Considering biking for all of your transport? Its an easy choice if you're one of those slender single people living on a bike trail leading from dorm to classes. What about the rest of us?
I'm going to out some of my personal life to give an example of who can do it.
We are a very middle class family making between 40 and 50K, which in a major west coast city is lower middle class. I am 47, married, and we have a 21 month old son. I am the "pedaler" of the bike that gets our toddler around town and groceries home.
We chose strategically as to where to live. There's no freakin' way would I say you can live just anywhere and do everything by bike. But thats why they make U-Haul trucks, so you can move to where pedestrian/biking is honestly doable.
We didn't just get rid of a car, or have it stashed for times of cheating a human-powered commitment. We've never had a car since becoming a family. Work is 1.2 miles away along an urban trail, and our main store is 1.2 miles away on another urban trail. We were committed pedestrians before becoming committed Bakfietsers. Thus, getting a bike that can carry a toddler and groceries feels like a expansion of our world, not a compression.
$3000 for a bike is something serious, especially in the post-mini-depression the US went into after 2008. We make less than 50K per year. Outing myself a little more here: I'm not choosing costly things to symbolically save the global environment. I'm pretty much an all-pragmatic, not into symbolic ethical acts. All that said, I chose the Bakfiets as our family SUV for the next ten years or more.
Thats our story, our situation, and our solution.
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