https://maxmautner.com/2026/10/11/how-fast-is-a-car.html
The median American worker earns $23.80/hour, or ~$19 after taxes. A used car driven the US average of ~10,900 miles a year costs ~$8,200, counting $1,700 a year for a parking space at home. That is ~430 hours of work before the car moves. A new car takes ~700 hours. A $999 e-bike ridden 3,000 miles a year takes ~25 hours.
People who bike everywhere, do any of you live in rural or suburban areas? There have been accidents with bikers here and almost universally people blame the biker and are really dehumanizing toward them. We also have an higher than average amount of giant trucks driving here. And there’s no bike lanes. How do you transport groceries?
That happens in cities too, americans love murdering cyclists regardless of location.
As for groceries, most people get saddlebags.
If you bicycle-only it you kind of have to change the weekly shop to 2-3 trips a week, best included in your commute, dunno how feasible that is for rural / suburban (assuming) america.
On a technical level panniers.
Is that not replaced with delivery yet? I don’t do a weekly shop anymore, i order online and it comes to me.
Technically better for everyone because even if it’s 1 weekly shop per person a delivery driver can be 1 vehicle for 30 houses or however many deliveries can fit as opposed to 30 vehicles.
That feels pretty contingent about being in a somewhat urban area tbh.
That’s why I’m asking. I don’t know how it is over there. I don’t know what’s available or if it’s being offered.
Where I live, ordering groceries usually costs more. The prices are higher and there is a delivery fee. But when I bike to work (often in the summer) it is a struggle to grocery shop since I can only fit so many items in my pannier, which also has my professional clothes in it. So it really does require 2-3 trips to the store instead of one big trip with my car
It sucks in places without basic infrastructure. Here my calculus comes down to the scale of the fuel crisis. I don’t see it getting better before it gets much worse. If that happens, the number of cars on the roads will decrease until they’re safer to ride on and there will be more public demand for stopgap infrastructure. At the same time your car will be prohibitively expensive to drive and whatever bus lines run there will also probably be hit hard. I’d buy an ebike in that situation so I’m not entirely stranded, transporting it in my car to conserve fuel where I can safely use it now.
That’s how it played out in the 1970s here. Everything was super car-centric until the pumps ran dry, then people had to switch and the region had to quickly start building out cycling infrastructure. I think this is fuel crisis going to be our generation’s Big One, so my purchasing is all anticipating degrowth and the worst economic conditions in living memory. At least with an ebike no matter how bad things get I can guarantee my own mobility and ability to carry 60kg for 50-80km without burning calories. A cyberdonkey is collapse insurance.
I no longer live in the suburubs, but our household had two cars when we did, and it would not have been safe or possible to do our commutes or errands on our bikes. Now we live in the city, and have zero cars.
I bus to work quite often, and I’ll probably do it in the winter more often. Not because of the weather, but because it’s so dark in the morning now, and so I don’t feel safe riding on some sections of my commute. Getting into the industrial park where I work involves a section of strode with no shoulder, and I can easily imagine getting splattered by a semi truck who drifted a few feet off the road.
We have baskets and panniers on our bikes, as well as a kid’s bike trailer which has a little extra storage in the back. We typically shop for groceries twice a week.
We share a Coscto card with a family member, so we’ll go maybe once a month with them and buy a bunch of stuff in bulk. So in terms in terms of total volume of groceries, there’s an appreciable amount that we transport by car.
We make pretty much all our meals at home too, we’re not suplementing with restaurants or deliveries (who can afford that?!). I see the Grocery Transport Issue being brought up a lot, but it hasn’t been an issue for us.
when i had the fortune of living somewhere it was practical and safe enough to bike for groceries i’d get a week or ten days’ of food into some panniers and hanging a couple relatively light grocery bags from the handle bars. throw in a backpack and you can probably do two weeks for two people if your life is like that.
if you shop with a basket rather than a cart the point where it gets uncomfortable to put more shit in the basket is decently short of what’s reasonable to bike with both by bulk and weight.
Suburbs and yes people blame the biker for accidents here and are really dangerous towards cyclists. Very few bike lanes.
I transported groceries in a large waterproof Chrome backpack. I could fit and transport 70lbs of groceries on my back at my peak fitness.
I hang grocery bags from my handlebars, but I could just as easily put them in a backpack or a basket on the frame.
Tbh the crosswalks are more dangerous than the rest of the roads, all 3 times that my bike was hit (and the majority of close calls too) were at crossings, less than 10 mph. Hour for hour, driving a car is just as dangerous.