-
that was a good read - the revelation is indeed profound
-
Excellent read, thanks Oliver.
-
I don't think things/attitudes to cycling and cyclists has changed much except that it has become acceptable to cycle more now because cycling in many different forms (e.g. mamils/brompton euro trips ) has become more 'topical' (e.g. there is a bike in nearly every advert). There may be more cyclists now but the anti cyclist attitudes remain.
-
Well written! Can you send this as a letter to all the newspapers?
-
much like Thatcher's remark about using buses when you're in your thirties
"A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."
Most of LFGSS would probably agree with that.
Anyway, this is why Dentists Riding Pinarallos have collectively done a lot to help cycling.
There's a pretty good chance a London cyclist selected at random between 8-9am on Monday morning earns more than the adjacent car driver. And he or she is likely to be fitter and better looking to boot.
That makes it harder to look down on cyclists as a bunch of wierdo hippies who should buy a car but can't afford one.
You are reading a single comment by @Oliver Schick and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
cryptthing
skidlidsid
not4sale
rhb
inappropriate_bike
@Oliver Schick
London is just different (and has changed a lot in the last fifteen years or so). Also, most people who have vague anti-cycling feelings won't think them through to their consequences. At the end of the day, you judge them by their actions, and that relatively few cycle is more eloquent than all that they say.
The dominant contemporary ideology is still some kind of futurism in which it is not respectable to use a simple machine when you can use a really heavy, expensive, and unnecessary one. People make these comparisons all the time. Obviously, you can take a modern bike and point out all the innovation, the super-bright LED lights or the latest bit of electronic shifting kit or whatever, and its eye-watering price, and all that may appeal to someone like a London banker using it as a status symbol and to save time keeping up a high fitness level through commuting on it from the Surrey stockbroker belt, but it's still something on which you're sitting out in the rain when it's raining, something that makes you sweat, etc., and we've overcome all these animalistic displeasures, have we not?
For most people in big cities, public transport is the immovable default (you arrive at work looking nice and smart and all that), but even in cities people see cars as universal tools, e.g. you can be dry, fast, comfortable, listen to your music, carry passengers and heavy loads, never mind that most of the time you don't do either of the latter, and much like Thatcher's remark about using buses when you're in your thirties (or something like that, can't remember the exact quote), the default assumption is that if you ride a bike you must be poor, because you're not solving all your problems by adopting modern tools. You can do everything with a car, if you have kids it's inevitable that you MUST have a car, and so on.
This is not excessive generalisation but a summary of thousands of conversations I've had on that topic over the years, at stalls at festivals, in social contexts, etc. Not everybody holds all of these views, but most people hold at least a few of them. Part of the reason why so many people turn evangelists when they have started to cycle is because the revelation is so profound, and some then proceed to piss off their friends because they're so strident, when cycling is really just a completely normal thing (which is the thing to keep promoting, rather than assigning any kind of exceptional status, however positive, to it).
Oh well.