A bike is a great mode of transportation when you don't need to carry anything heavy, bulky, passengers etc. and when weather permits.
It's not a replacement for a vehicle, nor will it ever be.
It's not a replacement for a vehicle, nor will it ever be.
My family uses our cargo bikes as our primary mode of transportation year round. It turns out that children were allowed to leave the house prior to the invention of cars and continue to be capable of wearing jackets in the winter. Many even like the snow.
The key thing to understand is that while sometimes you need more than a bike can carry, that's a small fraction of all of the vehicle trips Americans make. The average trip we take has 1.2 people in the car, is a relatively short (half of them are under 3 miles, a distance my son could do on his own as a 2 year old), and carries negligible cargo. Buying a vehicle for your 99th percentile needs is a significant expense for capacity you use only a handful of times a year — the average American spends $11k/year to own a car according to AAA, and for that much money you could buy and discard a new cargo bike every couple of months and still have plenty left over to rent a truck on the few occasions when you need landscaping or building supplies.
I'm perfectly fine with city dwellers having more bikes (if they so choose), whatever helps the traffic and parking in the cities.
My point still stands that in no way is a bike a replacement for all the utilities of a vehicle, whether you're offloading that by renting, borrowing, etc.
I'll drive my vehicle, you can ride your bike. The power of choice! No conflict needed.
Source? People get cars because they need one. The first big thing you get for yourself is a car, because it's so useful.
I believe the opposite of your statement is true, biking is only really practical in a very limited bubble.
However, we saw in just the past year the consequences of even a moderate increase in the cost of gas for the average American, how they reacted to it, and how they learned from it. From that, I think I can say with fair certainty that the American brand of city will not cope well with any meaningful shortage. There are other, longer term problems that will begin to show themselves as abundance wanes as well.
A car can only ever be as useful as the roads it drives on, and the same with a cargo bike. If there are copious protected bike lanes that go everywhere you want to go, you would bike everywhere in just the same way you drive everywhere today. The only difference between them is how they deal with black swan events that threaten the abundance that drives driving.
I'm not trying to be a doomer here, but most places can't (and likely none should) build expecting that they're always going to have the resources to sustain excess. This isn't a knock against you either, you don't always have a choice as to where you live and the means available to you to get around. However, it is worth being aware of the narrowness of this perspective.
https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-owne...
Florida - max temp 100F/38C
Have fun biking in Florida, unless there is a shower ready for you at each end.
Florida is also an interesting example given that it's both the southernmost point of the continental United States and at significant risk of catastrophic damages from the climate change caused in no small part by driving cars. Whether or not you prefer the status quo, continuing it isn't an option.
oooh, now do Texas. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Southern California
or, flip it. Do any of the states bordering Canada during winter.
Build the infrastructure and people ride bikes.
What about needing to go multiple places during the day? Should I now shower 4 times because I have 4 stops that require me to interface with people and appear clean?
Biking in Florida (substitute most of the southern US) for 7-8 months of the year is simply not possible unless it is acceptable to be a sweaty mess at each destination.
That's easy to say in Denmark, since the weather is virtually always pretty OK. It basically never gets below -10 or above +35. Without looking at the data I would guess 300ish days a year are between 5 and 25.
Cars also have situations they're a poor fit for: places without good parking, if you have to take part of your journey by another mode (bus, train, etc...) and need your vehicle on the other end, if you can't afford them (including fuel, insurance, etc), if there aren't good roads, if you're too young, etc.
We just need to use more bicycles.
The majority of my use of a vehicle was commuting to work. After that, it was shopping for groceries. I'm 2.5 years into having no vehicle. I'm 1.5 years into using a cargo bike. There are very few things that are not doable on my cargo bike as it is now. With a few DIY modifiations, I could narrow that even further. The remaining I can settle with ride shares from an app or even more old skool the use of friends.
More people live in cities than rural areas, but it doesn’t mean they’ll come to take away your car.
1. Ride your bike into a train
2. Wait 20 minutes
3. Roll out of the train and ride into your destination
See, it isn't that hard. What part of this process requires you to be tracked? You don't need any ID to purchase train tickets.
The Netherlands would like a word ;)
Most people here have a public transport pass in their own name, linked to their bank account.
There's also the "anonymous" transport card that you can get for 7,50 and then pre-charge with a set amount. It will act as a pre-paid card rather than a debit card, so you can't board unless there's a sufficient amount stored on the card. But since most people then use a debit card to transfer money to their public transport card, it's not really anonymous anyway.
So most residents here choose the personal variant.
There are many disabilities which don't allow driving, not to mention that in countries like the United States which don't take care of people there are many disabled people who cannot afford to own a car.
Accessibility doesn't have a single solution but if you look at areas which are welcoming to bicyclists they are also much better for a wide variety of disabilities because they have things like sidewalks, safe vehicle speeds or limited vehicle access, curb cuts, etc. You'll see people in electric wheelchairs or tricycles using bike lanes/paths, blind/deaf people don't have to worry as much about getting hit by a speeding car they were unable to notice, etc.
If you don't like bicycling, think of them as safe mobility lanes — the users certainly do, and we should all back having more of them because if we're lucky we'll live long enough to need them.
Not to mention asthma never prevented anyone from cycling. Maybe you won't win the Tour, but you can definitely commute cycling with asthma if your city is designed around humans and not cars.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpla/article/PIIS2542-5...
Don't recumbent electric trikes largely address this issue? Someone unable to operate one of those isn't very likely to be able to operate other types of (larger and faster) vehicles.