Lots of manufacturers stop calling that frame shape woman’s bikes, but rather find terms like step through or low step and so on to be better suited. This frame design is a lot more accessible for people who aren’t as mobile anymore (think old people, people with hip problems, heavy people) and are also much easier to handle with tall cargo on the back, typical example would be a child seat.
For the average person, this frame design is probably preferable as there are no benefits to the typical male frame shape.
My parents think it looks odd when a guy sits on one of these, but then my parents are in their sixties :>
Since I am a father and decided to bring my kid with me on bike rides, I needed that frame. It’s just convenient to not have to Jean Claude Van Damme before each ride.
I bought a step through because of the child seat too. Luckily before I dropped cash on a new bike I had already discovered that there is no way to swing your leg over the bike frame when a child seat is attached.
The disadvantage is higher weight for the same structural strength because the lower and upper tube are closer together (or combined into one tube) so the leverage is much less.
I dont mind the “mens” frame, but if other people want to use a low step frame I am not going to call them sissies or something stupid like that.
Well I’m 30 and I have 3, I’m really happy for everyone that doesn’t need and therefore just dont own cars, must be enormous savings per month on top of the lesser impact on the climate.
Edit: Aaaand there comes the car hate- ya’ll are talking about not imposing shit upon others, yet here you are judging me and my wife for not making it by without cars because of specific circumstances 🤷♂️ aight hypocrites.
As long as you dont drive a deathmachine through a populated city, nonconsentually transfering risk from yourself onto others, nobody ought care my friend. We all need farmers and miners and whatnot. Y’all could drive a turbo boosted afterburning steamroller with JATO assist as an emergency break for all we care, as long as its not harming others.
Most of the buddies I have who are both bike commuters and motorheads have their fun at the track or on the mountain roads. I’d take a 3000$ beat up Miata over these land yachts any day. I don’t understand the kind of people who roll coal to the whole foods parking lot in their spotless F690-compensator-edition. It seems as antisocial as it is unfun.
But thats my personal frustration you see. I can’t drive fun cars like that anymore because selfish pricks have made the roads less safe for everyone other than themselves.
Nobody is mad at you for having a car thats reasonably sized. You should be the most angry about these child-flattening-front-over-machines because youre the one who they’ll kill while they’re playing pokemon go on their dash television instead of looking at the road.
These assholes are destroying your roads, giving your kids asthma, and running over your friends and family. And they hate having their sociopathy pointed out.
Turns out most car pollution is actually from rubber tires flaking off and putting microplastics in your lungs.
This gets worse the heavier the car is, and because electric cars are heavier, theres a chance that EVS could actually be worse for particulate emmission than moderately efficient regular cars.
Wear is nonlinearly dependant on number of cycles, materials, and load. I’ve not seen anything in the litterature that indicates rubbers can maintain safety while decreasing their amount of particulate pollution. In fact, ive seen that they are a direct trade with one another.
Lighter cars being forced to drive slower, would do something about it. Also, simply restricting the number of cars in a city the same way we restricted the density of coal burning power plants in a city would also solve the problem in the exact same way.
Non-rubber materials such as steel do not have this problem, which is why trains are good.
Emissions Analytics provides various samples from its tests to give an all-round view of tyre pollution. The team has now tested more than 300 tyres on the European market, identifying 78 organic compounds and recognising 46 hazards codes. It turns out the least toxic tyre compound is 85% less polluting than the most toxic version.
I think the answer does lie in using less toxic tyres, as a starting point, something I was suspecting.
Another source says:
The International Union for Conservation of Nature pegs tires as the second leading source of microplastic pollution in oceans, and one 2017 study found a global per capita average of .81 kilograms in tire emissions per year, ranging from .23 kg per year in India to 4.7 kg (roughly 10 pounds) in the US. That may seem minor stacked up against the nearly 300 pounds in plastic waste the average American generates each year, but microplastics are tiny by definition — and an insidious source of toxins that researchers are only beginning to understand.
There is a colossal difference between India (where I live) and US, for example.
Also another article points out only large BEVs will be heavy, as usual BEVs will become similar in weight to normal fossil fuel cars by 2025.
Motorcycles produce exponentially lower pollution than cars, and cycles more or less produce none, which should be used, but cars are a need due to shitty designing of cities, and capitalist growth chasing.
Oh that’s excellent news. I hope this won’t be used an excuse to neither lower vehicle speeds nor improve the places that we live. I also don’t know if this will offset the doubling or tripling of the average automobile in terms of weight that is happening. Also, I fear that if these tires are even slightly less profitable to create, they will not be adopted, rendering fixation on them worse than useless.
It’s also a massive issue that some tires and asphalts are far quieter than others, which makes the people forced to live near high speed car infrastructure substantially less miserable. Noise induced stress is one of those health effects that I’m personally too anxious to read in detail about, as it scares the hell out of me. It’d be wonderful if quieter asphalt and tires were also the same kind that were less polluting, but I have learned that tech brained ideas pitched by car companies claiming to solve their massive problems rarely do.
Also, perhaps “EV magazine” has a vested interest in portraying inherent problems with automobiles as non-inherent?
I don’t want less car induced lung cancer, I want no car induced lung cancer.
Halving vehicle weights or ranges or top speeds would also nonlinearly decrease tire wear while also decreasing vehicle cost and danger to others, but here in the US none of those things are happening. Instead, every possible negative attribute is worsening, along with corresponding fluff pieces and propoganda to convince truck owners that they aren’t doing the harm that they are doing. I also feel terrified that these fluff pieces are poisoning wells of activism around the world, harming the entire human species rather than just the imperial core.
It’s true that smaller, two wheeled vehicles are drastically better for the environment, and the fact that so many cities in europe and southeast asia are able to exist with so few “cars” is a disagreement I have with your last, excellent sentence. I very much wish I posessed the intelligence to separate Private automobile ownership from Commercial automobile ownership, but I forget to most of the time. I do genuinely believe that private automobile ownership should be as rare as policy can make it, just like it is (kind of) for airplanes in the US.
I only shared the EV magazine link as I saw fair amount of neutrality. I knew this was going to come up, conflict of interest usually does become a problem, but it looks OK here on this topic.
Its all about the Pareto’s principle, no matter what it is. Find the Pareto frontier, and target it, but with proper assumptions as there can be more than 1 case targets. So that would look like, in no order:
an actual (and not for media optics) cutdown on speeds
less weight of cars without compromising safety
methods to hinder tyre particles from getting out at all (Tyre Collective built a device releasing next year, as these particles are electrostatic)
using less cars and more motorcycles
better and less toxic tyres
any tyre companies penalised, and tyre industry regulated for tyre pollution like how tailpipe pollution got regulated and successfully controlled
In the US, the government dispropotionately subsidizes car ownership and punishes cheap/sustainable living with actionable threats of death at the hands of sociopathic truck owners with persecution complexes.
Except drivers actually do that then cry oppression over giving up a foot on the edge of the road, and outright communism if you suggest a partitioned bike lane or improved public transit.
and if a city is designed right without so many parking lot requirements, travel times become lower, people become safer, noise levels go down dramatically, you appreciate that hopefully well designed city and its businesses, much lower stress levels when commuting, and you feel calmer as well.
mYHAHHAHQHQHQHQGQ IM WVERTWHERE YOU CANT GET AWAY FROM ME IMA MAKE YOU CRAZY BRO YHEB YOULL BE PUT IN A RUBBER ROOM A RUBBER ROOM WITH RATS THEN THE RATSBWILL MAKE YOU CRzy BRO
Tranalated this means The Abyss called forth the souls of the sinful and the souls of the innocent. your insolence will be punished with eternal torments, the likes of which only the gods have experienced.
In response to this
I am not crazy! I know he swapped those numbers! I knew it was 1216. One after Magna Carta. As if I could ever make such a mistake. Never. Never! I just - I just couldn’t prove it. He - he covered his tracks, he got that idiot at the copy shop to lie for him. You think this is something? You think this is bad? This? This chicanery? He’s done worse. That billboard! Are you telling me that a man just happens to fall like that? No! He orchestrated it! Jimmy! He defecated through a sunroof! And I saved him! And I shouldn’t have. I took him into my own firm! What was I thinking? He’ll never change. He’ll never change! Ever since he was 9, always the same! Couldn’t keep his hands out of the cash drawer! But not our Jimmy! Couldn’t be precious Jimmy! Stealing them blind! And he gets to be a lawyer? What a sick joke! I should’ve stopped him when I had the chance! And you - you have to stop him!
A very real thing that has lobbiests and a department you have to go to. You know, the DPV, the department of pedalled vehicles, its where you are forced to do basically everything from register to vote to get a death certificate. It’s CRAZY how much influence Big Bicycle has over our society.
I mean did you know that ~40,000 americans per year are killed by traffic violence every year. I bet 99% of those are from extremely fat men riding osmium bicycles at 50 mph, running people over!
And did you know that bicycles use alchemy to create almost all of the pollution that coats our cities, adversely affecting the health of everybody who doesn’t bike?
I mean hell, can you imagine bulldozing empoverished minority neighborhoods in every city in the US for 50 years to build these federally funded 12 land elevated bike lanes that totally exist? The nerve of those cyclists advocacy groups!
Damn bicycles, who the heck do they think they are?!
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