this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Bikes don't work well in places like where I live when you can easily get 1-2 feet of snow in the winter. Or very icy roads. They definitely should be used more, but they aren't a panacea.
Some nations that experience harsh winters have well maintained bicycle infrastructure year round. Access to effecient, maintained, and safe bicycle infrastructure is the biggest factor preventing or enabling cycling.
Biking in sub-zero temperatures when it isn't even safe to be exposed outside for more than a few minutes (also happens here in the winter) is not a good idea either.
Again, I am all about bikes. I think bikes should be widely adopted. I would also never ride one in winter conditions here no matter how well the infrastructure is maintained. Have you ever seen a road plowed after there's been a huge snowfall? Keeping a bike lane clear is not especially reasonable an expectation for a snowplow.
https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU?si=xm6kjWjVBJnN-iz_
Most bike lanes get a differnet treatment creating a tightly packed snow surface to pedal on.
Safe bicycle infrastructure does not equal bicycle gutters. Bicycle gutters are unsafe on most roads even in the summer and were designed without winter maintaince as a consideration.
It's funny how many of the same people making this sort of argument would happily go skiing in the exact same weather.
I sure as hell wouldn't go skiing when it's -30 and they say it's unsafe to be outside.
This is just conjecture.
My family lives in a rural town of 1600, my wife works 800m from home and I commute 50km to the nearest city for work. Most days she walks to work for 7:30 or takes the ebike. I take our EV to arrive at 9am. My daughter takes the school bus , which arrives at my home at 8:17am.
There is a bus that comes to my town and goes to the city each day at 7AM and 8AM. Unfortunately, I cannot take the bus, or I would have to leave my daughter unattended. I don't think I need to explain why taking my bike 120km a day round trip by the bike path won't work.
By taking the EV, I make my life work and I save a good amount of CO2 in the process. My old hatchback would have burned 7.7l fuel to make the commute , or 7.7 * 19.6 lbs CO2 = 150lb CO2 per day. My EV gets 16kwh/100km generating between 3/4 lb and 5lb CO2 for the trip, based on local energy mix.
I think a mixture is the real solution. Public transport and human-powered transport such as bicycles should be encouraged as much as possible, but they cannot apply to every scenario. I have to drive about 10 miles down a 4-lane highway to an industrial park whose only access is that highway. Both my home and that industrial park are outside city limits. The nearest bus to me is 2 miles away and goes the opposite direction. Even with robust public transport in this area, it wouldn't be economically justifiable to get a bus to go from anywhere near my semi-rural subdivision to that industrial park. Not enough people would ride that bus and it wouldn't be safe to ride a bicycle there.
So I'm a case where I have to drive a car. I don't like it. I wish I had another option. I would never drive again if I could, but right now I drive a car and the most eco-friendly car I could afford, which was a used Prius.
So people in this community can berate me if they want, but I'm pretty much out of options unless I do something drastic like quit my job and move. And "quit your job and move so you don't need a car anymore" is not advice anyone should take. Maybe one day, I will be able to do that. I rode public transport all the time when I lived by the train in L.A. and I loved it. But I don't live in L.A. anymore, I live in a small city in Indiana where public transport throughout the county, which is mostly farms outside city limits, is just not viable.
Your situation doesn't reflect the majority's situation, that's what people need to understand, with better public transport it's a very small minority that needs a car.
I do understand that. But this meme doesn't understand me.
In a way it does, if cars didn't exist you would have found work closer to home and your environmental impact would be lower. Your situation exist because cars allow it to.
That's a bad way to phrase it because it frames cars as technological innovation providing a benefit.
The reality, and the best way to phrase it, is different: his situation exists because massive government subsidies for car infrastructure allows it to. He's not an enjoyer of modern convenience; he's a welfare queen.
Good thing memes don't have to account for every individuals experience in the world huh
The meme makes a blanket statement forgetting about a big swath of rural people, falsely claiming that EVs don't address climate change when the cold fact is that EVs do represent a way for people like me to contribute to the solution. A meme like this deserves a reminder like mine.
Or you could simply remember that it's just a meme and stop getting so worked up!
Signed, A rural EV owner
Or, I could make a small post so that one of our rural neighbours, driving an SUV, doesn't read "EVs don't solve climate change" and think to themselves "Hey, that's true, may as well continue on with my SUV".
In America this is an extremely common situation. Public transit is abysmal here. We need to build that up before we start removing car infrastructure.
They also don't work well in places like I live, where we reach 120°F for about one to one-and-a-half months of the year.
Neither do cars work well in those conditions.
If you clear and salt the bike paths in a timely manner, like we also expect for other roads, then bikes are a perfectly viable option even in winter.
Weird, because mine works just fine. Also, salt is incredibly ecologically damaging. Never use salt because roads are snowy or icy.
Car work a lot better than bikes in the snow lol
Twice as many wheels probably means more traction, eh? I can quite safely drive through 20cm of fresh snow. Good luck biking in that.
We've invented means to clear roads of snow, that's how we manage to make cars go on them during winter
Oslo, Norway, is a great cycling city and all the kids ride their bikes to school in the winter. In Norway.
Neither do cars, unless the streets are plowed. And guess what could be done to bike lanes too, if the government in question gave a shit?