As a biker the main reason that anyone should not bike is if they live in the US and value their life. Biking in the US is TERRIFYING and I know zero people who bike regularly who have not been injured by a car. I still do it and others should too but it’s basically one of only 2 valid excuses as far as I am concerned

I am a bike guy. I don’t own a car. Haven’t for over a decade. But I’ve been hit by cars a couple times (only one major one that luckily only put my bike out of commission and not me) and had close calls way more than that. I live in a city with decent, for America, infrastructure with 100 miles of protected bikes lanes. And I get why safety wise, people aren’t ready to do it. I am taking my life into my own hands in a way every time I get on my bike and try to share the road with motorists, who are insane.

Like, I think the term ‘carbrain’ has gotten over used a bit by urbanists and anti-car folks because it is such a tantalizing term. But it’s certainly not without its use. Something happens to people when they drive cars. They become impatient and entitled on a way that borders on psychological transformation. I’ve never seen an average American more entitled to break the law than when they are a motorist. The speed limit is a suggestion, if you’re not going at least five miles over it, you’re not really driving. There is almost no other activity in American culture I can think of where people suddenly become rule breakers like this (and there should be many times where it would actually be good to break the law and they don’t!), but they suddenly think the most important thing in the world is for them to get where they are going and literally fuck everyone else.

How many times have any of us seen people double park or otherwise put their car in everyone’s way and just throw on their flashers as if ‘fuck everyone else, my shit is more important’ than we do with motorists? I can’t really think of any other situation where this happens so publicly, so nakedly as it does when people drive.

And the anger driving causes in folks, I think mostly comes from the cognitive dissonance of their behavior in their car and knowing, deep down, that it is wrong. That they shouldn’t be doing a lot of things they do in their vehicles. Stuff like pedestrians and bikers, who they literally have license to kill (look at the average criminal punishment for murdering someone with a vehicle versus literally any other way one can kill another human being and notice how little consequence there is for ending a human life while driving), remind them of the fact that their decisions are bad. Similar to how certain people get so angry about vegans/vegetarians. It’s the guilty that drives fear and turns it into rage. And that rage, in turn, makes them even more deadly.

Driving is hard. It’s demanding. And honestly it should have a much higher bar for who can do it because it is so dangerous. But, we’ve completely destroyed people’s ability to get to most places in our society without cars. So, until we make it safe and easy for folks not to drive, we’re stuck in this hellish predicament.

Rambling today, I guess.

im into bicycles but i cant use them outside of recreation in very specific areas like parks. like i would need to drive my bike somewhere in a car to ride it.

because i would be dead right now if i were a bicycle commuter

edit: to clarify, like i literally cant even illegally ride my bicycle on the sidewalks to a safe place to ride bicycles, because the sidewalks leading from my neighborhood abruptly end in the middle of nowhere after a few minutes’ ride

bc if i rode a bike around town i’d get run over by one of the thousands of psychotic, homocidal cagers in my city

Death to America

Theft rates where I live. You can have all the expensive locks you want, if you leave your bike out of eyeshot for more than a few minutes you’ll never see it again.

It’s 98 degrees outside today

Also I live on a 45mph stroad with terrifying bicycle gutters and no shade

Live in a part of my city where there’s been a lot of hit and run deaths from cars. Wish they’d redesign the roads here to make them less deadly :(

Honestly never really thought of it. I’ve used public transit my entire life and occasionally ride bikes.

When I was a kid I always dreamed of having a car, but the older I got and more I dealt with cars as a pedestrian (including being struck by one in a low velocity collision), the more I grew to dislike them in a city environment.

Then I always hear what a pain in the ass it can be to own one and that more or less solidified my car-free life.

As for bikes specifically, I usually rent out a bike when the weather is nice. I’ve been doing a lot of walking/running this year so I haven’t ridden as much as I have in recent years but I’ll probably get back to it later this summer.

I am uncomfortable with the fact that “bike” is not short for “Bichael.”

everyone i know who bikes regularly has been run over at least twice and i hit the tolerable limit on health issues a while back

I used to be an exclusive bike commuter when I was younger, in rural parts of a state where that was a pretty fucking dangerous thing to be. Close safety calls and a series of moves got me off the bike and I never really got back on. Now where I live the state of the infrastructure makes cycling straight up suicidal, way worse even than anywhere I lived in the States, and I’ve got more to lose.

Cars

I didn’t get to bike as much as I liked growing up because my parents lived on a mountain and climbing 500 vertical feet in a mile gets old fairly fast.

The older I got the farther I wound up living from places that I needed to go.

When I need to go to places (beyond work) I need to be able to carry about 100 pounds of stuff (minimum) and 700 pounds (maximum). Pretty much the only time I leave the house is to go to work or get groceries/farm supplies where the closest we can get some stuff is around 25 miles away (50 mile round trip).

I actually live really close to where I work now, I think the shortest route is about 10 miles. Which should be totally doable by bike, distance wise. But its almost all on a dirt road and past several CAFO style chicken farms. And that makes it dangerous to bike as lots of semi’s and overly large pickup trucks like to fly along the road, the road is in terrible condition often made worse when limestone gravel is spread on it, and during the 1/3 of the year that is now “Summer” the smell from the chicken houses can be overwhelming (and can cling to clothes), and the heat index will regularly be close to 100 degrees F so I’d get to work looking like I walk in from a rainstorm.