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I dare you to travel on your own bicycle in the depths of winter across the USA in the same timeframe as a car.
Traveling across the entirety of the US by car in the middle of winter sounds fucking miserable. That's what trains are for.
If you happen to enjoy that kind of thing and aren't on a tight timeline it is fun as hell. Like a mechanical version of hiking.
Like hiking, most people don't enjoy it or aren't really up to the challenge.
Like a mechanical version of hiking
I can't wait to describe driving this way to a friend so that we can both share in the laughter I'm enjoying right now.
Seriously though, with the right kind of terrain and conditions driving is a real challenge. If you have never driven off road through fields in wet, snowy conditions where stopping is likely to mean being unable to start going again and needing to guage how fast to approach a slope to maintain momentum it might sound silly.
Anyone who has never driven on an unpaved road might find it funny. Like how anyone who has only ridden a bike on paved roads might not understand the fun of going mountain biking off a defined path might find that funny.
Offroading on a motorcycle is more fun than a four wheel car most of the time, but all of things can be fun.
I own a lifted hatchback with gravel tires that I occasionally take down timber trails to camp or shoot. That's maybe why I understood what you meant. But the way it came across, it just sounded like you need to go hiking more :P
Yeah, I was going for the 'crossing difficult terrain challenge' part and probably should have said it was like hiking from your couch.
I think the guy above you was just talking about regular driving on the freeway, not overlanding in a 4x4.
Driving on the freeways, which are cleared quickly in the winter, isn't really any different than other seasons. There are plenty of cross country routes that use highways which aren't cleared as quickly, especially in hilly or mountainous areas, that can be fun to take for scenic routes.
Not everyone who travels across the country sticks to interstates.
Trains only travel along previously laid rails, at specific times. Plus, you'll need to rent a car at the other end to get anywhere. Better to take your own car and have personalized comfort the whole way. Also, yes, it does sound miserable. But if you're in a car, turn up the heater, turn on the radio or your favorite music, and just vibe while driving safely.
But if the cities were built for people rather than cars, you wouldn't need to rent a car at your destination. And trains run often if they haven't been critically underfunded for decades. And you can't really drive safely, even if you're a perfect driver, someone can run you off the road. Trains are orders of magnitude safer.
Not everyone lives in cities in the US and even then they are really spread out. It's the one thing I think the world doesn't comprehend about the US; we're spread way out.
My brother in christ, the reason we got this spread out in the first place was a robust national network of passenger rail lines.
It isnt like the rest of the world doesnt have rural areas, unless one lives in like singapore or something. Something like 80% of the US population lives in urban areas, and most trips arent trips between cities except perhaps for those that are close to one another anyways. So even if one accepts that rural areas are car centric by nature, that still leaves the vast majority of the population that isnt affected by that. The buildings within cities being spread out over a wide space making transit less efficient is a failure of city design rather than something fundamental and unchangeable about the US, we have a fairly serious housing shortage anyways, if we really wanted to decrease car dependence we could absolutely build up denser housing in urban cores to shift the population over time into areas that allow for more efficient transportation.
we could absolutely build up denser housing in urban cores to shift the population over time into areas that allow for more efficient transportation.
Sounds like prison
No, it really doesn't, unless one simply does not know what "prison" means. Improving access to transportation is entirely counter to the point of a prison, given that the primary characteristic of a prison is being hard to leave.
Having someone live below, above, and on either side within a couple of feet absolutely sounds like prison conditions. As far as hard to leave, unless you're walking or biking, you don't have that much freedom of movement, at least in comparison to a car or a motorcycle which becomes much more of a hassle of owning in cities. I'm also not saying cities should cater more to cars either.
I'm in an apartment in a city right now, I really do not notice the neighbors. Apartments are absolutely not as small as cells, unless you're living somewhere with an extreme land shortage like Hong Kong or something (and even then, the conditions will be more comfortable than a literal prison), or somewhere with some extremely progressive prisons.
For that matter, saying you don't have much freedom of movement unless you're walking or biking is a bit like saying you can't communicate with people unless you talk to them; being able to just leave your front door and walk to places you want to go, to include to stuff like train or bus stations for longer trips (which in turn can reach stuff like airports or car rentals for even longer ones), is freedom of movement.
If anything, having a car as the only good option is much less free, since one is required to acquire a license from the government to use it at all, which they can at any moment revoke and leave you with the choice of resorting to crime, relying on others to move you, or being stuck in one's own home.
I've lived in the city, mind you not a large one, but I noticed most everyone around me in my home at the time. From the guy 2 doors down that yelled at his dog to get off the couch anytime I had my window open, to sirens going off a few times a night, it was enough to notice how quiet the country is when the loudest thing at nights is the interstate 10 air miles from my home or the occasional owl that roosts in a tree in my back yard.
Buying a fare on plane, train, or metro is just essentially a one time license if you think about it. My point is that the traveling on time frames for departures and limited destinations for planes, trains, and metros is more restrictive over leave at anytime and go anywhere most anywhere on your continent of a personal vehicle. Each mode has their place and advocating for the elimination of any seems shortsighted.
Or you know, just how cities work...
🤡
Where are you going in rural america that you need to rent a car if you arent already living there?
Family, maybe.
Then... they can get their family to come pick'em up in their pickup truck.
So, someone's sister who works in a 100% remote IT job and who moved to a quiet rural town to raise her family is supposed to pick up and fit 5 people (including luggage) in her early 90's Civic hatchback from the closest airport/train station that's 100-200mi (160-320km) away?
I'd suggest that you work on your prejudice and critical thinking skills, as how that comment was worded was uncalled for and easy to poke holes in the logic of. You have to keep in mind that not everyone who lives in a quiet and isolated (even possibly self-sufficient) town is the stereotypical blue-collar farmhand that is commonly displayed by the media.
I just love how these threads always lead to anti-bike reactionaries coming up with increasingly contrived hypothetical situations to "justify" continuing to cling to their cars like a security blanket.
And then have the audacity to accuse the other side of "prejudice" and lack of "critical thinking skills."
You have to keep in mind that not everyone who lives in a quiet and isolated (even possibly self-sufficient) town is the stereotypical blue-collar farmhand that is commonly displayed by the media.
You have to keep in mind that only a tiny minority of Americans live in tiny and isolated towns at all, and pretending the solution for the vast majority of people doesn't work by pointing to those outliers is bad-faith idiotic bullshit.
You dont need to be a redneck to understand the value of a pickup in rural america. Shes gonna haul sheet of plywood with that hachback? Lmao
I'd hope they'd pick you up
Not everyone lives in cities in the US
But 80% do, so what's your excuse for refusing to solve the problem for the vast majority? The "and even then they are really spread out" is not it, BTW.
Money for the most part. It's cheaper to own, no HoA or Condo association. Not to mention it's quieter.
- "'Murica big" has fuck-all to do with anything
- Owning a single-family house in the suburbs only seems cheaper than owning a condo because single-family houses are massively subsidized. You're a welfare queen and you don't even realize it.
- Cars are the things that make cities loud in the first place.
Cars also travel along previously laid paths. I mean, technically there are off road ones that dont have to, but unless youre on your own land trying to get from one place to another without following the roads wont go so well.
Off-road travel, even in a car not explicitly made for it, is usually safer than traveling a derailed train. But I get your point.
Eh, I did that for a couple years in Utah and it was largely fine. When the snow got nasty, I took the bus.
That was back when my commute was 10 miles (16km) with a segregated bike path the whole way. My new commute is more than double that, so I drive. But if we weren't so car centric, things would be more compact and I wouldn't have this nasty commute.
we weren’t so car centric, things would be more compact and I wouldn’t have this nasty commute.
Hi, a different commenter here. I love public transportation (time to sit and read! meet interesting people!) and dislike cars, but realistically we often have other considerations that city design alone wouldn't solve.
- My most recent commute was 65 miles through a rural area -- I had to live in town A to support a family member and my job was in town B.
- Before that I was in an urban area, but had to live near the hospital area for my BFF's sake, and my job was out in the suburbs 18 miles away. No bike lanes, and public transportation took 2-3 hours one way. (and this was in a city with relatively good public transportation.)
Now I WFH so that's cool. But the experience made me realize how complex is the problem of transportation and urban design. I mean, I agree with the fact that bikes are awesome and we need better public transportation in the US, though.
I am curious, how much time did it take to make those 18miles (28km?) by car? I have just checked in my city, that has really nice public transportation (Tallinn), and to cross essentially the whole city (~20km, a route that nobody does, so probably not very well connected) on Monday at 9am it takes 59m by public transport (2 buses) and 40m by car (it takes 30m generally, but traffic). 2-3h or 2/3 times that to do 50% more distance looks like public transportation is not that good, did you mean "good for US standards"?
2-3h or 2/3 times that to do 50% more distance looks like public transportation is not that good, did you mean “good for US standards”?
Hah, good point. This was in Boston, where the MBTA rail system all connects downtown. So if you're just hopping on and off, or you only have 1 connection, things are great. Unfortunately the line didn't reach my job so I had to make a connection downtown, go to the end of the line, then catch a bus. The metro connections were pretty good but that bus was the killer; if the timing was wrong, I was waiting around up to half an hour. By car it was like 50-60 minutes during rush hour, half an hour if no traffic at all, so I ended up doing late rush hour and it was like 40 minutes.
For all that, I really liked the metro in Boston; it was great for just hopping on, hanging out downtown, then getting back without having to drive. But yeah, this is "relatively good", sounds like Tallinn has it better.
Yeah, I appreciate that it's complex, but in the US we prioritize cars instead of people.
A properly designed system will account for lots of transportation options. This means:
- force cars to go around city centers - prevents gridlock in downtown, and improves transit and walkability/cyclability downtown; enforce with car-free zones
- buses and bike paths to connect the different parts of the city
- trains to connect cities
- highways and roads connecting smaller towns
If you go to smaller towns, a car is your best bet. If you're going downtown, a train should be more efficient, and a car should be workable. If you live in or near a city, a bike should be sufficient.
We used to have one car because I could bike to work, but now we need too, and only because of the 2 days I commute to the office. And the worst part is that there's a train line near my house that I could totally take to work if they actually built the line they've been talking about for decades. But instead of building that line (connects to a larger system, including a stop at a major sports stadium), we expanded a highway (didn't fix traffic) and we're building a new highway (might help somewhat). Most of those cars are traveling along the proposed train route (it runs parallel to the highway), yet the highway gets priority.
I propose we rethink transit in terms of moving people instead of cars.
Yeah agreed it's an interesting problem bc it has so many components... unfortunately when we try to get one part of it implemented, people say: it's not going to solve the whole problem so why bother. I'm still learning about it and so are most people. But I think even the most truck-loving person has an older relative who can't drive any more, or maybe they themselves can't drive bc of a DUI or something, so there's always an opening for learning more.
Yup. Fortunately there are professions for solving these types of problems, so we need to stop demanding specific solutions and let them do their job.
It turns out adding more lanes often makes things worse, and the better solution is to replace cars with higher density transit, so your truck loving friend will likely be better off if we invest in transit instead of highways. I want to take transit to work instead of adding to traffic, but that currently takes 4x as long as driving (2-ish hours each way). You should absolutely be able to drive if you want, and the more practical other modes of transportation are, the less cars will be on the road since a lot of people would rather ride than drive.
Failed the brief on at least two counts. First, you took a bus when it got "nasty" - thus proving automobiles are more adaptable, and thus superior. Second, a 10 mile commute is not across the USA - granted the terrain in Utah is varied, but not coast-to-coast varied. You also didn't put up your times vs. average car travel time for the route, so I'm going to assume that your average speed was lower, and your average time was also longer.
a 10 mile commute is not across the USA
Because you don’t cross a continent by bike or car, you do it by fast or night train in which you can take your bicycle.
Or by plane if you’re in a hurry.
Was this all an attempt to "gotcha" people to prove that cars on free roads go faster and protect you better from elements than bikes? I mean, yeah of course they do. This doesn't make them "superior" in an absolute way because superiority depends on parameters. Take cost, health benefits, maintenance costs, environmental impact and bikes would be superior.
Can't talk about US, but in Italy the daily average by car was between 10 and 15 kilometers I seem to remember, that is 30-40min by bike at a slow pace. For that I would 100% say that provided infrastructure exists, bikes are a largely superior transportation vehicle compared to everything else. If you talk about traveling between islands I would say a boat is more efficient, or if you have to travel 500km I would say planes are. Superiority depends on the specific evaluation, that's my point. For the kind of coast to coast trip you mentioned, in winter, I would say trains can be vastly superior to cars, for example, and they can be combined with bikes.
50% of the Boston workforce commutes by train every day, and that's with how notoriously bad the Boston T is considered. 100 years ago, before the advent of car centric urban design, the Boston T was twice the size it is today, servicing towns all over eastern Massachusetts. A big part of the reason that a car is your best option for pretty much anything is because our country was redesigned to make it necessary. We used to have streetcar towns here - trolley systems that ran up and down the major hubs in towns - that they straight up paved over the rails for, making things less accessible in the name of selling cars and gasoline. They're also a major contributing factor in the death of small businesses and the rise of the giant box stores at the edge of town that you have to drive 20 minutes to in order to go food shopping.
Your argument is in bad faith, and your reasoning is disingenuous. Pretty much every large town west of the Mississippi grew around a train station. Nobody is taking away your freedom to sit in traffic on your morning commute. But imagine how much better that commute would be if you could take 50 cars off the road per bus or hundreds per light rail train. The average commuter car in the US has 1.2 people in it. If you make it so that drivers don't have to deal with walkers and bikers, and vice versa, everybody wins.
Took me 40 min each direction (best time was 30 min), car took 20-30 min (very little traffic) and the bus took 40+ min. But I could also skip the gym since I already got my exercise for the day, so I consider it a wash. With an ebike, I could cut that almost in half (legal top speed is 28mph, but nobody enforces that, so I could probably go 30-35mph). I average about 15-20 mph, depending on wind.
10 miles is really far for a bike commute though. If you live somewhere bike centric, you'd probably only go 3-5 miles, at which point the time difference is negligible and probably faster by bike because of no parking issues.
And the bus was only necessary because we don't plow bike lanes. With proper infrastructure, I wouldn't need the bus at all. My coldest commute was ~5F, and layers kept the ride completely comfortable, so the issue was literally only the lack of infrastructure.
My point isn't to say the US is currently completely bikeable, my point is that with proper infra, it could be. We don't have as nasty of weather as the NE and MW, but we do get low temps and snow, and I've seen madlads cycling in the MW in crazy weather.
But demonstrate the incontrovertible need for a car during one's regular commute through an average modern city. And I'm even offering the main exception - busses and taxis/ride sharing/whatever the current nomenclature, as I consider public transportation to be its own independent thing, unrelated to Cars.
I think the people who would enjoy such a venture via bike have or are already doing it, the rest of us would just like to be able to ride the bike through the city without having to play Frogger with three lanes filled with enraged lumps of cortisol *wrapped in two tons of steel and various other such substances.
Edit: added * to further drive home the viscerality of my desire.
I live in a city of 60,000 people in Colorado. The closest train station is 15 minutes away, by car. There is a bus that will take me to the train station, but it's an hour to walk to the closest one and the bus comes once an hour, 6 am to 7 pm, M-F. I can't afford to spend 4 hours on a quick trip to the grocery store and never leave my house on the weekends.
There are bike lanes on the main roads (4-6 lanes 50+ mph traffic). More than half the vehicles around here are massive jacked up trucks and SUVs. I have a bike, but do not have a death wish. It regularly snows, making bike riding a no-go for most of 4 months of the year.
I am very much in favor of reducing car traffic. But it's not feasible for so many people with the way cities are designed and the lack of public transport.
15m by car but to catch the bus you need to walk one hour and that bus will then bring you to the station? You essentially have no public transportation whatsoever it seems.
I mean, that isnt really an argument against public transit and bike infrastructure, its just an argument that the way to do it isnt to just tell people to stop driving and expect it to happen, one has to redesign cities to make these options feel like the safe and natural choice.
This was my thought as well, goes to show we need better long-range public transportation!
And bikes should be used for more granular destination points, once the bulk is covered via whatever works best as public transport in a given area.
Edit: bikes could also serve as a good first step toward a more rational approach toward public goods, as we could just stack public bikes at each node to be grabbed for free. It's self-limiting, it presents minimal waste as once you have one you don't really need a second, and it'd remove any entry barrier there may be to biking. Other than learning how to ride, of course. And this would be in addition to dedicated carry spaces for bikes on public transport - s'why I love the subway.
And I'm done hallucinating, I apologise.
we need better long-range public transportation!
That's what trains are for.
What you actually need is a different city design. Office and housing need to be within 2-3 miles not 20-30, then bikes, buses and stuff become reasonable alternative modes of transportation. Even buying groceries could be done without a car.
But the US of A chose to move housing out of the cities into suburbs dozens of miles away. As long as you don't change that you'll stay car-dependent. It's just too far.
It will also help to build more apartments that are cheap to rent. That increased concentration of people will make it possible for small local markets, restaurants, etc. to survive. Cost of living should also go down a bit because you'll reach more people with less infrastructure. That'll also increase tax revenue for the city. It's win-win for everyone.
But the US of A chose to move housing out of the cities into suburbs dozens of miles away. As long as you don’t change that you’ll stay car-dependent. It’s just too far.
Agreed, that right there is the problem. But it wasn't just a one-time choice it's an ongoing decision: (A) inexpensive large house in the suburbs/rural area or (B) more expensive small apartment in the city. Personally I choose B but I have relatives who live in rural areas (large houses, huge yards, 1 car per person) who think I'm crazy.
Fair enough, I'm all for trains! And I agree, they really do have the most potential out of pretty much everything else (to be fair, they each excel at different things) in terms of people over distance.
And I get what you mean about the structures, starting to see the same tendencies over here as well. Add to that the fact that our average is about 0.6 cars per person and growing (mostly concentrated in cities, of course), or something like that, plus an outdated infrastructure which is basically frozen due to being surrounded by historical buildings (and god forbid we do anything with those, ours is to wait and watch them slowly crumble!), and you have traffic jams in even the smaller cities and towns. It's fucking horrid, is what it is...
Plus every new neighborhood which is added around the city is either a new residential area filled with tumor-like arrangements of apartment buildings with, of course, insufficient infrastructure to support said 0.6 cars per capita, so the possibility of extending a public transport line of any sort to that area is basically nulliffied from the start, or a useless shrine to Corporate Capitalism in the shape of a business center with a couple of gaudy office buildings and a whole swath of land tarped over with concrete and "modernised." While maintaining the old two-lane streets. The main bus line for the residential area in which I lived in my old city used to run along the industrial traffic lanes - you'd frequently see lines of fully loaded semi trucks waiting for the bus to finish transfering passengers. Because they had nowhere else to put it, they just sold the area to developers without a second thought given to how they'd actually connect the area to the rest of the city.
And to get back to the trains, we actually have a decently extensive railway network, but all it's seen for the past few decades has been basic maintenance, and our trains are the same. I mean, most of our engines are from the Communist era and most of our train cars are hand-me-downs from Germany - and they're really nice train cars, honestly, the sleeping cars have wood paneling, in-cabin grooming sink, and actual mattresses, they're a splendid bit of engineering - and they start looking like hammered shit maybe half a year after being introduced. I had to make 12 900km trips by train throughout the country last year and I'd say I ended up with an immune response after at least eight or nine of them, felt flu-y for a couple of days. And, yeah, this is also a major problem with the education and level of wealth around here, but they really don't bother actually trying to maintain a semblance of cleanliness.
So of course everyone buys one and a half cars and lugs that hunk of metal all around the place.
The reason you can't is much more about infrastructure than weather, especially within cities
Source: I live in Scandinavia and everyone bikes even when it's cold
Just out of curiosity, do you have snow tires for bikes or are the paths cleared well enough not to worry about it?
Where I live we often get mixes of sleet and ice along with the snow and since it is sporadic throughout winter we do a pretty mediocre job of funding the removal. If we didn't have so many wide roads it probably wouldn't take as much effort.
I run studded tyres during winter, but the city also uses a clearing technique where they first clear off all of the snow from the bike lanes and then salt them to prevent ice. This kind of wreaks havoc on your components through corrosion, but leaves the lanes highly usable throughout winter.
I use the studded tyres as an insurance policy against any poorly cleared spots. They are usually pretty good about it, but sometimes the weather will just be bad.
I've been told that fat bikes do better on full snow, but I've never ridden one myself so I can't confirm it.
Here not just bikes talks about winter cycling in Olou, Finland. The answer is yes, the city needs to manage the lanes during winter instead of letting it be acceptable to push snow in bike lanes or leave them uncleared. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
This was exactly what I was going to link.
Certainly in my city bike lanes and sidewalks are cleared and salted before main roads. Though we just had the warmest January on record so a lot less snow to think about 😬
Even in the US, there are places that are bike friendly in the winter. Minnesota has a big winter biking culture, both for commuting and for recreation.
That’s impossible and no one is implying that bikes should replace other modes of transport for interstate travel. However, I bike commute in winter in Wisconsin and it takes less time than riding the bus. Driving a car is faster than my bike commute, but only marginally so.
Then bikes are not more freeing than cars. The means of easy, unscheduled, interstate mobility should be the American symbol of freedom. That's not a bicycle.
I love how you explicitly defined your requirements to be exclusive to car travel. Riding on a good train or bus network is incredibly easy and affordable in many places, speaking from experience.
Checkmate liberals-tier comment. Why did you even post this?
Initially, for shits and giggles. I can't ride a bike and I also can't drive, so I'm stuck on foot.
I dare you to cross the Atlantic in a car.
You might need to rendezvous with another vessel mid-trip for gas, but amphibious cars do exist.
Best of luck my dude