cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/226775
After living in a region that was (foolishly¹) designed exclusively for cars, I moved to a proper city: a city with public transport and a cycling infrastructure. Started using public transport and felt liberated. No more insurance burden, no maintenance burden, no vehicle registration, no traffic fines, parking fees & fines, no more financing unethical right-wing oil companies that are burning up the planet, etc. It was a weight off my shoulders to live cheaper and more ethical.
public transport also unethical
Then a colleague convinced me that using public transport needlessly is also unethical… that the huge amount of energy required to power that infrastructure is still harmful & wasteful. Public transport needs to exist for various reasons like serving disabled people, but when able-bodied people flood onto it, more vehicles must be dispatched more frequently and I was adding to that burden.
the winner: cycling
So after years on public transport I switched to a bicycle. It’s even cheaper than public transport. And it came with another upgrade to liberties:
privacy— my realtime whereabouts is no longer surveilled & tracked (no license plate readers, no public transport card readers w/DBs, no insurance records which can then intermingle with other insurance & credit records & cause harm in other ways).
independence— it’s easy to maintain one’s own bicycle. So I’m free of dependency on mechanics & free of dependency on public transport schedules (which can be unreliable). Dirt cheap and you only need to depend on yourself.
After evolving into a cyclist, I cannot stomach the thought of living again in a non-cyclable region. Those regions are encumbered by stupidity and addicts: people addicted to their perception of convenience (despite sitting in traffic that bicycles are immune to and despite looking for parking)… and people addicted to energy (from oil or power plants) because they think peddling their bike will be a notable effort.
Intelligence of car drivers
It’s been said jokingly (by Douglas Adams IIRC) that dolphins are smarter than humans because they’ve figured out how to get their needs met without investing crazy amounts of cost and labor to create things that work against them to some extent. Cyclists are like dolphins in this regard, as they see people work their asses off to be able to afford the car that takes them to work, where they earn the money to finance their car ownership so they can work more. At the same time they work to finance the oil politicians who work against them.
2023 research suggests cycling makes you smarter and apparently 2014 research suggests cyclists are more intelligent² (I suspect there’s the factor that people with naturally higher IQs favor cycling anecdotally. E.g. many profs cycle to universities).
self imprisonment
We all live in a prison of some kind. My new prison is being self-excluded from a big chunk of the car-dependent world and living in all those regions. But I prefer my new prison better than that of car dependency and being forced to finance companies that finance politicians who work against humanity.
footnotes
¹: it would be unfair to fault pre-climate aware municipal designs as foolish, but foolish that decades thereafter these shitty designs are still being maintained (unlike Utrecht who were wise enough to realize their mistake & fix it) while people continue rewarding the shit designs with their residency and tax.
²: I’ve not read the 2014 study myself. Some articles claim the research shows cyclists are perceived as more intelligent while other reports claim cyclists are more intelligent.
Claming that car owners have less intelligence strikes me as a bit elitist, people are taken by many lies of the system but that does not mean they are unintelligent or inferior in some way, they are for the most part victims of a misinformation campaign of colossal scale. That is not to mean that it’s not an achievement for you to have changed, but it’s important to not have to undermine others in order to celebrate our achievements
Claming that car owners have less intelligence strikes me as a bit elitist,
I suppose the Douglas Adams joke & anecdotes might be the culprit there but the intelligence paragraph was motivated by research by others & not really meant to be supported by my experience. IQ tests have some unavoidable subjectivity but hopefully modern standardized tests have gotten past the elitist history of IQ tests in the 70s. Readers of course should chase up the citations and see for themselves if the research is solid if there’s any doubt & sufficient motivation.
they are for the most part victims of a misinformation campaign of colossal scale.
Indeed it’s tricky to separate misinfo from true info. OTOH cycling has benefits even if climate denial were to nix the climate factor although it’d be less clear-cut.
Actually, you should’ve tracked down the research. You are the one posting very short articles which make claims about research, but they actually have no research in them. To make this claim responsibly, you are responsible for actually providing the research.
There are no citations in the articles you linked, they just make claims about research. And the titles are sensationalist, the one article that goes slightly in depth to one unnamed study also says that people who walk are more intelligent. This suggest that the research is actually just pointing to the way any exercise helps the brain. Without citations, we have no way of checking any potential bias of the writers, or seeing how large the sample sizes are for the article that boldly claims cyclists are more intelligent.
This is incredibly flimsy research at best, if not intentionally misleading and dishonest to push this weird cyclist elitism.
Yeah furthermore it’s wholly unnecessary, the health benefits and all make a better argument to that point, but still many places specially in the US are designed in a way to make cars all but a necessity, so if you live in a place where the distances you need to travel are reasonable and cycling is safe sure, but that’s in no way a broad generalization
Frequency is actually an issue that can make public transit basically unusable if it’s low enough. If the bus comes less than every 15 minutes for example it becomes quite unreliable as busses will eventually clump up due to traffic. Even every 15 minutes seriously pushes the boundaries of usability. And if ridership gets low enough the bus route will be canceled or relocated which can be a death sentence for disabled people who relied on that bus stop to get around. So for public transport, using it is actually essential to creating cities where cars are not used. It needs to be good enough that it’s faster than taking a car for most people to consider using it. Improving infrastructure like dedicated BRT and bus only lanes and giving busses priority at signals are both things that help, of course. But getting that quality requires a lot of people to use it, and that requires population density and high ridership.
Frequency is actually an issue that can make public transit basically unusable if it’s low enough.
True. It would perhaps be more sensible to dispatch smaller lighter vehicles in preference to frequency dropping below <15min. The double-decker buses and bus-trains (double length with that accordian connector) could be replaced with normal sized buses with more seats for handicapped and more flip-up seats for strollers & bicycles.
I recall some parts of Los Angeles where a bus comes once hourly. It was reasonably full but that infrequency probably kept people in cars. I think I only used it when my timing was just right. I’ve gotten quite spoiled where I am now. My blood would start to boil if I have to wait more than ~7 min.
And if ridership gets low enough the bus route will be canceled or relocated which can be a death sentence for disabled people who relied on that bus stop to get around.
Low ridership of non-handicapped people enables routes and schedules to better cater for those who really need the network. Disabled people have fewer masses of people to compete with and can be prioritized. Bus stops could be put closer to their homes with less impact to others.
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