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Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

There is nothing worse than using a bike in a dense city. I love cycling, but the moment you are confronted with high concentrations of pedestrians and cars it quickly gets unbearable and unreasonably dangerous.

Not to mention that it is impossible for some people, 1:30 with a train, 45 minutes with a car and about 3 hours with a bike, makes thr choice rather obvious.

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Alternative take: I LOVE riding in a dense city. It’s exhilarating and gives me the wildest rush akin to downhill skiing on mountain biking, it puts me in a flow state requiring extreme focus.

No doubt it can be dangerous and no matter how honed my instincts are with regard to predicting how cars and pedestrians are going to act there’s always unpredictable risk, so I understand not loving that.

In another life I wish I had done a few years as a bike courier, I would have loved it.

A life or death obstacle course is absolutely not something I want to experience every day while going to work. And I am pretty sure that the same thing goes for most other people.

See, the problem you have is a large concentration of cars.

And pedestrians, who are easily as reckless and uncaring.

They don’t kill me if they’re reckless or careless, though.

It probably depends on the city but it can be surprisingly relaxing in London these days. They've build a lot of cycle ways. With the concentrations of pedestrians you just have to slow down a fair bit.

There are few things in the world that I love more than riding a bike in a seriously dense megacity. Zipping past everyone is such an exhilarating feeling. Everywhere I go I rent a bike.

Building a custom ebike that can do 50km/HR and then you can pace cars and it's s lot more harmonious. I spent a lot of time planning routes to work, preferred side streets and bike paths. Your not constrained to the shortest route when you have a bit of per power helping you out.

>Building a custom ebike that can do 50km/HR

Illegal. And suicidal.

Not a particularly nuanced take there - my road legal '250W' e-bike in New Zealand provides electric assist up to 45 km/h, which lets me keep-up with & over/undertake traffic in my dense city. Definitely doesn't feel suicidal, rather practical actually (especially compared to my 60+ km/h hill bomb commute on my previous vintage non-electric bike).

Where I live it is illegal. In a car, basically any accident at 50 km/h is survivable, even being seriously injured is rare. With a bike you just need one mistake to die.

Not sure with ebikes but with regular bikes the overall death rate is lower for cyclists than drivers in my demographic (oldish bloke). Cyclists may crash but drivers get fat and heart attacks.

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