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.
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!
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
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.
