I don’t know where you live, but that’s just not true in large swaths of America. The other options add multiple hours round trip anywhere and in many parts of the US it’s not an option.
My work is currently a 20 minute drive down a freeway going 60 mph. There is no bus to take that route. There isn’t even a connection, or a transfer, the only other option would be a cab.
I’m just talking basic economics. A car costs 10x what an e-bike does. A car is, by any logical definition of the word, a luxury purchase compared to an e-bike. You just live in an area where you’ve decided that everyone needs to get around in luxury vehicles, and you’ve built that into your infrastructure. This would be like building all of our infrastructure to only accommodate stretch limos, and then trying to argue that limos are a necessity. It’s comically absurd. It’s a clown world.
You just live in an area where you’ve decided that everyone needs to get around in luxury vehicles, and you’ve built that into your infrastructure.
I did not decide that. The cold hard reality is that my work and my home are 15 miles (24km) apart. That’s a 1.5 hour bike ride, 3 hours round trip. You are absolutely right about costs, but I have NO option to bus, I cannot bike that daily, none of my coworkers live next to me.
I want more public transport. I would rather live with just a single car in my household that we use solely for large trips and moving large amounts of stuff. God knows it would be cheaper. I’d like that. I can’t feasibly do it.
If you are moving a full car of people, it’s probably the best way to get around. However the average occupancy of a car is 1.2 people. The vast majority of cars have just 1 person, often driving less than 5 miles which is an easy distance to cycle.
Having more people cycling means the roads are less congested for the people who really need to use them. And with less people driving and more cycling, it should hopefully get safer.
People need the car for the average commute which is more than five miles its about half an hour by car which means half of commuters drive longer. Having already expended substantial resources on the car the cost of a 5 mile jaunt is about $1 to 1.50 round trip and 10 minutes or 30-45 minutes including waiting and 3-5 for the bus.
Alternatively if the wealter is neither very cold hot or rainy and you have an extra hour and don’t mind arriving sweaty and rumpled you could bike and risk your life more than driving a 1950s car!
Its an impractical idea that doesn’t scale compared to telecommuting and improving public transit.
The danger comes from cars, and the reason the distances are so great is because the landscape was designed for cars. Those fatality numbers are biased to make it seem like bicycles are dangerous by framing it in terms of the mode of transportation the victim was using, instead of the agent causing the fatality, and by comparing the numbers to VMT.
But, spin it differently: Capitalist elites bribed lobbied politicians to force you to spend your money and time on a motor vehicle to schlep your family around like sacks of potatoes to all your destinations by locating them unreasonably far away, so that the huge amounts of space needed by motor vehicles fit in between, and they could enrich themselves by selling motor vehicles. Now it’s become an arms race of bigger and bigger motor vehicles, further lining the pockets of the capitalist elites, at the expense of people’s (especially children’s, the disabled’s, and elderly’s) agency and freedom—because otherwise they’ll die under the bumpers of the maniacs operating motor vehicles that you’ll encounter in all of those extra miles you’re forced to travel.
Different spin, different bias, but still 100% fact.
I strongly disagree with VMT as the proper measure, and here’s a simple, constructed example of why:
There are two cities of about 200,000 people. One is compact, and easy to get around by transit, walking, or biking. The people drive around 2,000 miles per year each. The other is a low-density, mostly suburban area, and people drive around 15,000 miles per year. They have the same casualty rate per VMT of 3 per million miles.
Those two cities aren’t equally as safe. Not even close! The one city would have 1,200 crashes, injuries, or deaths each year, and the other would have 9,000. That’s a major difference which should be accounted for in policymaking and land-use decisions.
As far as the American landscape, it’s spread out not because it was cheaper. How could that be, when it takes more infrastructure to spread out? It was more expensive, and that was actually the point of car-dependent suburbs. They were more expensive to build and maintain, which kept the undesirable people out. Then, the desirable people were subsidized, through the GI Bill, tax breaks, mortgage lending standards (e.g. redlining), and the like.
I don’t claim it’s a grand conspiracy, but it is verifiable history.
The metric you desire ought properly to be determined by what problem you are trying to address. We aren’t building America like sim city we are deciding what to do with our existing situation. For a person deciding what to do they need to weigh the actual consequences of various choices. Deaths per billion not million vehicle miles captures the actual costs of doing so. 2 for sedans 110 for bikes.
Anyone who drives 15,000 miles isn’t replacing their car with a bike. You would be asking them to bike 288 miles per week which is absolutely insane. Nobody is doing this. If they drive 5000 they might but at the cost of a drastic increase in risk. This leaves us where we are now where almost everyone either can’t or won’t.
This is valid if your city doesn’t have dedicated bike infrastructure that gets plowed. Snow can be hardly an inconvenience at all if bike infrastructure is treated with equal importance as car infrastructure.
Regular cars are far better equipped to handle snowy conditions than bikes. For instance a car can easily drive through thick fresh snow, even absent any cleaning because it’s heavy and high powered. Also, a car has windshield wipers. I have ridden my bike through heavy snowfall, and apart from how much it sucks, another issue is that you can’t see shit.
How does one avoid freezing their nuts off riding in the snow? I used to bike to school when I was a kid and even at less than a mile ride with gloves and shit on my hands and face were killing me by the time I got there.
So, caveat: I think the guys in thi sthread trying to put ideals of a no-car society over the reality of what it’s like to be poor and commuting every day on bike are full of shit. That said, I have spent most of 20 years biking to work in the vicinity of a big city.
In winter, you have to dress like you’re prepared to be lost outside overnight with no shelter. Like, you have to learn to ACTUALLY dress for the cold, for extended periods of time. (And you have to pay attention to the weather report–if it’s going to be wet, you need something that can handle being wet.) Most kids who try to bike to school try to do it in the clothing that they’d wear to drive to school. They either do not physically own the winter layers they need to stay warm, or they were never taught to properly layer.
But basically, you need probably 3 layers minimum in Chicago-type weather. Probably more if you’re further north. I would regularly wear jeans with two layers of some type of pants underneath, like fleece and some other base layer, and on top I’d have long-sleeve shirt, t-shirt, another long-sleeve shirt or sweatshirt or sweater, and over all of that a heavy duty winter jacket. For my head I’d have a full-face mask with a thick warm hat on top. Sometimes a scarf too. For my hands, I’d have multiple layers, and I’d usually wear mittens rather than gloves because mittens are warmer, and I’d have more than one pair of mittens. When biking, at least one layer of mittens needs to be wind-breakery because that wind is COLD. For shoes, I’d have wool socks, sometimes two pairs, and real heavy-duty winter boots on (not sneakers or whatever).
The thing is, a lot of people who never have had to actually spend significant time out doors won’t even OWN sufficient layers to stay truly warm in the cold. Either due to poverty (it costs money to buy really, truly warm clothes of the right material), or lack of knowledge of how to dress for the cold. (I lacked both when I was young!) Or they’ll have thin cotton fast fashion when they actually need wool or synthetic warm-weather gear. Or they’ll be concerned about looking stupid (because if you dress properly, you look dumpy and not cool.)
But then you’re left with all those layers when you arrive at your destination and are back indoors? Like I understand you can take off a coat and gloves but if you’re wearing underclothes as well. Like if you’re in a business environment and have to wear a professional attire you’re limited by that in how you can layer up.
I was very lucky and worked at a place with a gym, so I just showered after my 18 mile commute, problem solved.
Surely even without a locker room, people can change out of the bottom layers for the workday though. You’d need a place to keep your clothing, but if you’re in an office with cubicles or something similar, that’s fine.
This is about educating people so we can help fix this issues. No one is saying our system of car focused infrastructure isn’t there and fucked up. They’re saying car infrastructure costs significant amount of tax money (which you’re paying invisibly) and have a large cost associated with them. Bikes are relatively cheap, and their infrastructure is much cheaper, and the same is true for public transport.
Yeah, our society is dominated by car interests. Part of the problem is when anyone recommends a solution that isn’t cars people complain saying “this doesn’t work in this situation” and we never improve. Just agree it would be great and it sucks it isn’t better. You don’t have to always say it doesn’t work in a lot of places. We are all very aware.
For over a decade I went everywhere by bike in Sweden. They have bike lanes that get plowed and sanded in winter, the snow is not a problem, the problem is places with bad, car-centric infrastructure.
No, it’s about having the infrastructure for it. And even car infrastructure is a huge luxury compared to bike infrastructure. It costs cities 10x to support one car commute as it does to support 1 bike commute.
Most people just live in areas that demand that luxury transportation be the only form of transportation. That doesn’t mean cars suddenly are no longer luxuries, simply because your area chose to make practical transportation options impossible. You can pass a law making stretch limos the only road legal vehicle. That won’t change the fact that stretch limos are ridiculous luxury vehicles.
Don’t think that you understand the meaning of the term luxury and trying to rewrite the English language and correct all the people who do actually speak it isn’t helping.
I haven’t owned a car for most of my adult life, and things start to get really difficult in winter with snow (insufficient bus routes in a given area, and sidewalks/bike lanes covered in snow and not able to be transversed).
When job-hunting I had to exclude a lot of places because of how impossible it’d be to do the commute in winter. Given how expensive rent is, plenty of people are forced to live with relatives or live in certain cheaper areas long past when they’d prefer to leave, which means if the roof over your head is in an area without sidewalks/bike lanes/public transit, you rely hardcore on a car to get to work and back. And if you don’t have that car, you basically lose your job. Maybe you can sustain it over the summer, but once winter snow kicks in you’re pretty fucked the first hard snow or ice that comes through. If you’re lucky, it’s close enough to walk–but not everyone is lucky like that. Also, if your job has mandatory overtime and you’re doing 50-60 hour weeks, walking 2-3 hours one way to work is a no-go.
I say this as someone who regularly biked/used public transit in Chicago winters. Not having a car shaped my life in ways that effectively made me poorer/deeper in poverty.
Not having a car shaped my life in ways that effectively made me poorer/deeper in poverty.
Another way to say this is that designing an entire landscape around the car has shaped everybody’s lives in ways that make millions of people poorer/deeper in poverty.
I’m talking the machines themselves. A car costs 10x what an e-bike does. Yes, infrastructure sucks in many places. That doesn’t change the fact that a car is objectively a luxury compared to a bicycle. You live in an area that has made getting around in a luxury vehicle the only practical option. That doesn’t mean cars aren’t luxury vehicles. People who live in areas that mandate that the all homes must be at least 10,000 ft^2 don’t automatically become poor.
Cars are a luxury, while bicycles are utility. We just build our cities with classism in mind. We build our cities to require expensive luxury travel modes, all in some misguided attempt to keep the poors out.
Your definition of objectively is off. Just because there is an alternate universe where cars would be a luxury doesn’t mean that cars are a luxury for all timelines.
Status quo of now demands a car. It sucks. We are now stuck in a vicious cycle of people need cars because there’s no public transit -> people don’t need public transit because they have cars -> people need cars because there’s no public transit
@IonAddis needs a car. Without it, their job options are limited. Much like me. We’d like to ditch our cars, but we can’t.
Aw, c’mon, cars are objectively speaking luxury items today. A modernized Daihatsu Opti with a sticker price of about $5,500 (the inflation-adjusted price of a Ford Model T) would completely meet the requirements for getting and keeping a job.
Even in contries where there’s good public transport that’s not really the case. My aunt lives in a town 40min from where I live, and she wakes up at 4am to go work at a factory 10mins from where she lives. There’s no public transport at that hour and no, an ebike is not a viable solution for those roads.
I’m all in for having big parking spaces outside of cities so people load off their cars and then use public transport, but in the countryside that’s just not viable.
That sounds like an infrastructure problem. If you built roads that were only accessible by literal monster trucks, would you try to pretend that monster trucks are suddenly practical necessities instead of ridiculous extravagances? Your aunt just lives in an area where they decided that it’s OK to require people to make a big luxury purchase just in order to get around. It may be necessary to buy a big luxury in some areas, but that doesn’t mean cars suddenly become the transportation of the working class.
You have to have to be suffering from a severe case of motornormativity to believe the clown math that a $2k purchase is a luxury while a $40k purchase is a necessity.
This is not the US, there are no monster trucks. It’s just a place in Spain where several towns are near each other and the factory is in-between so people go by car. We live surrounded by mountains my dude, it’s not an infrastructure choice.
Motornormativity holy shit you really have not stepped a foot outside cities huh.
I don’t have a car but good fucking luck telling factory workers that their car is a luxury lmao.
I take it you’ve never been outside a big city in Texas, California, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, Minnesota, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Et Cetera.
I’m only listing places I’ve been. An e-bike would just not cut it, especially if you have small children. There are places you can not go without getting on a freeway, and there is NO WAY IN HELL I’m putting a small child on the freeway or highway on a bike.
Why are you talking about infrastructure? You’re changing the subject. Obviously the infrastructure needs to support them, just as cars are pretty damn useless without good road infrastructure. But cars are objectively an order of magnitude more complex and expensive than e-bikes. Cars are a luxury, bicycles are a utility. The key problem is that many cities are built to require you to use the luxury means of travel instead of the affordable utilitarian ones.
Naw, we are talking about the same thing. I bring up infrastructure, as many have, because that’s the reality of the situation. The entire continental United States is built for cars, and that’s not changing anytime soon. The reality is that cars are necessary, and at this time, it is near impossible and a safety hazard for most americans to try and use bikes due to the hostile road infrastructure in place.
It is NOT economically more feasible here, at this time, and unless the investors that have put billions of dollars into lobbying for car-dependent cities suddenly want to default on their near-hundred year investment, it isn’t going to happen.
If you can afford a car, you can afford an e-bike, even a cargo e-bike. Cars are luxuries compared to bicycles. Never forget that.
And if you are too poor to live near your employer?
I don’t know where you live, but that’s just not true in large swaths of America. The other options add multiple hours round trip anywhere and in many parts of the US it’s not an option.
My work is currently a 20 minute drive down a freeway going 60 mph. There is no bus to take that route. There isn’t even a connection, or a transfer, the only other option would be a cab.
Fortunately, places like this aren’t likely to need congestion pricing
indeed
I’m just talking basic economics. A car costs 10x what an e-bike does. A car is, by any logical definition of the word, a luxury purchase compared to an e-bike. You just live in an area where you’ve decided that everyone needs to get around in luxury vehicles, and you’ve built that into your infrastructure. This would be like building all of our infrastructure to only accommodate stretch limos, and then trying to argue that limos are a necessity. It’s comically absurd. It’s a clown world.
I did not decide that. The cold hard reality is that my work and my home are 15 miles (24km) apart. That’s a 1.5 hour bike ride, 3 hours round trip. You are absolutely right about costs, but I have NO option to bus, I cannot bike that daily, none of my coworkers live next to me.
I want more public transport. I would rather live with just a single car in my household that we use solely for large trips and moving large amounts of stuff. God knows it would be cheaper. I’d like that. I can’t feasibly do it.
How are you going to take an ebike for anything besides a short distance on non highway roads?
A car can be used to move an entire family safely. You need 3-5 bikes to do the same far less safely including the very young, old, infirm.
Fatality rate for sedans is 2 per billion vehicle miles. Bikes are about 110.
Bear in mind that this is in the US which has bad drivers driving aggressively in environs ill suited.
Furthermore the average person commuting by car commutes 30 minutes by car the average bus rider an hour.
These are often distances too great to bike.
If you are moving a full car of people, it’s probably the best way to get around. However the average occupancy of a car is 1.2 people. The vast majority of cars have just 1 person, often driving less than 5 miles which is an easy distance to cycle.
Having more people cycling means the roads are less congested for the people who really need to use them. And with less people driving and more cycling, it should hopefully get safer.
People need the car for the average commute which is more than five miles its about half an hour by car which means half of commuters drive longer. Having already expended substantial resources on the car the cost of a 5 mile jaunt is about $1 to 1.50 round trip and 10 minutes or 30-45 minutes including waiting and 3-5 for the bus.
Alternatively if the wealter is neither very cold hot or rainy and you have an extra hour and don’t mind arriving sweaty and rumpled you could bike and risk your life more than driving a 1950s car!
Its an impractical idea that doesn’t scale compared to telecommuting and improving public transit.
The danger comes from cars, and the reason the distances are so great is because the landscape was designed for cars. Those fatality numbers are biased to make it seem like bicycles are dangerous by framing it in terms of the mode of transportation the victim was using, instead of the agent causing the fatality, and by comparing the numbers to VMT.
But, spin it differently: Capitalist elites
bribedlobbied politicians to force you to spend your money and time on a motor vehicle to schlep your family around like sacks of potatoes to all your destinations by locating them unreasonably far away, so that the huge amounts of space needed by motor vehicles fit in between, and they could enrich themselves by selling motor vehicles. Now it’s become an arms race of bigger and bigger motor vehicles, further lining the pockets of the capitalist elites, at the expense of people’s (especially children’s, the disabled’s, and elderly’s) agency and freedom—because otherwise they’ll die under the bumpers of the maniacs operating motor vehicles that you’ll encounter in all of those extra miles you’re forced to travel.Different spin, different bias, but still 100% fact.
VMT is the only reasonable metric to compare relative safety. It is literally the only metric that tells you how safe your family will be traveling.
The fact that its cars that mostly make bikes dangerous is important but mostly irrelevant to any individual making decisions.
Same with America being spread out. Mostly it is because it was cheaper and therefore more profitablr for individual actors not some grand conspiracy.
The elderly, young kids, and especially the disabled don’t need safer bike lanes they need better public transit
I strongly disagree with VMT as the proper measure, and here’s a simple, constructed example of why:
There are two cities of about 200,000 people. One is compact, and easy to get around by transit, walking, or biking. The people drive around 2,000 miles per year each. The other is a low-density, mostly suburban area, and people drive around 15,000 miles per year. They have the same casualty rate per VMT of 3 per million miles.
Those two cities aren’t equally as safe. Not even close! The one city would have 1,200 crashes, injuries, or deaths each year, and the other would have 9,000. That’s a major difference which should be accounted for in policymaking and land-use decisions.
As far as the American landscape, it’s spread out not because it was cheaper. How could that be, when it takes more infrastructure to spread out? It was more expensive, and that was actually the point of car-dependent suburbs. They were more expensive to build and maintain, which kept the undesirable people out. Then, the desirable people were subsidized, through the GI Bill, tax breaks, mortgage lending standards (e.g. redlining), and the like.
I don’t claim it’s a grand conspiracy, but it is verifiable history.
The metric you desire ought properly to be determined by what problem you are trying to address. We aren’t building America like sim city we are deciding what to do with our existing situation. For a person deciding what to do they need to weigh the actual consequences of various choices. Deaths per billion not million vehicle miles captures the actual costs of doing so. 2 for sedans 110 for bikes.
Anyone who drives 15,000 miles isn’t replacing their car with a bike. You would be asking them to bike 288 miles per week which is absolutely insane. Nobody is doing this. If they drive 5000 they might but at the cost of a drastic increase in risk. This leaves us where we are now where almost everyone either can’t or won’t.
Maybe if you live somewhere it doesn’t snow
This is valid if your city doesn’t have dedicated bike infrastructure that gets plowed. Snow can be hardly an inconvenience at all if bike infrastructure is treated with equal importance as car infrastructure.
Oh the Urbanity! on Youtube has a really realistic take on this in Montreal: https://youtu.be/sokHu9bhpn8
Linking w/o tracker here
https://youtu.be/sokHu9bhpn8
Regular cars are far better equipped to handle snowy conditions than bikes. For instance a car can easily drive through thick fresh snow, even absent any cleaning because it’s heavy and high powered. Also, a car has windshield wipers. I have ridden my bike through heavy snowfall, and apart from how much it sucks, another issue is that you can’t see shit.
How does one avoid freezing their nuts off riding in the snow? I used to bike to school when I was a kid and even at less than a mile ride with gloves and shit on my hands and face were killing me by the time I got there.
So, caveat: I think the guys in thi sthread trying to put ideals of a no-car society over the reality of what it’s like to be poor and commuting every day on bike are full of shit. That said, I have spent most of 20 years biking to work in the vicinity of a big city.
In winter, you have to dress like you’re prepared to be lost outside overnight with no shelter. Like, you have to learn to ACTUALLY dress for the cold, for extended periods of time. (And you have to pay attention to the weather report–if it’s going to be wet, you need something that can handle being wet.) Most kids who try to bike to school try to do it in the clothing that they’d wear to drive to school. They either do not physically own the winter layers they need to stay warm, or they were never taught to properly layer.
But basically, you need probably 3 layers minimum in Chicago-type weather. Probably more if you’re further north. I would regularly wear jeans with two layers of some type of pants underneath, like fleece and some other base layer, and on top I’d have long-sleeve shirt, t-shirt, another long-sleeve shirt or sweatshirt or sweater, and over all of that a heavy duty winter jacket. For my head I’d have a full-face mask with a thick warm hat on top. Sometimes a scarf too. For my hands, I’d have multiple layers, and I’d usually wear mittens rather than gloves because mittens are warmer, and I’d have more than one pair of mittens. When biking, at least one layer of mittens needs to be wind-breakery because that wind is COLD. For shoes, I’d have wool socks, sometimes two pairs, and real heavy-duty winter boots on (not sneakers or whatever).
The thing is, a lot of people who never have had to actually spend significant time out doors won’t even OWN sufficient layers to stay truly warm in the cold. Either due to poverty (it costs money to buy really, truly warm clothes of the right material), or lack of knowledge of how to dress for the cold. (I lacked both when I was young!) Or they’ll have thin cotton fast fashion when they actually need wool or synthetic warm-weather gear. Or they’ll be concerned about looking stupid (because if you dress properly, you look dumpy and not cool.)
But then you’re left with all those layers when you arrive at your destination and are back indoors? Like I understand you can take off a coat and gloves but if you’re wearing underclothes as well. Like if you’re in a business environment and have to wear a professional attire you’re limited by that in how you can layer up.
I was very lucky and worked at a place with a gym, so I just showered after my 18 mile commute, problem solved.
Surely even without a locker room, people can change out of the bottom layers for the workday though. You’d need a place to keep your clothing, but if you’re in an office with cubicles or something similar, that’s fine.
You assume people work inside the city and not in a factory outside of it.
Great, and those places service maybe 10 percent of the United States.
This is about educating people so we can help fix this issues. No one is saying our system of car focused infrastructure isn’t there and fucked up. They’re saying car infrastructure costs significant amount of tax money (which you’re paying invisibly) and have a large cost associated with them. Bikes are relatively cheap, and their infrastructure is much cheaper, and the same is true for public transport.
Yeah, our society is dominated by car interests. Part of the problem is when anyone recommends a solution that isn’t cars people complain saying “this doesn’t work in this situation” and we never improve. Just agree it would be great and it sucks it isn’t better. You don’t have to always say it doesn’t work in a lot of places. We are all very aware.
For over a decade I went everywhere by bike in Sweden. They have bike lanes that get plowed and sanded in winter, the snow is not a problem, the problem is places with bad, car-centric infrastructure.
Congrats for having a good immune system. I was sick once a month the year I decided to bike to work in winter.
It snows in Copenhagen, people keep biking.
No, it’s about having the infrastructure for it. And even car infrastructure is a huge luxury compared to bike infrastructure. It costs cities 10x to support one car commute as it does to support 1 bike commute.
Most people just live in areas that demand that luxury transportation be the only form of transportation. That doesn’t mean cars suddenly are no longer luxuries, simply because your area chose to make practical transportation options impossible. You can pass a law making stretch limos the only road legal vehicle. That won’t change the fact that stretch limos are ridiculous luxury vehicles.
Don’t think that you understand the meaning of the term luxury and trying to rewrite the English language and correct all the people who do actually speak it isn’t helping.
Not true.
I haven’t owned a car for most of my adult life, and things start to get really difficult in winter with snow (insufficient bus routes in a given area, and sidewalks/bike lanes covered in snow and not able to be transversed).
When job-hunting I had to exclude a lot of places because of how impossible it’d be to do the commute in winter. Given how expensive rent is, plenty of people are forced to live with relatives or live in certain cheaper areas long past when they’d prefer to leave, which means if the roof over your head is in an area without sidewalks/bike lanes/public transit, you rely hardcore on a car to get to work and back. And if you don’t have that car, you basically lose your job. Maybe you can sustain it over the summer, but once winter snow kicks in you’re pretty fucked the first hard snow or ice that comes through. If you’re lucky, it’s close enough to walk–but not everyone is lucky like that. Also, if your job has mandatory overtime and you’re doing 50-60 hour weeks, walking 2-3 hours one way to work is a no-go.
I say this as someone who regularly biked/used public transit in Chicago winters. Not having a car shaped my life in ways that effectively made me poorer/deeper in poverty.
Another way to say this is that designing an entire landscape around the car has shaped everybody’s lives in ways that make millions of people poorer/deeper in poverty.
I’m talking the machines themselves. A car costs 10x what an e-bike does. Yes, infrastructure sucks in many places. That doesn’t change the fact that a car is objectively a luxury compared to a bicycle. You live in an area that has made getting around in a luxury vehicle the only practical option. That doesn’t mean cars aren’t luxury vehicles. People who live in areas that mandate that the all homes must be at least 10,000 ft^2 don’t automatically become poor.
Cars are a luxury, while bicycles are utility. We just build our cities with classism in mind. We build our cities to require expensive luxury travel modes, all in some misguided attempt to keep the poors out.
Your definition of objectively is off. Just because there is an alternate universe where cars would be a luxury doesn’t mean that cars are a luxury for all timelines.
Status quo of now demands a car. It sucks. We are now stuck in a vicious cycle of people need cars because there’s no public transit -> people don’t need public transit because they have cars -> people need cars because there’s no public transit
@IonAddis needs a car. Without it, their job options are limited. Much like me. We’d like to ditch our cars, but we can’t.
Aw, c’mon, cars are objectively speaking luxury items today. A modernized Daihatsu Opti with a sticker price of about $5,500 (the inflation-adjusted price of a Ford Model T) would completely meet the requirements for getting and keeping a job.
Sure would, where can you buy those?
I have the same question. I can’t. Cars are all luxury items nowadays.
Even in contries where there’s good public transport that’s not really the case. My aunt lives in a town 40min from where I live, and she wakes up at 4am to go work at a factory 10mins from where she lives. There’s no public transport at that hour and no, an ebike is not a viable solution for those roads.
I’m all in for having big parking spaces outside of cities so people load off their cars and then use public transport, but in the countryside that’s just not viable.
That sounds like an infrastructure problem. If you built roads that were only accessible by literal monster trucks, would you try to pretend that monster trucks are suddenly practical necessities instead of ridiculous extravagances? Your aunt just lives in an area where they decided that it’s OK to require people to make a big luxury purchase just in order to get around. It may be necessary to buy a big luxury in some areas, but that doesn’t mean cars suddenly become the transportation of the working class.
You have to have to be suffering from a severe case of motornormativity to believe the clown math that a $2k purchase is a luxury while a $40k purchase is a necessity.
This is not the US, there are no monster trucks. It’s just a place in Spain where several towns are near each other and the factory is in-between so people go by car. We live surrounded by mountains my dude, it’s not an infrastructure choice.
Motornormativity holy shit you really have not stepped a foot outside cities huh.
I don’t have a car but good fucking luck telling factory workers that their car is a luxury lmao.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motonormativity
Removed by mod
I take it you’ve never been outside a big city in Texas, California, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, Minnesota, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Et Cetera.
I’m only listing places I’ve been. An e-bike would just not cut it, especially if you have small children. There are places you can not go without getting on a freeway, and there is NO WAY IN HELL I’m putting a small child on the freeway or highway on a bike.
Why are you talking about infrastructure? You’re changing the subject. Obviously the infrastructure needs to support them, just as cars are pretty damn useless without good road infrastructure. But cars are objectively an order of magnitude more complex and expensive than e-bikes. Cars are a luxury, bicycles are a utility. The key problem is that many cities are built to require you to use the luxury means of travel instead of the affordable utilitarian ones.
Naw, we are talking about the same thing. I bring up infrastructure, as many have, because that’s the reality of the situation. The entire continental United States is built for cars, and that’s not changing anytime soon. The reality is that cars are necessary, and at this time, it is near impossible and a safety hazard for most americans to try and use bikes due to the hostile road infrastructure in place.
It is NOT economically more feasible here, at this time, and unless the investors that have put billions of dollars into lobbying for car-dependent cities suddenly want to default on their near-hundred year investment, it isn’t going to happen.