But at the end it pays off. Full privacy, free workouts, faster commute, being outside (getting sun, maybe fresh air).
Invest in a good bike (maybe even eletric bike) and commute faster :)!
Bikes have been around for a long time and are expected to technically stay the same in the foreseeable future.
Electric buses are so much better than gasoline buses. Fewer vibrations, less noise. Makes it much more suitable to relax or do some work on your phone. Plus, the cost (manufacturing+maintenance+fuel) of electric buses is 25% lower than the cost of gasoline buses. At the moment, only 10% or so of buses are electric. So the effect of these two improvements are mostly still to hit the market.
And in a few years, buses will start to become autonomous. Which reduces the costs of a bus operation by 70%.
Imagine we get autonomous electric buses with nice seats and tables. Then you can do your work in a bus while getting from A to B super cheap. Mobility would be so different.
You might have missed the electric bike revolution that started a few years ago? Probably half the bikes I see here (in Flanders) are electric. It has enabled many people who would never have considered it before to start biking.
And bikes are absolutely taking market share from cars here. Honestly I don't even understand why enough people still use their cars through my city instead of biking. It easily takes 2x or 3x the time to get anywhere.
I am an ex-avid cyclist. Bikes are easily stolen, You can get soaked if the weather is poor, If it is bitterly cold it can literally take you hours to warm up (especially if you are older). If you have to ride in traffic it can be very frightening especially if you haven't done it before. Other people find cycling simply uncomfortable, I've been told it more uncomfortable for women.
Yeah you need to adapt to weather. But a good pair of biking pants, rain cover for the shoes, thick leather gloves and different pairs of coats (which you anyway need) usually do the job.
If your bike is super uncomfortable there is tons of different sattles and options. Even bike fitting to fit your bike perfectly to your body.
> I use a decent U lock. Always lock the frame to something metal and solid. Additionally I have a ~100USD insurance to cover my several thousand dollars bikes. Never got stolen any.
You are lucky. I've had two bikes stolen. I ride a very old and battered looking mountain bike (Marin Hawk Hill 97). My anti-theft measure is that it isn't worth stealing.
> If your bike is super uncomfortable there is tons of different sattles and options. Even bike fitting to fit your bike perfectly to your body.
If you haven't cycled in years it is just painful on backside and your nether regions. I hadn't cycled in over a year and I was saddle sore for about two days afterwards. I was expecting it btw. The bikes I have fit me perfectly, I use a good saddle (roll).
Generally people buy the cheapest POS bike from a store, the fitting probably isn't right or they just get their friends bike that they no longer want and put up with it until they can afford a car. They aren't going to a proper bike shop to get fitted up.
Now my bikes don't get stolen anymore in Flanders (even though I use a much cheaper and more convenient frame lock).
About the weather, I just wear warm clothes. I'm about ten minutes away from my children's school, not 2 hours. It rarely gets lower than -5°C though (23°F).
It also works because we have decent cycling infrastructure so cars don't kill too many cyclists.
I'm not an avid cyclist or an avid automobilist but I sometimes have to drive the same route by car and I have never wished I was in a car rather than in a bike including under rain, while the other way around is almost every time.
The bikes I had stolen would be about €2000 today. I ride a second hand mountain bike that is old and isn't a target for thieves.
> About the weather, I just wear warm clothes. I'm about ten minutes away from my children's school, not 2 hours. It rarely gets lower than -5°C though (23°F).
I am in North of England. The temperature itself frequently isn't the problem. It is the wind chill factor. You can literally feel it chill your bones. I have fenders on all my bikes and tbh that reduces how wet you get by about 30-50% but affects the bikes handling a lot IME.
If your city has nice green public spaces linked by bike lanes, and has a good “human” level of density where most of the stuff you actually want to go to are reachable in less than an hour of cycling, people will naturally gravitate towards that, since biking in green spaces is usually enjoyable in and of itself.
Paradoxically this makes driving nicer as well, since it frees up traffic for car enthusiasts.
When I was living in Sofia (Bulgaria) I used to bike a lot, just because it is nice. And I did own a car and used it frequently. But my commute / grocery run / recreation was usually done by cycle.
* Theft. I have to carry a lock and cable (for the front wheel). These are heavy and get dirty.
* Storage. I have to haul my mountain bike up and down the stairs in my apartment. Additionally I can't put the bike on my right shoulder and I cannot carry things on my left as it "feels wrong". So the whole process is a PITA.
* Being run over and accidents. I've been hit by cars hard enough twice to send me in and out of hospital for months. I had other less minor collisions with cars. I do not like cycle lanes either because there is even more chances of collision (read below).
* I am also normally dodging people's dogs and/or children while on a cycle even on the "cycle" lanes. This makes any cycle frustrating.
* Cycling has intertwined itself with the insufferable green crowd. I used to enjoy cycling for the act itself, I am not naive enough to think I am saving the planet.
Is that so? The insufferable green crowd is also pro public transportation, is that a reason to have an issue with trains?
I actually prefer working on and driving my 97 LandRover Defender these days and Making Youtube Videos.
Would you be happy to be associated with aristocracy, now that you drive a land rover, because many "old money" people drive those?
While in your first comment you gave lots of reason why you dont ride a bike, now youre saying you stopped mostly due to perception of others..thats to me just as silly as all the tesla drivers who are now oh so afraid to be associated to musk and going so far to putting stickers on their car claiming they didnt know musk is unhinged.
BTW it was a form of transport to me. I used to cycle everyday to work and I used to cycle after work and at the weekends.
When I say it was infected by the green crowd, I am not including people that simply use it as a means of transport. I would have thought that would be obvious.
I am talking generally about cycling as a whole. I got into it because I thought mountain biking was cool when I was 12. Now almost every discussion about it is about building whole cities around it, carbon emissions etc. That is pushed by people primarily by people in the green crowd. I used to personally know these people. I probably still have their email and phone numbers hanging about.
There are a lot of extremists in the cycling the movement that want to totally ban cars, think pet ownership is akin to slavery and they are very vocal and some are involved in planning transport infrastructure. I know this for a fact, because I used to know these people personally.
You only think this is all silly because you haven't encountered these people.
> Would you be happy to be associated with aristocracy, now that you drive a land rover, because many "old money" people drive those?
Most Defenders are driven by Farmers I would wager. You are confusing a Defender with a Range Rover. Defenders are very bare bones, mine doesn't even have a Radio. I also have no issue with the aristocracy. They don't interfere with my hobbies or my life in any meaningful way. In fact many of them that I have met are very nice.
> While in your first comment you gave lots of reason why you dont ride a bike, now youre saying you stopped mostly due to perception of others..thats to me just as silly as all the tesla drivers who are now oh so afraid to be associated to musk and going so far to putting stickers on their car claiming they didnt know musk is unhinged.
To clarify, it was a combination of all the reason I listed. You are focusing in on this particular issue because you took exception to it.
The primary reason is one I didn't list (as it was only relevant to myself). I am in my early 40s now. My left ankle has issues, my right knee has issues. My right shoulder is slightly deformed from breaking my collar bone 3 times. When I was run over (the second time), I broke all my fingers on my right hand, some of the fingers didn't set correctly. I don't want to go through that in my 40s again and the roads are less safe than they were 15 years ago.
As for the Musk stuff. I believe it is largely astro-turf'd on the net. If people wish to sell their Tesla or adorn it with Anti-Musk slogans because of his current involvement with the Trump Administration, they are free to do so. I see nothing unhinged about it at all.
If they were to engage in acts of vandalism or violence because of anti-Tesla sentiment that would be unhinged IMO.
> When I say it was infected by the green crowd, I am not including people that simply use it as a means of transport. I would have thought that would be obvious.
Sorry but nothing in your comment made that obvious. It seems you are the one who is conflating cyclists with the "insufferable green crowd" (why caring about the environment is insufferable is a question for another time). People ride the bike for all kinds of reasons, they are quicker, they help them excercise, they help them save money, they simply enjoy it.
> You only think this is all silly because you haven't encountered these people.
I live in berlin, I know this kind of extremism very well, and still would never dream to judge cyclists as a whole - because i know it's just a means of transport that both "good" and "shitty" people use.
> the roads are less safe than they were 15 years ago.
Maybe that's because there are many many more cars on the road than in the past, population is rising everywhere. For everyone to have a car is simply not sustainable, especially in cities.
Buses are subsidized. In cities with subways, they are used primarily to accommodate people with limited mobility or to cover rare routes. Between cities, they remain the cheapest option. Therefore, I'm not sure that cost is an important factor.
[0] https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in... [1] https://www.paris.fr/en/pages/bicycles-outperform-cars-in-pa... [2] https://english.kimnet.nl/publications/publications/2018/04/...
Not in a society that is car-centric. But in countries that optimize for different types of transport, it is quite busy with bikes. Every commuter bike would have been a car otherwise - so also taking much more space.
Probably half the urban bikes I see now are (mostly cheap) electric ones. There's also a question of infrastructure; many cities have made great improvements in bike lanes over the last few decades.
> Electric buses are so much better than gasoline buses. Fewer vibrations, less noise.
Also faster takeoff, which is quite important (urban bus routes are typically very stop-start-y).
> And in a few years, buses will start to become autonomous.
I have doubts.
(Buses are very big and heavy, and other road users tend to behave badly around them; they're a near-worst-case for automation. You might get away with it on a mostly-segregated BRT line, but not a conventional bus route.)
So true, weather is an issue (but in a way it's fun to now look at the sky to see where the clouds are going), clothing too a bit. My only problem is that weak health quickly cut your ability to move far.