Rain, ice and severe cold are a removed. I like bicycles, but driving to work in a heated car looking at that poor cyclist riding somewhere at 6 in the morning at -6°C, sorry, no, I’m gonna go with a car.
I disagree cycling in winter is nice. Just get some warm clothes and good tyres. A car is also really expensive to own in the city. Why pay for a car and parking when the alternative is almost free and arguably more fun.
I’m less likely to sweat profusely in winter
If the weather is bad enough, I will take transit instead, but cycling down to -10 C is doable without any problems.
I will be far less inclined to bike if it’s raining, that I do hate with a passion. Of course, I could just work from home in that scenario as well, if I don’t feel like taking transit
Ice and snow are difficult. But I don’t give a shit about the rest. It’s still way more fun than sitting in traffic.
Was the removed word bitch (female dog) by any chance I wonder?
Because lemmy.ml is run by a bunch of pearl-clutchers that think profanity is a tool of the capitalist oppressors.
Why did you ask if the removed word is removed?
Looks like they shadow-remove the word
Me logged in (via Sync): —
Me not logged in: —
For some reason your comment appears uncensored to me, but the top commenter’s is censored.
Bikes were and still are a revolutionary technology. There’s a reason suffragettes were often associated with bicycles.
Good pun.
I don’t see it
Bikes were and still are a revolutionary technology.
lol, thank you!
Revolution to mean revolving/rotating
Thanks!
Bicycle is the wheel reinvented.
Bicycle is two wheels.
Now with double the amount of wheel!
But what if i need to commute 600 miles to work and back every day and on top of that once a year I drive a million miles to my vacation home? Checkmate!
Because it’s harder to kill someone by hitting them with it.
But in all seriousness, you can go a lot farther, a lot faster, across much worse terrain and weather in a car than a bike.
How often does the average person really need to do that? Multimodal is where it’s at! Drive when you need to, don’t when there are alternatives. But alternatives need to exist for that to work, so vote for them.
A bicycle gives you freedom of lightweight activities within a few miles of your home. You want to play baritone sax in the band 25 miles away? It’s not happening with a bike.
The 25 miles is a bit much, but if your instrument/sporting gear can fit in a bag, you can carry it on a bike. There’s backpacks for guitars, cellos and tubas and I regularly see kids cycling to their lessons with those. This is a fairly dense town though, so 5km max (20 minutes at child-speeds). Kids also can’t drive cars, so if it’s not happening by bike, it’s not happening at all.
For me? Yeah 25 miles is a bit much depending on how regular that commute is. Once a week, maybe. Once a day, like a job? 5 miles tops is my limit. But I’ve heard of people doing 20-25 mile work commutes before.
If you are really active and can shower at work it can be fine. Bit if not it will suck.
If you do it a few times and get used to it, 20 can be fine, if there is a shower at work it certainly is better.
Don’t forget that maintenance is super cheap AND most people, with only the most basic tools, can do the work in their living room or even just on a sidewalk. And if I don’t get it right and the brakes don’t work perfectly I probably won’t fuckin’ die.
Hi, car owner here. I do all the work myself and it requires a fair bit of knowledge, expensive tools, space, and a childhood where I was never told I couldn’t do that work if I was thoughtful about it. That’s a high fuckin’ bar and requires a whole lot of privilege-oh there it is, too many people with privilege like to shit on those without and most of North America has dogshit for public transit or bike infrastructure and the “freedom of movement” with a car is all there but heavily artificial. Thanks auto industry and their lobbyists.
I do my own bicycle and auto repair, and the bicycle is way easier. Maintenance is:
- clean chain every so often (500 miles or start of the season) - get a chain cleaner tool thing ($10-20) and 50/50 Simple Green ($10 will last many years) and water, and then rinse, dry, and lube ($10 lasts years) - total process, 10 min?
- replace chain - $20 or so, plus a tool for $10 or so; do every 2k miles or so
- replace brake pads - $10-20
- tires ($50 for a fancy fire) and tubes ($10) - replace tires when bald, tubes when flat (or patch them), and get some tire levers ($5-10) to make it easier
For tools, you need a wrench set, and probably only like 2-3 sizes.
My yearly maintenance costs for all of our bikes (1 adult, two kids) combined is about $50. If that. You could also go to your local bike shop instead for about double that.
A quick tip on bike chains; if you are using lubricant you should never use heavy degreaser on the chain. The factory oil is the best lubricant and normal lubes don’t penetrate between links enough.
However, if you are going to degrease you chains, you should use paraffin wax instead of lube. I have an 11 speed chain with 3000+ miles and it’s only showing around 1% stretch. I don’t even use fancy bike specific wax, just food grade gulf wax. Another plus is the whole drive train is dry; doesn’t get your hands dirty if you need to remove a wheel, cassette, or derailleur.
Admittedly waxing the chain is a pain in the ass, but some of my chains are like $70 a pop so getting as much life from them is more important.
I have an 11 speed chain with 3000+ miles and it’s only showing around 1% stretch.
Wow, that’s a solid chain. I usually need to replace mine around 2000-3000, but my chains are like $20-30, and I don’t treat them very well (I stay on high gears on short climbs a bit too long).
I haven’t bothered with wax, maybe I should. I just do a decent job lubing everything a few times per year. I degrease (chain only, I’m careful around the derailleur and hub), rinse thoroughly, dry thoroughly, and then lube and wipe 2x. I don’t get any squeaks and it rides smoother after a cleaning, so I think I’m doing a decent job.
But I’ve heard wax is more of a one and done thing. Maybe I’ll try it the next time I replace my chain.
Also this is a healthy maintence regime. In my experience most cyclists do nothing on that list except swapping flat tubes and their bikes still ride just fine, if not merely sub-optimally.
Honestly have never done preventative maintenance on my bikes, only necessary repairs. Still thinking about repairing the shifter since I’ve been missing 1st gear for about 7-8? years now.
True. If you’re just riding casually, you don’t really need any maintenance.
But if you’re relying on it every day, keeping up on maintenance can reduce costs long term. Dirty chains destroy the cogs (inexpensive) and drive train (expensive), stretched chains cause gear slippage and inefficient power delivery, worn tires increase chances of flats and reduce grip, and worn pads reduce stopping ability, which could result in nastier accidents.
If you’re riding a lot, keep up on maintenance, just like you would with a car. If it’s just occasionally like once or twice/month, you can probably get away with some neglect.
And if you have a bike with a belt you can replace all chain-related maintenance with “check if the belt looks weird maybe once a year”.
Yup. I recommend taking it in if it looks weird, it’s not worth learning to replace a belt since they’re usually good for many many years.
Exactly!
People over-state bicycle maintenance.
$50 and a couple YouTube videos gets you everything you need for the first few years of maintenance. You can get fancy with a bike rack thing, but I never bothered and I’ve been fine.
If you screw up, go to a bike shop and they’ll get you sorted for $50 or so, and they’ll probably teach you how to do it right if you ask nicely. If you have a bike coop, it might be free.
For the newer cars, the lockout of self repair is real. You need an EEPROM reader to get the diagnostics out, and only then using firmware found on a chinese forum. Fixing a part requires you to just order a replacement, and once you take apart the car and put the part in, you then need to tell the cars electronics to accept the part as part of its diagonistics or it wont fucking start, even if its non-critical and everything else is fine.
Mechanical work comes pretty easy to me. I have no doubt I can fix virtually anything on my bike, short of things that require welding (we might see about that someday too…).
But cars mechanical work? Tried it some times. Frustrating as hell, don’t even want to touch it. I hate everything about cars, including the way they’re built.
I think it heavily depends on the make. Both my families mustang and f150 were terrible to repair. But my camry by comparison is a joy. I can tear it apart almost the whole way with a 10 and 12 mm in an afternoon.
I’ve done work in soft manufacturing, so i know how to use a wrench, but never worked in cars.
I acknowledge bikes are way easier BTW, can fix almost any problem in my bike in a few hours, just think repairability should be on people’s minds.
Cold, rain etc… And moving heavy things (like heavy groceries)
Cuz putting on a raincoat or some warm clothes is too much for these weak ass people.
Inb4 they just remove regulations so it becomes the vehicle of freedom
Try this when you are in your 70’s and come back and we’ll chat. And bring a cure for my chronically poor balance on your way over.
Many 70+ yr olds cannot or should not be driving cars either, because of eyesight/reflexes. Bicycles on the other hand, especially if conditioned throughout life, and later Trikes/Handbikes/Recumbents can be great options for many elders, and cycle infrastructure is perfectly usable for mobility scooters etc for those who really can’t or do not want to bike.
I dare you to travel on your own bicycle in the depths of winter across the USA in the same timeframe as a car.
Traveling across the entirety of the US by car in the middle of winter sounds fucking miserable. That’s what trains are for.
If you happen to enjoy that kind of thing and aren’t on a tight timeline it is fun as hell. Like a mechanical version of hiking.
Like hiking, most people don’t enjoy it or aren’t really up to the challenge.
Like a mechanical version of hiking
I can’t wait to describe driving this way to a friend so that we can both share in the laughter I’m enjoying right now.
Seriously though, with the right kind of terrain and conditions driving is a real challenge. If you have never driven off road through fields in wet, snowy conditions where stopping is likely to mean being unable to start going again and needing to guage how fast to approach a slope to maintain momentum it might sound silly.
Anyone who has never driven on an unpaved road might find it funny. Like how anyone who has only ridden a bike on paved roads might not understand the fun of going mountain biking off a defined path might find that funny.
Offroading on a motorcycle is more fun than a four wheel car most of the time, but all of things can be fun.
I own a lifted hatchback with gravel tires that I occasionally take down timber trails to camp or shoot. That’s maybe why I understood what you meant. But the way it came across, it just sounded like you need to go hiking more :P
Yeah, I was going for the ‘crossing difficult terrain challenge’ part and probably should have said it was like hiking from your couch.
Trains only travel along previously laid rails, at specific times. Plus, you’ll need to rent a car at the other end to get anywhere. Better to take your own car and have personalized comfort the whole way. Also, yes, it does sound miserable. But if you’re in a car, turn up the heater, turn on the radio or your favorite music, and just vibe while driving safely.
But if the cities were built for people rather than cars, you wouldn’t need to rent a car at your destination. And trains run often if they haven’t been critically underfunded for decades. And you can’t really drive safely, even if you’re a perfect driver, someone can run you off the road. Trains are orders of magnitude safer.
Not everyone lives in cities in the US and even then they are really spread out. It’s the one thing I think the world doesn’t comprehend about the US; we’re spread way out.
My brother in christ, the reason we got this spread out in the first place was a robust national network of passenger rail lines.
It isnt like the rest of the world doesnt have rural areas, unless one lives in like singapore or something. Something like 80% of the US population lives in urban areas, and most trips arent trips between cities except perhaps for those that are close to one another anyways. So even if one accepts that rural areas are car centric by nature, that still leaves the vast majority of the population that isnt affected by that. The buildings within cities being spread out over a wide space making transit less efficient is a failure of city design rather than something fundamental and unchangeable about the US, we have a fairly serious housing shortage anyways, if we really wanted to decrease car dependence we could absolutely build up denser housing in urban cores to shift the population over time into areas that allow for more efficient transportation.
we could absolutely build up denser housing in urban cores to shift the population over time into areas that allow for more efficient transportation.
Sounds like prison
Or you know, just how cities work…
Where are you going in rural america that you need to rent a car if you arent already living there?
Family, maybe.
Then… they can get their family to come pick’em up in their pickup truck.
I’d hope they’d pick you up
Cars also travel along previously laid paths. I mean, technically there are off road ones that dont have to, but unless youre on your own land trying to get from one place to another without following the roads wont go so well.
Off-road travel, even in a car not explicitly made for it, is usually safer than traveling a derailed train. But I get your point.
But demonstrate the incontrovertible need for a car during one’s regular commute through an average modern city. And I’m even offering the main exception - busses and taxis/ride sharing/whatever the current nomenclature, as I consider public transportation to be its own independent thing, unrelated to Cars.
I think the people who would enjoy such a venture via bike have or are already doing it, the rest of us would just like to be able to ride the bike through the city without having to play Frogger with three lanes filled with enraged lumps of cortisol *wrapped in two tons of steel and various other such substances.
Edit: added * to further drive home the viscerality of my desire.
I live in a city of 60,000 people in Colorado. The closest train station is 15 minutes away, by car. There is a bus that will take me to the train station, but it’s an hour to walk to the closest one and the bus comes once an hour, 6 am to 7 pm, M-F. I can’t afford to spend 4 hours on a quick trip to the grocery store and never leave my house on the weekends.
There are bike lanes on the main roads (4-6 lanes 50+ mph traffic). More than half the vehicles around here are massive jacked up trucks and SUVs. I have a bike, but do not have a death wish. It regularly snows, making bike riding a no-go for most of 4 months of the year.
I am very much in favor of reducing car traffic. But it’s not feasible for so many people with the way cities are designed and the lack of public transport.
I mean, that isnt really an argument against public transit and bike infrastructure, its just an argument that the way to do it isnt to just tell people to stop driving and expect it to happen, one has to redesign cities to make these options feel like the safe and natural choice.
This was my thought as well, goes to show we need better long-range public transportation!
And bikes should be used for more granular destination points, once the bulk is covered via whatever works best as public transport in a given area.
Edit: bikes could also serve as a good first step toward a more rational approach toward public goods, as we could just stack public bikes at each node to be grabbed for free. It’s self-limiting, it presents minimal waste as once you have one you don’t really need a second, and it’d remove any entry barrier there may be to biking. Other than learning how to ride, of course. And this would be in addition to dedicated carry spaces for bikes on public transport - s’why I love the subway.
And I’m done hallucinating, I apologise.
Eh, I did that for a couple years in Utah and it was largely fine. When the snow got nasty, I took the bus.
That was back when my commute was 10 miles (16km) with a segregated bike path the whole way. My new commute is more than double that, so I drive. But if we weren’t so car centric, things would be more compact and I wouldn’t have this nasty commute.
we weren’t so car centric, things would be more compact and I wouldn’t have this nasty commute.
Hi, a different commenter here. I love public transportation (time to sit and read! meet interesting people!) and dislike cars, but realistically we often have other considerations that city design alone wouldn’t solve.
- My most recent commute was 65 miles through a rural area – I had to live in town A to support a family member and my job was in town B.
- Before that I was in an urban area, but had to live near the hospital area for my BFF’s sake, and my job was out in the suburbs 18 miles away. No bike lanes, and public transportation took 2-3 hours one way. (and this was in a city with relatively good public transportation.)
Now I WFH so that’s cool. But the experience made me realize how complex is the problem of transportation and urban design. I mean, I agree with the fact that bikes are awesome and we need better public transportation in the US, though.
Yeah, I appreciate that it’s complex, but in the US we prioritize cars instead of people.
A properly designed system will account for lots of transportation options. This means:
- force cars to go around city centers - prevents gridlock in downtown, and improves transit and walkability/cyclability downtown; enforce with car-free zones
- buses and bike paths to connect the different parts of the city
- trains to connect cities
- highways and roads connecting smaller towns
If you go to smaller towns, a car is your best bet. If you’re going downtown, a train should be more efficient, and a car should be workable. If you live in or near a city, a bike should be sufficient.
We used to have one car because I could bike to work, but now we need too, and only because of the 2 days I commute to the office. And the worst part is that there’s a train line near my house that I could totally take to work if they actually built the line they’ve been talking about for decades. But instead of building that line (connects to a larger system, including a stop at a major sports stadium), we expanded a highway (didn’t fix traffic) and we’re building a new highway (might help somewhat). Most of those cars are traveling along the proposed train route (it runs parallel to the highway), yet the highway gets priority.
I propose we rethink transit in terms of moving people instead of cars.
Yeah agreed it’s an interesting problem bc it has so many components… unfortunately when we try to get one part of it implemented, people say: it’s not going to solve the whole problem so why bother. I’m still learning about it and so are most people. But I think even the most truck-loving person has an older relative who can’t drive any more, or maybe they themselves can’t drive bc of a DUI or something, so there’s always an opening for learning more.
Yup. Fortunately there are professions for solving these types of problems, so we need to stop demanding specific solutions and let them do their job.
It turns out adding more lanes often makes things worse, and the better solution is to replace cars with higher density transit, so your truck loving friend will likely be better off if we invest in transit instead of highways. I want to take transit to work instead of adding to traffic, but that currently takes 4x as long as driving (2-ish hours each way). You should absolutely be able to drive if you want, and the more practical other modes of transportation are, the less cars will be on the road since a lot of people would rather ride than drive.
Failed the brief on at least two counts. First, you took a bus when it got “nasty” - thus proving automobiles are more adaptable, and thus superior. Second, a 10 mile commute is not across the USA - granted the terrain in Utah is varied, but not coast-to-coast varied. You also didn’t put up your times vs. average car travel time for the route, so I’m going to assume that your average speed was lower, and your average time was also longer.
a 10 mile commute is not across the USA
Because you don’t cross a continent by bike or car, you do it by fast or night train in which you can take your bicycle.
Or by plane if you’re in a hurry.
50% of the Boston workforce commutes by train every day, and that’s with how notoriously bad the Boston T is considered. 100 years ago, before the advent of car centric urban design, the Boston T was twice the size it is today, servicing towns all over eastern Massachusetts. A big part of the reason that a car is your best option for pretty much anything is because our country was redesigned to make it necessary. We used to have streetcar towns here - trolley systems that ran up and down the major hubs in towns - that they straight up paved over the rails for, making things less accessible in the name of selling cars and gasoline. They’re also a major contributing factor in the death of small businesses and the rise of the giant box stores at the edge of town that you have to drive 20 minutes to in order to go food shopping.
Your argument is in bad faith, and your reasoning is disingenuous. Pretty much every large town west of the Mississippi grew around a train station. Nobody is taking away your freedom to sit in traffic on your morning commute. But imagine how much better that commute would be if you could take 50 cars off the road per bus or hundreds per light rail train. The average commuter car in the US has 1.2 people in it. If you make it so that drivers don’t have to deal with walkers and bikers, and vice versa, everybody wins.
Was this all an attempt to “gotcha” people to prove that cars on free roads go faster and protect you better from elements than bikes? I mean, yeah of course they do. This doesn’t make them “superior” in an absolute way because superiority depends on parameters. Take cost, health benefits, maintenance costs, environmental impact and bikes would be superior.
Can’t talk about US, but in Italy the daily average by car was between 10 and 15 kilometers I seem to remember, that is 30-40min by bike at a slow pace. For that I would 100% say that provided infrastructure exists, bikes are a largely superior transportation vehicle compared to everything else. If you talk about traveling between islands I would say a boat is more efficient, or if you have to travel 500km I would say planes are. Superiority depends on the specific evaluation, that’s my point. For the kind of coast to coast trip you mentioned, in winter, I would say trains can be vastly superior to cars, for example, and they can be combined with bikes.
Took me 40 min each direction (best time was 30 min), car took 20-30 min (very little traffic) and the bus took 40+ min. But I could also skip the gym since I already got my exercise for the day, so I consider it a wash. With an ebike, I could cut that almost in half (legal top speed is 28mph, but nobody enforces that, so I could probably go 30-35mph). I average about 15-20 mph, depending on wind.
10 miles is really far for a bike commute though. If you live somewhere bike centric, you’d probably only go 3-5 miles, at which point the time difference is negligible and probably faster by bike because of no parking issues.
And the bus was only necessary because we don’t plow bike lanes. With proper infrastructure, I wouldn’t need the bus at all. My coldest commute was ~5F, and layers kept the ride completely comfortable, so the issue was literally only the lack of infrastructure.
My point isn’t to say the US is currently completely bikeable, my point is that with proper infra, it could be. We don’t have as nasty of weather as the NE and MW, but we do get low temps and snow, and I’ve seen madlads cycling in the MW in crazy weather.
The reason you can’t is much more about infrastructure than weather, especially within cities
Source: I live in Scandinavia and everyone bikes even when it’s cold
Just out of curiosity, do you have snow tires for bikes or are the paths cleared well enough not to worry about it?
Where I live we often get mixes of sleet and ice along with the snow and since it is sporadic throughout winter we do a pretty mediocre job of funding the removal. If we didn’t have so many wide roads it probably wouldn’t take as much effort.
Here not just bikes talks about winter cycling in Olou, Finland. The answer is yes, the city needs to manage the lanes during winter instead of letting it be acceptable to push snow in bike lanes or leave them uncleared. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
This was exactly what I was going to link.
Certainly in my city bike lanes and sidewalks are cleared and salted before main roads. Though we just had the warmest January on record so a lot less snow to think about 😬
Even in the US, there are places that are bike friendly in the winter. Minnesota has a big winter biking culture, both for commuting and for recreation.
That’s impossible and no one is implying that bikes should replace other modes of transport for interstate travel. However, I bike commute in winter in Wisconsin and it takes less time than riding the bus. Driving a car is faster than my bike commute, but only marginally so.
Then bikes are not more freeing than cars. The means of easy, unscheduled, interstate mobility should be the American symbol of freedom. That’s not a bicycle.
I love how you explicitly defined your requirements to be exclusive to car travel. Riding on a good train or bus network is incredibly easy and affordable in many places, speaking from experience.
I dare you to cross the Atlantic in a car.
You might need to rendezvous with another vessel mid-trip for gas, but amphibious cars do exist.
Best of luck my dude
Checkmate liberals-tier comment. Why did you even post this?
Initially, for shits and giggles. I can’t ride a bike and I also can’t drive, so I’m stuck on foot.
One thing people don’t seem to grasp in many different situations is the vastness of the US. Most states are bigger than a lot of countries. You can fit several European countries into some of the biggest US states.
True, but when I lived in the US the majority of my trips weren’t cross-state, but 1-10 miles which can totally be cycled if the infrastructure was there.
True in many situations, but American society isn’t like that. They want you in seven places in 5 hours all miles and miles apart. Busy busy busy!
because the entire transport infrastructure is geared towards making cars the safest, quickest and most convenient way of getting places. its by design, absolutely on purpose.
i own a pedal bike and enjoy riding, but i can get places nowhere near the speed and safety. i almost always need at least a bus ticket to get halfway there, which forces me to rent the damn bikes wherever i go if i want to use them. a basic city motorcycle or scooter is fucking cheaper and quicker than mass transit where i live, without the disadvantages of a pedal bike. this is probably why they seem to be so popular rn.
it feels like you have to go out of your way for any alternative and its still worse. maybe its time to rethink it but wtf do i know. you can blame the car industry or capitalism for that.
in north america - go to NL and it’s the opposite - it’s a political decision.
for reference, i’m on south america.
sadly, the NL is one of the exceptions, not the rule in the world.
Try riding a bicycle 105 kilometers to your parent’s house and see how that feels
Take your bike on the train. That’s what I did last time I had somewhere to be that was >100 km away, and it was a fantastic trip
In nice weather? Pretty good, as long as you are staying the night… And don’t mind being tired… And don’t need to bring much with you… And can wash your clothes there before you cycle back.
My only issue is the grocery store is a half an hour drive away by car because we live rural. We shop once a month for staples and stock a lot of things in bulk to avoid making multiple trips. Not everyone does or should live in a city. If there was a service like a train or a bus even we would use it but it isn’t an option.
I know a couple of people my age (about 40) who really prefer not to drive, but it’s such a strange preference IRL that I suspect most people online who claim that it’s what they prefer have just never experienced how much better it is to have a car and live somewhere where driving is convenient.
I know that sounds patronizing but I was a bikes/mass transit supporter myself when I was younger and it was 100% because I hadn’t learned how to drive and I didn’t know what I was missing.
That’s fun. I was a driver kid and didn’t know what I was missing till I moved to a place with good bike/public transport infrastructure.
I suspect people who claim that they prefer to have a car never experienced how much better life quality is in a place without cars where cycling is convenient.
(The noise pollution alone is worth it!)
There’s no accounting for taste, as the saying goes, but where have you been that is quiet but not car-reliant? The lower population density that is made possible by driving reduces noise much more than cars increase it.
You underestimate how much noise cars make. I’m 20 meters from my neighbors and I never hear a peep. Meanwhile, I’m a kilometer from the highway and I can hear always hear it at least a little bit (and a lot when the wind is in my direction). So you have to go really low density, like 1 house per square kilometer and 5 kilometers of dirt road before even reaching a regional road, to go quieter than this, but… unsurpisingly, not many people live there.
