Originally Posted by
Maelochs
The idea is, i guess, that you start off riding to work because you can't afford a car...
Not me. I drove from the git-go as a young adult. When I was in 10th grade my father bought me an old chevy panel truck for $200 that barely ran for me to work on as part of an auto-mechanics course at my high school. I fixed it over the winter. It was pretty cheap to own and operate back when gas was well under 50 cents a gallon. That's what I drove to work once I had a job a significant distance from home. I was "into bicycles" in those days too but I was also a teenager with a chevy panel truck that had shag carpet in the back
(date machine)
I'm sure my truck was a serious fire hazard. It needed a fuel pump but I was too cheap to buy one for the first year or so. I mounted a two-gallon gas tank on the hood and ran gravity-fed gasoline down to the carburetor
Frequent gas stops needless to say. I also carried a five gallon tank in the back that I could refill with
I could probably have gotten by without all that but I thought it was a cool idea and ran with it.
I spent my 20s mostly driving and then started commuting to work by bicycle when I was about 30 and had a wife and daughter at home (no more picking up girls).