From a purely numbers perspective, this hits the nail on the head.
From a practical perspective, it fails utterly.
A bike can get you from point A to point B easily enough, but what about the details?
Where are you going to put the pizza you splurge-ordered five minutes before leaving work?
Where are you going to put the large watermelon you unexpectedly found on sale at the grocery store, while just picking up a few things for lunch?
And for unattached/unmarried men, how the deuce are they supposed to peacock their socioeconomic status to the majority of women whose primary partner “preferences” are the very Machiavellian 666 attributes?
Our entire western civilization - including bicycle design - is centred around the personal (ICE/electric) vehicle. From neighbourhood density & layout to walkable cities to wide and ubiquitous non-vehicle paths, it’s all grossly lacking.
At least Europe is fixing things, and only because the culture of bike-riding has existed since WWII, and became well reinforced over the last 30 by additional cultural considerations and political policy decisions including road designs and bicycle prioritization.
So yeah, even I am looking at the stats and going, “I wish”, without any irony. It’s a nice dream, but while our Protestant ethic for hyper-individualization continues to exist, any focus on anything other than vehicle prioritization will be seen as downright communistic.
Just look at how the province of Ontario - and its lardy-arse hyper-conservative premier Doug Ford - has begun ripping bike lanes out of the cities which installed them, because “those bike lanes cause traffic congestion”, despite all of the evidence showing that this is just not true. It’s all a political stunt designed to make Cletus-IQ conservatives forget that they vote against their own best interests, by giving them a “liberal windmill” to tilt against and be distracted by as Ford and his buddies bleed them dry.
rekabis•18m ago
From a practical perspective, it fails utterly.
A bike can get you from point A to point B easily enough, but what about the details?
Where are you going to put the pizza you splurge-ordered five minutes before leaving work?
Where are you going to put the large watermelon you unexpectedly found on sale at the grocery store, while just picking up a few things for lunch?
And for unattached/unmarried men, how the deuce are they supposed to peacock their socioeconomic status to the majority of women whose primary partner “preferences” are the very Machiavellian 666 attributes?
Our entire western civilization - including bicycle design - is centred around the personal (ICE/electric) vehicle. From neighbourhood density & layout to walkable cities to wide and ubiquitous non-vehicle paths, it’s all grossly lacking.
At least Europe is fixing things, and only because the culture of bike-riding has existed since WWII, and became well reinforced over the last 30 by additional cultural considerations and political policy decisions including road designs and bicycle prioritization.
So yeah, even I am looking at the stats and going, “I wish”, without any irony. It’s a nice dream, but while our Protestant ethic for hyper-individualization continues to exist, any focus on anything other than vehicle prioritization will be seen as downright communistic.
Just look at how the province of Ontario - and its lardy-arse hyper-conservative premier Doug Ford - has begun ripping bike lanes out of the cities which installed them, because “those bike lanes cause traffic congestion”, despite all of the evidence showing that this is just not true. It’s all a political stunt designed to make Cletus-IQ conservatives forget that they vote against their own best interests, by giving them a “liberal windmill” to tilt against and be distracted by as Ford and his buddies bleed them dry.