Anons argue in comments
Cars are the ultimate symbol of freedom because you just get in and go wherever to do whatever.
Pick nanna up? sure. Go buy her groceries? Sure. In the pouring rain? Ok. Pick up her dog from the vet? Yep. Drop by the garden store and grab 50kg of fertilizer? You bet.
You can do all of those things with out any planning or notice. You just get in and go wherever the day takes you.
I’m a bit bonkers about bikes. I have a cargo e-bike. It absolutely could do all of these things in separate trips. Doing all of them together would be a challenge but I am 100% here for that so long as nanna is. The main difference is planning. You need different gear, like a bike trailer for example. You’re also probably going to pick the right time of day, like early before it gets too hot or too windy, provided that it’s not raining.
That freedom comes at quite a cost. Both to the driver and society. Riding a bike puts the “free” in freedom
Taking a vacation road trip from Florida to the Grand Canyon with three kids with only bikes also comes at quite the cost. Bikes are great, but in many practical scenarios they are slow. Not all of us live in Manhattan, or a dense city, or even a well connected and safe to traverse suburb.
Bikes cost time.
Because showing up to a client meeting dripping in sweat on a 103 degree day is considered to be poor form. Because I got a new job and don’t have an extra two hours in my day to ride a bike back and forth, and moving isn’t in the cards. Because I have to carry a couple kids and all the crap the goes along with them.
because the US sucks ass and the entire world just does what the US does is also sucking of the ass.
It’s not that I disagree with you, it’s that we can do better and we’re not.
Frankly I find bikes stupid as a proposed method of transportation.
I would love to see cities designed around everything needed being in walking distance, with a supply of inexpensive rentable cars for the things that aren’t, like meeting friends that live elsewhere, so we can travel between walkable locations, but at no time do bikes seem a reasonable option.
They have so many inconveniences and problems attached, and don’t provide enough transportation utility to make up for it.
A car provides shelter, climate control, a comfortable and relaxing ride, and enough cargo space to transport most things we could need to transport on any sort of regular basis.
A bike meanwhile provides no shelter from the elements or outdoor temperature, an uncomfortable ride that digs into your ass, requires you to exert yourself significantly, and has between zero and very little cargo space; certainly not enough to do something like shopping for groceries.
Pushing for using bikes as primary transport is ridiculous; there’s a small number of people for which that would work, but for most it doesn’t and never will. For most people, things are either in walking distance, or you need a car, so it’d be a lot better to restructure our living spaces around walking.
Human beings literally exhale CO2. This makes me curious what the actual carbon efficiency is when using a calorie to CO2 analysis factoring in the carbon footprint of the diet needed to fuel said travel.
Because IIRC carnivores are only 10% efficient, so this feels like a complicated problem. And then of course the carbon footprint of the manufacturing of various methods of transport and break even points over what periods of time.
“carbon footprint of the diet needed to fuel said travel”
This only works under the assumption that people would only eat as much as they need to, looking at the increasing overweight problems in developed countries this is clearly not the case, most people would have eaten that much annyway.
Anyone who has ridden in rain and adverse weather would know one reason cars are more popular.
Danish citizens cycle in rain with no issue.
Of course the workplaces accomodate for that.
You just need the whole society to revolve around bike transport, and it will become normal to ride in the rain.
Yeah… pretty sure Denmark doesn’t get regular thunderstorms or hail storms.
Why are you “pretty sure” about that? Did you give it any thought?
https://www.essl.org/cms/category/news/
6 July: A supercell produced a swath of very large hail across Denmark. Hail had very eccentric shapes with pronounced lobes, leading to very large dimensions across the longest axis, up to an estimate of 10.5 cm
I never said they don’t get hail, I said they don’t get regular hail. In general, hail is uncommon in Denmark, and large hail is even more rare.
Well ofc that depends on how regularly you mean, but it’s definitely multiple times annually.
But yes, those are record ones.
I was speaking anecdotally, but it’s good to back that up with some data.
https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2023/egusphere-2023-176/egusphere-2023-176.pdf
Page 15, Table 1 shows a clean table, with Denmark in the bottom 10 for large hail size in European countries; relative to places like Germany, large hail (the kinds you’d really want to avoid while on a bike) in Denmark is considerably more rare. That study only has two citations, though, so not the greatest source.
This survey is much better cited and comments on hail throughout Europe and in Denmark, but I can’t access the PDF at the moment: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169809516300291
because conservatives are fat
