Replying here to your below comment because of the "stack" limit. You wrote "I want to go to visit my friend Bob who lives 10 miles away but the rain is pouring down." as a justification for ownership of a car.
We just went through 2 weeks of heavy rain here in Germany. I am only biking (not even an E-Bike) and what I did is just looked at the rain radar with a simple app, add a bit of buffer time, packed rain clothes in my bike bag and just go. I was only once a bit wet because I was too lazy to pull out my jacket as I came back home one evening.
You will always find a good excuse to keep the apparent comfort of a car, but once you start to really bike on a regular basis, in my case, I found the bike way nicer, you bring movement in your life. It helps my health and my mood, which is a nice side effect.
> Maybe you enjoy half an hour cycling in rain that's going to last 6 hours, but I don't.
At some point, people are going to have to start preferring long term survival over short term enjoyment.
I don’t love getting rained on, and there are days that the last thing I feel like doing is getting on the bike or walking somewhere, but feeling like doing something is often not the primary reason to do it. And I realize that if I can’t/won’t make the harder decisions, I have no business encouraging others to do the same.
Societies collectively need to change habits and shift mindsets about the ways we live life. It certainly won’t be because it all feels good.
I’m not saying there is no place for cars, and clearly there are situations where a bike won’t work. But that does not mean our current car culture is acceptable either.
> At some point, people are going to have to start preferring long term survival over short term enjoyment.
Two things on this: A. Electric cars are now viable. B. Even if they weren't, current climate change projections are not a threat to human survival, merely going to make life harder by a hard to quantify amount.
We just went through 2 weeks of heavy rain here in Germany. I am only biking (not even an E-Bike) and what I did is just looked at the rain radar with a simple app, add a bit of buffer time, packed rain clothes in my bike bag and just go. I was only once a bit wet because I was too lazy to pull out my jacket as I came back home one evening.
You will always find a good excuse to keep the apparent comfort of a car, but once you start to really bike on a regular basis, in my case, I found the bike way nicer, you bring movement in your life. It helps my health and my mood, which is a nice side effect.