Old 12-29-08, 07:53 AM
  #48  
pacificaslim
Surf Bum
 
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: Pacifica, CA
Posts: 2,184

Bikes: Lapierre Pulsium 500 FdJ, Ritchey breakaway cyclocross, vintage trek mtb.

Mentioned: 0 Post(s)
Tagged: 0 Thread(s)
Quoted: 13 Post(s)
Likes: 0
Liked 5 Times in 3 Posts
Originally Posted by Roody
I really don't care if you love cars. It's your disdain of bikes that puzzles me. You seem to have the attitude that bikes are great toys, but useless as transportation. I see from your little biography that you've never had a chance to rely on a bike as an adult. That probably explains your ignorance of their role as transportation. Try riding your bike to the store or to work a few times. There's a good chance that you'll slowly start to see the beauty of the bike as the most perfect transportation for medium distances.
I don't have a disdain for bikes. I totally dig them, but admit that they are unpractical as transportation for many people in this country. If I still lived the flat, rural town i grew up in, or lived the 'stay in a few square mile' existence i did in santa barbara and portland, or had the backup of an extensive public transport system like we have in japan, then sure, maybe i'd rely totally on a bike for local transport. But I live on the california coast, separated from civilization by mountain ranges totally impractical to pass by bike in any reasonable amount of time available for commuting to work. (and since i work for the public and have to maintain a 30-min maximum response time, i have to have a car handy). Yes, I can walk or bike to the store: did so three times over the weekend. But unless I want my world to be tiny, I need some other way to get in/out of town and we lack the main component of that: trains. Too many americans are in this situation for bicycles to ever reach high usage numbers as only means of transportation.

I guess I didn't spell it out but of course I rode a bicycle in Japan. All my local trips were either on foot or bike. I took my son to preschool by bike, did the shopping and so on. It was totally appropriate for the situation. And I didn't need a car for more distance trips because of the train system. But the u.s., even the sf bay area, is very far away from being practical for a no-car lifestyle. My belief is that to get there, we aren't going to replace cars with bikes, but with something else: mass transit plus bikes, or cleaner personal transport vehicles.


Originally Posted by genec
Regardless of your attitude... there is a darn good chance "the Dutch" and others have it more right than we do. In the US of A the most popular form of transportation uses a tremendous amount of non renewable energy... eventually that will catch up with us and force us to either radically figure out how to use other forms of power or start to use human based transportation. We have had several "warnings" in the past, the most recent with the recent $5.00 a gallon gas. Either we will learn to be more like "the Dutch" or we will find ourselves in far worse condition than the current economic downturn.
Clearly gasoline powered cars are dead technology and were a bad idea to begin with. But the question is will we replace them with human powered travel or replace them with cleanly powered personal or mass transit vehicles? Even if our personal preference is for bikes/walking, surely you can see the unlikeliness of going that way instead of progressing to some new technology (as has been the path of mankind since the beginning: when have we ever gone "back" away from machines?)
pacificaslim is offline