Originally Posted by carless
It's pure joy for a teenager with a new license
Yep, and when mom and dad stop paying for insurance, repairs and gas, it becomes hell to scrounge up the money to pay for it all, as any under-25 who just started living indepedently knows...
Personally, I started biking for one single reason: giving insurance companies the finger. I am from France, and had painfully and dearly accrued enough years without accident to make the cost of insuring my car reasonable, at a time when I could ill-afford it, then I went abroad for some years, and when I came back to France, no insurance company had me in their records (or so they said) and they "had" to insure me as a new driver despite certificates from my insurance companies abroad, at about EUR600 / yr for a subcompact car. Even if I could afford it then, I didn't want to be taken for a cash cow and I got me a bike on a whim. The result was that, yes, I could send a big FU to the insurance companies, but I also dropped 60lbs, quit smoking and rediscovered my city
