Originally Posted by
KD5NRH
Locally, not really; people see that I haul as much home from the store as many of their typical trips, and when they find out it takes me ~10 minutes to get home from the stores on the other side of town, they pretty much realize I've got a fine solution, at least when the weather is good. When we have a week of steady rain, I tend to agree with them that I'd rather have a car available and choose to use the bike or not on a trip-by-trip basis.
OTOH, I do have a lot of people online who think I'm crazy for using a means of transportation that makes it impractical to visit the nearest large city (60-75 miles of hills, so easily a day to get there and another to get home, especially with any load at all) when I could just get a car and be there in the same hour it used to take me to navigate ~8 miles of Dallas traffic. On that one I sometimes agree; I miss being able to get off work at 5, grab some dinner and be at a swing dance (swing dance clubs are good competition for triathlons and hilly centuries in terms of the concentration of women with spectacular legs) there by 7, but that's a want, not a need.
Then again, I couldn't dance nearly as long before getting back to heavy riding, so it balances out to a degree.
For me, the norms of the automotive lifestyle seem extravagant and almost 'hyperreal,' to use Jean Baudrillard's term. It's like in the movie, the Matrix, where people are running around jumping buildings and dodging bullets. It's so strange that a normative culture has evolved around the combustion power, to the point where getting around by bike on smooth pavement, an incredibly fast and efficient mode of transportation by pre-automotive standards, is construed as falling short of expectations. It's so strange that people have lived their entire lives taking automotive culture for granted to the point they don't even have a car-free baseline to frame reality. It's like living in a Star Trek reality where people are so used to beaming around instead of walking that they forget what actual geographical distance is and means.