The person on the left is carrying bags, the one in orange is a delivery driver and a couple of people are wearing backpacks. Aside from car brained, Damaris is also blind.
These morons are insufferable because they don’t believe anything exists outside the frame of the photo. they have worse object permanence to babies
Yeah. That building is probably an office block.
And those guys usually have loading/unloading areas in the back (if not an actual car park).
The right building is a clothing store. There are indeed often back entrances for smaller vans for supplies
I bet all those NYC bike messengers love this.
What about the bags on the cyclist’s steer? Those are goods.
How do workers carry goods from the ports to the stores?
Did they forget what century we live in?
yesyes the stores are all just there to be pretty, you can’t buy things from them, everyone was completely stumped by how to get the stuff into the place so nobody tried and now we’re all dead of brain herpes. Jesus.
The author could be the first to use a bike to haul furniture if he wanted to
Furniture gets moved by bike here all the time in the Netherlands ? We got this amazing invention called a bakfiets (tub bike) or we just balance it on the back.
Cool. Because we here in the US are so ice-centric though, we default to that for moving heavy things
Not saying i wouldn’t rather have had a car to move shit around but it’s certainly doable for some things.
Bicycle trailers are a thing for a reason. I’m sure hauling a washer and dryer would be difficult but a sofa is easily achievable. For heavy stuff most places offer delivery for free or really cheap
I’m sure hauling a washer and dryer would be difficult
Not difficult at all:
https://www.carlacargo.de/site/assets/files/1722/carla-cargo-boxes.1320x0.jpg
Yeah you can haul all kinds of things with a trailer. You migjt even be able to get a couch from A to B without one if youre strong enough
When I lived in Switzerland I literally used a bike to haul furniture (flat packed). Honestly it’s easier than you might imagine.
I brought a big tv home on my bike too. It’s quite achievable, if awkward.
But a cargo bike would have been a better choice than my conventional bike.
No offense, but “flatpack” furniture isnt really
A truck carrying freight ≠ a person driving home groceries. Groceries that typically fill up a car’s trunk just for 2-3 people; a bicycle isn’t carrying that. You’d need a rickshaw-like cart hooked onto it. They do exist though, for passengers, so making one for personal cargo loads is doable.
I wouldn’t want to do any of that in winter, though. Snow, ice, and sub-zero wind-chill (plus the further cooling effect while moving) are not when anyone should ever be on a bicycle.
Also, driving to a larger grocery store is non-negotiable for us because they’re the ones who stock the lower-demand allergy-safe foods. Guess how much a corn allergy sucks in America, on top of others. While most allergies and medical conditions are rarer than not, they are a huge problem.
Didn’t get me started on commuting - and youn literally can’t remote-work a labor job. Imagine having to make a 30+ minute car commute on a bicycle on top of a 9+ hour day.
So while yes, fuck cars, bicycles are not anywhere close to a magic bullet. Our entire civilization needs a comprehensive bottom-up overhaul that addresses every problem simultaneously, since most of them are interconnected.
Person who lives a car-centric life think human experience everywhere is the same.
Groceries, in particular, are more of an effect than a cause. Lots of people live without cars in New York City, or London, or Paris, or Toronto, or Tokyo, and they manage to eat. The reason you need to buy 7 days worth of food for two people all at once is because you live in a field far away from everything. “Getting Groceries” becomes a special trip, because, while driving, leaving the highway, stopping and parking are inconvenient.
As a pedestrian in a city, I was going to walk past 5 food stores on my way between work and home anyway, and it’s really not problem to walk in and buy only what I ran out of yesterday, or some special item I wanted for tonight’s dinner. It’s simple to shop for 5 or 10 minutes, five times a week, rather than one hour once a week, and never need more than a single bag of groceries at a time. And rather than being inconvenient, it’s actually great because I’m only buying what I need right now, the things I’m going to use as soon as I get home, so it’s very simple.
Allergies could be tricky, yeah. If you’re lucky the local shop, by nature of being smaller and more local, actually knows you and knows you need this stuff and stocks it because they know you’ll buy it from them. But that’s not a guarantee, for sure. That having been said, if the only people driving were people with corn allergies, the roads would be a much safer place!
Skill issue.
The Dutch absolutely use bikes to carry goods.
I’ve seen people with TVs on their bike. I’ve seen them with multiple crates of beer on the handlebars (kingsnight).
I saw three people on one (regular) bike.
Also these:
You can stack at least 3 crates on the back of the bike if you have a bag carrier, 2 otherwise. Then 1 or 2 on the bar between your legs, and 1 on the steering bar, or 2 if you also have a bag carrier there.
Ebike recommended if they’re full, but it’s way doable when bringing them back to the store.
I’m sure that works well where it’s flat. Try that in a city with tons of hills and you’re gonna have a much harder time.
Ebikes can take a lot of the pain out of that. They’re very powerful now.
And most cities are very flat.
I live in the very non flat south East of the Netherlands. We still do everything on bike. Groceries, mail, like 4 children while carrying groceries and being on the phone.
Yup and if we really NEED to transport big things, sure, we might need a van. But that’s probably a once every once every year thing max.
A perk of belonging to my city’s bike advocacy group is that you can rent this for no additional charge:
64″ aluminum truss-frame trailer; easily carry a 4×8 sheet of plywood, eight bags of groceries, or whatever else you can fit on it up to 300 lbs; holds 4 plastic tote boxes before stacking
Nosireebob, can’t haul stuff around with that… /s
Trying to persuade the (amazingly) only contractors on the entire planet that think they need a tiny-penis truck because they occasionally need to pick up some wood from Howm Deeepo to ride a bike is like trying to get blood from a stone
My dad has a solid bike trailer. It’s not as big as your group’s one, but he can do about a WinCo shopping cart worth in it. That’s plenty for the vast majority of their household needs.
Anyways…
Holy leg day
That’s awesome
You can’t just dictate what you believe roads should be for and think everyone should agree with it as fact. Roads are for a lot of things, and even in this guy’s narrow definition, people are goods, in fact they are the most important and valuable goods on the roads.
Yeah, and I mean, even most car traffic doesn’t fit into this ridiculous definition. People take their car to just do recreational stuff all the time.
I mean, holy fuck, how else would you get there than via streets in some fashion? Take the helicopter from your roof?
When I used to be on twitter and in response to idiotic comments like that, I would post the video of the guy cycling with a fridge on his back, one of someone moving a piano, several tradesmen that quit their vans to use cargo bikes, the pedal cab company in London (proper cargo bikes not the shitty tourist things) and the mother of 6 from Portland that had a cargo bike to take them all to school.
It used to shut them up
“Well I don’t want to bike with a fridge on my back!”
“Oh I was never suggesting you could.”
No, I was definitely suggesting you could but could you? Especially people like the person who made the half literate other reply
I was intending more like reverse psychology. “I’ll show you!” That kind of thing.
I get how I might not have said that well enough though.
You are av ducking idiot if you are moving fridges on your bicycle
You’re a fucking idiot if you think roads were only built for the transportation of goods & services as they were superceded by canals then by railways.
It was a massive step backwards in inefficiency in an orchestrated move by vehicle manufacturers that freight was shifted back to roads.
And the guys (yes, more than one) carrying fridges on their shoulders while cycling, have more fucking balls than you’ll ever dream of having.
We’ve got to move these microwave ovens. We’ve got to move these colour TVs.
TIL driving to and from work is “recreational” unless you have a TV or something in the back of your car.
He didn’t make it to the second semester of high school economics where he would have learned that labor is a service.
