myrridin

Paved does not mean particularly suitable for bicycles, I suggest you try riding on cobblestones regularly, or even better log paved roads... As to how long the roads would survive, you are mistaken. The predominant source of damage to road surfaces is environmental. For instance when building the new Denver airport, the contracter paved the runways much earlier in the schedule then originally planned... By the time the unused runways were ready to be used (ie they finished the airport) those runways needed considerable maintenance. This was after only one (or two) years of disuse. And runways are constructed to much higher standards than any regular road.

The premise of the story is that electricity (and presumably other engine types) ceased to function overnight. If that were to happen the vast majority of the worlds population would die of starvation in fairly short order. Rebuilding any form of technology would take more than the fifteen years mentioned. Just learning to grow food, and build shelters would be the bulk of the effort for any survivors.

No precision technology is not needed to create such technology, for instance the screw used in the first screw length was hand made. But mass production does require precision and cheap mechanics. Something that the one off technology that would be available so shortly after such a collapse would not be suitable for production.

Both of the examples you describe used fairly high level technology (screw lathes for instance). Such machines are fairly rare, and the tooling (a consumable) required is even harder to produce than those parts need to maintain a bicycle.

Yes, but why would such communication be needed in such a collapsed society

Reading books is not a good way to learn actual mechanical skills. Talk to anyone who has acquired a pre-industrial skill (such as hand tool woodworking). It requires a fair bit of experience before the old books about such subjects actually begin to make sense.

Mobile 155

what is the subject we are talking about again? A TV show or the perception of Bicycles in the US. One is not supposed to be based on reality and the reality of the other is that we haven't seen an increase in bicycle adult sales percentages since 1974-75. How can we be surprised by either?

tagaproject6

The subject gets pretty obscured, but one thing is for sure, Vizzini showed up!

Artkansas 

I think you underestimate how much mere social organization can do to maintain facilities. Whether its totalitarian or democratic, power usually goes to the better organized.

Traffic will tend to keep a lot of the weeds away, serfs can do the rest. Airport runways are built to higher standards. Yes Denver may have needed maintenance, but it's trying to safely land jumbo jets at a high rate, not traffic moving at 5-30 mph.

That is your presumption. Yes, lots of people would die and lots of people would be out in the fields picking. But once again, social organization. Look at what the Inca's did without even the wheel.

I'm pretty sure that lots of people would be able to scrounge the parts they needed to make factories to serve the market they saw. Trading routes covered thousands of miles even in prehistoric times. The Romans had factories turning out mass produced goods as did the Chinese.

But they were all around before the bicycle and you need less tooling to make a lot of bicycles.

How much do you think Ghengis Khan would have been willing to pay if he knew of such a system to coordinate his empire? It would be of incredible value to him.

Nope, you do need to practice, as with all skills, but just having this information available puts people so far ahead of those in the middle ages.

Since this is all conjecture, and the dynamics of a civilization are hard to predict, I'll let you walk around in your fictional collapsed society, and I'll pedal my bike in my fictional steampunk world.

You can't win the argument unless you can prove your assertions.

iheartbacon

Maybe in a post apocalyptic world we'll all go back to high wheelers.

https://worksmancycles.com/shopsite_s...ml/page38.html

iheartbacon

Horses are the hooved spawn of Satan. I got trampled by one when I was a kid.

myrridin

Weeds are not the real problem. Cracks, holes, disjointed pavement. They all would occur very quickly. And all would make bicycling on those roads a problem.

Further, more than 9 out of every 10 would die very quickly. Getting to the farms wouldn't really help. There are no farms near enough to the population centers to provide long term food for most of the population. And in such a situation folks would not be behaving in a civil manner. One only has to look at the mess that occurred with Katrina in New Orleans to get a small sample of the behavior that would occur in such a situation.

Not a presumption, but simply from having viewed the show in question. And we have ample evidence that social organization does not survive real catastrophes--people revert to fairly base behavior unless some outside force can enforce civility... Something this program's scenario precludes...

Drakonchik

Vast, long-lasting, over-supply of all kinds of things after the majority dies. Like the supply of animals and leather and best arable land after the Black Death. And there would be a plethora of bicycles and spare bicycle parts to boot in a future human die-off, especially in a mere 15 year time frame.

no1mad 

Now take what you just said and put into the context of the show that started this thread. Where are the supply depots going to be located at? In the larger urban environments. The show's opening credits even has a voice over that states that odds of surviving in the cities were marginal, that people headed for the countryside. Why would the people fleeing would want to go back? Why would those already out want to go to the big city?

You need food, water, shelter, and clothes to some extent to survive. Transportation isn't a key to survival... well, in today's socio-economic climate here in the States it is...

As much as most of you like to think that the bicycle is the be all and end all of transit solutions- it's not. Unless you have a cache of parts, sooner or later you will have to abandon them. In time, it may be possible to retool to manufacture more parts, but that will also depend on who controls the factories and resources. Since this show is set in the USA in roughly 15 years from now, it's not surprising that there is a lack of bicycles being shown, given the current state of transportational/utility cycling in this country.

Someone brought up horses. Yeah, they poop, but that can be recycled for crops. People were riding horses long before the wheel. They can be used as a beast of burden. Plus the carcass of a dead animal can be consumed as meat and the skin can be used as material. A bicycle can neither feed or clothe you.

Drakonchik

Bicycles exist for salvage everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. Unless of course one of the show's premises is that every home garage in the country will be individually nuked.

And of course the ample supply of horses will reduce wear 'n tear on the bike fleets. ;-)

no1mad 

Okay, fine, let's go that route. At some point, you will probably encounter incompatibility issues. I've heard that Shimano and SRAM don't play nice together, let alone Campy.

tagaproject6

There's always fixed gear.

Drakonchik

After the weak of mind and body have been eliminated, crafty wrenches will rule the earth, scoring the best free tools, hacking together the illinest franken-bikes, and a receiving the finest favors as barter for their wares!

Cyclist0084

Thinking along the lines of the OP, a couple of years ago I read a four book series that had the same basic premise, only the outage was due to solar radiation. In that series, bikes were heavily used. People also got the snot beat out of them for their bikes. It was a pretty decent book series; much better than Revolution.

Drakonchik

Touche! In fact we could probably pound out a better screenplay than "Revolution" right here on this forum! ;-)

I-Like-To-Bike

That would be the end of civilization.

Mobile 155

If we are real about it the show is just a show. Horses don't need roads, they are the origional 4x4. A man or woman on a bike can flee from a man or woman on foot but the man or woman on foot can easily take down a bike, not so a horse. The romantic in the TV writers see the Native American society as the likely replacement for the modern machine and electric dependant society. Cities would be someplace to avoid not flock to. Bicycles would require more effort to ride than a horse or Mule. Horses can pull wagons and they can transport families a lot easier than bicycles. Without transportation getting tires for bikes could be a problem but tubes would be a real pain in the bottom.

]It would be a lot easier to revert to Hunter-gatherer with use of horses. You can plow with a horse and you can hunt over a wider range with a horse. So if I were writing an apocalyptic movie I would use horses, Mules, Oxen way before I would have people on bikes. I would think you would need a more civilized society to make bicycles a viable alternative to the loss of cars, trucks, planes, trains, ships and motorcycles, in a fictional story for TV. In fact that seems to be how most fictional TV movies go. In a country that has roads and some infrastructure that could support more bicycles our society has not embraced the bicycle by even a whole percentage point in more than 36 years.

We embraced Cell phones by over 1800 percent, personal computers shortly after the first ones hit the market. People want transportation that moves them without them having to put out the effort themselves. So I am not surprised that yet another apocalyptic TV show would forget about bicycles and go back to horses. Besides you can still make war with horses and a charge by bicycles simply doesn’t sound very apocalyptic. Has anyone ever heard of the four cyclists of the Apocalypse? But everyone know about the four horsemen.

All in all nothing about such shows surprise me. Did anyone see a bicycle in Hunger Games? Omega Man? Logan's Run? THX1138? 2001? Advanced future or regressed future all seem to be sans bicycles. Nothing new here.

Drakonchik

We saw bicycles when the Japanese Army took Singapore, 1942.

Arguing that horses will be more useful than bicycles such that bicycles won't be seen in a post apocalyptic future is a bit like arguing that because those in the future will find sledge hammers useful, they will find no use for roofing hammers, ball-peen hammers, claw hammers, brass hammers, etc etc.

Mobile 155

What do you mean arguing for? It is a TV show. I was talking about why I would pick Horses in a "fictional" TV Pilot. 500 riders on horses could charge down on a small outpost and take down the population. I pretty girl has to hide and after the hoard leaves walks out to survey the carnage. Just doesn't work with bikes and would make a whole season. 500 cyclists come charging over a hill, half of them fall off the bikes when they hit logs and can't cross the small stream. A wise acre kid tosses roofing nails in the road past town and most ot the rest of the 250 cyclists get flats. The ten or so the reach the three foot fence have to dismount and toss their bike over only to have them stolen by street urchins leaving them on foot to attack the 400 towns people armed with picks, pitchforks and shovels. Season over get ready for reruns of Mayberry.

Dude it is a show that has to sell to people that the majority believe people on bikes all have DUIs. If the apocalypic future comes I would be far happier with a gun, small army of friends, a fort and food for a year than I would be worried about bikes not being represented in Hollywood. Besides Horses can be trained. Picture the Movie Zorro and what would happen if he called to his bike to roll up to the building so he could jump off of the roof and get away. Just does work does it?

You are not from Portlandia are you?

enigmaT120

I need to re-read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court again. Twain thought bicycles would have some advantage over horses but I can't remember what it was, nor what he had the characters use for tires.

Keith99

Yea, majorly stupid. And the cross bows from the trailers all look uber high tech.

The idea that batteries don't work also is off putting. At that point one is down to basic chemistry and physics not working , which means basic bioligy fails also.

Keith99

Thought I'd pick this one to expand on.

I did leatherwork. My uncle (now dead) became a pretty darn good woodworker. (His daughter was a pretty good violinist and it seems there is a gap in violins, it goes from not all that good to $100,000 and up).

In large part both of us learned from books or online.

BUT we could get the tools and materials needed and described in those books. Uncle Bob went a long ways into doing it all himself. BUT he did start with milled and seasoned wood. He was a research chemist so he mioght have been able to produce glues and other things needed post disaster.

But while he produced top grade violins, me guess is just making anything that could be tuned at all would ahve been the best post disaster.

Given my tools and supplies (and I did some commercial stuff so I boutght some thigns in bulk) I could likely keep the tack for my sisters and neices horses up for 15 years plus. And I could teach someone some basics.

But the key is supplies. Very few people do thigns start to end and the process is like a chain, not a rope. Miss one link anywhere along the wau and the process simply does not happen.

And for my family it is totally moot in this fictional situation. We are in Southern California. Water comes in by the aqueduct and electricity is used to pump it. Without that all of Southern california is a graveyard rather quickly.

Nightshade

I agree that this show is standing over open water with no net!! It will sink very soon!

I watched about 10 min and that was enough for me to move on to something else to watch that didn't insult my intelligence!!

ChrisM2097

I watch it. I could definitely see myself getting bored with it. I'd rather watch Mythbusters, Dirty Jobs, or The Big Bang Theory.

Dahon.Steve

I suspect the editors of the show made the following assmptions.

1. No more Bicycle Tires --- Without electric power, it's not likely bicycle tires will ever be made. Futhremore, after 15 years, all bicycle tires will be used up, including innter tubes and parts.

2. Bicycle would be dangerous --- Riding a bicycle would in such a time would be looking for trouble. With cars not working and horses at a premium, a working bicycle would be worth its weight in gold. You would have to ride for your life everywhere you went and would face assault daily. If there are working bikes, they are probably rare and owned by very powerful and dangerous people.