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zerakith

@zerakith@lemmy.ml

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zerakith ,

I'd be keen to know your (or others) experience of biking and driving in those conditions because in my experience cars aren't well suited to those temperatures either. I don't have direct experience of biking in that low but I know people who do and they swear by it.

Of course you could throw fuel at it and keep your car running all the time to stop it from freezing. 😷

https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/329955-russia-cars-extreme-frosts

Anyway as others have said no one is actually saying cycling is the solution for all extreme use cases that's a strawman.

zerakith ,

Not to be too negative but begging for drivers to consider us human is so tiresome.

We already know how to nearly eliminate road death. Unbundling the modes (segregation) and treating cars as guests where that's not possible. After that treat infractions by drivers seriously. If you can't drive safely your license should be removed. No more arguing in court that you need to drive to get to work.

zerakith ,

It also, I think, centres the ability of drivers to act independently of the visual design of the infrastructure and whilst, that is possible of course, research suggests driving behaviour is more strongly determined by design than conscious choice.

zerakith ,

I wonder how much damage to utility cycling the UCI has done. Maybe its not worth unpicking since the harm is so much less than the motor lobby.

Its just such a shame that UCI compliance dominates cycle manufacturing.

zerakith ,

I didn't mean that all bikes sold were UCI compliant as directly as that. The market has focused on pursuing a fairly narrow definition of performance for a bike in part because of the narrow definitions of racing cycling. That's had knock on effects for the type of components that have been focussed on and developed. The near ubiquity of diamond frames over recumbents which prioritise comfortably for example.

I think we have seen that effect lesson over the last decade or so (e.g. belt drives for example). Ebikes help as they have very different markets, need different properties and have by definition no need to overlap with UCI compliance at all.

Of course its quite hard to unpick the other factors that have led the market to be cater so strongly to leisure market over the utility market but the UCI I think is up there in setting a cultural standard for what a bike is at the cost to alternatives.

zerakith ,

Being available in a niche market isn't the same as being affordable because its a mass product. There's more use-cases then you outline: they are particularly good for those with certain types of disabilities. You are right that mixing with traffic is another key reason why they arent as popular. There's a reason you see them most commonly in areas with decent segregated infrastructure. Personally I have a DF for some of the reasons you outline. My point wasn't all about the frame though that was just an example, its also true of the focus at component level where R&D has not prioritised low-cost low-maintance options because the high-cost high-performance market was more lucrative and that stems from in part from the direction performance cycling took.

Has anyone calculated the administrative costs associated with traffic safety research? (crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov)

Just had the fleeting thought that maybe there is a substantial cost to review and create enormous traffic safety research systems and the subsequent training required of law enforcement personnel and administrative staff....

zerakith ,

I haven't seen any work estimating this. I have as part of my work spent some time trying to estimate the upstream effects of private cars (and other forms of transport) and it quite quickly gets very hard to find very much data. Even something quite basic like road maintainance gets quite difficult to unpick. So we know broad generalisations like heavier vehicles cause more damage but its quite hard to isolate this connection with individual traffic make ups (e.g. how much change in costs does a 10% change in average vehicle weight cause)

Sadly, we don't have a culture that particularly wants to know or track the costs. I'm not sure I'd be so confident though that the administration costs would be completely neglible. Some of the costs are quite high level: highway engineering, infrastructure and enforcement which can have high labour and materials costs. Probably what you need is a "natural experiment". Find a town or city that already happens to have a strange policy (I vagually recall somewhere that has a network of golf cart usage?) and try and ask the relevant authority whether they can provide the back history of spending and compare it to a similar size "normal" road network.

Related bugbare of my mine is the term cycling or walking infrastructure when in reality most if it is actually only necessary because of cars so its really car infrastructure (i.e. to facilitate cars going non human speeds without killing people or damaging buildings).

zerakith ,

I agree there may be quite a large range but just to say that can still be useful.

I think its crucial to start denormalising all the costs and externalities of car focussed transport policy. Motornormativity means policy makers and general public internalise costs of progressive infrastructure and are blind to the huge costs of the status quo.

So even being able to pin a wide range on it can be helpful. Not for financial costs but for emissions I was able to show even for the lower end of a wide range of additional hard-to-quantify emissions for scenarios that didn't drastically reduce private car usage as well as electricify would blow past thier carbon budgets.

zerakith ,

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