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WobblyPython
@WobblyPython

You're out on two wheels. I don't give a shit that you pedal it. You know how unfriendly car drivers are. You know how bad the streets really are. You know what it's like to be outside with no AC. You know the joy of leaning into a good turn. You know what it's like to be connected to the world you're traversing by virtue of being in it. You know what it's like to strap on some gear because shit can go wrong.

Anyone trying to gatekeep or divide the two is just wrong.


kda
@kda

that order of magnitude more kinetic energy, and the bike in question weighing about twice as much as you, really, really change some aspects of it.

Though that's mostly just a quantitative difference in terms of how horrific certain failure modes can be!


ShugoWah
@ShugoWah

kinda tangential but we were driving home from a trip yesterday on the highway and I saw a motorcyclist go by and it just struck me the nerves of steel that must be required to travel great distances like that

an hour straight of driving a motorcycle at highway speeds, with no ability to relax your position or do anything with your hands because they just don't work that way


kda
@kda

You kinda get used to it! It's like riding a horse with no sense of self-preservation or even ability to steer itself, but which has a fairly incredible degree of stability, assuming you don't exceed the capabilities of its tyres.

But you're constantly two seconds from death in a way that you just aren't on either a pedal bicycle or in a car. The close calls don't feel like "oh fuck, that could've been expensive" or "that could've been a nasty fall" โ€” they feel like "I just barely avoided dying right then and there".

Depending on the bike you're on, you can outrun basically any threat posed by other road users. But you can't outrun the limits of your own reaction time or the bike's traction.


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in reply to @WobblyPython's post:

Oh so you were the smaller vehicle and are upset that a larger, faster vehicle decided to pass you unsafely for simply existing as you had every right to do?

Sounds like you actually have a lot in common with the plight of the cyclist and should pack it back up your butthole when you want to complain about them being slow like you were.

mfs will look at 40000+ car deaths in one country in one year and sprawling unwalkable cities built to be entirely reliant on cars and go "the problem is the cyclist who knocked my starbucks out of my hand that one time"

I'm in Iceland, every road has a sidewalk, there's numerous bike paths, most of them will take cyclists to their destinations faster than the road, and there's multiple apps that have mapped them out.

damn, wish i lived somewhere like that, being able to go outside and have my biggest worry be "getting bumped into by a cyclist" instead of "getting turned into chunky marinara by an SUV" sounds like a dream