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Comment by alt227 | Hacker News Reader

Only on flat smooth surfaces which are a relatively recent invention. Take them on any natural environment and it falls very quickly below walking.

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The difference between riding on grass and riding on a dirt trail is VAST - grass is like 3x worse; but when that dirt trail turns into a mud trail, the grass is better.

Humans made trails by walking for eons before roads were envisioned. Maybe for a chariot you need a proper road, but a human made trail is just fine for a bicycle.

Not only just fine but often times way more fun!

I rode my mountain bike A TON as a kid, gave it up for the more "prestigious" road cycling as an adult, but maybe 2 years ago bought a mountain bike to ride with my kids.

My goodness it took about five minutes on a local trail to feel like that same little kid I was back in the day, the feeling of speed, focus, and flow. There's nothing really like it for me, as it puts me square in the moment.

I hope you're not implying that people in countries with hills don't use a bicycle because that's not true ;-) Check Denmark and Sweden for instance.

Denmark doesn't have hills. It might have "hills", but not real ones. The same goes for the inhabited parts of Sweden.

Colombia could have been a better example, they have real mountains and people over there do use bicycles to do their thing. Granted, not a great percentage of the population does it because you do need to be really fit in order to handle 10% slopes, but of those that do you might get future Tour de France winners.

Egan Bernal already won in 2019 (and before that Nairo Quintana was second in 2017).

Yeah, I was thinking at Bernal when writing my comment. As far as I know he used to bike to school when he was a kid, and he wasn't living in the flat areas of Colombia.

The record for the Tour Divide is about 13 days for 2700 miles from Canada to Mexico down the Continental Divide.

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