[dahart]

I wasn't attacking you with an ad-hominem, I'm sorry it seemed like that. I was honestly asking why you're so bothered about bikes. You have a lot of reasons, but I don't understand your overall thrust or point.

> and diverting the talk about cars instead.

You keep saying this over and over and over, yet I keep pointing out consistently that I'm primarily focused on bikes vs cars, and primarily responding to your comment here, which compared bikes to cars, and didn't even mention walking. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24186001 You somehow don't even see you're the one moving the goal post.

[jodrellblank]

Take a step back, I don't want bikes banned, or to stop you from riding your bike on the road or pavement tomorrow. We're imagining a future where we say that internal combustion engines emit too much air pollution and CO2 and should be replaced. One choice we have is to replace them with electric cars. Electric cars still have large resource costs around the planet because they're quite big, and have costs in their use in urban environments in parking spaces and charging cables and traffic lights and etc. (NB. another unmentioned thing - all the desire for self-driving cars isn't going to build self-driving bikes anytime soon).

There is an element of social unfairness where people need frequent use of tens of thousands of dollars of car to live a first-class citizen life, and doing without makes people second-class citizens in many ways. If we step away from cars (and for the moment, motorbikes and mopeds and so on), there are not many choices left, they boil down to:

1) Keep the world the same, solely switch cars for bikes.

2) Rebuild and rezone smaller and denser, but stop at bike distances.

3) Rebuild and rezone smaller and denser, to walking distances. Walking distances have to be very dense because people walk slowly.

The first is unworkable - 2% of journeys done on bikes today is not going to boost to 90%+ journeys done on bikes just by taking the cars away. The distances in the world today are built for cars.

The second has all the costs of cars but on a smaller scale. It has all the costs of rebuilding and rezoning. It has all the social unfairness of still needing a personal transportation device. And on top of that it has all the problems of bikes that I've been listing because they're not very good compared to cars.

The third, done well, has the massive advantages that you don't need a vehicle and get more money in your pocket. The cost of having to use walking effort instead of driving is offset by the fact that you don't have to walk far. The disadvantages of not having a vehicle are traded off with the advantages of not needing a vehicle. More people get a first-class experience of life.

The first is cheap but it won't work. People need cars now because everything is so far apart and it was built far apart because everyone else has cars. The second and third are not going to happen because rebuilding is expensive and people don't want to give up their cars. But if they did happen, the second is a chance to make hundreds of millions of people's lives simpler, cheaper, easier, less hassle, and lower global resource use, not done, stopped short of that, deliberately to make people have to use bikes just for the sake of people using bikes. It's a /tragedy/.

Even if the third happened perfectly, that wouldn't stop you from riding your bike to work. What it would mean is you wouldn't have to. Most people wouldn't have to, and wouldn't. If the second happened, it would mean most people couldn't avoid riding a bike to work because work was deliberately zoned too far to walk to prop up bike use.

> yet I keep pointing out consistently that I'm primarily focused on bikes vs cars

I'm primarily focused on humans vs vehicles. Bikes and cars both go on the vehicle side. I criticised biking to work, I have kept criticising biking in every reply, that's not moving goalposts unless you think I was cricitising bikes in favour of cars - I wasn't, I was just criticising bikes. Like the parent three posts to that one is "There's also a lot more people biking now and I'm hopeful that it will help shape future legislation to make the city even more bike friendly" - why? Why hope to make legislation to make the city more bike friendly instead of hoping to make the city rezone so people can live and work close enough that they don't need vehicles? "I want to see more bikes" why do you?