Oh yeah, when you bring the price thing in to it you could buy a really nice new ebikes every year for the average cost of keeping a car legal and on the road.

Here’s the thing. Everyone will bike like the Dutch and the Dutch will bike even more. It’s not a question of “if.” We are already past peak oil. There will only be more wars and more climate change. Those who survive will be relying on bikes because petroleum won’t be an option anymore and electric cars are not a real solution. Cities will become more dense, suburbs will decay, in all likelihood huge parts of the US will completely collapse because life will be impossible without cars. We know petroleum is finite and there is no other technology that will replace this.

We can prepare by rolling out infrastructure now, or we can just keep going and crash as hard as possible in to a wall. No matter what we do, we’re going to stop using gas. I hope we do it on our terms rather than waiting for tons of people to die before we fix it, but I honestly don’t have a lot of hope. But hey, some people are starting to wake up so maybe we can keep that going and save millions of lives.

Don’t worry, when gas becomes $100/gal in the next decade or two the US will become really bicycle friendly.

Bicycle theft is also a problem in the Netherlands, but they still do it. There are also lots of people not in the Netherlands who bike to work and don’t have their bikes stolen.

That’s not the problem. The problem is car culture.

In the Netherlands they have functional bike parking, which makes it a lot harder to steal bikes. They also use wheel locks, which are much harder to cut without damaging the bike. There are also sites like bike index that let you track your bike serial number in case it gets stolen. If you use bike index and your bike is stolen there’s actually a pretty good chance it will be returned. Also, if you buy a bike check it on bike index first to see if it’s stolen.

There are plenty of people who bike in Seattle. Ebikes make it achievable for most people. Also, there are tons of cities that are flat. Why isn’t Austin or LA as bike friendly as Amsterdam or the Hague? Hills aren’t the problem.