. I think a seat post mounted hitch would be able to handle more weight without this issue.
Get your lazy ass on a bike, ya bum!
If I even look sideways at it, I end up with at least broken nose, probably broken knees.
Yeah, honestly the “just get a bike” rhetoric is general pretty ablist.
Everything is ableist if you think about it enough. “Just get a car rhetoric” is ableist against blind people. Even “just take public transit” is ableist against immunocompromised people.
A society should make accommodations for those with special needs, but we don’t have to give those accommodations to everyone who asks. Some people will need a car, that doesn’t mean your average able bodied person should be driving one, and most of the “just take a bike” rehtoric is directed towards those people.
If everyone except for those with disabilities switched to public transport, bikes, it’d be a massive improvement.
I don’t think anyone wants to outlaw motor transport, especially for those without other options.
Inexpensive? In THIS economy?
Compared to a car they are damn near free for a used one.
We can’t sell a bike for any price around here. People just leave them out for whoever wants them.
Out of curiosity:
What’s that “note” a bike doesn’t need?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loan_note
Shorthand for a loan I imagine.
Thanks, didn’t know that.
Leases are often referred to as car notes in slang.
Thanks, never heard that before…
“Probably one of the most fuel efficient vehicles in existence” is one of the dumbest takes I’ve ever seen. The human body is a ridiculously inefficient machine.
my BODY is a MACHINE that turns PIZZA into WHEEL ROTATION
sort of the human body is pretty inefficient but a 20 mile bicycle ride can burn around 1000 calories while a gallon of fuel contains 31,000 calories.
http://berkscountynature.org/calories_in_gallon.html
I am not a chemical engineer so I am not sure how equivalent these two measurements are… I mean for starters I can eat 1000 calories… but I think if I tried to get 1000 calories by consuming gasoline; I would die.
a 20 mile bicycle ride can burn around 1000 calories
That really would be efficient!
But I guess you actually meant to say kilo calories ;-)A moped would be the closest equivalent ~100mpg so 3,000 calories per mile, vs a bike at 50.
I think it’s more that the moped /ICE engines are very inefficient then bikes are efficient, as an electric scooter would be lower then both.
Keep in mind how much CO2 gets emitted for the food you eat during it’s production. Being vegan helps.
Of course it’s still much between than driving a car, but an ebike would be even better. Even if you charged it with electricity from a coal power plant the CO2 emissions would be way lower
being vegan would help if it effected production
I don’t eat more on days I cycle to work than on days that I take the bus or work from home.
It’s almost as if you burn all that fuel to move the car, the content of the car (people) is almost a rounding error.
And generating heat. I believe motorcycles fail to beat bicycles with rereads to efficiency. Though there are significantly better than cars EVs included
Fuel efficiency is measured in litres per distance travelled, which is basically energy used per distance travelled.
I have a power meter on my bike, so I can get pretty accurate numbers for calories burned, by measuring the total kilojoules of energy used. On my road bike it takes roughly 1700kcal to travel 100km on a mostly flat course. According to Google there are approximately 8000kcal in a litre of petrol and a Smart Fortwo (a very small car) burns 6 litres per 100km on the highway. That’s 48000kcal to travel 100km, being generous.
Now let’s consider that the human body can convert roughly 20% of the energy consumed as food into useful work. That’s still only 8500kcal worth of food to travel 100km. So even with a full car with 5 people in it, 5 people on bikes are still going to need less fuel to travel 100km. Not to mention that producing the food will release much less carbon into the atmosphere (but that’s another topic).
In addition, the fuel that goes into a car is this ultra-refined blend of chemicals that is produced in a refinery. You have to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, use heat and various additives to transform it into automobile fuel, then ship it to a service station. I would imagine that the process of refining oil into gasoline is probably not 20% efficient.
Your body works on stuff that literally grows on trees. If you have a back yard, or even a decently sunny balcony, you can grow a tomato plant. Then, you eat that tomato, and voila, bike fuel. So, even if the calorie efficiency of a human body converting food into fuel isn’t great, the human body is the refinery. It can theoretically even be fuelled by foraging, no crops necessary.
Well, per traveled distance with moderate speed it is not completely untrue.
But still outclassed by a similar, but electrically powered (or assisted) vehicle.
Something a lot of people have a hard time coming to accept…I’m really curious here, how so? I would expect energy inefficiency to be an evolutionary disadvantage.
Part of it is due to thermodynamics. A diesel engine works at a high temperature difference, with peak gas temperatures going somewhere in the >1000°C range.
High temperature differences lead to high efficiency >40%.A human body can’t use high temperature processes, so has to stick to chemical workarounds which lead to additional losses.
A diesel car will typically run 20 km per liter. One liter of diesel is about 10 kWh. so if you put four people in the car, that’s 2.5 kWh per person. 2.5 kWh should allow you to walk for eight hours, or about 40 km. *quick edit: this is walking, cycling will get you further on 2.5 kWh!
Another thing is, diesel engines are water cooled, the heat is shed to the environment. This is about two thirds (varies 60-70%) of the energy produced, the > 40% efficiency you mention is only achieved by the highest performing engines around today.
Ok, lets assume an efficiency of 35%.
That means 3500Wh usable energy per liter of diesel.A complete 500Wh charge of my ebike gets me ~70km at 20km/h without any pedaling (tried that out).
So the usable energy delivered by one liter of diesel would be sufficient to drive me and my bike a distance of 7*70km = 490km.
A person won’t be able to sustain 20km/h on a bike with the same low effort as walking at 5km/h, but even if that was the case, in 8h this would only get him 160km far.============
Edit:
Looked up some numbers for bicycling.
Driving 20km at ~20km/h burned energy is generally given in the range ~500kcal, meaning 580Wh.
That is better than I expected, as the 10kWh primary energy would get you ~350km far, so almost as good as the diesel engine.(To be fair: this doesn’t yet take into account the CO2 footprint of food production, which is really abysmal. But that’s a different topic.)
I can’t believe more people have figured this out yet. The simple answer is: money. The REAL answer is that money itself is the dominant life form on our planet. Humans are powerless against anything that allows money to congregate and reproduce. Billionaires are quite literally the reproductive organs of the money demon that rules us. Politicians are the brain. We (the tax paying citizens) are the food.
So why do we drive cars instead of riding bikes? Money wills it so.
Sure, that’s why.
Let me hop on my bike for the 12-mile round trip to the nearest grocery store. No idea how I’m getting anything home though.
It’s a quick trip out to our camp in the swamp, only 52-miles out and back, 3 miles of which are impassable on a bike. I’ll just carry it over my head.
Then I’ll make the quick 625-mile round trip to pick up my kids 4 times a year. Hope they got their own bikes!
“But if we all lived packed in like rats in arcologies, we wouldn’t need cars!”
You should visit one of the university cities in the Netherlands, and then tell me if you’re still fine with cities designed around bike traffic.
Edit: this one’s on me for getting down voted. In my experience, if you go to the university cities, you have to have eyes in the back of your head as a pedestrian. There’s alway some cyclist coming from a random direction at high speed, ringing the bell and expecting you to give way (even in pedestrian zones). So as a cyclist it’s probably nice, as a pedestrian not so much.
I study in one. It’s great
My mostly car-centric university city is full of students drunkenly driving 2000kg missiles at 2-4x the speed of my 40kg ebike. Give me a visa and I’ll buy a house in one of your cities so that I can be safe and mad instead of just mad.
Imagine actually wanting to drive in a city where you can take a train, a bicycle, or just walk instead. Then, imagine being angry that it’s a bit less convenient than it would be in Shithole, California for you to flatten children with your 2000kg Americamobile. Couldn’t be me.
If you’re American, lmao. If you’re European, that’s even funnier.
do you actually have something to say or are you just impotently whining?
Edit: now that you actually explained what you were talking about, I actually agree with the pedestrian thing when cyclist are riding on sidewalks when there are bike lanes available for example.
Can you write down the problems you have with them? I’ve stayed in Copenhagen for a few weeks with a bike and it was lovely.
Already did, still fine with it.
Now what?
wdym?
I have, I am?
Gonna need some elaboration on this one…
What?
