it probably depends on where you live (city vs. suburb). here in chicago, the commuter/utility cycling scene seems to be dominated by the 18-35 year old demographic.

when i take longer recreational rides out in the burbs on a sunday afternoon, the white middle-age male demographic is in full control out there.

my $.02
 

I think I would rather have a helmet on than not. a little protection doesn't seem like such a bad idea. I am not sure why people are SOO against them.

I thought this was well written and wanted to add my thoughts to it as well.

Has anyone else looked at the author's five points with regard to cars?

When I flip down the visor on my van a sticker tells me "Death or serious injury may occur". To make it worse, it's telling me that this death or serious injury may be inflicted by one of the vehicle's safety devices! My wife covered this sticker in her car with a sticker that says "375 Horsepower". I guess she didn't like the auto industry selling fear to her.


Cars might fare slightly better than bikes on this one, but mostly because they're such hulking beasts that it's hard to drive a car like a kid. Cars roll through stop signs. In heavy traffic, the last car through a "yellow" light is routinely still in the intersection well after the light turns red. Speed limits? Hah!

I don't have a survey handy saying how many drivers think other people drive like idiots, but I have a fair idea what it would say.


I've got nothing here. Cars have this nailed. You can wear the same clothes to drive a car that you wear to sit on the couch in your living room. Of course, that's not really a coincidence, is it?


Please! This isn't even close. Most cyclists wave at least to one another (never mind the large minority who think this is stupid). Most, I think, are friendly toward random people who happen to make eye contact with them. People in cars, not so much. People in cars, for the most part, don't even look at one another unless it's to observe the other guy picking his nose. Then there's the not insignificant minority of drivers who are outright hostile to other people. Mean people are mean regardless of the vehicle they use.


I don't know off hand which automobile publication is the largest, but I'm pretty sure that the majority of its content centers around horsepower and sportiness. I think the magazine shelf at my local grocery store has more publications dedicated to making cars seem like something you could race than it does about any other single "sport".

This one cracks me up anyway. The guy wants people to treat bicycling for transportation as if it's "normal" but he also wants industry magazines dedicated to this "normal" activity. Yeah, I'll look for that right after the premier issue of Minivans Monthly. And Bicycle Times...this has been bugging me lately. Yes, it's a very different magazine than Bicycling, but is it really any less consumer oriented? True, the reviews don't focus on $8,000+ carbon race bikes. Instead they focus on $2,000+ steel utility bikes. I don't need a $2,000 utility bike any more than I need an $8,000 race bike. I can race on a $500 bike and use a $100 bike for utility purposes. Just because the magazine caters to the tweed crowd doesn't make it any more grown up.

It along with a bunch of other stats are here

The one about average age is under Table 3.

I deliberately picked my apartment to be 30 min away by bus because I know I can do that distance by bike :)
Not sure if this was by choice, but some of my coworkers live like 70km away. Maybe the houses are cheaper?

Tying this back to the article, using the European yardstick doesn't necessarily work on US/Canada or elsewhere. They have made it easier to be closer, things are more spread out here. We can try and change bits of it, but tackling the sprawl would do more to address cycling.

The reason why we get pissed at drivers is basically the same reason why driver gets pissed at some of us. We are not consistent, and did something unexpectedly.
Though I suspect that people have loud complains about cycling not because there's more of them, but as a group, we are less consistent. e.g. we can expect most drivers to stop at lights, we can expect that most drivers will stop at at stop sign, from a small road to a major road, and be mindful of californian stops if it's a 4-way stop in the middle of the suburbs.

But different cyclists do different things. Some stay on the sidewalk, some stick by the rules strictly, some bend it a bit (guilty as charge, at stop signs with clear visibility, I will slow and roll through if I know there's plenty of space), and some are just outright reckless.

Tackling that problem would be interesting, yet tough.

Who is more mature?

A) Person in tight jeans/short skirt with flip flops/high heels pedaling a 40 lb batavus into a rainy headwind.

B) Person in water proof pants/lycra shorts with cycling shoes pedaling 25 lb crosscheck into a rainy headwind.

Cool! :-)

Thanks for posting back the source!

This was interesting though -
As shown in Table 2, the majority of pedalcyclist fatalities in 2011 occurred in urban areas (69%) and at non-intersections (59%).

Also interesting -More than one-fourth (28%) of the pedalcyclists killed in 2011 had a blood alcohol
concentration (BAC) of .01 grams per deciliter (g/dL) or higher, and around one-
fourth (23%) had a BAC of .08 g/dL or higher

Minnesota only had 5 fatalities? Whereas both California and Florida had over 100 (the worst states for that statistic). Though that's probably also a reflection of the fact that with the temps it's easier to bike year round there...

Also, what's the population of CA vs the population of MN? Not 20x, but you're right climate probably does a lot to explain the difference.

does it matter? ;)

Though it would be funny to see a)

Who's "They"? In Europe there's less land, so higher population density is a necessity, cars are less necessary, and bikes and other options are more viable.

Here in the US, without that land constraint, we have spread out. Urban planners have prioritized suburbia and designed everything around a car-centric lifestyle. And that's only recently, before there were urban planners, when the economy was shifting from agriculture to industry, too many clung on to the fanatasy of living in the country, and thus chose to live farther from city centers, in tract housing with yards, not fully understanding the deal with the devil they were making by embracing a lifestyle that requires a car. Now we're stuck with their legacy, and road infrastructure that is anti-bike.

Great point, in Europe you have to be rich and it is hard to get a license, many are riding bikes out of necessity and they build their infrastructure around this.
Europe in the whole is small compared to the USA so logistics come into play here.
It seems like every 50 miles you have to show your passport, where in USA the land is vast and If you commute in a large city many factors come into play.

Culture is a huge factor also, that is why soccer and cycling is huge in Europe and not so much here.

Perhaps that is why Europe esp. France is mad at a certain American for winning 7 something or another.
(disclaimer don't want to turn this into a whats his name thingy or a helmet debacle...lol)

Good stuff really as a I for one love a healthy debate and find humor in the flames...

I would really like what the author has to say, and he is a member........hmmmm

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So, for crying out loud, quit preaching helmets. They aren’t necessary and you won’t die riding without one. Anyone who has thoroughlyexamined the literature will reach the conclusion that helmets can do little toprotect you against serious injury.

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What?!?! This guys a doctor? . . . Oh, a chiropractor. nevermind. I have hit my head twice while riding a bike. Did the helmet prevent serious concussion? I don’t know. Maybe I should stop wearing it and the next time I fall I’ll find out.

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Start riding like adults. .

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I do

Quote:

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Save the spandex for when you need it. . . . There is nobody on the planet Earth who has not looked at a pair of Lycra shorts and said to themselves “There’s no way in hell I’m gonna look good in that

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I need it to be comfortable when riding a bike. I do not give a dam what others think. Maybe they would like it better if I took fashion que’s from the Kardashians. Hard to do since I don’t lead my life by what others think about what I wear, and never watch crap like that.

Quote:

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Be nice to others. .

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I am, unless they write stupid, logically flawed articles.

Quote:

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It all comes down to this. If werent cycling to grow beyond its small, homogeneous niche, all of us cyclists need to change our behavior to reflect the cycling culture that we want to bring about. In other words, if you want an environment where most of the population rides a bike — then you should ride your bike as you would in that environment..

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Slowly, in uncomfortable clothing while risking the most precious attribute I have; my brain? No thank you.

RubeRad: that should've been a "That". The lack of sprawl makes normal commute easier, because you can't be that far from where you work. My bad.

Culture is another big thing - In Hong Kong (lived there for last 3 years), everything is "close", but the drivers has 0 sense that bicycles are there. There was a handful of incidents where trucks back into bikes and run them over (with fatalities). Their cultural thing is that cars is a sign of luxury, and only see bicycle as a recreation thing, so it actually is rather dangerous because drivers are simply not going to expect a cyclist on the roads at all.

There are also no way to lock up bikes, etc...

Cultural change is always the hardest one. We can fix availability issues, we can fix urban sprawl if we wanted to. Getting people to believe in the new norm is the tough part.

OK, this thread is full of reactionaries like this screaming "DON'T TAKE AWAY MY HELMET OR MY SPANDEX" -- but I'm not seeing a lot of actual interaction with the point of the article.

OK, bikers enjoy their helmets and their spandex, we get it.

BUT, how many of us bikers (a) think more people should ride bikes more often, to more places, and (b) think it is worth removing obstacles that prevent them from doing so?

Sure, spandex isn't keeping you off of a bike, but the article is dead on that there are tons of poor cagers who are intimidated away from biking because all they see is a small crowd of intense cyclists that wear a lot of spandex. Or not much of it, depending on your perspective.

If you don't care what these poor cagers think of you, do you care at all what they think of themselves? Would it be any better for you (us) if you (we) could do things that would help to enlighten more of these poor bastards and get them out there on bikes with us, creating more demand for cycling infrastructure, and more public understanding of and tolerance for cyclists on the road?

It's the second part that I question is really true. Let's say you were to hand out a survey out to people who lived within 10 miles of work and asked them to rank the reasons why they don't commute by bike, my guess is that spandex would be pretty low on the list if it shows up at all. Here's what I think you are more likely to see:

It would take too long
I often have to travel to other locations while at work
I wouldn't feel safe
What if it rains/snows, etc?
It's dark when I go into or come home from work
I have to drop the kids off at daycare/school or run other errands
I need to look good and there's no shower facilities
It's too much work

As far as spandex goes, I think most people are smart enough to realize that it's optional. It's not like we put our kids in bike shorts and jerseys before we let them get on a bike. Most adults have ridden in regular clothes plenty of times.

When I see videos of people biking in Copenhagen I'm not sure. ;)


I'm not worried about anyone taking away my spandex. I just can't stand irrationality. Does my wearing spandex really keep people from biking? If so, maybe they need to visit a life coach or something, perhaps some positive affirmations.

Seriously, though, I rode to work today in clothes that from 10 feet away looked like normal street clothes (apart from my helmet, gloves and shoes). I wore Zoic MTB shorts, complete with chamois liner, and a wicking/quick-dry T-shirt. Both of these are designed as athletic equipment, but they look like normal clothes. That's not why I wear them though. I wear them because they're useful. If I choose my wardrobe based on the image I want to project to people, I'm not really setting a useful example.

If I wear what works best for me and people see it and say, "I'm not getting on a bike if I have to dress like that," then probably they aren't getting on a bike anyway. If, on the other hand, they are thinking about getting on a bike and are looking to see what I'm wearing because they want to know what to wear, then they are probably counting on my having chosen something that works well.

If I were riding a couple of miles from a downtown apartment to a downtown job, then I would probably just wear what I wanted to be wearing the rest of the day and that would be the right example to set. Since I'm riding from my house in the suburbs to my office in a different suburb, anyone driving between these two places and looking at me should see that my normal work clothes aren't a good choice.

This really isn't rocket science.

completely, utterly, totally agreed!

this whole notion that helmets and spandex are the two big dams holding back the floodwater of tens of millions of motorists converting to bike riders seems really silly to me.


here it is in a nutshell:

if you want to wear a helmet........................... then wear a freaking helmet, idiot.
if you don't want to wear a helmet.................... then don't wear a freaking helmet, moron.

if you want to wear spandex............................ then wear freaking spandex, idiot.
if you don't want to wear spandex..................... then don't wear freaking spandex, moron.


this is not hard. it's really, REALLY, REALLY simple.

STFUARYB!

This is great! So much of the discussion in bike advocacy circles spins around some variant of trying to let people know what it's like to ride a bike (though not necessarily phrased that way). The truth is, almost everyone knows exactly what it's like to ride a bike. Almost everyone on my street has at least one bike in their garage. I'd bet there are only a few of us who own spandex.

I was biking to work for over a year before I even considered the possibility that I should wear spandex. As I recall, I bought my first pair of bike shorts for recreational riding and then realized it would be nice for my commute too.

That's an excellent point because if you ever want to have a significant number of people commuting by bike to work in North America one of the things you have to accept is that many of us face obstacles that don't exist to the same degree in places like Copenhagen. It's one thing to ride wearing a suit a couple of miles on flat terrain in mild weather, it's quite another to ride 10 miles on hilly terrain in hot weather while mixing it up with motorized vehicles traveling on the same roads at a much higher speed.

So to me, ideally you have people wearing a wide variety of clothing including street clothes AND spandex. Why? Because spandex is one means of overcoming some of the obstacles that keep people from riding a bike. It's not the only means but it's something that works well for many of us.

Need to wear a suit at the office but don't want to get it all sweaty or dirty on a bike? Change at work.

Have to ride a long ways and chaffing is a problem? Spandex shorts might solve that for you. Maybe you don't like that look. Fine, throw a pair of regular shorts or a skirt on over them.

Passport controls every 50 miles; commuting requiring less logistics for bicycling than U.S.? All this is involved for the typical European bicycle commuter unlike the U.S. commuter who has no passport controls on his typical 50 mile jaunt?

Have to be rich to own a car in Western Europe?

When was the last time you visited Europe?

imo, this has little to do with the mythical lance-alot mamil intimidating some poor newbie and everything to do with cliquish behavior of "bike culture" folk. i have personally seen newbie bikers who were turned off to biking entirely by well-meaning hipsters who took them on rides in their "normal" clothing on crap bikes and then wondered why they did not have fun sweating buckets and being chafed to rawness.

the whole idea of "normal" bike clothing is also completely tone deaf. lulemon is everywhere. elastic tights/shorts are everywhere. moisture wicking shirts are everywhere. tweed cycling britches and merino wool knickers, not so much.

Add 4 (yours) and 5 (mine) on the "focus."

However, ditching the car at approximately $9,000 per year should help cover some of those extra "city living" costs right?