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I can’t drive because I am neurodivergent and traumatized, so I get panic attacks when I drive. It’s too fast, too much power and responsibility and my schizoautismo brain shuts down not knowing what to do. So I ride my bike everywhere.
Too scared of my ADHD to drive… Too scared of my ADHD and other cars to ride a bike :x
I can bike alright, it’s just a trillion degrees here every day
Air conditioning.
Air conditioning is why the car is so popular.
Nah, I wanna ride a bike and get to work good and sweaty. It instills fear in my enemies
It’s all kinds of comfort. Comfort to only walk a little when you arrive. Comfort of being “safe” while others are endangered (by you). Comfort of only pushing a pedal with minimal force, instead of propelling yourself. Comfort of having all your shit with you, like a miniture house/oversized backpack. Comfort of keeping a distance to others, being able to hide all you flaws with your carry-on personal space while othering everybody else. Comfort of being sheltered from environment while driving (+ AC), actively worsening the environment.
There have been hot days where friends met me at a bar and asked me ”Weren’t you hot on a bike?” It was only then I realized the day was considered hot, because I had wind cooling, and they had a metal greenhouse with solar gain.
That only works if by “hot” days you mean “comfortably warm”. For actually hot weather, it’s gonna have to be evaporative cooling (sweat) and even then it gets pretty uncomfortable unless you’re going at a leisurely pace IMO.
I can wake up in Utah in the morning, and be at the beach in California in the afternoon. I think that’s freedom. Google says that same trip on a bike is 3 days. Through Vegas and the Mojave desert. If you don’t die.
Used to be able to do the same on a train, tripping on laudanum the whole way.
With HSR you could do it and be back before lunch, tripping on lsd the whole way.
I confused Utah with Ohio and was very confused.
Not only are bikes one of the most efficient forms of transport, they might be the most efficient form of powered locomotion, period. A human being on a bicycle is far more efficient than anything in nature.
ETA: Unless you consider e-bikes a separate category, since they (in some cases?) add regenerative braking on top of everything else.
I don’t think most e-bikes have regen braking… Maybe the really expensive ones might…
Yeah, I’m learning that from this comment section. Guess I just kind of assumed they would.
e-bikes a separate category, since they add regenerative braking on top of everything else.
Actually, the vast majority of e-bikes do not have regenerative braking.
Because on a bike, you don’t actually tend to use your brakes very much or very often. And even when you do use the brakes, you’re slowing a smaller mass down from a lower speed (compared to cars with regen braking). There’s just not much energy there to be harvested from regen braking. Which makes it generally not worth the extra money, weight, and complexity to include a regen braking system.
Interesting, didn’t realize.
Yes, actually:
(Besides a ‘velomobile’, anyway … which is basically just a bicycle with bodywork for better aerodynamics.)
Death sentence to whoever chose to animate a fake scatter plot over this thing. And yeah velomobiles are just speed-optimized bicycles.
Finally a graph that dares to compare cows and jet fighters!
Probably not the only graph that does so. Both are relevant sources of greenhouse gas emissions as well, so they probably share some graphs on the topic of climate change.
Mice should be ashamed of their inefficiency.
This is so cool. Why do I intuitively expect the efficiency should increase with the Y axis instead through? It feels somewhat upside down?
The Y axis is cost of transport, low cost = high efficiency.
Now if we could just get a salmon on a velomobile
Velomobile looks like fun but they cost so much. Seems like they are typically custom built and use carbon fibre. So several thousand or more. Meanwhile my bike was like £600.
I wonder if you could produce fairing kits for common recumbent bikes and split the difference.
I think it’s because they are made in such small volumes. Shame, as they look cool.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I assume that the main upside of a velomobile is removing the un-aerodynamicality of the human on it
Which makes me wonder whether a bike without a biker will be more aerodynamic than a velomobile
curious where lighter than air vehicles and trains end up on there
Blimp efficiency depends on size, a big one would be on the bottom right. But then some wind would send it tumbling around and it would crash into Jet transport and Horse, rapidly disintegrating as it pulverizes Human on a velomobile against the bottom axis.
Same as sailing ships I suppose, if you are just using the wind like a hot air balloon anyway.
It would be very difficult to measure how much energy (in calories) a sailing ship is using in order to move.
The notion of “fuel efficiency” kinda stops making sense for a sailboat.
regenerative breaking on a bicycle ? not on mine thank god. I often coast down hills, last thing i want to have to do is pedal so the damn bike don’t brake
I’m not sure why anyone would design it like that. I would expect it to be linked to the brake handles, not active at all times.
No one would do that. On mine it’s a switch but most are wired to the brakes as you mentioned. The main benefit is really just that you get brakes for free without any wear, though it is only generally possible on direct drive hub motors.
I have a hybrid with regenerative breaking. I’m not sure how well it compare to a theoretical regenerative ebike setup, but at least with my car I never need to use the gas even when the regenerative ebike is on.
That, and when I do give it gas it automatically decreases the regenerative breaking, which I imagine wouldn’t be too hard to implement on a bicycle.
Checkmate:
Plus you know those guys were drunk as fuuuuuuck
I recently saw a scatter plot somewhere, I believe it was
speed vs energy efficiency or somethingbody weight vs cost of transport. And all animals, as well as most modes of transport follow a roughly anti-proportional relationship on a log-scale.If you’re fast heavy, you use a lot of energy.If I remember it right, thefastestmost efficient animal was the salmon(?). There was one single outlier from that trend, an animal that is muchtoo fast and muchtoo efficient for its weightat the same time: Human on a bike.Edit: Found it: https://slowrevealgraphs.com/2025/12/31/a-human-on-a-bicycle-is-among-the-most-efficient-forms-of-travel/
I had to click way to many things to see an actual version of the graph large enough to read without my glasses so here’s a link to that lol: https://static.scientificamerican.com/dam/m/715ae217b6961ab5/original/saw1125Gsci31_d_DEFAULT.gif?m=1759758107.705&w=1300
What if we gave a salmon a bike
Then we could judge a fish on it’s ability to ride a bike.
Too bad trains and boats are missing from the graph.
I agree. To my surprise, human on a bike still seems to win out, though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3AEffizienzLeistungFahrzeuge.png
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
That is interesting! Looks like that table is for passenger transport specifically, not energy per mass. People don’t pack nearly as densly in transport as heavy cargo does. Not safely and willingly anyway.
There’s also a table in that Wikipedia article that breaks it down for a few real world train services with percent capacity ranging from 27 to 65% (in different networks / on different trains, though). But yeah, humans like their personal space, even in trains, those wasteful brats.
It might not be a bad idea to get some kind of insurance in the alarmingly likely event some jackass hits you and drives off either oblivious or indifferent.
Or just make driving a car around you unpleasant.
What kind of insurance is available for a bike that would cover collision.
Also the transmission lasts between 2 years and forever. Probably also depends on how aggressively you use it.
Well, the bicycle I use now is actually somewhat decent unlike the one I had as a child (so maybe that’s why it doesn’t have many problems).
cars require roads for the most part and that’s a socialized freedom boats would be a better symbol of freedom
My wife likes to ride a bike, a lot. The more you get into it, the more expensive it gets. No those bikes and accessories aren’t cheap. That thing getting stolen is a serious hit.
Simple general store ones are cheap, dedicated sports store ones are far from cheap.
Bicycles are great force multipliers, but legs are true symbol of freedom of movement. More versatile, almost everyone already have those, already using those is the maintenance required to maintain those.
Though yeah i absolutely can’t understand how cars became a symbol of freedom. Those are literally like a ball and chain around your legs.
The cost of maintenance, car itself and fuel, stress from said fuel price and then getting to sit in a traffic jam overwhelming majority of the time, while trying to memorize huge amount of road rules that many just ignore and which can result in death.Yeah sure racetrack driving might be nice or going somewhere really remote, but that’s so rare as to be a statistical anomaly, overwhelming majority of the time it’s basic everyday driving.
You can cycle a lot without getting into racing bikes though.
Walking you are going to want shoes. Shoes wear through and actually cost more than a decent regular bike per km.
Underrated point. Someone always brings up the cost of bikes in these threads and it’s silly. Sure, some hard core cyclists will put $20k into the hobby, but it’s not at all necessary.
I’ve got maybe $1200 in my total set up, and I could have done it far cheaper if I’d been picky about shopping sales and buying used.
The bike was around $750 new, $80 for an ergonomic saddle (saves on padded shorts, but YMMV), $60 for a helmet that fits well, $100 for pedals with toe clips so I can wear street shoes, and a few accessories here and there.
I put in 30-50 miles a week on average and I’ve had the bike for better than 2 years with no major mechanical issues. I don’t know where that puts me in terms of milage over the average cyclist, but I have a great time and get plenty of exercise without breaking the bank.
I used to ride a mid to high range Fuji (a semi permement loan) with no toe clips or any aditional gear, and in street clothes. At my peak riding with that bike, I was doing 90 miles a week (to and from work only. I was probably doing more outside of work travel). Like once a year the tubes would blow out, that was the only cost. The bike was also not rated for my hieght. To boot, I was at least three inches too short for it, and would use road curbs to mount and dismount lol. Ya couldnt stop me from riding.
god I miss it. I just got my bike working again, an REI mountain bike, and I like it, but have no where to go on it, I just lap my neighborhood a couple times a week. I miss the city in this way. I used to go to the store with a back pack, put my shopping on my back, ride to friends houses, do a 20mile trip with a mapquest printouts, get lost, find my way. So much fun. I did everything on my bike for close to ten years. It was liberating not needing gas money, and by god was I fit
As a note about the “symbology of freedom” when it comes to cars it I think comes down to American centric shit again. When I lived in small town USA where there is nothing to do but meth and everyone knows everyone else’s business the dream of packing your shit in a backpack and getting into the car and driving 4 hours away feels like freedom. You can go to a city or town and get away from it all.
Now you can do the same in Europe on a train but that won’t sell cars so…
You can even see it in American car ads. There are two kinds of cars - the commuter, which focuses on luxury and style, and the “get away from your life” car, the SUVs you stick your camping gear in and go to the middle of nowhere to get away from your shitty life and experience nature in.
Cars are a symbol of freedom because there is no transportation options, so not having one feels like prison
When I lived in small town USA where there is nothing to do but meth and everyone knows everyone else’s business the dream of packing your shit in a backpack and getting into the car and driving 4 hours away feels like freedom. You can go to a city or town and get away from it all.
That’s mainly because they quit running passenger service on those train tracks running through town 50 years ago.
Fair, from that perspective it does make sense.
A sports car is also not cheap.
Yep. Even the actual race bikes being used in the Tour de France right now are only $10k or so. The only sports car that little cash will get you is a used Miata.
Like most any hobby, you can spend as much on it as you like. But the bike coop in your city will probably sell a perfectly-serviceable used commuter to you on a need-based sliding scale all the way down to $20, if not totally free.
As for legs… They’re nice, but I’ve ridden my bicycle 110+ miles in like 8 hours. That’s a massive quantitative difference, and a huge impact on quality of life for someone who needs to get around.
I do agree and I did got my own bike for free from trash pile through her connections to local biking community.
But she is making full use of the specialized equipment and bikes so i will not fault her for doing it.
I paid the same for my pretty basic commuter bicycle and my literal motorcycle.
Its baffling how expensive even slightly nice bicycles are.
Because distance. Bikes makes total sense in cities or just anywhere where there is a dense enough population that you can do all you want inside a 5km-10kkm area, but for a lot of north america, Australia, etc the freedom comes from being able to take any road you like and see where it ends up
I hundered percent did this on my bike. Ive done it in a car, but you can “take a road and see where it goes” on a bike.
@Jarix @Shellofbiomatter The overwhelming majority of trips aren’t aimless wandering in search of freedom, they’re utilitarian trips to the grocery store, library, a friend’s house, your kids’ school, etc. The percentage of people in sprawly countries who truly live too far away from daily necessities to get there by bicycle if the roads were designed for safety and comfort is far too small to justify adopting standards that force even cities to make their streets bike-unfriendly.
Just responding to why cars are seen as the vehicle of freedom.
In all things people rarely, if ever, maximize what they COULD do.
And we can disagree with those people who view it that way if we want to frame it, but I can’t visit my friends in the city by riding a bike. When I do hang with friends I’ve often gone out of my way to give people rides because it’s much better for them to use my offer of a lift home than it is to use public transit or their own mobility.
My main point though is distance is the determining factor in this equation.
Ok, then why isn’t the bullet train the symbol of freedom? You can visit friends much further away than a car can. How about motorcycles? You can visit your friends even if there’s insane traffic or the road is out.
I think cars being the symbol of freedom is unrelated to any actual utility, rather it seems based on a story advertisers tell about a car offering you control.
Because that’s a track that can’t go off the beaten path…
Neither can your car, it can only go where roads go, when traffic permits.
The more into get you it, the more expensive it gets. No those bikes and accessories aren’t cheap.
She’s ‘getting into it’ wrong.
My hot take of the day: Unless you’re making up for the cost of it by winning money at competitive events, you have no business even thinking about any bike that costs more than $600. And for the vast majority of people, $600 is the luxury option – a $200 used bike (with a bit of maintenance) will do everything you could ever ask it to.
Sincerely, someone who does most of his commuting on a $20 used bike from the 90’s. (It’s a great feeling of power, overtaking a $1500 ebike on your $20 steel frame 90’s cruiser.)
Everyone’s finances are different, your economic guardrails won’t necessarily make sense for someone else. I’ve built plenty of commuters that have rolled out the door of my local coop for < $50 and I put love into every single one of them, every single one of them was (Mostly) solid. But I also have a $3.5K dream build that mostly just hangs on my wall made from vintage new-on-shelf parts, an ode to late-90s / early-00s roadie aesthetics.
Yeah I would generally agree to that. I got mine for £600 and admit it’s more than I really needed. But it’s a pretty nice bike and I use it a lot. It was the cheaper model from the more expensive brand so my thinking was it’s probably a pretty good frame and I can replace other parts as I go.
Replaced the tyres after about 2 years, new ones cost like twice as much but marathon plus touring tyres should last far longer and are much more puncture resistant.
I do agree, but in her defense she is making full use of it and over time has progressed from the basic commuter to more advanced bikes which have had significant increase to speed and enjoyability/comfort of the ride. Up until now she has already rode 5k km just this year, planning to finish this year with 10k km.
For everyone else I do agree and have a basic commuter that I literally got from a trash pile through her connections to local biking community.
almost completely unregulated
Not if the car brains get their way
My city has police on bicycles. And I guess that if I performed some “interesting” maneuver on the road in their sight - I’d absolutely be apprehended by them and fined.
I’ve only ever seen them apprehending a biker who decided to use bicycle lane tho.
But yeah, not “unregulated”, yet with most of regulations being there for my own safety such as helmet and reflective thingies in wheels.
police on bicycles
So the question is who can cycle faster?
Ebike regulations are in consideration or in place in some jurisdictions, but I haven’t heard anything about regulating analog bikes.
Yeah, my state’s passed restrictions, but they only apply to e-bikes.
Odd situation where e-bikes have a defined speed limit, but remove the motor and it no longer applies, outside of whatever the cop who stops you is feeling that day.
This is all well and good in a vacuum but suburbs exist and people have kids. If all the cars disappeared tomorrow I would be fucked and wouldn’t feel very free.
Even if e-bikes were a solution to that they’re being regulated to shit to limit their usefulness covering larger distances quickly. We don’t have the rail infrastructure to make navigating in and out of or between suburban areas effective or even possible. Transporting people who can’t transport themselves would be immensely more difficult and forget about interstate travel.
Cars go really far, really fast, on your schedule. Plenty of things exist that solve those problems on paper but at least here in the US are not implemented in a way that make them viable for anyone outside of a well funded metro area and god forbid you have dependents.
I’m all for fuck cars but getting a bike is like a tiny piece of a much larger issue if we want to truly replace the freedom automobiles afford us.
Most of us understand that and want cities to be improved away from a car-centric design.
Many in the fuckcars community drive a car.
I’m sure that’s true I don’t doubt it. I just think the original post lacks a metric ton of nuance and situational awareness to attack the issue honestly.
the original post lacks a metric ton
I mean, in all fairness, it is a 4chan shitpost
True true
I live in an area where lots of parents have bikes designed to hold two kids in the back.
I don’t know what you’re rambling about with train travel. Could I just teleport us to the train dimension, where I could lament that cars will never work because we have interstate rail, and no highways? Makes about as much sense.
That’s fine, but we don’t live in the train dimension. We live in the car dimension. And unlike your train dimension, problems the car dimension are real and people who truly want to replace cars as the main mode of transport for the majority of people will realize that comes with actual problems that need to be solved for actual people in order to make any real progress. I know it’s hard but to achieve your goals you will have to tap into some dormant empathy in order to further your goals.
Answer: freedom without effort is more freedom than freedom with effort. If that difference was small, nobody would put up with all the negative effects of cars
Driving a car is way harder than riding a bike. We don’t let kids drive cars. You have to do a test and everything!
No it isn’t, the consequence of failure is just higher. Cars are stupid easy to drive
Depends if you’re just focusing on the act of driving vs driving on any given road in any given country. Road rules are different, shapes of cars are different, there’s auto and manual etc.
No. No they are not.
Unless you’re driving competitively on a dedicated track, you aren’t centred in a car, which is disorienting.
Also, large areas of your field of view are blocked by metal sheets in a car. Combine that with the aforementioned disorientation and it’s an awkward, confusing design that you just have to struggle with until you get used to it.
Then there’s the gears. In a bike, you just need to flick a switch to change gear. In a car, you have to do a whole dance with two pedals and a lever. And also the clutch sometime is a brake but not quite? The clutch does a whole lot of random things which make sense to engineers but nobody will ever explain them to a learner driver.
Driving a car is fucking hard. There’s a reason you need to pass a test before they’ll even let you practice.
You can make anything sound hard if you decide you want to. That doesn’t make it so
driving cars is quite a lot of effort and money. though in other ways.
Personally i see what you mean, but most car drivers will not agree. Especially if those car drivers live a long distance from shops or work, or if those car drivers live somewhere where you have to go up and down hill to get to your destination.
one small nitpick
Being hit BY a bike rider is much safer, but being hit AS a bike rider is not.
Being hit by a CAR is what’s unsafe. If you get hit by a bike, while on a bike in general you’ll be fine, worst case is you break something which is the best case when a car is involved
Well, yes, but the post clearly implies it is comparing to cars in matter of safety, and in our current reality the bike is not safer for the biker themselves.
I love bikes and 100% support better bike infrastructure but for anything over a few miles it’s just not practical to ride a bike for most people. Even if I’m physically capable of riding maybe 80 miles, most people aren’t.
If I want to go hiking in the White Mountains in New Hampshire from Boston in Massachusetts I’m not gonna pedal my way there. I’m taking a motorcycle or a car. I’d like to see better public transportation in the form of either trains or busses but realistically I’m not sure that public transportation is viable to such a rural area.
Remember that roads are not naturally-occurring, geological formations. The reason that a car or motorcycle seems practical is that you’re not paying the full cost of driving. In fact, nobody is willing to pay that much, which is why American infrastructure is crumbling.
So people should only travel via naturally occurring geological formations? And if they need to travel hundreds of miles they should only do so on a bicycle or by foot?
“I like waffles!” “So you hate pancakes?”
No, that was obviously an analogy to point out road infrastructure is expensive compared to rail or cycling infrastructure. And there’s other modes of transport that act as force multipliers to cycling; commuters in the Netherlands can bring their bikes on trains or store them securely at stations. There’s no need to limit yourself to one mode of transport at a time.
Literal skill issue, is what I’m hearing.
I see plenty people biking multiple km, even elderly people. You just need to bike more.
Cars are the ideal transportation for large distances in low density areas. (Edit: motorcycles too)
Big trains are ideal for moving a large amount of people from one city to another, or freight over great distances.
Medium trains are ideal for moving a large amount of people over large distances in the city.
Tramways, buses and bikes are ideal for the last mile and medium distances in the city.
Walking is ideal for moving over small distances.
Motorcycles are the ideal transportation for large distances in low density areas.
Even the “downtown” of a village of <10k people are much nicer when they’re not 50% parking lot and you can walk down the street without cars blowing by you doing 65.
Well, it’s part of the picture for many areas.
In my area, you can’t ride a motorcycle during a third of the year, save rare exceptions.
In all areas, there are other inconveniences. You can’t carry young children, it’s not great for carrying logs, agricultural produce, mulch, etc.
I see people carrying those things every day lol.
I think it’s a concern for many in the countryside.
Motorbikes are even more important in the countryside, where roads aren’t always so good. If a road is washed out or theres been a landslide, bikes can still make it with some delay, and can use a lot more alternative paths. There’s places in the highlands here literally only accessible by bike.
For large elevation changes lifts would be cool too. Get some fkin whatever those wire hanging things are called in NH and CO.
Skill issue.
Not sure what you mean by that. If it’s directed at me, I’m reasonably fit and I enjoy cardio. If it’s directed at others, many people are elderly and not capable. Either way, the United States are huge and definitely require transportation that’s not human powered.
Unfortuntely would require me riding at least 20KM to get to work in relatively dangerous conditions (could get run over lmao). But I am very much an exception, being in the country.
![[meme] Anon likes bikes](https://files.ikt.id.au/aqdemc.webp){kind=link}
