Evelien wrote:I'm so happy I was born where I was born
. I looooove riding my bike, it gives me freedom. I'm 30 but why the heck would I get an expensive driver's license when I can go anywhere on my bike..? ^^
Europe and the UK are fantastic for bike riders.
US....not so much.
Where I live, I am 10 miles to the nearest town. Summer has started and it is (I am going to use Celsius degrees for Evelien's sake here) 26.5 degrees in the day. By the time you get home from shopping by bike, milk would be sour, butter would be soft and ice cream would be melted. By the end of next month it will be 37.7 degrees in the day. At some point we will have weeks long where it never gets below 43.3 degrees in the day. This will not stop until close to the end of October, when it will begin to rain. We can get as much as 5 cm of rain in an hour. Then will come winter. This winter was grand, we got almost no snow. Last winter we got a meter of snow. This year instead of snow we got ice storms, again we were lucky we kept power, but one year we got an ice storm that put a 3 cm of ice on the road that lasted two weeks. Have you ever ridden a bike on ice?
And I live in a state where the winter is generally very mild. Where I grew up, farther north, there was about 1/3 of a meter of snow on the ground all winter long and outside of the main roads the streets were icy all winter long.
Also, car drivers are very careless around bike riders. They pay no attention to them and many people are hurt every year because they were riding bikes and a car driver "didn't see them."
This is why in the US we "can't go everywhere on a bike."