[verisimi]

Yeah - I should get my grannie and her grandkids to come make the 200 mile round trip by bike!

I hear what you are saying - if you love bikes long journeys are wonderful. I imagine motorcyclists or long distance runners could get the same buzz.

> It may not be for everyone but I want to live in a world where that experience feels accessible to as many as possible.

But let's not kid ourselves that this is a viable option for most people. And if you mean that we should get rid of even more roads for bike lanes, you are actually going to restrict people engaging with distant relations and friends.

[prmoustache]

> And if you mean that we should get rid of even more roads for bike lanes, you are actually going to restrict people engaging with distant relations and friends.

That is utter bullshit. You could dedicate half the secondary roads to non motorized traffic and add a separates bicycle path alongside every highway and fluidity of the cars traffic wouldn't be affected at all. It would even improve.

[Xylakant]

Me, my father and my son are making the trip Berlin - Baltic Sea this year (we‘ve made the return three years ago). It‘s about 360 km, so roundabout 200 miles. We‘ll have electric cargo bikes, granted, but the small one is just 5, so he can‘t be expected to ride that on his little bike. It‘s definitely an option, but a lot of people don‘t consider it as an option. One of the problems I believe is that people consider the start of their holidays to be when they arrive at the destination - the trip there is a chore. If you want to travel by bike, you need to consider the trip as part of your vacation.

[ksplicer]

Many elderly can't drive for medical reasons. Safe bicycle infrastructure doubles as a safer place for electric wheelchairs. Decreasing car reliance with better biking and walking infrastructure and better public transit, such as buses or trains, would increase accessibility for the elderly not decrease it.

[fock]

Maybe we should reevaluate wether it's actually necessary for a free and democratic society to have these distanced families as a norm. The societal model you describe essentially evolved in lockstep with capitalism (people moving into cities/generally moving for work) and I'm not totally sure that it has to be this way. We could just live more regional and still be free and democratic as well! Indeed, currently it looks like rootlessness proclaimed by you and others as the preferable lifestyle will take away our freedom and democracy with it.

[verisimi]

Of course, we don't have democracy. We don't contribute to the thousands of decisions that are made. We have 'representative democracy' where we choose someone (once every 5 years) to make all those decisions for us.

We should re-evaluate what? The reality that the system we find ourselves in, means that families are distributed? Would you force people back together into the same region?

[brudgers]

The freedom of movement is a marker of political liberty.

Some people (but by no means everyone) are better off away from their family and the town where they grew up.

Imagine that you are the fourth generation to move far away from your patents, as I am. There is not some community in which I have generational roots…and it was the prospect of conscription by the Tsar’s army that started it all. Not capitalism.

For me, employment someplace far away was the way out of where we weren’t from and that wasn’t for us.

Some people have a reason to stay. Those reasons are sometimes the reasons for other people to leave.