snip
It's a good thing that car accidents don't happen, or you would never be able to drive either. :P
A great comment that was ruined by this last sentence. As someone who has driven small cars, trucks, motorcycles and bikes... they are not all the same.
You know that. You know not only how the accident severity varies, but also how drivers treat people differently. That doesn't make it right, but if you pretend there is no difference, well, I'm surprised you've never had any bad encounters while biking!
Sorry, my intent with the comment wasn't to argue that dangers while cycling don't exist. They absolutely do. When a car hits you on a bike or while you're walking you are going to be hurt much worse than if you were in a car. Accident severity certainly varies - and accidents do happen.
I do believe though, that people overly focus on the accidents and fail to take into account the whole picture.
This has been studied several different ways -
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2920084/ but looked at holistically, the health benefits of cycling rather than driving outweigh any safety gains you get from driving an automobile.
As for the rest of your comment, it sounds like you compare "how long things take" based on your condition and bike. I own a mountain bike, and I rode a friend's excellent road bike. The different levels of difficulty were incredible to me. It felt like "taking a break" when I got on the road bike. But... my speed biking is still something like 10-15 mph, while my car is more like 30 mph on average. So even 10 minute round trips are doubled or tripled going from car to bike, assuming the same route. And yet... the road I take to get to the closest grocery store, I would 100% avoid on bike. I'd add a couple miles to the trip and take a much safer route. But a 10 minute round trip would suddenly be easily 40-50 minutes. In the right mood or mindset, this would be fine.
This is very much the way I used to view things, before regularly cycling places. My car goes 80 kph on the highway, and I average about 30 kph on my bike. So it should take me 2.7 times longer to do anything on my bike than in my car, right?
This logic holds true for very long trips, but not short ones . . . and very rarely in the city where there are lots of lights and stop/go traffic. There are a myriad of little things that slow you down when you're driving.
Two that immediately jump to mind:
- Parking a car takes much longer than locking up a bike, and bike racks are usually closer to the front door of buildings than where you have to park.
- There's a place where I've got to make a left hand turn on the way to work. It has a left hand turn light that's very short and often gets jammed up with dozens of cars waiting to turn, which wastes minutes. On a bike I'll just hop off and walk on the sidewalk to the pedestrian signal, press it, wait a couple seconds for the white man, walk across, and then hop back on my bike in the lane I want to be in.
- It's often possible to take shortcuts that are unavailable to people driving . . . going across empty fields, down bike paths/trails etc.
This stuff seems to matter most for shorter trips. I honestly can't think of a single 10 minute round trip that I could do faster in the car than on my bike - if you're counting time from door to door.
But it would also requiring buying a bike and panniers, as my mountain bike is far from ideal for grocery trips. (I did use it for that purpose a lot when the living conditions were just right, about 15 years ago! Just what I could carry in a backpack without worries about temperature.)
Fancy bike isn't necessary (and in some ways would be a negative for groceries). I've tried pretty much all the methods that you can to carry stuff around on a bike. This was my first grocery getter - a 45 lb department store mountain bike:
If you're regularly getting around large grocery loads, I think a rear children's trailer is the way to go. For medium sized loads baskets are great. Small stuff (like commuting to work) I prefer just a backpack.
Topic: Electric Cars: Can they finally become popular in the United States? (Read 534171 times)
