Taking a vacation road trip from Florida to the Grand Canyon with three kids with only bikes also comes at quite the cost. Bikes are great, but in many practical scenarios they are slow. Not all of us live in Manhattan, or a dense city, or even a well connected and safe to traverse suburb.
If you were to say, ride a bike from Washington D.C. to Portland Oregon, they money saved on gas, maintenance, insurance, and lease payments, would amount to 3 times as many hours of work.
This is a ridiculous example, but, frankly, saying our main mode of transit should be cars because we might want to take a long road trip once a year is absurd. It’s an outlier use case that could be addressed with other systems more effectively.
Taking a vacation road trip from Florida to the Grand Canyon with three kids with only bikes also comes at quite the cost. Bikes are great, but in many practical scenarios they are slow. Not all of us live in Manhattan, or a dense city, or even a well connected and safe to traverse suburb.
Bikes cost time.
If you were to say, ride a bike from Washington D.C. to Portland Oregon, they money saved on gas, maintenance, insurance, and lease payments, would amount to 3 times as many hours of work.
This is a ridiculous example, but, frankly, saying our main mode of transit should be cars because we might want to take a long road trip once a year is absurd. It’s an outlier use case that could be addressed with other systems more effectively.
Sure there are situations where bikes aren’t suitable.
Bikes cost time. You have to think of the time it has cost you to earn the money to buy, run, and maintain a car.
It is much easier to take a bike with you on a train than it is a car.