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Be the least steal-able bike on the street!
How do I do that?
Make all the other bikes more stealable
Bring a second bike along with you, and lock it with a $10 combination lock chain.
Or just boltcutter the locks off all the other bikes in the rack. Thieves will think twice about stealing your bike when there are a half dozen better choices.
Any ways that dont involve being a complete asshole?
Understand the difference between a recreation bike and a utility bike.
Having a really awesome mountain bike with top of the line shocks or a super light road bike that costs more than a car is awesome. But don't park that outside the mcdonald's.
Instead, buy a used bike or get a REAL mid-tier bike from target or bikesdirect or whatever. And use that for commuting or going to the store or whatever.
And if this sounds prohibitively expensive because "enthusiasts" would need to won multiple bikes and need a place to store them? You are starting to understand why "just replace your car with a bike" is a very "upper middle class white person" mentality.
Fuck that. You don't need to spend more that $300 to replace your car with a bike. But something used and ride it every day. You don't need more than one.
"Replace your car with a bike" is also basically limited to only single or childless adults who live in an urban area with everything they need nearby. Because if you have a family or more than a few miles to places you need to be regularly, you're going to have a much harder time without a car. So it basically is not applicable to millions of Americans, with our massively large square mileage of country that we occupy.
I live in a family of 6, and we were able to live car free for a year when we lived in germany. My dad used to live and work 300 kilometers away, and he would visit us every few weeks, coming by high speed train. My mother did all the buying groceries by bike. And we didnt live in any big city. It was a town of less than 10.000 people. It is possible for families to live car free. We did roadtrips by bike, visited nearby cities, went to beaches by train. We did have the car of a relative available, but we used it some 5 or 6 times in the whole year.
I dont care if you have a family, you can live car free, if in the right place. And we aren’t super rich or anything, we lived with our relatives, and my dad lived in a friend’s house, who gave him a very big discount.
And we also didn’t have any 3 bikes each, our bikes were mostly oldies borrowed from old family friends who didn’t need them.
And if you do the math, 100 dolars a month, is pretty cheap for a car, if you consider gas and wear, so it is cheaper to buy a pretty nice bike every 3 months than to own a car.
That's a very America specific thing and not applicable to most pieces.
Which is why I take it to mean "replace applicable travel events with bike rides". I can't go carless in a suburb, but I can cover many daily needs with a bicycle. This is from someone that regularly commutes by 80mpg motorcycle and uses it for many grocery/light shopping needs, so it's not a fear of cargo/passenger capacity.
Similarly, this is what shoots the rail dream down. Yes, it's nice to dream about the freedom of a train ride taking you to a fun destination. But then what? You arrive at the city and then... Stay in the city? Hope it's a city at all? If it's a decent-sized city with an airport, a car rental will probably work out fine enough. But then how did you get to your train station? Well, probably by car too. The regrettable situation of the US is that it's not just a cute little country jam-packed over millenia. It's as vast as the entire European continent with the population heavily concentrated on the coasts. If visiting cities are your thing, it's easier to work out. But no, we're not going to completely revamp the rail system to be "like germany, Spain, France, or England" because we already have that. It's just in a straight line from DC to Boston. The area triangle made by London/Paris/Berlin is very similar to Boston/DC/Detroit. In the same way Americans generalize "Europe" to mean Spain, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, and the UK, ignoring all the east Europeans, we forget how empty it is between the Mississippi River and the west coast states - roughly half the continental 48 states house just 26% of the continental population. That's including Texas in the middle with 9% in itself. The carless infrastructure drops quickly because population density drops quickly. The cities are largely isolated by seas of suburbs or emptiness.
Whatever, tangential rant. I love rail, I work in rail, I rode the acela for fun. But we can't right suburbs without displacing half the population. There is a strong westward density drop-off after the Mississippi River, a small one after the Missouri, and a sheer cliff after the line dropped from Winnipeg to Dallas until you get within 50 miles of the Pacific. That's a 1300x1300 mile square of emptiness.
It's funny to me when people use the US's land size as a reason for needing a car...as if they live in Miami, need to commute to New York for work every day, and have to pick up the kids off from daycare in Anchorage after work.
It's not the geography that necessitates cars. It's poor city planning.
And now it's weirdos protesting things like 15-minute cities, as if being able to walk to a grocery store, a department store, a doctor's office, schools, and a park within 15 minutes from home is a bad thing.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that those millions of square miles are actually occupied, in many parts other than the cities. I don't care what you do with your big cities, and I don't know who you've seen protesting the alleged 15-minute cities, but the rest of our huge nation still has to operate as well. That's why we have cars.
I think this is too narrow of an assessment. More common in America than single adults living alone are two adults living together, with each having their own car. So while you're right that the present American land-use reality isn't exactly conducive to having a plurality going car-less, it's entirely probably for a couple to save substantial money by switching one car for a bike and keep just one car for the household. That's something that can apply in huge swaths of the country, although it's exceptionally apt for cities.
Even a scooter or motorcycle is better than a car (though not necessarily safer).
Well I have both but I prefer the car when it's raining.