I would like to re-balance out your balancing: If you ride a bike every day, you probably won't be obese for long. Decent e-bikes do fine even with obese peopl

I would like to re-balance out your balancing: If you ride a bike every day, you probably won't be obese for long. Decent e-bikes do fine even with obese people, the motor is not the primary motor, it is only meant to assist your pedaling. Powerful LED-based lights for bikes exist, and will absolutely both make you visible to anyone, and let you see any potholes etc. You can carry plenty on a bike. For instance there are panniers and pannier bags front and back, bike trailers, backpacks made specifically for biking. Go further and you have cargo bikes, both trikes, reverse trikes and bakfiets/Long Johns. Beyond that, there are specialized moving "van" e-bikes, which I've seen used in the Netherlands. Toddlers can ride trailer bikes, which attach to your own bike, and lets them pedal and help out, preparing them to ride their own bikes. Bikes don't toss people over the handlebars "all the time", only when people have absolutely no feeling with the front brake and just jam it on as hard as they can. Learning a bit of basic motor skill completely prevents it from happening. In 30+ years of cycling, I have never lost traction once. It's basically impossible to force the rear wheel to slip unless you jam the brake for a sweet powerslide. For the front wheel, just steer around any gravel or other loose material in corners, it's a very basic bike-riding skill. Distance is a factor, that is a tradeoff you make for a less expensive house, but also a significantly longer commute. This is where bikes work great in tandem with public transit. You ride the bike to the station and bring it with you and ride the proverbial last mile. It does take a little bit of effort to optimize for better cycling conditions, but the payoff is absolutely worth it. And it won't be a perfect solution for 100% of people, because it doesn't have to be. As long as we get a significant percentage of people to bike, that's a victory! The bicycle is one of the greatest mobility-increasing inventions of human history. It put entire populations on wheels, let them transport their produce much easier and much farther than simply carrying it. They're inexpensive, simple to repair and DIY. Millions of Americans in cities like NYC, LA, SF, Seattle love their bikes. The reason they are not more popular is due to the overall infrastructure in the US being hardcore focused almost entirely on cars and cars only.