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Comment by quinnchr | Hacker News Reader

I live in one of the worst cities for cycling in the US and I do all of those things regularly.

I bike to Costco and Ikea all the time, but sure you do have to get big stuff delivered unless you have a trailer (https://www.bikesatwork.com/blog/move-it-by-bike-moving-serv...). I used to commute to downtown from the suburbs daily. When I was young my dad used to bike me to daycare/school all the time. If you need to be somewhere in a suit you bike in pants + undershirt and add the rest when you get there.

All of these things are possible, admittedly there is a real limitation of needing to live within a 15-20 mile radius of work. The best data I can find suggests about 23% of commuters have a commute of more than 20 miles. So I would say cycling is a perfectly reasonable solution for the majority of people.

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> So I would say cycling is a perfectly reasonable solution for the majority of people.

This is patently absurd. A more gross generalization could hardly be made.

And the average between this and reality is worse than the status quo, so when politicians compromise, we get worse off overall.

Irrational people...

Well show me some data then. Like I said, it seems like the majority of people live within a reasonable radius of work to make cycling feasible. I'm not saying it's easy, and there are plenty of people it doesn't work for, but I seriously doubt it's 80% of people.

I don't need to show you data. That is ludicrous. Use your imagination. There are a million reasons and situations that make bicycles not in any way a suitable replacement for cars. You are generalizing wildly while demanding data to contradict you. Daily life is all the data you need.

Alright, since we're apparently in the "no data needed zone", I'll go off of my daily life:

I bike two miles to work, I work, I bike home. I walk or bike to a grocery store, and carry my goods back. I walk or bike to bars, and come back.

If a car is absolutely essential for getting into work, either you or your company is doing it wrong.

EDIT: Ah yes, and this is in probably one of the sprawliest, least bike-friendly cities in the US.

It's not wrong to live more than 2 miles from your job, or to have a family, or to want or need to transport more than you can on a bicycle, or to refuse to risk your life more than necessary by mixing cycling with automobile traffic.

A friend of mine was killed riding her bike when a cop ran into her. I live in a relatively small city, and traffic was not busy at the time.

It's a simple fact that cycling with automobile traffic is far more dangerous than driving. Take that risk if you want to; it's your life (though if you're killed by a car, it could be your fault, and it could ruin the driver's life too). It's not wrong to refuse to take that extra, unnecessary risk!

If you think that everyone should do what you do or else they're "doing it wrong", you are thinking wrongly.

There is something very, very wrong/unsustainable at a systems level if people are forced to use cars (or some other singular mode of transportation not based on their own power). Perhaps we need to have goods delivered to us, or have our own supplies of things, or be able to remote in, or whatever...

Indeed, if biking is so dangerous, I propose that there is something wrong with the traffic rules--there's a great writeup about how streets were (at the beginning of the 20th century) almost completely mixed-mode transportation and that car companies pushed for redefining norms to plant the idea that they were only for cars.

You've been brainwashed.

In college I didn't have a car so I walked/biked/bussed everywhere. Going to the market was still a hassle and I only had to buy for 1 person. I still had to go often because there was only so much I could bring home in one shot. Now, when I go to the market, I'm buying at least a week's worth of groceries for a family of five. I would need a pretty big bike trailer to get all those goods home. And since it would take quite a bit longer, I'd also probably need to add something to handle the frozen/refrigerated things. So, I bike for leisure and not for utility.

> When I was young my dad used to bike me to daycare/school all the time.

How did all your siblings fit? Or did your Dad make multiple trips?

> live within a 15-20 mile radius of work

You really think people want to bike 20 miles? That's going to cost you about 2,000 calories (round trip). That's completely unrealistic for most people. They would have to double their food, plus end up exhausted every day at work.

And that's for perfectly flat terrain!

(The weirdest part is the extra food costs more than the equivalent gasoline, and produces more CO2.)

My dad used a bike seat for me, which was doable since my brother and I were different ages and weren't often going to the same place. There are of course bike trailers for hauling 2-3 children around and don't forget pedicabs which regularly haul around 3-4 adults.

After you get used to it you don't really feel exhausted. Yes commuting 20 miles by bike is definitely an upper limit, at least for me, but I do know people with longer bike commutes.

So assuming you fuel yourself with pure beef, the most unsustainable food I could find, you'd need about .85 kg to get 2000 calories. On average the production of beef releases about 13.3 kg of CO2 per kg of beef, so we're looking at 11.305 kg of CO2 per commute. The average CO2 produced for a medium sized car is about .5 kg per mile. So for the same 40 mile commute you're looking at around 20 kg of emissions. So even if you choose to only eat the most unsustainable food it's still better than driving. If you switch to pork or poultry you can reduce that 11.305 kg of CO2 by about 75%. Cars just don't even come close.

What is up with the downvoting of perfectly reasonable comments like this? Is there some anti-car mafia on this thread?

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