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By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted October 03, 2009 at 19:12:06
That's why prices for bikes and bike parts have jumped by at least 30 percent in the last year? And why, in the meantime, prices for cars, used or new, plummeted in the same time?
Mark my words: the bicycle will outlive the automobile. Cars may be "faster" over long distances, such as the mountain to burlington, but I doubt anyone here could beat me door-to-door anywhere downtown. The speed of cars is a prime example of false economy, anyway, as cars tend to cost many times what bikes do and cost far more over their life (gas, insurance, depreciation, car loans and repairs versus inner tubes, tires and chains). Even if you drop $5000 on a bike and ride it heavily, the likely repair costs over the next 5 years are a fraction of what even one visit to the shop with a car often costs (hell, you could even buy a new $5000 bike a good chunk of the time). Bikes can be produced in very small workshops, out of less than 30lbs of material, from very basic stock (steel tubing, chains, some basic parts machining etc). Cars require vast factories. Cars require massive amounts of dwindling fossil fuels, or even more massive amounts of farmland. Bikes require no fuel. Cars contribute to horrific rates of illnesses related to sedentary lifestyles (heart disease, obesity etc) as well as smog, whereas bikes, in the absence of cars, tend to make their riders a whole lot healtheir. Cars cause virtually unavoidable sprawl because of the land requirements of parking, roads etc., and enable far more by their ability to travel large distances. Bikes, on the other hand, tend to help local communities because it's far easier to interact with passers-by on bikes than in cars. I could go on and on...
Roads are not made for cars, they are made for transportation. There were roads thousands of years before there were cars, and the notion that cars should be the exclusive users of roads is a far newer. We've already in many cases criminalized pedestrian use of roads (jaywalking, marching without a permit, "obstructing traffic" etc), to do the same to cars would be an absolute affront to public health.
"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford
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