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Oxford Professor: Cycling is 10 times more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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Yeah, but bicycles don’t have the same profit margins as cars
Edit: just gonna add that I was being snarky with this comment. I’m for walkable cities with quality public transportation infrastructure.
Bikes really are a downward spiral. First people don't need to spend 20% of your annual salary into their car so they have all this extra money that they can use.
Worse! Since they are now traveling through their city in open air rather in a glass and steel prison they might start noticing local businesses and spend their money there rather than the billionaire's owned giant box store.
And now that they arrive home on their bike they will stay to notice their neighbors, maybe even say hi and start building local communities. It's also much easier to build a local community when you don't have deadly machines that you need to avoid passing in front of your house all the time.
My $4k piece of carbon and $3k hunk of titanium would like to have a word...
I would bet just about anything that the only reason profit margins could possibly be higher for a car is due to volume
which, if everyone rode bikes, wouldn't be an issue at all.
Absolute profit, sure
cars are more expensive, so they'll win out.
$7k doesn't get you much of a car. That's the beauty of bikes, getting something that is basically professional-tier is still quite within reason to be purchased by an average consumer.
and yet people will be shocked that a decent everyday bike can cost as little as £500. For some reason they expect them to be practically free. For much less you can only buy a BSO (Bicycle-Shaped Object)
You can definitely get a good daily-driver for less than that if you buy used and aren't scared of learning a bit of bike maintenance.
Alternatively, people should look into cycling co-ops. There's one in my town that refurbishes old bikes and sells them for around $100 (Canadian)
I think maybe in total I've sunk ~$2k into my road bike, and that's with upgrades for more than half of that figure. By being strategic (i.e making liberal use of AliExpress), you can get a very high quality bicycle for shockingly little money.
Lol $7K doesn't get you much of a bike these days, at least if you're trying to keep up with the lycra warriors. Meanwhile you can still get a top-shelf '90s era bike for $50.
Idk, I've built a very respectable bike for $2k. Sure, if you want to top spec absolutely everything, that will cost you, but you really, really don't need it.
Might be less of a difference than we would think since every shared car would presumably become multiple bikes.
Eg: Family of 4 that have 1 car, turns into 4 bikes?
Of course big oil wouldn't like that very much. Screw you big oil, you are a turd.
Around here families of four probably have at least two cars. I didn't realise what 'car-dependency' looked like until I moved out of London. People tell me, "You don't have transport," but I walk, I have a bike, I get the bus or the train.
It's worse for the economy if people have to buy and run cars because that's money that could have spent elsewhere. It's "lost opportunity cost" to have to have cars.
Bicycles also help reduce health costs. As does walking and good public transport.
have you seen the latest price of the most expensive bikes? Maybe not a car price of the last couple years, but the most expensive bikes are the same price of small car in the 90's and 00's.
And please also note, that people have more than 1 bike (but not the expensive ones)
People don't buy carbon fiber bicycles for commuting and those who do tend to have them stolen unless the have a closed and locked place to but them at both ends of the commute.
If there's one thing I learned from living in The Netherlands is that you want a bicycle for day to day commute which is impeccably maintained whilst looking like crap (which explains why most bicycles outside Amsterdam Central Station look shabby).
Fancy bicycles are for Sunday Cyclists.
Also park your shitty looking bike next to one of those fancy bikes.
👍
Modern bikes are beyond insane. Like, $10K to $15K is considered normal and appropriate - just to get disc brakes, electronic shifting, internally-routed cabling etc. Meanwhile I look for '90s era hybrids on Craigslist for $50 or thereabouts and get thousands of miles out of them - and somehow I'm still able to shift gears and stop when necessary.
I’m an avid cyclist and I would never spend 10k on a bike. For my nice favorite bike it was $2500. I commute on a vintage road bike and it works great, it was $200 on fb marketplace.
Like, with downtube shifters? I obviously like to poo-poo advanced bike technology, but indexed shifting is one thing I'm hugely in favor of.
Yeah it’s a Bianchi Europa. I guess the downtube shifters are bearable for me if I’m not racing. Especially since if it gets stolen I only lose $200. And I guess the $200 of work I put into it for funsies lol.
Agree. I saw a review of an e-bike that could ring using an alarm if you didn't find it or something. Why?!
We need to develop e-bike and cargo-bike vehicules to be fully inclusive to people who can use regular mecanical bike but why make it full of electronics and computer? They only needs lightings and a motor, that's not rocket-science.
Electronic shifting?
Yeah, like the derailleur is moved by a little electric motor instead of by cable. So you can control it with your phone - which is considered important for some reason.
As I understand it, the gears always being perfectly indexed is the big selling point for electronic gears.
I wouldn't know since I run mechanical, but this is what I've heard.
I mean, in 40+ years of bike riding (always mechanical) I've never had a problem with the indexing on shifters. At most I occasionally have to click a lever twice instead of once, or twist the handlebar a bit more. It just seems like a (very expensive) solution in search of a problem.
You've never used the barrel adjuster in 40 years of riding?
Yeah, never. I don't even know how to use it. I just get my bikes tuned up at the local bike shop every year. FWIW I'm kind of embarrassed by my lack of bike mechanic knowledge, and I recently bought an old Diamondback for commuting with the goal of doing all the work on it myself.
No need to be embarrassed. Basically you turn it to get your gears to index properly, which prevents the need to push a bit extra on the shifting levers to actually get the gears to shift.
You can try it yourself by turning a bit in one direction and then seeing if the gears shift better - look for no sounds being present and the shift completing without any additional push. If it got worse, then turn the other direction. Seems a lot more intimidating than it actually is.
I used to be woefully deficient in mechanic knowledge, but then I started going to the local coop bike workshop, which is probably one of my favourite places in the world.
Oh my god
Wow. I bought my city ebike for about $2K and it’s served me fine. I’ve maybe spent $50 in maintenance in the year since, and $200 in cycling gear.