There’s 2 types of bikers, those who are sweaty af and love it and those who are sweaty af and miserable and the latter is why people prefer cars. Me? I want a train… that i can drive OFF ROAD!
those who are sweaty af and miserable and the latter is why people prefer cars
but now that ebikes and electric motorcycles exist cars should basically be banned in all downtown areas
You must live somewhere with hills.
People have the wrong kind of bikes. You either need a cheap women’s bike that goes 20 km/h if you try hard and 15 km/h if you go easy (you will chill!) or an Ebike if you got the cash.
Everything else is a hobby bike.
Living in a flat city, I have the opposite philosophy: biking is more fun if you go fast without putting in any effort, and you don’t need an e-bike for that: you need an excellent bike that’s built reliable.
I have a 2k€ city bike that I bought like a decade ago. Configured for max reliability, it only needed absolutely minimal repairs so far. E.g. it has a belt instead of a chain which I didn’t need to touch yet. It was like 200€ out of the 2k, but it not needing maintenance is so convenient.
What trains are you taking that can drive on roads? I would somehow exclude streetcars from being trains but we basically don’t have any of those anymore so I’ll leave the statement as it is.
Heh, heh, ahem, have you heard of a railroad
What about a train bike
Bike slower if you get super sweaty.
Oh yeah but the RANGE on these things SUCK. How am I supposed to travel 500 miles in a single trip!
Having a bear chase you the whole distance helps
i pick the bear
Eating 566 Nerds gummy clusters at a rate of one every 3 minutes and 30 seconds.
High speed rail, there is hands down no better way to travel 500 miles in a single trip.
I think it might be a bit dangerous to ride a bike on a high speed rail. And I don’t see how it would help either.
But consider that the speed of the train and the bike are additive
Yeah but can I eat a burger while riding a bike? Checkmate atheists.
yes?
I’ve eaten slices of pizza from the box while riding before lmao
skill
let me tell you, I can no longer do this
damn i gotta get my bike serviced and start riding again
I’m sold then.
hell yeah
dudes rock
You can if you’re brave
I swear someone on here shared a video of someone cooking and eating a can of beans while riding a bike, but somehow search engines fail to find it
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Once you get used to it, keeping your bike up becomes nearly as natural as standing on two legs. You don’t even notice it anymore but you shift your weight to keep it steady as needed. The only risk is hitting something on the road that causes the tire to suddenly shift direction, but even then that something needs to be able to break the momentum so a bit of speed is enough to protect you from most pebbles and other small stuff that you won’t see quickly enough to avoid. You do need more space to maneuver through.
and you can wash it down with a beer in a paper bag, and hardly anyone will care because you aren’t in a megagram+ mass vehicle
I absolutely have while drunk as shit. One of my favorite things to do ngl
I used to eat fries a bit while biking around on campus. Holding the clamshell in one hand and grabbing the fries with the other.
You can! Just gotta learn how to bike without using your hands. I see people do all sorts of dumb shit in bikes in Copenhagen
I think getting ketchup and burger grease on my handlebar tape would disturb me even more than squirting it straight into my keyboard.
bag over the tape
Written by a USian because they never encountered bike traffic and bike parking problems, which are issues basically in any west European city
My town used to have problems with this up until a decade ago (sadly most people switched to cars by now).
We have several factories here and they all had to have their own bike parking lots which used to be a sight of its own, with bikes hanging from walls and even roofs sometimes.
Drivers hated it specially during end of shift times as the streets would get a massive amount of bikes and even if there were not that many of them, folks would cycle side by side with their friends and neighbors which slowed down the car traffic anyway.
Now that most people use cars, the dedicated parking areas that were used for bikes are mostly empty or at most been converted into a couple parking spaces for cars, which gets reserved for higher ranking employees only since its limited. There are no parking lots anywhere so people park their cars on the street.
Most streets had to be converted to maximize parking space, which took even more space than the side-by-side bikers used to and slowed traffic more as well. Food trucks were banned so it doesn’t take parking space. Traffic lights were all replaced by mini roundabouts (not sure what the name is in English). Between 5 and 7pm it takes several minutes to get a chance to cross a street now.
Cars:
Have air conditioning
And a lot of areas would be cooler without cars its crazy how much a traffic jam heats up an area when you have a bunch of cars idling
chopping down all the trees and paving a 12 ft wide strip of black tarmac so cars can even drive there in the first place also massively increases the temperature
Good thing we have air conditioners then
If you bike up a hill then you get to coast down it and that’s like the lord’s air conditioning
hold on i understand a little thermodynamics and i know it’s a scam
just make sure you’re either always going downhill or standing still against the wind
And then there was Florida
But then i’d have to change my clothes when i get to work
You can either:
- Bike in a less physically strenuous way so you are not so sweaty that you need a change of clothes
- carry a change of clothes.
In Denmark it’s very normal for people to do the latter.
This is just a me problem but no matter how much deoderant i put on i still smell like ass if I do anything physical once in a day
This is like the Futurama joke about solving climate change by dumping a big block of ice into the ocean
Cars:
Also require everything to be further away, increasing your time in extreme weather.
there’s like three layers of civil engineering between cars and me living too far from the grocery store to walk there. you could make an incrementalist improvement on my neighborhood, and put some public accommodations where the shitty religious school is, or build over the open storm drain and turf grass that’s too steep to use for recreational purposes and everybody would still drive to anything outside of a couple square miles or so.
And need big asphalt roads that retain heat and make the surrounding area significantly warmer compared to either light rail, smaller roads needed for bikes and even regular train tracks
To be fair they don’t necessarily need asphalt roads. That’s just what used to be the most convenient and relatively cheaper kind of road. There are other options these days that are better both for the vehicles and for the environment - but even if those better options were used, your point still stands in general.
collisions are significantly less likely to kill
I guess if it is with another bike…
With any other non-motorized traffic participant.
Incompatible with traffic jams
You would be surprised. Rush hour in Copenhagen is quite something.
Too many hills :(
e-Bikes ;)
[Laughs in Dutch]
I desperately want to bike everywhere but the hills in my neighborhood are too extreme. Going down them is scary and trying to peddle up them killed me.
I am dead now.
