[lapetitejort]

Bicycles do not have software to install a kill switch. They do not have license plates to be read by surveillance cameras. They do not require costly insurance to legally ride. They are not powered by fossil fuels. Buy a bike. Learn to maintain it. Advocate for safe biking infrastructure in your area.

[iamnothere]

Sure, buy a bike. AND buy an older (but maintainable) vehicle for hauling, transporting multiple people, and traveling long distances. It’s not either or.

[horsawlarway]

Entirely this.

I have a wonderful cargo bike (urban arrow - splurge purchase for my 35th birthday and second kid) - I use it for most in-city transportation tasks, including picking up kids from daycare/school, groceries, trips to restaurants, etc.

I also have a 2011 truck with ~200k miles on it. It's well take care of, and shows no signs of stopping any time soon. It hauls stuff from home improvement stores, help family move, and takes us on vacation.

I've been debating getting bumper stickers for each of them along the lines of:

"My other ebike is a truck" - for the bike

and

"My other truck is an ebike" - for the truck

[bluGill]

I had such an older vehicle until a couple weeks ago when the fuel tank supports rusted to the point the tank wasn't supported. There was just more maintenance needed than I had time to do - it would cost about what I paid for a modern 3 year old vehicle just to get it running and who knows what it will need next year from parts I wouldn't replace. (the new car is also electric so much cheaper to drive, though it doesn't have the capacity of the 1 ton truck it replaced so I'm stuck when I need that)

[mhurron]

Bicycles are also not a viable replacement for almost all the uses of a vehicle. None of this advice is useful.

[uriegas]

Transportation influences urban development. That is why most houses have a garage. There is no such thing as private transport (streets are public). Transportation has been heavily centralized since the New Deal. The bicycle was okay for most people living in cities in the 30s, now it is not because the government has favored the car infrastructure over the last decades. I think we need to start with not letting government develop their big infrastructure projects which are not resilient. Advocating for the use of bicycles might make sense in some places yet bicycle infrastructure is required.

[wincy]

I dunno, I live in what most people would call peak Suburbia and have all sorts of bike trails I didn’t even know existed until I got the electric assisted bike, I can range 5 miles away from my house in any direction without having to be on any major roads, and have a trailer for doing grocery shopping. I went 15 miles away and back one time but took quite awhile. All the grocery stores I frequent are within this range. When it’s warm out, I use my bike for probably 90% of my trips out of the house.

[alistairSH]

Beg to differ, they're viable for basically all local use cases...

Groceries? Yep. School? Yep. Commuting? Yep. Etc.

They aren't viable for hauling multi-ton loads, or covering long distances, that's about it.

[recursive]

Almost all? I think most car trips could have been bike trips.

[_verandaguy]

What?

A vehicle (presumably a car, since bikes are vehicles too) gets you and your stuff from point A to point B. Bikes do that too, though at a smaller scale.

If your commute or your errands aren't excessively long or require the use of a controlled-access highway, a bike's a perfectly fine alternative. The limiting factors are seasonal road or bike path maintenance and the discipline of other road users.

[dlcarrier]

A city near me (Davis, CA) requires all bicycles to have a license and can confiscate unlicensed bicycles.

[wahern]

As of 2023 municipalities and counties can no longer mandate bicycle registration. (See https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-veh/division-16... as amended by sec. 7 at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...) Though universities, like UC Davis, might still be able to require it for bikes on campus.

I hadn't heard of the requirement before. Mandatory registration originally seems to have been intended to address bike theft. All bicycles sold in California must have a serial number. A significant number of cities (most?) had ordinances requiring registration. But few people knew about it and even fewer registered their bikes.

[digiown]

I'm puzzled why there is so little emphasis on prioritizing bikes and other means of non-licensed transport among libertarians. Driving consents you to various things like forced ID checks, drug tests, and sometimes searches, and cars are relatively easy to track down compared to humans. In effect, car-centrism reduces civil liberties as it necessitates licensing for participating in society. And no, privatizing everything will not improve it. It will just make it worse since you'd be forced to allow insurance companies to track you to be allowed into private roads, etc.