Robert Foster

Thanks for the warning. You have to know if I find any definitive stats I will be back like a kid with a new toy.

Roody

I doubt if you'll find many good statistics on bike travel. Like I said, nobody cares enough to gather the data. Rather, nobody cares enough to pay for the data gathering.

Robert Hurst has put some thought into this topic so you might want to check with him. ILTB probably knows as much about it as anybody else.

zephyr

Hey, how bout the term bikecentric instead of bike heavy?

philski

6 and 4.

OMG it's the "think of the children" argument! I've never heard that one before!

My kids and I ride several times a week in the summer, and every night in the spring/fall within a few blocks of our house. Mom is generally on skates as she plays roller derby. I have yet to take them beyond 25 MPH zones but by the time they are 10 I'd see no reason not to. I was commuting to my job at a frozen custard stand at age 13, from 2 miles out of town, into and across town with no/few shoulders and I made it just fine, rain, shine or snow (northern Wisconsin). I wasn't coddled as a child and my kids won't be, either...

-philip

philski

My personal, only semi-educated-opinion, is that there are demonstrable reserves which could keep us going for several hundred if not a thousand years even following exponentially increasing demands. New (Chinese) oil rigs are going up in the Gulf and new drilling is ongoing in North Dakota.

We have yet to reach the point where oil shales and oil sands are tractable simply because there is so much "cheap" and "easy" oil to be had... so once we "peak" the easy oil we'll start hitting the shales and sands. So the supply itself will not peak.

My belief is oil will never peak because by the time we even get close we will have moved on to different technology. We do not and should not have to wean ourselves now and sacrifice our lives to the "green gods". We have plenty of oil to bridge the gap. (and if people were serious about going green they would embrace nuclear).

That's my soapbox rant.

-philip

philski

Everyone has a choice. If you believe and have a fire in your belly to do something, you will do it. The problem is we have a lot of whiners nowadays that expect everything to get handed to them on a silver platter. If you really want the best for your kids you will make sacrifices necessary to get them into a good school district or homeschool them, as a simple example. The choice is where you draw the line between whining on a forum and actualizing in real life. You may have to make sacrifices but if the principles are important enough, you will do them.

Or at least I will, and have...

philski

You know what they say about assumptions. I'm 29 with a wife and young kids. I have never ridden competitively. I have not owned a new bike since I was six years old. Tying into the other thread about choice to move, I operate my bike habit very cheaply in order to save money for the future, to pay down the house, to finance my childrens' education. In order to do this I make sacrifices - no new bikes, no fancy upgrades, none of the typical male trappings. I brown bag my lunches. I don't belong to a gym but instead scour Craigslist for weightlifting equipment. My wife clips coupons and makes sensible travel decisions with the car.

I do all-right financially but there are things which are important to me so I make sacrifices. We are moving 1000 miles at the end of the year to a better place to raise my family even though it means a decrease in pay; purchasing a similar house for more money; most likely getting a higher interest mortgage and an overall higher cost of living. However my kids will enjoy growing up in a better environment, we will be closer and more accessible to grandparents and other relatives and it will be more similar to the environment my wife and I grew up in. So we make sacrifices because we believe it is the right thing to do. We aren't exactly in a position to be moving but by making sacrifices we can make it happen and know 10 years down the road we will appreciate the sacrifices we make now.

It's a self-reliant HTFU attitude. You want something? Make it happen. Make the sacrifices. Work the extra hours. Get it done!

-philip

dahut

"Bikecentric lifestyle" has a nice, PC ring to it, too.

myrridin

+1

It is nice to see folks with that attitude!

Roody

IMO, Compassion and empathy are both compatible with a self-reliant philosophy.

Some of the most self-reliant people I know are disabled people who struggle mightily with handicaps that you and I cannot begin to imagine. They are not whiners, and they don't ask anybody for a handout. They could teach me (and probably you) volumes about what it means to HTFU. They deserve to have infrastructure that serves them and their needs. Walk a mile in their shoes-- or roll a mile in their wheels--before you dare to tell anybody to HTFU!

cooker

That is peak oil.

That's just bad reasoning. If oil consumption increases exponentially for a thousand years a whole planet made of pure oil coudn't supply it.

Historically, oil consumption has doubled every 10 years, so at that rate of doubling, we'll consume a thousand times as much oil per day as we do now 100 years from now, and about a million times as much per day as we do now, in 200 years. In a thousand years, at that rate of growth, our daily consumption would be the amount we consume now, multiplied by 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Roody

But if we close our eyes and wish really really hard for something, won't it come true?

Robert Foster

While researching the links on bicycle accidents I did come across and interesting one for San Francisco information wise. It lists the “at fault” for many of the accidents and some are indeed ascribed to the cyclist. I might take some of them with a grain of salt except for the ones listed because of a pet peeve of mine, riding on the wrong side of the road. There are times I would like to shove some of them into traffic myself. Still here is the article that took me to the site. Yes it is an attorney blog but the site is a newspaper that gives some interesting charts and graphs. It shows someone is looking at bicycle accidents.
https://www.gjel.com/blog/san-francisco-bicycle-accidents-rising-faster-than-ridership.html
https://www.baycitizen.org/data/bike-accidents/
I also got to look at a blog on traffic in Manhattan and from watching pedestrians, Motorists and Cyclists I am surprised anyone makes it home alive.

cooker

Something we agree on. And of course they always expect us to veer blindly into traffic to their right/our left, even though they can see it. I also dislike wrongway cyclists on narrow one-way streets, even if they are on the other side, and not directly in my way, since they force cars to crowd me.

philski

Again with the assumptions. I spent several years working 250+ hours/year with the mentally handicapped and mentally challenged as a volunteer. It was very inspirational and I learned they don't need my compassion or empathy. In fact my empathy and sympathy, I discovered, was more a coping mechanism for me than it was a benefit to them! Many of these individuals were abandoned as young children and brought up in an institutionalized environment. They seemed to embrace HTFU because it was their life.

This was all in response to a post saying I should care about road development for the less capable/women/children; followed up by I believe it was you saying that there are people "stuck" and "not able" to get out of their situations in life. What I'm trying to say is, if you want it enough, you can make the sacrifices necessary to achieve your needs.

-Philip

philski

See below. Your ascertation of doubling every 10 years is wrong. It is more like 2% average over the past 40 years. Which makes the exponent 1.005...

Unfortunately for you, the facts disagree.

https://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx

KD5NRH

Dude, Apple tech support isn't a volunteer gig; you got screwed.

trike_guy

You seem to be quite the clever hard working guy, but I don't understand your refusal to accept the concept of running out of oil (to the extent that the free market drives the price high enough for other sources of energy to see increased usage).

cooker

Fair enough - it doubled every 10 years through the middle of the 20th century but growth has slowed in the last 30 years according to the graph in your link: showing approximately a 41% increase in 30 (not 40) years (which is closer to 1%/year, not 2%), to around 85 million BPD. So let's say that is our exponential growth rate. In a millenium, that 30 year, 41% increase would repeat 33 times.

So if you're right, daily oil production in 3011 will be 7,000,000,000,000 (7 trillion) barrels a day: a bit less than the amount I first suggested, but still quite a lot

Roody

I don't know when we'll run out of oil, but I hope it's soon.

A couple years ago, policy wonks predicted that alternative energy will be economical when oil prices hit a steady cost of $70 a barrel. I don't know if they still stand by this prediction or not.

DX-MAN

Funny how they're so quiet now........... Of course, they forgot to factor in the collateral costs that get added to EVERYTHING when oil goes up, so their figures for alternative energy were misleading. OOPS, just gave them an excuse to be wrong.

What we need is a form of transportation that runs on FAT; America sure has enough of that to go around!

Oh, wait... OOPS again.........................................

Roody

I don't think oil prices affect demand for alternative energy immediately, because many expenses and inconveniences are involved in switching energy sources. But eventually people will want alternative energy, when they become convinced that coal and oil prices will remain high for more than a few years.

gerv 

Perhaps they might even want some new forms of energy (or the ability to conserve energy...) if they finally woke up and realized what coal and oil are doing to their quality of life.

dahut

It probably hasn't changed by that much. However as we also learn from economics, what makes sense far too often is ignored.

bragi

If what you say about oil demand is true (2% average annual increase), then that demand doubles every 35 years. (I did the math crudely, possibly erring massively on the conservative side, because I didn't account for the fact that 2% of this year's demand is smaller than 2% of next year's, somewhat larger, demand.) It's a much slower rate than Cooker claims, but it's still a very rapid increase in demand, and the obtainable reserves not going to last much more than a hundred years, maybe two. More importantly, the oil that's left is going to be hugely more expensive to extract, which means that everything that we need for modern life is going to get hugely expensive, too, which in turn means that most of us, in real terms, are going to get a lot poorer. Civilization is not going to collapse, and most of us are going to get fed, I think, and we certainly have enough time to wean ourselves off oil before utter disaster strikes, but I think it's safe to say that the era of comfy mass consumerism will be over within the lifetimes of most of us. We're clearly headed for a standard of living more like that of late 19th century people: a lot of poor people who aren't actually starving but who aren't thriving either, a smallish middle class, and an even smaller class of obscenely wealthy people.

I like your posts. Keep them coming. It's refreshing, and hopeful, to see a young person who has a can-do attitude.