dahut

Ive heard all this, and it sounds great. And, I remain a solo commuter for all of it. Im not "fairly senior" - I'm just a wage worker. That certainly matters, as I have no positional visibility. In other words, no one is sucking up to me or going on team building, 'Management Randonee's' at my behest. I have gotten the company to agree to a bike rack, but that's pretty much it.

Even after several seasons of showing people it is possible, most still think I'm daft. This includes the upper echelon folks. A lot of them give me moral support, and some say they admire me for sticking to it. But there arent any of them emulating me. Im safe in saying I see NO other bicycle commuters in my vicinity, either from my work place or any of the others in the area I ride in.

In my case, it matters that I'm not living in densely populated urbania. My workplace is a 13 mile ride out from the city, and many of my fellow employees travel far more than that to get to work. 30 or 40 miles is common.
It isn't so much breaking down cultural barriers or advocacy, as overcoming the prominence, even necessity, of the automobile in their working lives.

Mithrandir

Funny, I thought the numbers were too high. I work in an office with about 4000 people in it, and on a good day there are two bikes besides mine at the bike rack. Typically it's just mine and one other. That's about 0.075% commuters... on a good day. No one commutes here. It's ridiculous.

I-Like-To-Bike

Please explain WHY it is "ridiculous" that others make choices different than you?

LeftinFlint

Here in Flint, "vehicle city," I see a good number of people biking for transportation. I suspect few of them filled out the survey, but they keep going until the weather gets really bad. Then it's just me and people who don't know how to drive in sloppy weather.

bragi

I most certainly do not want to factor out bike-friendly cities; I live in one, after all. I was just pointing out something that this study makes really obvious: outside of maybe a half-dozen large, mostly northern, well-educated cities, and maybe a dozen more college towns, the vast majority of the US is not yet interested in using bicycles for regular transportation.

mnutz

This is a tough one for me too. I have 2 children and while I'm great with taking them around our small town, I would not want them out on the highway with me.

Roody

The census data is about as good as you're going to get--certainly much better than the conflicting "evidence" that you and ro-monster have observed at your personal workplaces.

The blog article did a good job of pointing out some of the limitations of the data, IMO. For example, only people who use bikes for their primary commute mode are counted, not people who bike commute a couple days a week, or people who ride a bike to and from a bus but do most of the commute miles on the bus.

Roody

Down the road in Lansing there are many more transportation cyclists than there were 10 years ago; fewer in winter but certainly not nearly as scarce as we were a few years ago.

But bear in mind that the survey only counts people who bike commute to their jobs. Bikes will certainly be undercounted in cities like Flint that have a high unemployment rate.

Mithrandir

Well you see, when people ***** and moan about the ever increasing price of gasoline every so often, and then proceed to drive alone in their gigantic SUV's to work every day, I tend to find it ridiculous. But I guess that's just me.

Caretaker

Not just you.

Me to.

work4bike

Yes we are an extreme minority. I'm not car-free, but I'm about as close to it as can be. I drive so little that I actually got to think a little before starting up the car.

Another indication of being an extreme minority is that I have people that greet me (people I don't know) and ask me a lot of questions about my cycling, because they've seen me on the roads; this actually happens quite often.

Mithrandir

And to further prove my point...


So the building I work in has about 4000 workers. It also has about 2000 parking spots. You can imagine the friction that develops in the morning when more than 2000 cars need to park, every. single. day. Basically if you don't get here by 7:30am, you're not getting a parking spot, so you have to drive around and around until you can find one, or drive a few miles to downtown and park in a commercial lot, and either walk back or take a bus back. It's ridiculous.

So this morning one of my coworkers had an emergency to deal with at their house and couldn't get here until an hour ago. He had to drive around the lot for 40 minutes to find someone leaving the lot. He got upstairs and started biatching about it and how the parking here sucks. I said "You only live 8 miles away, there's plenty of spots at the bike rack, why not bike here?". His response? "Oh shut up."

I stand by my "ridiculous" comment. When people would rather spend 40 minutes driving around a parking lot plus 15 minutes driving, than 30 minutes biking, that is utterly ridiculous.

Suburban

One year I went downtown in the car with 2 kids and 1 newborn. Had to see specialist. I got my ticket going into a parking garage and the counter said there 4 spaces. People dodged into spaces faster than I could get to them. I had a newborn screeching, 2 kids arguing and circling for 1.5 hours all the while, paying for my "parking", because this counted towards time in the parking lot. I would have gone to another lot but the other lots I'd seen said "full".

Never again.

I-Like-To-Bike

Never again? Then how?
Would it be "ridiculous" if a mother with 2 kids and a newborn considered going downtown to see the specialist by car instead of a bike?

I-Like-To-Bike

I am sure you do stand by your statement, as well as your belief that what works for you should be everybody else's course of action too.

Artkansas 

If car-free is a cult, do we get free Kool-Aid for our water bottles?

cycleobsidian

Well it is quite impressive that you keep on biking despite getting very little encouragement. Good for you; it mustn't be easy.

cycleobsidian

I'm so glad ILTB is here.

He is the self professed moral authority on people taking the moral authority.

What would LCF ers do without ILTB pointing out the error of our ways?

Roody

It is amusing that when he makes these knee-jerk defenses of the car cult, he actually believes that it is worth defending and in need of defense.

bragi

I kind of like ILTB's comments, even though I hardly ever agree with them. And let's not forget that, while he is not at all car free, his bicycle commute is not for the faint of heart. He's the equivalent of someone who mocks vegans while eating a huge plate of broccoli and carrots every day.

I-Like-To-Bike

Remind us again; who is it claiming that other people actions are "ridiculous" because they choose to do things differently than YOU?

I-Like-To-Bike

Another straw man argument, buddy. Appears YOU are defending the extreme cult-like idea of declaring that people are "ridiculous" for making any decision different than your own.

The issue has nothing to do with cars at all, but is all about group think, parochialism and lack of empathy by the "extremists" of this list who post their narrow minded views and expect them to be accepted at face value and as gospel.

Ekdog

Prior to the Civil War, anyone who favored the abolition of slavery was considered a radical extremist.

Caretaker

I'm puzzled by the this 'extremist' label. How does one qualify?

The views posted on LCF appear to me fairly mild, maybe not always well thoughtout but far from extreme.

e.g. Currently there are two threads running, one where the OP is thinking of getting rid of his family car and the other a teenager asking whether it's a good idea to get a DL. The only sign of 'group think' is people posting advising the former to keep the car and the later to go for the DL.

Final question. Am I an extremist or do you have to be American to qualify? I only ask because I get the impression there is some kind of low intensity civil-war going on here.

Mithrandir

I didn't say that and you know it.

I don't understand how you leap from my observation that virtually no one in a 4000-person office bicycle commutes is ridiculous (especially when compared to the national average in the original post) to that somehow meaning that I think everyone in the world should bicycle commute. Perhaps take some more time and read the words that I wrote, instead of automatically assuming some magical meaning that I never put forth?