In Belgium, Belgian people buy mostly new ones in the range of 500-1000. People who don't earn much or students, buy the cheap/used bikes you mentioned.
Electrical bikes are > 2000 € and pretty popular.
In general, a whole family can bike together and it's very popular during the summer. We can bike were-ever we want during Covid as long as it's in the 25 km. range.
I actually have 2 bikes ( 1 normal and 1 race bike) and a bike lending subscription when friends come over ( 1 € / bike / 24 hours for 12€ / year)
I've had bikes repeatedly stolen out of locked garages at home!
I'd never buy a bike that was worth any reasonable amount of money, my commute pre-covid was a good candidate for an electric bike, but no way would I spend more than a 2 or 3 hundred dollars on something that will get stolen within 3 years.
Is bike theft just less of a problem in Belgium?
Also second-hand and rusty ones are better than new ones. Some Dutch cities have a free-of-charge engraving mechanism where you basically engrave a serial number on a bike to make it easier to track down stolen bikes, as well as to know that you're not actually buying a stolen bike.
Also, you'll be responsible if you're caught with a stolen bike, which is a nice deterrent to actually use a reliable source when purchasing a bike. Shops act as a middlemen between you and the person selling the bike, and they're responsible for making sure that the bike you're purchasing from them isn't stolen. On the downside, that drives the cost up a bit, but on the bright side, you usually get some months of warranty period in which they'll repair your bike free of charge in case anything happens to it.
That advice predates the battery-powered angle grinder, which many bike thieves in Western Europe now use. Even the toughest, most expensive U-lock can be broken in about a minute with an angle grinder.
2 locks is indeed the standard in big cities. Also make sure they are sold secure gold rated or Art 3. Anything else is a waste of money. There are a few new lock types which are supposed to work better against angle grinders like Tex-lock or LitLok.
Because the average bike price is going up it also becomes interesting to steal parts. A decent handlebar + shifters are easy to sell individually. Companys like Hexlox or Pinheads are working on locks to tackle that.
That's an interesting point. Doesn't that make a folding full-size bike the only real solution?
Something like Changebike DF-611MB:
https://www.changebike.com/df-611mb
> There are a few new lock types which are supposed to work better against angle grinders like Tex-lock or LitLok.
After a quick search...
Tex-lock cut in 32 seconds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ictBpMHKhK0&t=1m20s
LitLok cut in 16 seconds:
Presumably if it's actually his bike, he'll be thankful.
Of course, my confidence to do so was buoyed by the fact there were two other bikers parking at the same time as me, it was in a busy public area, and I was wearing a bunch of leather and kevlar.
Or get two different ones. Bike thieves specialize on one or two specific locks and prefer easy targets.
On the other hand there are multiple trails which I can and will use now that spring/summer is here.
I think the reluctance to use bikes for basic transport is more to do with lack of space on the road rather than theft.
side note: the ubiquitous Japanese bike style you're referring to is called "mamachari"
I did feel a major sense of safety in Tokyo, however.
I have a number of friends with anecdotes about forgetting items on a bus/train and the lengths to which individuals or companies will go to return them is pretty impressive.
Once you accept that, it's not that much money. The bad part is that you can never buy that Really Nice bike you'd really want.
I'd neither, but a friend of mine did. He got his bike insured (replacement value), for a pretty reasonable amount, considering. And AFAIK most people with expensive bikes do, which is probably also the reason police is not too keen on acting.
Pros: Never had a bike stolen
Cons: Can't really just ride it somewhere and let it sit all day.
My use cases have been:
1) Commute to work (my work let me bring it up to my office to park it during the day)
2) Ride somewhere and back home (always parked in my dwelling)
3) Ride it to maybe a place to eat, but park it literally outside the window, locked, so I can watch it while I eat.
Sucks I can't just do whatever with it, but I have a beater if I needed to do that.
Morale hazard:
https://www.irmi.com/term/insurance-definitions/morale-hazar...
Which is one of the reasons I don't have one, that and the types of drivers make it more dangerous, got better from my observations, but still, I'll walk more as unlike the country - not as far to go for most things.
That and if I'd endured a few thefts, I'd just end up getting angry and knocking up a bobytrapped bike and probably go too far and that's probably another reason for me to not own a bycicle. Though I did checkly suggest upon twitter once to the local police that they should have a bait bike, maybe has a spike in the seat that raises up. They liked the idea with supportive comment. But I'm sure it would not playout well legally. Besides, imagine some poor person, drunk for the first time, gets on the wrong bike by mistake. Though I'd probably build some form of electric shock into it, though again, I'd know I'd go too far.
Reminds me of an initiative in Amsterdam many decades back, 90's era iirc. The city had put a a large number of bikes in town for people to use, park up, free for all to use - early bike hire, ride and drop thing without any paying - just free use bikes. Coz what happened was people stole many of them, not everybody lived in Amsterdam and with that, maybe a good initiative, but needs to be done on a large scale to work.
Until then, i'd not buy anything new, second hand end-user type of affair as locks are just not that good and anything close to good would be more than the cost of a use and abuse bike.
Racing bikes don't need locks, since you stall them at your garage or a private place during the night.
Bike theft is usually common in student cities, were cheap bikes have cheap locks and one "steals" from another. The more expensive ones (> 400 €) are normally not stolen, since they also have more decent locks.
Also, bikes can be engraved ( eg. like a serial number).
Fyi: My bike is parked at a "big" train station at night (in Bruges) and it never got stolen in 2 years.
Of course it's mostly a problem at universities and train stations at night, where you can find big bike racks and no-one around. Lesser locks might be fine away from crime hotspots.
Are you happy spending 2 or 3 hundred dollars on burning gas within 3 months?
In China 37% of the population owns a bike, but in Shanghai 60% of the daily trips are by bike.
There are more people riding bikes everyday in northern Italy (which has about 2 times the population of Belgium) than in Belgium, even though the amount of bikes per capita on a national level is much lower than Belgium.
Numbers of bikes sold alone doesn't say much, more so because in some countries bikes are a status symbol, just like being member of a golf court is in Florida.
Most do it because it says something about their life styles more than their likings.
At that price point it becomes hard to justify owning a bike yourself...
Add in however much you think these bits of hassle are worth:
• various amounts of time spent looking for a bike, especially if you go somewhere they don't tend to cluster and someone else took the one you're using
• bikeshare bikes are typically kind of heavy and clunky, possibly with solid tires that don't blow out but transmit every bump in the road to you
• bikeshare bikes are usually one-size-fits-all, which I guess is fine if you're the perfectly average size, but they're always too small for me; an improperly-sized bike is harder to ride and can create more strain on your body
And of course you can subtract maintenance costs, I'll pull 50€ out of my ass as a yearly number for that.
I think they are tiny. I have wondered how they got this so wrong, but decided that it must be intentional. It prevents long journeys and limits the frequency of curb hopping and other damage causing activity.
Certainly do more to increase bike usage and keep the momentum of usage going than any marketing thing.
What would be nice would be better incentive to use public transport and to not use cars, we have used the stick with taxes for a while, carrots like this can only work better. If they could get that balance right and maybe focus on cheaper public transport, incentivise ride sharing and bikes, more so bikes over electric as they are more accessible to the whole populus, not just those who can afford to cash in on incentives out of many peoples reach.
Been all well having subsidies for solar paanels, electric cars, but when the outlay and means to get those put those out of the reach for so many, let alone people who rent, or indeed walk or cycle. Perhaps the focus would perhaps incentivise using less electricity, incentivise public transport and bicycles, not just expensive hire bikes for hipsters in which most will end up being stolen by those who can't afford to access them via other means.
But this initiative as a one off is both timely and good on many levels as you say, getting unused bicycles into action over the whole disposable mentality of most objects, is fantastic. Also nice boom for the bicycle repair industry, though unsure how they have been impacted by things currently.
More useful in replacing cars in many area's, as using existing infrastructure, unlike trains.
Where I live, in Seattle, the bus system has been wildly popular over the past several years and the transit system has had high ridership growth (in total rides and as % of commutes) in North America while most of the peer agencies have seen total declines. The problem is that they stopped scaling:
- For a while Seattle has been unable to hire enough drivers to run the schedules, because there is simply more demand than supply of bus drivers in the entire US
- Seattle has also run out of space to store buses, and for various reasons people do not like having a bus depot located in their neighborhood (parking lots are unsightly, the bus depot generates traffic and lots of diesel buses are unpleasant; electric is not mature enough for widespread fleet replacement and it would be a massive capital cost)
- the amount of buses being run is now so high that buses get stuck in bus congestion, even with a whole four lane road dedicated only to buses in the downtown area, and several more bus lanes on parallel roads
So now we are hurriedly spending $50B to replace buses with rail, because
- trains carry more people in one vehicle and with one driver
- trains have full or mostly full separation from traffic, which means higher average speed and thus better fleet utilization and running less vehicles for the same frequency
Answered my own question by READING THE ARTICLE...
> A network of 3,000 registered mechanics will be set up, and €50 of repairs will be redeemable, such as tyre changes or chain replacements. The mechanics will provide the repairs and then be reimbursed by the government, meaning citizens will not actually receive any money
TLDR: It is 50EU credit per repair job.
> A network of 3,000 registered mechanics will be set up, and €50 of repairs will be redeemable, such as tyre changes or chain replacements. The mechanics will provide the repairs and then be reimbursed by the government, meaning citizens will not actually receive any money
Very common rhetorical technique. Not everyone who does this is calculating; a lot of people just parrot what they hear. But the goal of the messaging is to make marginalize, to make it sound like some tiny group whining about their hobby, which inconveniences "normal" (car driving) people.
Turn it into a game - start talking about the motorist lobby as just another special interest, compare them to some other lobby your conversationalist will find distasteful - guns, animal rights, mountaintop removal, something will push their buttons. If you do it well, the cognitive dissonance is fun to watch.
I don't ride my bike much anymore; have had repeated bad experiences with shithead motorists (live in SF) and just won't risk it anymore. But when I did, I never spent more than $100 on a bike, because it was just going to be stolen within a year.
Car market is much richer but most of it comes from second-hand retail, which is practically non existent for bikes.
For comparison 45 billions is half of the market size of the tobacco industry and about the same size of the gun market.
Not bad for an hobby and more similar to a lobby itself.
I absolutely love them. They wouldn’t work on a racing bike where you need to shift quickly without taking your hands off the bars but for a commuter or a touring bike they’re ideal.
I’m an American, and literally everyone I know owns at least one bike, and it’s rideable. I’m not even in a big city - in fact I live closer to cows and sheep than to anything resembling a skyscraper...
You are, far and away, an outlier.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/693817/percentage-of-peo...