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Read the word "granted" and disregarded the rest of the post. Trying to pass off your experience as some kind of canonical working class struggle when you don't

Read the word "granted" and disregarded the rest of the post. Trying to pass off your experience as some kind of canonical working class struggle when you don't need to pay for food is about as tone deaf as it gets, not to mention starting it with "to put that into context" as if you have ANY idea what that context is. I can tell you're just like "well, the poors can just ride bikes" having never ridden one yourself, otherwise you would know that a bike that you could cycle a 40km to 60km round commute on in a rural area is gonna set you back $2k and you won't get finance on it the way you do with a car, not to mention the fact that the cycling clothes you would need to buy to cover rural distances are mostly in the designer category and therefore very expensive. Not to mention your mechanical service, which if you're commuting daily is probably $80 every six months plus any parts which wear out, $15 for brake pads, $5 every time you puncture any wheel, $60 for new tyres every year, and the occasional unexpected uninsurable $200 "bottom bracket, crank and chainring all wore out at once" repair.

rayiner 6y ago
> Read the word "granted" and disregarded the rest of the post. Trying to pass off your experience as some kind of canonical working class struggle when you don't need to pay for food is about as tone deaf as it gets, not to mention starting it with "to put that into context" as if you have ANY idea what that context is. No, you’re the one lacking context. Most low wage workers are young, and the median American lives 18 miles away from their mom. People making $10/hour living on their own for the first time who have parents or grandparents randomly drop by with food is a very common scenario. People making $10/hour trying to support a family is not. Also, the notion of biking 60 km round trip in rural areas strongly suggests you’ve never been to one. Someone working a $10 service job in a rural county isn’t commuting 30 km each way. My wife grew up in Sibley, Iowa. It’s about a mile and a half across North to south, and less than that East to west. The apartments are all in town, and so are the stores. The people who might need to commute longer are farmers and farm hands, but they make a lot more money. The average farm hand in Iowa with a high school education or less makes $30-40k/year: https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c1-60.html https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c1-60.... (The hours are long, so it works out to $12-15/hour.) They’re not riding bikes.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- maaarghk 6y ago
  Sibley sounds like a nice place, but it's not the whole world.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Most of America is closer to Sibley than to the big coastal cities. Median home value in Osceola County is $100,000, or about double the median income. According to ACS, the median American home is $217,000, about three times the national median income. The median California home price is $615,000, almost 9 times the median income. In the Bay Area, the median home is a million, ten times the median income.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    To expand on rayiner's comment a bit: Sibley sounds pretty much identical to all but the absolute smallest cities/towns I've visited or lived in. Just because they're small doesn't mean they don't have apartments (or trailer parks), nor does it mean they lack grocers or restaurants or auto shops or gas stations or offices. If anything, the average commute is shorter (at least distance-wise) in a rural town/city than a large city, since there's less distance to cover to get from one end of town to the other. Cities tend to grow outward faster than they grow upward, so from a square-cube-law point of view, the bigger the city, the longer the commute (without having to pay through the nose for rent).
yellowapple 6y ago
> I can tell you're just like "well, the poors can just ride bikes" having never ridden one yourself I did ride one to and from work for 3 years, specifically because I couldn't afford a car at the time (and then later did buy a car but couldn't afford to drive it for my daily commute because I was unemployed). > otherwise you would know that a bike that you could cycle a 40km to 60km round commute on in a rural area Maybe if you hadn't "disregarded the rest of the post" you would've read the part about using bus services to cover most of that distance. Bus fares are an additional expense, sure, but you can readily save money on a monthly pass, and plenty of transit systems offer discounted rates for low-income riders (though I think $10/hour might be above the typical threshold). Not that such a commute is typical even in rural areas anyway. "Rural" areas include small towns/cities, and quite a few of the jobs in such towns/cities are within those towns/cities. Ain't everything way out on some random farm (though even in those cases, you'll typically have access to live either on or very close to work; this is a common living arrangement for migrant workers in California). The furthest I had to bike for work was a one-time computer repair job about 13 miles outside of town, uphill in the mountains. Did that on my bike, even while carrying parts and tools. > when you don't need to pay for food Like I said in the comment: even if I didn't have that particular resource (for which I'm grateful and count myself lucky), I still had enough from my paychecks to cover that. That money went into savings and the occasional meal eating out instead. And I still did need to pay for most of my food; the main things they brought were soup and Spam (because they could buy them on the cheap at Costco), plus a bag of rice if I remember right. I was on the hook for anything else. And mind you this was with no roommates and more than $1k/month rent; there were plenty of other areas where I could've trimmed my budget and made things work. > not to mention the fact that the cycling clothes you would need to buy You don't need cycling clothes to ride a bike. > Not to mention your mechanical service, which if you're commuting daily is probably $80 every six months, $15 for brake pads, $5 every time you puncture any wheel, $60 for new tyres every year, All of this is still a tiny fraction of the $250/month figure for a car. Though I will say that in the 3 years I did ride my bike daily I didn't change the tires once. Nor did I change the brake pads. Probably should've taken better care of that thing, lol
labcomputer 6y ago
> otherwise you would know that a bike that you could cycle a 40km to 60km round commute on in a rural area is gonna set you back $2k Pot, meet kettle. That's an almost laughably out of touch estimate for a 40-60km commuter bike. Speaking as someone who has cycle-commuted between 30 and 60km, full time, for the better part of two decades (including a couple winters in the upper midwest and a 10 year stint of not even owning a car), plus recreational riding on the weekends, my response is: Horsefeathers. A nice gravel or cyclocross bike (with components one level below, say, Shimano 105, or SRAM Rival), one that will easily take 10 years / 75,000 miles of daily commuting with moderate maintenance costs, should set you back no more than about $1k. Paying more than $1k doesn't get you a more reliable bike. It gets you a lighter bike (which is often less reliable). And, respectfully, if you're paying $5 every time you puncture a tire, that's a you problem. When you're on a budget, you patch tubes instead of throwing them away. Cranks generally last the life of a frame, and bottom brackets don't suddenly catastrophically fail without warning. You're criticizing someone for not understanding what it's like to live on a low income, but all your cost estimates are from the perspective of an upper-middle income person who rides a fancy bike recreationally on the weekends. Like a politician who thinks that a gallon of milk costs $20.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  And to expand on this: that ain't even factoring in the fact that used bikes exist. As do the dirt-cheap ones at Wal-Mart. Yeah, they suck, but they do the job. I don't know of any electric bikes in this category, of course, but certainly lots of regular ones. Mine was probably nice when it was new, but it was 10+ years old by the time I got it.

rayiner 6y ago

> Read the word "granted" and disregarded the rest of the post. Trying to pass off your experience as some kind of canonical working class struggle when you don't need to pay for food is about as tone deaf as it gets, not to mention starting it with "to put that into context" as if you have ANY idea what that context is. No, you’re the one lacking context. Most low wage workers are young, and the median American lives 18 miles away from their mom. People making $10/hour living on their own for the first time who have parents or grandparents randomly drop by with food is a very common scenario. People making $10/hour trying to support a family is not. Also, the notion of biking 60 km round trip in rural areas strongly suggests you’ve never been to one. Someone working a $10 service job in a rural county isn’t commuting 30 km each way. My wife grew up in Sibley, Iowa. It’s about a mile and a half across North to south, and less than that East to west. The apartments are all in town, and so are the stores. The people who might need to commute longer are farmers and farm hands, but they make a lot more money. The average farm hand in Iowa with a high school education or less makes $30-40k/year: https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c1-60.html https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c1-60.... (The hours are long, so it works out to $12-15/hour.) They’re not riding bikes.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
maaarghk 6y ago
Sibley sounds like a nice place, but it's not the whole world.
- rayiner 6y ago
  Most of America is closer to Sibley than to the big coastal cities. Median home value in Osceola County is $100,000, or about double the median income. According to ACS, the median American home is $217,000, about three times the national median income. The median California home price is $615,000, almost 9 times the median income. In the Bay Area, the median home is a million, ten times the median income.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  To expand on rayiner's comment a bit: Sibley sounds pretty much identical to all but the absolute smallest cities/towns I've visited or lived in. Just because they're small doesn't mean they don't have apartments (or trailer parks), nor does it mean they lack grocers or restaurants or auto shops or gas stations or offices. If anything, the average commute is shorter (at least distance-wise) in a rural town/city than a large city, since there's less distance to cover to get from one end of town to the other. Cities tend to grow outward faster than they grow upward, so from a square-cube-law point of view, the bigger the city, the longer the commute (without having to pay through the nose for rent).

yellowapple 6y ago

> I can tell you're just like "well, the poors can just ride bikes" having never ridden one yourself I did ride one to and from work for 3 years, specifically because I couldn't afford a car at the time (and then later did buy a car but couldn't afford to drive it for my daily commute because I was unemployed). > otherwise you would know that a bike that you could cycle a 40km to 60km round commute on in a rural area Maybe if you hadn't "disregarded the rest of the post" you would've read the part about using bus services to cover most of that distance. Bus fares are an additional expense, sure, but you can readily save money on a monthly pass, and plenty of transit systems offer discounted rates for low-income riders (though I think $10/hour might be above the typical threshold). Not that such a commute is typical even in rural areas anyway. "Rural" areas include small towns/cities, and quite a few of the jobs in such towns/cities are within those towns/cities. Ain't everything way out on some random farm (though even in those cases, you'll typically have access to live either on or very close to work; this is a common living arrangement for migrant workers in California). The furthest I had to bike for work was a one-time computer repair job about 13 miles outside of town, uphill in the mountains. Did that on my bike, even while carrying parts and tools. > when you don't need to pay for food Like I said in the comment: even if I didn't have that particular resource (for which I'm grateful and count myself lucky), I still had enough from my paychecks to cover that. That money went into savings and the occasional meal eating out instead. And I still did need to pay for most of my food; the main things they brought were soup and Spam (because they could buy them on the cheap at Costco), plus a bag of rice if I remember right. I was on the hook for anything else. And mind you this was with no roommates and more than $1k/month rent; there were plenty of other areas where I could've trimmed my budget and made things work. > not to mention the fact that the cycling clothes you would need to buy You don't need cycling clothes to ride a bike. > Not to mention your mechanical service, which if you're commuting daily is probably $80 every six months, $15 for brake pads, $5 every time you puncture any wheel, $60 for new tyres every year, All of this is still a tiny fraction of the $250/month figure for a car. Though I will say that in the 3 years I did ride my bike daily I didn't change the tires once. Nor did I change the brake pads. Probably should've taken better care of that thing, lol

labcomputer 6y ago

> otherwise you would know that a bike that you could cycle a 40km to 60km round commute on in a rural area is gonna set you back $2k Pot, meet kettle. That's an almost laughably out of touch estimate for a 40-60km commuter bike. Speaking as someone who has cycle-commuted between 30 and 60km, full time, for the better part of two decades (including a couple winters in the upper midwest and a 10 year stint of not even owning a car), plus recreational riding on the weekends, my response is: Horsefeathers. A nice gravel or cyclocross bike (with components one level below, say, Shimano 105, or SRAM Rival), one that will easily take 10 years / 75,000 miles of daily commuting with moderate maintenance costs, should set you back no more than about $1k. Paying more than $1k doesn't get you a more reliable bike. It gets you a lighter bike (which is often less reliable). And, respectfully, if you're paying $5 every time you puncture a tire, that's a you problem. When you're on a budget, you patch tubes instead of throwing them away. Cranks generally last the life of a frame, and bottom brackets don't suddenly catastrophically fail without warning. You're criticizing someone for not understanding what it's like to live on a low income, but all your cost estimates are from the perspective of an upper-middle income person who rides a fancy bike recreationally on the weekends. Like a politician who thinks that a gallon of milk costs $20.

yellowapple 6y ago
And to expand on this: that ain't even factoring in the fact that used bikes exist. As do the dirt-cheap ones at Wal-Mart. Yeah, they suck, but they do the job. I don't know of any electric bikes in this category, of course, but certainly lots of regular ones. Mine was probably nice when it was new, but it was 10+ years old by the time I got it.