But that would require a small amount of effort. Seriously though I get some cities aren’t bike friendly (they could be though) but worked in a city that was pretty great for bikes. Small/medium sized manufacturing plant with a bunch of rednecks and almost all of them lived within 5 miles. Of course they were crying like hell when gas skyrocketed and other than me there was 2 people that biked. I think the best part is a good chunk drove gigantic trucks.
Here’s the thing. Everyone will bike like the Dutch and the Dutch will bike even more. It’s not a question of “if.” We are already past peak oil. There will only be more wars and more climate change. Those who survive will be relying on bikes because petroleum won’t be an option anymore and electric cars are not a real solution. Cities will become more dense, suburbs will decay, in all likelihood huge parts of the US will completely collapse because life will be impossible without cars. We know petroleum is finite and there is no other technology that will replace this.
We can prepare by rolling out infrastructure now, or we can just keep going and crash as hard as possible in to a wall. No matter what we do, we’re going to stop using gas. I hope we do it on our terms rather than waiting for tons of people to die before we fix it, but I honestly don’t have a lot of hope. But hey, some people are starting to wake up so maybe we can keep that going and save millions of lives.
It’s an interesting scenario, but why count out electric cars?
You can ride a bike to work or the store around here, but you’ll be walking home. Bikes are way too easy to quietly steal.
Bicycle theft is also a problem in the Netherlands, but they still do it. There are also lots of people not in the Netherlands who bike to work and don’t have their bikes stolen.
That’s not the problem. The problem is car culture.
In the Netherlands they have functional bike parking, which makes it a lot harder to steal bikes. They also use wheel locks, which are much harder to cut without damaging the bike. There are also sites like bike index that let you track your bike serial number in case it gets stolen. If you use bike index and your bike is stolen there’s actually a pretty good chance it will be returned. Also, if you buy a bike check it on bike index first to see if it’s stolen.
Yes but not everyone lives in a flatland like the dutch do, I believe I could fully transition to a bicycle if cars weren’t the top priority on my city, but I know many friends that live in parts of the city that are basically mountains.
Ebikes are definitely the answer. Much easier to ride up hills and very accessible for regular people to start riding. Plus they are significantly cheaper than cars when you account for insurance and registration and maintenance, etc.
