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Comment by fourneau | Hacker News Reader

It’s a regional statement, not disconnected.

The reality is that many people in North American live far from their workplaces and some of us live in areas of extreme cold. This is where 15m of exposed skin can result in frostbite. We bundle up, but by cycling we’ve turned the commute into an unnecessarily dangerous adventure.

The same applies to cities further south: a non trivial amount of days are extremely hot and you’re risking heat strokes.

Edit: don’t get me wrong. Bike infrastructure is awesome and I wish there were less cars on the roads, etc. We just have very different variables to play with so we need to come up with different distributions of mass transit vs personal transportation. Comfort is important!

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I live in Edmonton, North America's northernmost major city. I've been cycling year round for about 15 years. It went down to -42 in February, and I was out riding.

I've never had frostbite. I've still got all my fingers and toes. Although it isn't enough fingers and toes to count all the people I've known personally who've been killed or crippled in car accidents.

It’s definitely not impossible, but it’s riskier.

My point is that we default to easy and comfortable when given a choice, and cycling in -42 is neither. We won’t see mass adoption of cycling in these areas, regardless of infrastructure, unless we forced people to do it... and I don’t think pushing the majority of people towards enduring that kind of weather is something we should do, when there are alternatives.

Learning to read isn't easy or comfortable, so we force everyone to do it, because most would default to illiteracy if we didn't. Not destroying the planet is even more important than literacy.

Sure, no disagreement there. I’m not arguing against bikes but we should also be heavily investing in other forms of mass transit.

You bike in during the dead of winter, and that’s amazing. But how long is your bike ride in? How far out of the city do you live? Would you still do it if your commute was double?

Additionally, in Ottawa, many people live far out of the city and commute in via the highway for 30-40 minutes by car because it’s more affordable than living in the city. The bike ride is well over two hours. They will need other solutions as well.

My commute for a long time was 16 km each way, now it's 1/3rd of that. I've been hearing about climate change since I was a kid, so I've had my whole life to set my life up accordingly. I didn't make decisions that made commuting by bike unfeasible.

I don't think I've met a bicycle commuting advocate who doesn't also advocate for improved mass transit and walkable development. We stopped building neighbourhoods that way and razed many of the ones we had in the second half of the 20th century, so there's a huge supply and demand imbalance for walkable neighbourhoods in North America.

> we default to easy and comfortable when given a choice

Yes and that's exactly where 90% of our pollution/climate issues are coming from: convenience.

Mad respect my friend.

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