tandempower

People often choose a car based on how it looks. Those who don't care much about the looks of the car; i.e. those who see driving purely as a practical issue, may still avoid choosing certain types of vehicles because of their looks (I noticed this in myself many years ago when I was considering getting an affordable and reliable car and realized I was deterred from one just because it had been damaged by a rear-end collision that couldn't be hidden cosmetically). So whether people are motivated by how they want to look or how they don't want to look, looks may be a major factor in people's process of overweighing the LCF lifestyle.

So the question is, if you are LCF or wholeheartedly seeking to give up driving, how did you overcome the issue of not wanting to look different than people who drive around, park, and enter and exit cars. Are you a person who loathes 'fitting in' aesthetically in general? Do you simply not care how you look? Maybe you look good enough that you feel you will look good biking for transportation as well. Do you or have you ever wanted to be hidden from view while on the roads and driven or wished to drive for this reason?

Although it seems strange to me that personal transportation choices that have so much influence over the environment and the future would be ultimately determined by concerns as superficial as looks and privacy, I wonder how big a factor this could be in the long-term cultural struggle to adapt transportation norms to changing realities. Are most people superficial enough to resist transportation reforms 'until the bitter end' simply because they feel like they would look weird riding a bike in street clothes? Likewise, are clothing and bike-design fashion trends sufficient to motivate or deter large numbers of people from transportation biking? Are all the car-commercials depicting people wearing their vehicles sufficient to seduce people into feeling better-looking wearing a car than a bike on the roads?