Anons argue in comments
Cuz putting on a raincoat or some warm clothes is too much for these weak ass people.
Rain, ice and severe cold are a removed. I like bicycles, but driving to work in a heated car looking at that poor cyclist riding somewhere at 6 in the morning at -6°C, sorry, no, I’m gonna go with a car.
I disagree cycling in winter is nice. Just get some warm clothes and good tyres. A car is also really expensive to own in the city. Why pay for a car and parking when the alternative is almost free and arguably more fun.
I’m less likely to sweat profusely in winter
If the weather is bad enough, I will take transit instead, but cycling down to -10 C is doable without any problems.
I will be far less inclined to bike if it’s raining, that I do hate with a passion. Of course, I could just work from home in that scenario as well, if I don’t feel like taking transit
Ice and snow are difficult. But I don’t give a shit about the rest. It’s still way more fun than sitting in traffic.
Like my mom used to say: are you made of sugar?
If it’s me on the bike, know that I’m pitying you. -6°C is nothing. I drove a lot of miles as a delivery driver, and saw a lot of faces behind windshields in that time. Very few happy faces. Driving makes people miserable.
Rain is no problem, just get a proper jacket and rain pants. They’ll last you years.
Ice can be a problem, but you can get studded tires if you’re really regularly riding on ice.
Severe cold? I’ve biked in -20 weather, and with proper gear it’s not bad. You’re working hard and you heat up pretty quickly. The tricky things are your fingers and toes. Your fingers need enough freedom to operate the brakes and so on, so you can’t just use huge and bulky gloves. If you’re using clip-in pedals, your choice of footwear is a bit limited.
The real issue with winter biking isn’t the cold or the ice, it’s the lack of proper cycling infrastructure. Biking on a road next to a bus is hard enough in summer. In winter where there’s uncleared snow, slush and ice, it sucks. In places with proper winter cycling infrastructure it’s no problem.
Imagine how hard it would be to drive a car in winter if cities didn’t send out snowplows to clear the roads. That’s what it’s like for cyclists now in most (but not all) places.
I’m disabled in a way that means I can’t use one, but can use a car, which kinda sucks.
Fortunately bike infrastructure usually helps me in my chair, so I’m all in favor of wider bike adoption.
I don’t know your limitations, but you’d be surprised at the number of ways cycling can be made accessible.
For example, there are handbikes that attach to a wheelchair. As with all assistive tech it depends on your specific situation what is possible.
That blows. Glad the infrastructure helps your chair get around, though. Also, every biker not using a car gives you more space, so that’s an additional plus
Welcome to the Netherlands. If there’s anything that fills me with pride it’s our cycling culture. Most people have a car too, but I don’t, and I do everything by bike and public transport.
Denmark checking in. Not unusual for people in the city not to have a car. I’m happy with my bike that I use every workday to cycle into the city centrum in all weather - I love dressing myself up in rain boots, rain paints and rain jacket and be on my way in heavy rain or snow, feeling like I’m in an episode of Deadliest Catch
I cycled from Bruges to Amsterdam this summer and honestly it was an amazing holiday. Few days with headwind made us wish we had eBikes but the infrastructure was amazing. We basically could cycle on bike roads for 90%+ of the distance and felt very safe doing so. We loved especially Zealand landscape, food and small roads passing through the fields.
I think few countries would have made the holiday so pleasuring and chill, and obviously we encountered just so many people going on with their daily life even between cities with their bikes (I am assuming 20+ km rides). I have noticed that with ebikes also elder people had complete freedom to use bikes as they wished.
I really hope the dutch model is followed by more cities or countries.
A bicycle gives you freedom of lightweight activities within a few miles of your home. You want to play baritone sax in the band 25 miles away? It’s not happening with a bike.
The 25 miles is a bit much, but if your instrument/sporting gear can fit in a bag, you can carry it on a bike. There’s backpacks for guitars, cellos and tubas and I regularly see kids cycling to their lessons with those. This is a fairly dense town though, so 5km max (20 minutes at child-speeds). Kids also can’t drive cars, so if it’s not happening by bike, it’s not happening at all.
For me? Yeah 25 miles is a bit much depending on how regular that commute is. Once a week, maybe. Once a day, like a job? 5 miles tops is my limit. But I’ve heard of people doing 20-25 mile work commutes before.
If you do it a few times and get used to it, 20 can be fine, if there is a shower at work it certainly is better.
40 km is more “take public transit” range than going on a bike.
Similarly, if you had to go 300 km for a meeting, you wouldn’t want to have to drive it, you’d want to take a TGV, Shinkansen or other high-speed train.
Cars are the ultimate symbol of freedom because you just get in and go wherever to do whatever.
Pick nanna up? sure. Go buy her groceries? Sure. In the pouring rain? Ok. Pick up her dog from the vet? Yep. Drop by the garden store and grab 50kg of fertilizer? You bet.
You can do all of those things with out any planning or notice. You just get in and go wherever the day takes you.
I’m a bit bonkers about bikes. I have a cargo e-bike. It absolutely could do all of these things in separate trips. Doing all of them together would be a challenge but I am 100% here for that so long as nanna is. The main difference is planning. You need different gear, like a bike trailer for example. You’re also probably going to pick the right time of day, like early before it gets too hot or too windy, provided that it’s not raining.
That freedom comes at quite a cost. Both to the driver and society. Riding a bike puts the “free” in freedom
Cars are the ultimate symbol of freedom because you just get in and go wherever to do whatever.
Pick nanna up? sure. Go buy her groceries? Sure. In the pouring rain? Ok. Pick up her dog from the vet? Yep. Drop by the garden store and grab 50kg of fertilizer? You bet.
In such case most freedom has form of freight train.
car go further faster, and car more useful when not in big city.
For this, bike friendly cities have good public transport (bus/tram/metro) and bike shares
Most cities aren’t big enough to be bike friendly or have public transport at all, let alone good public transport (as an issue of not enough taxes to do it bc small and not enough demand for private section either).
Small cities are super nice for biking. Where are you from?
Don’t want to be too specific but I’m from a small town in east texas with ~1,300 people.
Heard that US sucks… Seems to be true everytime. Small towns in japan are really nice for bicycles, as well as big cities. The medium ones are hit or miss
the town is half farm bro it’s as dense as it can be without the local economy collapsing. not to mention the entire thing is built around the intersection of two highways so to walk anywhere you have to cross two of the most semi-truck covered highways in the state (just a consequence of position relative to several much larger cities along those highways). even if we built the infrastructure it simply wouldn’t be safe and the distances would simply be too long, and considering we can’t even afford to keep the schools open all 5 days (this is the actual official reason we switched to a four-day week) I doubt there is enough taxes to add any infrastructure. this is not a flaw of the US, the town is just too small (in terms of population) to support what you are talking about.
You mean not dense enough (as in high concentration of people).
Commutes need to be short enough that bikes are a reasonable alternate mode of transportation. That means you have to get to work and shopping within 30 minutes or it isn’t feasible for most folks.
That can only work if they get rid of a lot of residential suburbs and instead build condos and apartments close to places that offer a lot of jobs. Then it’ll work out.
no I mean too low in population. it is not reasonable or feasible to make anything other than a large city bike-friendly, and suburbs are large cities in comparison to the majority of cities. also replacing real homes with apartments is a bad idea because it takes away true personal ownership of your home. you seem to be unaware that small towns exist and that a lot of people do not want to live in a big, dense, concrete slab of a city. you should leave your city sometimes and remind yourself that the people outside of it do exist.
I live in a small town of just 20k people in an apartment. It’s perfectly fine.
cool but just because you are fine living in a concrete box does not mean everyone else does or that trying to get everyone to will solve anything. you are out of touch with the people around you. there’s these things called ‘privacy’ and ‘property’ that normal people aspire to have and that apartments are the polar opposite of. it makes much more sense to phase out the idea of having the whole company work in one place than to force everybody into apartment complexes so they can always be at their master’s beck and call. it’s crazy that you are on the fediverse and yet you want to have your real life situation be exactly as centralized as the platforms you are here to escape.
You have a somewhat weird assumption of what I’m trying to tell you.
I don’t want everyone to live in an apartment. But they are needed for a healthy city. The residential suburbs made of of single family homes that the US is building everywhere are not sustainable. The infrastructure costs far outweigh the tax revenue they’ll every generate. The people living there have to have a car to get around because everything is too far away. This just can’t work in the long run.
there’s these things called ‘privacy’ and ‘property’ that normal people aspire to have and that apartments are the polar opposite of.
That’s plain wrong. My neighbors have no idea about what I do in my apartment. I never let them inside and there is no need to do that. Heck I don’t even know their names Even my landlord was never inside since I rented it.
And why do I need to own it? What advantage is there? I would be stuck to this place as property isn’t that easy to sell.
My parents are trying selling the family house they built themselves for almost 2 years now. They are now too old to maintain it and none of the children wants it. We all have our own lives. That’s the reality for most of the people that own property: You are stuck with it whether you like it or not.at their master’s beck and call
Do you have some kind of delusion?
it’s crazy that you are on the fediverse and yet you want to have your real life situation be exactly as centralized as the platforms you are here to escape.
Those two don’t compare. At all. You’ll always need to have some kind of central ‘power’ to coordinate efforts and resources. Here the instance is the center that’s doing that, much like a city does. And if I don’t like the instance I switch to another one like if I don’t like a city I’ll move.
You’d be surprised how far you can travel on a bike. As long as you cycle within your ability/fitness level and eat enough you can basically cycle forever. I cycled 300km in one day last year and it wasn’t even that hard. I just made sure to eat enough carbs and stick to a sustainable pace. It took some determination, but it was not difficult physically. Humans are built for endurance.
You cycled for 300km for fun. You didn’t cycle 240km to another city with a 10kg boardgame hanging off your back, taking your dog and gf with you, while it was -15c and snow drifts in winter. And you had to get back home by a certain time in the evening for another thing.
I did this described trip with a train and I won’t do it again without a car. Public transit is only as good as its schedule is frequent and stops are closeby.
I didn’t say cycling 300km was the most convenient way to travel such a distance, just that travelling long distances by bike is doable.
People don’t want bike as a hobby they want it as a viable way to go a to b. Bikes are not a viable method of travel for anything that is further than 30minutes and without hills. Ebikes shoot up viability greatly though.
I’m aware, but car still go further faster so it’s better if you aren’t in a big city.
City designed for car. City still suck for car. Big traffic.
true but that is because you can’t reduce traffic, you can only make it smoother. no matter how much space you add people (or anything, really) will fill all available space. this is why a well-placed and well-built roundabout can be very helfpful, it simply makes traffic flow better.
U no caveman now?
forgot was do bit, many sorry.
because conservatives are fat
They conserve their fats
A related question: why is the “big tough guy” image a guy in a truck?
Like, you push a pedal with your foot to make your vehicle go vroom vroom. A granny could do that.
Surely a tough guy is a guy who is straining huge muscles to make a bike hit 50 km/h. A skilled guy is one who can maneuver his bike down a narrow mountain-bike track.
Imagine looking back in history and seeing a dude being carried around in a sedan chair and thinking that was the ideal image of masculinity, rather than the surely jacked dudes carrying him.
Someone can probably do the math, but i have a hunch that humans are technically not very fuel efficient if you look at calories burned pr the total mass being moved along.
But whatever it is biking is awesome, but being technically correct is even better.
Humans are actually unusually energy efficient for mammals when walking and even more so when cycling. Here’s a little info graphic showing a breakdown.
One thing to keep in mind if you have a dog is they’re less energy efficient than humans. While dogs can run faster, a reasonably fit human can easily out distance an equally fit dog when walking or distance running.
Also, I love the units. Using miles on one axis and km on the other.
Nice graphic.
But it seems like it doesn’t factor in kg of mass moved. A human and a bike is a lot lighter than a car or a horse. You could also argue that the vehicle weigh should be ignored but then again you could easily argue back that weight of goods move can possibly be a lot higher with a car if you load it up to capacity. Ignore that. I did not see it said 5 riders for the carI’m back with better data. I’m assuming the travel path is perfectly flat because I don’t feel like modeling elevation changes. I’m being energy efficient (read: lazy).
For cycling, I’m using the global average human weight of 62 kg, assuming the cycle is 8 kg, and the pace is 10 kph, which is pretty relaxed.
For walking, I’m using the 62 kg person walking at 4 kph.
For driving with petrol, we’ll use the same spherical 62 kg human and a 2024 Toyota Prius with a fuel efficiency of 4.8 L/100 km and a mass of 1570 kg. One liter of petrol is approximately 8174 kcal. Double the energy expenditure for an estimate for your typical SUV.
For electric, I chose a 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N with an energy efficiency of 21.2 kWh/100km and a mass of 2235 kg. One kilowatt-hour is approximately 860 kcal.
Walking: 0.74 kcal•km-1•kg-1
Cycling: 0.34 kcal•km-1•kg-1
Driving(p): 0.24 kcal•km-1•kg-1
Driving(e): 0.08 kcal•km-1•kg-1Edit: keep in mind this includes the energy required for each vehicle to move its own mass. If we calculate the energy required just to move a single person and NOT the vehicle, we get:
Walking: 0.74 kcal•km-1•kg-1
Cycling: 0.38 kcal•km-1•kg-1
Driving(p): 6.32 kcal•km-1•kg-1
Driving(e): 2.96 kcal•km-1•kg-1Only in an electric car jammed with 5 people (0.59 kcal•km-1•kg-1) do we begin to get close to walking efficiency again.
@TDCN@feddit.dk: this update might be closer to what you’re looking for.
Oh really. It seems to contradict the graphics. Cars are also stupid efficient now. I also ran some quick calculations on my electric bike and it is crazy how many km*kWh⁻¹ you get and how little it cost to run.
I’ve heard about some research showing that an electric bike over it’s entire lifetime is more environmentally friendly than a traditional one because the amount of extra food you need to consume without the electric help is over time more co2 than the co2 it costs to charge the battery. I don’t know where the research is from since I just heard it from a colleague so don’t quote me on it, but electric motors are really efficient so it sounds very plausible to me.
Electric bikes are super efficient, I’m a big fan.
While the petrol and electric vehicles are surprisingly efficient moving a given unit of weight, that also includes their own weight, constantly, making their overall energy use…not great.
Wait so cars are more efficient than cycling now ?
Seems so. Even cheating it in favor of the bikes. But looking at electric car numbers it should make ebikes even more effecient.
Yes and no. They take less energy to move a given unit of weight around, but they’re massively heavy so they expend tons of energy moving themselves the entire time.
If only I could up vote your comment again. These numbers are really nice to have.
It still doesn’t give us kcal•km-1•kg-1 (or an equivalent), which is what I was looking for. We could do some math to get us some loose estimates, though. I’ll do exactly that and report back shortly.
This is very useful. My four friends and I will have to stop swimming to work, and take the car instead.
a reasonably fit human can easily out distance an equally fit dog when walking or distance running.
You say that, but I’ve been on hikes lasting a few hours with a dog and they’re still full of energy at the end. Humans are persistence hunters, and I’m sure eventually a dog would get exhausted before a human. But, this isn’t something that most humans are likely to experience with their pets.
You couldn’t be more wrong. Bicycle is the most efficient way of moving.
If you account manufacturing energy, then in a short time it is overcome by walking.
Interesting. It just feels so counterintuitive, but as I wrote, it was just a hunch and apparently many telle me now its not so. Do you have any numbers or sources to back up the claim that I can use for future fun facts sessions to annoy my family?
Quick math shows I am quite a bit more efficient than a Nissan Juke traveling 150 miles at 19mph. About 50kcal/pound for the car and 8kcal/pound for me+bike to travel the distance.
something like 50-80 % of the energy we use (it depends on how active you are,) is used for just sustaining life (AKA your base metabolic rate.)
humans convert a bit less than 50% of the food-energy into a form we actually use- glucose. even though bicycles themselves are fairly efficient with the power put into them, humans themselves are not all that efficient. as for most effecient animals, that would probably be something like an albatross, which extracts energy from the wind to fly. (Specifically using a technique known as ridge lift. in the R/C world, the speed record is 548mph or so- set by a glider using similar techniques, and albatrosses can cross entire oceans.)
Bikes dont contribute to climate change
Where are you all buying bike that don’t hurt your wallet to replace? I guess there are Walmart bikes but I’ve literally had a huffy fall apart while in motion.
Used bikes can be had for like 20 bucks. You even find them for free on the side of the street, but you just need bolt cutters.
anything is free if you have the required equipment and skill
If replacing the bike is a concern (I’m assuming due to theft etc), then buy used. Not only do they cost less, they also look cheaper. It does require you to put in some work if you want to be cheap. But that’s the same with a car, it won’t magically change its brakes either.
Auctions by municipalities, police and the like are a good tip if you have time and the skills to determine what is a hopeless trash pile and what is slightly rusted but good quality.
Online listings, but it requires patience.
Bike groups/coops/repair shops, if you have decent ones.
Buying used makes a lot of sense, especially for commuting. The design of the bicycle was basically perfected in the late 1800s, anybody trying to tell you different is a fart boofing Tesla fanboy with an engineering degree and zero cycling experience.
(Admittedly, I ride a carbon frame road bike with electronic shifting, not because I’m a shit sniffing engineer with a hard-on for Musk, but because I’m a middle-aged man with lycra for brains).
I currently ride a 15-or-so-years old KTM trekking style bike with an assortment of random parts Frankenstein-ed to it. Apparently that and never cleaning it makes it ugly enough to not be stolen in a medium city.
Also, I technically do have an engineering degree, which is why the lights and wiring are, ahem, functional. Most of the time.
Keeping thieves away by never cleaning the bike reminds me of the old bicycle touring strategy of hanging sweaty and unwashed clothes to dry from your handlebars when parked. Bonus theft deterrent!
Also, I technically do have an engineering degree, which is why the lights and wiring are, ahem, functional. Most of the time.
To be clear, having an engineering degree is cool – it’s the very specific (but all too common) type of engineer that wants jerk off into his own mouth when he sees a Cybertruck and organically follows Elon Musk on Twitter, that is lame and has a lot of bad ideas, sometimes about “innovation” of bicycles.
Because it’s harder to kill someone by hitting them with it.
But in all seriousness, you can go a lot farther, a lot faster, across much worse terrain and weather in a car than a bike.
I live in rural Norway up in the mountain side. We have wind, snow, ice and rain like hell, and I have ~150 elevation to get to the main road to get anywhere.
… I’m still considering getting a bike for all the mentioned benefits.
I used to love to bike but I moved to an area with steep hills and it’s too high effort. Maybe fine for exercise but I always used them for transport and you can’t arrive at work or a music lesson drenched in sweat. Wish they would install those hill lifts some countries have. I walk now. Would love an electric but the expense makes it much more painful when it’s stolen (and every one of my regular bikes has eventually been stolen).
