Comment by PSZD | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PSZD | Hacker News Reader

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I was living less than 5 miles away from work for years, it made it very easy to commute by bike (although winter really sucked at times).

This year, that got bumped up to about 12 miles (work moved, not me). At that sort of mileage, it takes much longer to bike, and doing it consistently 5x a week with a physical job is iffy. Not to mention, bike infrastructure to that location is much worse, mostly because the only option runs along a 6-lane road, and resulted in me crashing due to road debris in the dark. Bills from that incident could have bought me a car.

Other options are mainly limited to public transport (buses). Typically takes me about 2 hours one-way, including wasted time at the start of a shift.

Then there are cars. Guaranteed to save me a minimum of an hour a day, with much lower chances of personal injury.

Electrical bike is a popular option ( Belgium).

45 km/h, so your trip would probably take 30 minutes.

Purchased an electric assist bike and get 16-17mph at a leisurely pedal. At racing intensity I’m pushing 25-28mph. I would recommend!

> (although winter really sucked at times).

> and doing it consistently 5x a week with a physical job is iffy.

I don't think we should be trying to convince people to ride to work every single day. This is much harder to do than just riding some of the time, and it would still make a big difference. Getting people to ride on average even one day a week to work would have huge benefits: reduced pollution, reduced traffic, reduced CO2 emissions, improved health.

I think daily (or nearly) is much easier than you think, mainly because it's so much harder to form a habit like that when you have to make a conscious daily choice between "easy" and "hard".

Context-dependence like "not raining or icy" does make sense.

> At that sort of mileage, it takes much longer to bike, and doing it consistently 5x a week with a physical job is iffy.

Would an electric bike have helped? As car batteries get cheaper and better e-bikes are following suit, and many models get 40+ mile ranges and provide assist to 20-25 MPH even with hills.

Most laws don’t allow over 19-20mph on bicycles before its classified as a moped. That doesn’t mean you can’t provide the extra speed (I see up to 28mph on mine when I go hard), it’s just that the speed is limited but range increases (I’ve traveled over 30mi on a single charge so far)

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