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Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

> Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g. Manhattan)

The things people will do to not build bike paths.

Unfortunately Manhattan doesn't seem like a great place for bikes. The weather is just too variable. Some daredevils will be out in any weather but for most people it's just not feasible about half of the days of the year.

Not that helicopters make any more sense. The city needs some car bans, and yes, bicycles are part of replacing that. But only mass transit will be able to move enough people when there's a foot of slush on the ground.

...ChatGPT? Such an odd take, to point at weather being variable.

This is a coastal city at a fairly run-of-the-mill latitude, people build functional bike networks in much worse.

I'll point you to my prior comment re:bike-commuting in D.C. versus the same in Boulder, Colorado. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46367940

There needs to be an entire wholesale change in both infrastructure and culture to make bike-commuting workable in most extant cities.

Relatively speaking, the infrastructure is the easy part.

I think we'll get to the heat death of the universe before bike-commuting in Houston, Texas would ever be "a thing".

Weather in New York is perfectly fine for biking. If you can walk outside you can bike. Both means of transportation are equally resilient to bad weather. What you need is protected bike lanes, so you can bike relaxed and holding an umbrella if necessary, as millions of people do every day in Netherlands and other European countries.

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