Anon rides a bike

be me
live in a relatively new part of town in the Netherlands
bike 20 minutes to the city center
no hills or mountains because netherlands
See almost no cars because most bike routes are completely seperated and shorter than car routes
Park my bike in a surveilled parking area funded by the city
Do all my shopping for the day and return
MFW my friends and family don't even realize how good we have it
- So how easy is it for an American to move to the Netherlands? Asking for myself
  
  If you are skilled labor, yes: https://www.expatica.com/nl/finance/taxes/the-dutch-30-ruling-explained-101641/
  But what @abbadon420 said is equally true. Housing market's fucked beyond belief. Now, if you want to WFH and live out in the sticks, you'd be set.
  
  I guess it's easy enough, but good luck finding a house.
- No hills or mountains is great for biking, but bad for beautiful nature experiences (BNE)

1 gal of gas: ~29k calories - $4.609
~29k calories of rice: ~$600 <-- sus math btw 🤔
It's simple: drink the gas.
 
okay, update:
my math was wrong. new cost of rice: ~$11.5 (ordering in bulk)
CONCLUSION
Drink the gas.
- 100 grams of raw white rice is 365 calories, meaning that it's about 3650 calories per kg. 29k calories of rice is 8 kilograms.
  Where are you buying rice that it costs $75/kg???
  
  I did my math wrong lol
  Found some at 66c/lb. Need 17.5 lbs. $11.5 👌
- If you drink a whole canister of gas, that's enough to cover your nutritional needs for the rest of your life!
  
  BRB
  
  Also, gas is less toxic than vitamin C. So you should be fine! :D
- Yeah but I don't have to carry an actual ton of weight on my bike.
  Except when I'm taking yo mama home after date night
  
  stfu nerd
  My mom has lost a ton of weight and im v proud of her 😡
  
  Your mom is so fat when she sits around the house she's morbidly obese.
  
  Aww snap!!
- Taking this further, that $4.60 of gas will power the most efficient car for about an hour.
  That $12 of rice is enough energy for you to power your bike for like 50 hours.
  Conclusion: Just drive your car. Do you really want to waste 49 hours on your bike? /s
  
  But that's because that fuel is used to do much, much more work. if you scale down the unit to, say, a scooter (50cc) it will last much longer. Most scoots have 1gal tanks and they can get over 100mi per tank.
  That being said everyone will think you lost your license due to drunk driving so to prevent this you should replace alcohol in your life and simply drink gas.
  Real ones will switch to drinking biofuels because they're better for the environment.
  Ethanol is a good option.
  Pro-tip: make sure it's not denatured and is purified—it's less dangerous for consumption that way.
  Wait a second...
- If you bike regularly, you actually don't spend more calories. You only see calorie burn uptick when first taking on new exercise, which falls off over time back to your usual normal calorie cost. Because of this, that calorie cost for a biker is calorie intake they'd already consume even if they didn't bike. It's essentially free, in contrast to the gas of the car which is always a cost.
  Checkmate liberal. /s
  
  You can't convince me of free energy
  NICE TRY SCIENTOLOGY
- Gross metabolic efficiency is gonna be around ~25% so you're best off measuring kilojoules of work as an approximation of calorie burn, and then compare that to how many gallons of gas would be consumed when in a car, but you'd still probably wanna drink the gas
- One thing to account for is that humans are very inefficient at converting food into energy output. Only about 25% efficient to be precise. So you need to eat about 4 times more calories than you end up outputting into the bicycle.
  The same thing applies to ICE cars, their engines are also very inefficient. EVs however reach an efficiency of 80-90%, they only end up using more energy than a bicycle because of how much faster you usually drive them. But if you drove an EV at the same speed you would ride a bicycle they would be vastly more efficient. And that's not even accounting for the amount of energy used to produce food in the first place, which is a lot higher than the energy content of said food.
  The superior choice is obviously an electric bicycle though when you want to have the most sustainable transportation, you get all of the efficiency gains from a battery operated motor, whilst still having the low weight and drag of a bicycle
  
  EVs however reach an efficiency of 80-90%,
  That's not accounting for the inefficiency of turning heat into electricity in the first place (turbine generation is about 90% at utility scale) or turning photons into usable electricity (photovoltaics are at about 20%). And with turbines, you have to account for the inefficiencies in processing the fuel to get it to that point.
  The whole universe is just an entropy generator and we're gonna lose a lot of useful energy as we try to manipulate it.
  
  "low drag of a bicycle" citation needed

Actual unironic gigachad moment

And park directly in the immediate front of the building I'm visiting. No circling around and around without finding a space to park my overly expensive rust box. Just arrive, lock the bike to a post and be there.
Totally different experience in that aspect alone.
- Hm... Is there any law that says I can't ride my bike in the store? 🤔
  Sure would make shopping faster.
  
  where I live is quite common to ride bikes for transportation, lots of places have stickers disallowing riding the bikes in the buidings
  You can still take the bike in in some cases, but not ride it.
  
  idk about bikes, but I saw some madlads rolling slowly on their electric scooters in shops
  
  I don't think laws forbid that.
  Ask the shop owner what he thinks of your idea.

be me
be downtown on bicycle
actual protected bike lanes
zipping past hundreds of people that decided to drive for some reason
bumper to bumper traffic
road capacity literally maxed out
honking and yelling at almost every intersection
pic related
- Road capacity in traffic: basically zero Single bike lane capacity: absolutely massive.

Be American
Living paycheck to paycheck
Need job
Good worker
Work overtime when needed
Trying to pay off car
Smug biker does a driveby near open car window
Rethink my life
Realize U.S. infrastructure often requires vehicles
In middle of daily 40min commute, one way
Realize the same distance on bike would be two hours
Depresso
- This is why we need good public transit on top of good biking infrastructure. The two working together let's you get anywhere a car can go while not taking a lot longer.
  
  I miss Japan's public transport. Never felt like I needed a car while in the city.
  
  You're not wrong, but that's not going to work over the entire country. There's just too much space to cover; the country would go bankrupt trying to provide mass transit everywhere that it's needed. So while this could be, if you could convince people to actually do it, a solution in urban areas, it's never going to work out in the thousands of miles of country and they have the exact same problems. They just have less traffic and more empty space to cross.
- Get a closer job or move closer to your job if it's a good reliable job. I did and it's fucking wonderful! Riding gets easier and easier as you get stronger and better cardio too.
  Took me a long time, a lot of work, and some luck but I can't recommend it enough. Most days I ride my bike or skateboard, but even walking doesn't take long. I only resort to a car if I'm too injured to ride/skate/walk far or the weather makes it too dangerous (which is rare, I've ridden through more storms than I can count lol, icy conditions suck though).
  Damnit, now I want to go for a ride.
  
  just get a job closer to your home
  just move
  Idk man, not sure either of those are the easy solutions you're implying them to be.
- Everyone employed is living paycheck to paycheck; you just spend it all
  
  Some lucky few still get to build up an emergency fund, possibly retire, or even become independently wealthy, but yeah, most of us are working class stiffs.

Be me
Download Pokemon Go
Start running to work
Gotta catch them all
4 months later run a 50K
"What was your training like?"
"I dunno, run more?"
(true story back in 2022)
- Bro pokemon WENT
- You might want to check out walkscape to run even more
  
  I couldn't get into Walkscape, but it's definitely better for running as you don't need it open until you're done.
- I’m trying to figure out, how do we get them to POKÉMON GO TO THE POLLS

Ngl, I have a nice ass and legs. Nice compliments, too! It's worth it to bike everywhere if your city allows it
I forgot to mention that the cost of repairs is also dirt cheap here.
- pics or it didn't happen
  
  I'll let these babes do the talkin'
- I can't bicycle anywhere. Well, at least my commute would be certain death, There is a nice bike trail a few miles away but I'd have buy a bike and a rack for my car to haul it over there. Can barely afford the car.
  
  Depending on your personal circumstances you might not need a rack. I always just take the front wheel off (quick release) and shove my bike in the back seat
  
  Well, at least my commute would be certain death,
  RIDE TO VALHALLA! WITNESS! WITNESSSS!!

Given that's a greentext, legitimately expected anon to somehow get injured or killed by some not paying attention driver on unsafe road or something. Glad he didn't.

I do think it's funny that America has the worst traffic in the western world, yet in Europe we can get by just fine with roads built by people that even the Romans considered to be ancient.
- That's because Europeans invest in all forms of transport, so you don't get people who can't fathom the concept of taking any trip from point A to B in anything other than a car.
  Edit: not sure why I'm getting downvoted. I think Europe does it way better if that wasn't obvious
  
  Would be great if Europe actually invested in all forms of transport. Where I live, the rail system is run into the ground instead of getting maintenance and expansion.
- It has to be said that people from one place underestimate the other...
  In Europe, 100 miles is a long distance.
  In America, 100 years is a long time.
- I mean there has been some work done to those roads in the meantime and it’s not remarkable you chose to build them on the quickest way to go from A to B while keeping construction cost in mind…

Me unironically wanting to do this
100F outside most of the year because Florida (that's 38C for you europoors)
Have to wake up at 4am before sunset to be able to ride at all
work at 9
Can't into roadbike :(
- It would take me 3 hours to get to work on a bike, and 3 hours home. I’d love to be able to do it, but Vancouver is expensive and I don’t want to waste my free time biking in 30° weather
  
  Where do you live, Chilliwack? Lol. I get it though heat sucks. I'm in Kelowna and bike whenever I can, but I'm not showing up to dinner or a meeting drenched. Errands or casual hangs though sure why not. It is a little less soupy humid here so even 40° isn't awful as long as you're moving and have a breeze.
- 4am before sunset
  4am is technically "before sunset", but I assume you meant "before sunrise".
  I used to live in central Florida (so not even the benefit of the ocean climate) and I rode my bike everywhere and I lived in a house with no AC. I was young and high all the time, which I guess made being soaked in sweat and stinky all the time bearable. Somehow I still got play from women - apparently I was cute back then and I was hyper-fit, at least. Absolutely no fucking way I could stand that shit now.

My job is 15 mountainy miles away, and when I show up drenched in bicycle sweat everyone in the office says I smell bad
- People shouldn't live that far away from their workplaces. They didn't used to, before we invented shitboxes.
  
  I would love to live 5 minutes away from my workplace
  But I saved about $300,000 on my mortgage when I bought a more rural house that isn't near the city/my office building
- You could get a decent e-bike?
  
  "But they're so expensive, I'm not paying that much for a bike! I'd rather pay 10 times as much for cheap car that'll sell all my text messages to data scraping companies while polluting the environment and destroying my future."
- You can get an E-Bike or other personal electric vehicle if you want. Eco-friendly, inexpensive, fun, and won't leave you drenched in sweat.
- That’s the downside bike enthusiasts like to gloss over about - and in summer it doesn’t even have to be mountainous.

I always wanted to learn how to ride a bike. Always looked like fun.
- Do it. I took up cycling last year (although I learned as a kid) and now it's literally my favourite thing to do ever. I'm also the fittest I've ever been.
  
  I wouldn't even know how to start. And, even though I know it's silly, I'd be super nervous to try in front of people. I'm fat. They'd laugh at me 🤣
- Absolutely go do it! Riding a bike is one of the simplest joys in life once you get the hang of it. I live ripping around doing all my errands on it. I have a reasonably nice vehicle but really I only drive in the worst of the winter, or to get out of town to do some activity. In the summer that activity is usually mountain biking, go figure!
- So do it?

Yeah, but do you dress like a chode and hang out at vitamin shops?

Couldn’t finish reading that disaster of a paragraph. What a fucking loser, “bicyclefag?” Calling people “tards?”
Yeah… fuck that guy.

Wish it was just that easy to use bikes as transport. Everything feels like 1km far away.
- 1km is basically nothing by bike?
  
  Depends on gradient, but yeah
  
  Maybe, I just lost my sense of size/distance.

Too bad for the lung cancer
- Pretty cool study. Shame its so small of a sample size, but it shows some very positive signs.
  
  Idk, I used to cycle to work a lot before changing jobs, and I've got to tell you, the fumes I felt in my throat were more noticeable than anything I've ever experienced in my car. Plus when exercising you simply breathe more.
- People who regularly cycle live longer than people who don't.

Have fun commuting 30 miles to work on that thing. Especially when there's 8 or 10 inches of snow, -10 wind-chill, or there's a thunderstorm rolling in. I've seen people do it; they look absolutely fucking miserable and it's a miracle it doesn't kill them.
- Enter the saviour of the commuter - trains.
  
  I like trains
- sees happy person
  gets mad
  
  Yeah good luck driving your car through a tornado. I've seen it, these people didn't look happy.
- Respect to those folks. A miserable ride is often rewarding because it's one of those lows that is eminently temporary and gives you an appreciation for the highs, especially if you are dressed appropriately so as not to catch a cold or some such. Kind of like shoveling snow for that sweet sweet mug of hot chocolate on the sofa afterwards. But yeah, also a good city will provide alternative options for its citizens, trains, buses, rideshare even. If a 30 mile bike ride is the only alternative to driving from place A to place B, your government doesn't want you to have any kind of freedom to choose how you get from place A to place B, if there are no affordable housing options or good job opportunities that change that equation, your government is working on behalf of the big car manufacturers and dealers to keep you enslaved in debt to them, which is pretty fucked up
- Bruh I will literally just stay home if there is that much snow I'm not fucking stupid
- You may have misread the history. The man is having fun with his current commute and he does not seems to be looking for some sort of a change in his routine.
  
  Some corrections:
  You may have misread the history. The man is having fun with his current commute and he is does not seems to be looking for some sort of a change in his routine.
- That's when it gets fun no bad weather just bad gear
- Don't live in the USA, simple as.
- Children in Norway ride their bikes to school every day, even in the snow. Are you saying you're weaker than these literal children and need your climate controlled box to keep you comfortable? You can also choose to live closer to work if you want. Surprisingly most adults get to choose where they live.