I’m more wondering why someone would spend that much on a damn bike. I bought my car for 15k of course that was in 2010 but I’m still driving it to this day. Toyota Corolla before anyone asks.
Edit: I just realized this was posted under fuck cars and now I feel like a dick comparing it to the price of my car. It wasn’t intentional but still holy shit that’s still a stupid amount of money to spend on a bike. Like how can you even justify that price? It has to be a completely insane amount of markup.
Entry level racing bikes are about $3-5k these days. That’s a top end Pinarello with custom paint. It might be $15k, but it’s probably closer to $10-$12k with those wheels.
I’m the guy who puts my $8k mountain bike on the back of my 20 year old shitbox Honda when I drive to the trails
Singapore has some of the best mass transit in the world. It rivals Japan and Spain in quality. And in a city as dense as it is, it kinda has to be or the metro area simply couldn’t function. If everyone in Singapore needed to own a car to get around, the city would be in permanent gridlock 24/7.
I think most people forget when you get these bikes it’s like buying an f1 car in motorsports. That 15k bike is probably nearly identical to what the pros are running, like maybe they use a different hand grip or seat but for the most part that’s a completely custom chasis, redesigned from the previous year and up to spec to compete in a professional capacity right off the bat.
Probably a status symbol to some extent. And some people are so rich they will spend a lot more for very slight, incremental improvements. For them, the difference between $5k and $15k might be more like $5 and $15 for an average person.
Someone who spends 10k+ on a bike is probably fit as fuck, so biking 10s of miles to get somewhere is nothing, plus you can take it on the train. New bottom bracket every couple years, maybe 200 in tyres, maybe 100 in brake parts. Cost of getting around, it only takes a few years to pay for itself even at those prices when you add on the actual costs of running a car, saying all this as someone who drives. If you don’t need to move a bunch of stuff or other people around, in terms of transport cost even an expensive bike is cheap of you use it.
Almost certainly competition / training. A bike like this is your exercise, leisure, hobby, your source of competitive spirit, your hobby, and of course its your baby who you love and keep tuned up. A 15k car is a great value, a workhorse. Is it your baby? Maybe it is if you’re still driving it.
Definitely not my baby. Just a cheap reliable source or transportation in a city that you have to own a car to get anywhere. Paints chipping off and it has rust but still gets me to work everyday so I don’t care. I’m a tightwad so spending like this will never make any since to me. I’m just not a person that wants many material things.
These bikes are at the same level as what is being used at professional levels. You can always get a cheaper bike if that’s not what you are into, but it’s like looking at an f1 car and saying it’s overkill for the road, well no shit, it’s made for the extreme end of the sport. Calling these bikes crazy is like conflating the price of an f1 car to the price of a civic.
now I feel like a dick comparing it to the price of my car
I don’t think its an unfair comparison. There’s simply nothing that you can do to a bicycle that will make it more complex or difficult to manufacture than the most bare bones automobile. So it is a bit crazy that folks can charge $15k for a fancy frame and tire set, when an extra ton of precision engineered material costs the same.
At some level, it just feels like gouging. A good bicycle should be the sort of thing anyone can afford, not a luxury good reserved for wealthy hobbyists.
Just don’t force me to drive into your downtown office with paid parking that’s often full just to sit at a desk and video-conference with people halfway across the country in the name of some misguided “return to office” mandate.
It’s often difficult to find meeting rooms with enough space, so sometimes all you can do is have everyone get their own 1-person phone room. Meeting in someone’s office isn’t a thing because nobody has personal offices anymore - it’s all “open concept” bullshit.
It's distressing how many people are stupid enough to think this game is going to be feature complete on launch. "There isn't a mode of transport that fits my personal opinion of how transport should be done??!??!? I'M NOT BUYING THIS!"
K. It's published by Paradox. It will probably be under continual development like the original was for nearly a decade. Hop on whenever it looks like something you're into. Fuck.
It’s distressing how many people are stupid enough to think this game is going to be feature complete on launch.
Yeah, imagine how stupid it is to think a game would be feature complete on launch! Never mind the entire history of computer gaming up to the blatant rip-off cash grabs of the last few years…
You can't be more than about 10 years old if you think the "entire history of computer games" only launched feature complete games.
Motherfucker, RETAIL BOXED RELEASES IN THE 90's would have shit added on after publishing. The only difference is that you didn't get regular patches that added new features, you had to wait until the expansion pack came out. Online multiplayer games where you couldn't play with anyone that had newer map or character packs. Shit that would be a minor update now used to come out as full price releases.
Hell, if a company released a "sequel" that had as little new content as Doom 2 did compared to Doom they'd be fucking crucified. "WTF, man, only like 30 levels and two new enemies? BUT MODDERS ALREADY MADE MORE LEVELS AND ENEMIES!??!?"
"Games only released feature complete!" - Someone that has literally never played Starcraft, Diablo, Unreal Tournament, Doom, SimCity, Duke Nukem 3D, or literally hundreds of other games I can't be arsed to list.
It’s odd you used SimCity because the expansions are two skin addition bundles and updating the modding tool.
I think I understand what you’re trying to say, but “feature complete” isn’t the term. While “stuff was added” to boxed copies back in the 80s and 90s, it wasn’t to the degree you see today.
Also consider most boxed copies didn’t see updates. They didn’t until the early 2000s because most people didn’t have (reliable) internet access. Hell I played a different version of Counter Strike than a friend of mine for months because his internet was awful and his download kept failing.
SC2K was released DOS/MAC only. A later release "Special Edition" added a mod tool, a few scenarios, and the shocking ability to play it on Windows. There was a scenario expansion pack. There was also a completely separate commercial release with this thing called "networking." Dunno what that is.
Three separate commercial releases, all of which had different features.
You are 100% wrong about boxed games not getting updates. They did, you just had to get lucky enough to buy the most recent release of the game. Imagine for a moment if EA released a game then did bug fixes but made you buy the game again if you wanted the fixes. Yeah, that shit was COMMON. Some companies would offer bug fixes on disk but most would just lawlgoturmoney. All the arrival of the internet did was make it so that patches could be delivered separate from a retail release without physical media.
"Feature complete" is literally the fucking term used by the person I responded to. Try reading.
Yes people with different ideas on what should be a core feature of modern city management are stupid. Honestly even when CS1 came out the car-only approach felt a bit anachronistic.
If you don’t care about that, that’s fine. But being disappointed that there’s basically been no progress in this matter in the past 10 years doesn’t make people stupid.
I’m a software developer, I’m well aware. I can’t look info their development schedule or budget. And as a user it’s my prerogative not to care. Either the software does what I want or it doesn’t.
In this case we’re asking the developer to consider adding a feature and letting him know we don’t consider the product feature complete without for our use case.
They are free to take the suggestion or not. No one involved here it’s acting particularly idiotically imo.
I think, people are especially worried that it’s an afterthought. Many of the most dedicated city builder fans do want to play around with different modes of transport. It’s quite the contemporary topic in city design.
And so, yes, those folks would have probably preferred other features to be left out and rather bikes to be part of the core game.
Many of us love building beautiful fantasy cities. And it suck when you can only build cities that are worse that reality. Ok. I do understand, that there is not every mode of transportation from the start. But biking and walking!?
Unfortunately SUVs are very popular here also, though they tend to be a bit smaller than in the US, and I even saw a few pickups, in a country where you definitely don’t need one…
I’m going to point one that hasn’t been mentioned. Infrastructure.
Highways, roads, streets have way too many lanes that are way too wide. This encourages drivers to drive faster. Faster driving makes overall the roads and vehicles to feel more dangerous, because they are. People’s response is to want and acquire larger, heavier an faster vehicles that make them feel safer in those hostile roads.
This is what contemporary urbanism is talking about when they say that infrastructure determines behavior. You can alter people’s behavior by changing the shape of infrastructure.
The problem in most of the western world is that the answer of authorities (heavily misled by car and oil industry) has been to make more lanes that are wider. In the false belief that this would make roads safer. When in reality the result is the opposite. Other measures like police enforced fines, speed limits, etc. Are also useless to mitigate the lack of safety and carry a huge set of problems with them like systematic discrimination and endemic corruption.
The answer is to make narrower lanes, with fewer lanes in densely populated area, less parking, traffic calmed and car traffic banned zones. Protect bicicles and pedestrians with concrete traffic segregation. Impose aditional fees and taxes for vehicles above a certain weight and parking space take up. Those things will signal people that it’s fine to drive a smaller, slower vehicle, it’s fine to use public transport instead. Along with more public transport options available.
I get what you’re saying, but have you ever driven in Italy? The lanes are terrifyingly narrow compared to the UK, but the drivers are far more reckless!
Is c level a motorcycle or an e-bike? I’ve never seen an icon for an e-bike before, and if it is, I am loving the conciseness of the design. If not, there’s no way a motorcycle is better than a line bus right?
Just a bonus note from a Dutch guy, the text just below say lekker blijven likken, or: ‘just keep on licking’.
Headline should be : Hertz rending Teslas now, definitely not a terrible idea and average Americans not good at pulling levers that aren’t incredibly obvious
Giving someone a car with less than 90 miles of range and limited charging options without included adapters is pretty shitty. Definitely a bit of user error, but if you’re renting out EVs they need to be close to fully charged. Having to find a charger and wait for the car to charge right after you pick it up is pretty shitty.
Yeah, I get dinged if I return a gas vehicle with less than 3/4 tank, and yet Hertz is handing out EVs with under half a charge?? That’s some major bullshit.
Imagine a rental car that needs 8 hours of downtime to rent it again. Now imagine being management at Hertz and the fact they don’t even understand THAT much. Imagine how dumb the average American is and now think about the fact 1/2 of them are dumber than that- can’t find a door handle and are unashamed of that fact.
Downtime isn’t an issue if you allot enough cars to always have your rental fleet in rotation. Have 55 total for every 50 rental cars. Have level 2/3 chargers to cut charge time/etc.
Lots of ways to make it a non issue, but Hertz doesn’t care. They will just fuck up instead and bill you for it unless you can get a lawyer or the national news involved.
It also doesn’t take more than 30 minutes to charge it from empty to 80%.
It probably takes a good chunk of that time just to do the paperwork.
Handing out/driving away from a charger at 80% is standard practice and fine. Starting at 40% at the home base is unacceptable. It’s such an easy problem to solve.
That’s charging from empty on a level 2 charger. A DC fast charger can charge it in 15-30 min.
Having one or two fast chargers at a large hertz probably makes sense for emergencies, because people probably are usually returning them mostly charged.
Some people are really stupid. Like seriously when it comes to every day functions many people struggle. Especially when it comes to vehicles, some people just know that there is on and off and forward and backwards… never take anything else into account. It’s because of this that flying cars would be a disaster, you can’t have these things breaking down all the time or running out of gas. I’ve seen people literally lock themselves in vehicles before, never change their oil, put antifreeze in the washer fluid canister, drive on a flat until the tire ripped apart, evevtually fell off and had to buy a new rim. Some people should really not be allowed to drive without passing some sort of “basic knowledge about vehicles and what to do when something goes wrong” course.
Some people should really not be allowed to drive without passing some sort of “basic knowledge about vehicles and what to do when something goes wrong” course.
And yet we hand out drivers’ licenses like candy because the alternative is being trapped at home with no bike or transit infrastructure.
I mean, the article does say they had never used an EV and rented a gas car but got given the Tesla anyway. I don’t think that’s a basic knowledge thing. They weren’t trying to drive something that they were unfamiliar with. Why would they know how the charging works?
There hasn’t been much of a reason for someone who doesn’t drive an EV to know about charging, which is very different from filling up a car with gas. And heck, every gasoline car uses the same gas nozzle, which isn’t the case for Teslas. Plus gas stations are never more than a stone’s throw away, which is more than can be said about EV chargers (let alone Tesla compatible ones).
When I see the image what came to mind was that experiment where they had an overpopulation of rats in a cage and how all of the rats turned on each other and killed each other.
Too much human density is not good. You have to be sure to get the percentage of humans to a acre of land just right, to prevent the rats situation.
Part of the thing is humans aren’t rats, so we can’t necessarily extrapolate from rat behavior to humans.
And another thing is space is 3-dimensional. If people have spacious apartments and access to good parks and public spaces, we don’t necessarily need as much private acreage.
And a final thing is different people have different preferences. Some people enjoy and prefer those tiny houses. Some people prefer a homestead with acreage. Some people are happy with a condo in a high-rise. Some people want a rowhouse with a little space for a garden in the back.
But – at least in North America – we make it literally illegal to build anything but the houses on the left on the vast majority of urban land.
If we’re going to talk about forcing people into living conditions they don’t want to be in, we should be talking about how we’re systematically shoving most people into sprawling, car-dependent suburbia.
I know that, growing up in suburbia, I felt trapped like in a cage because I couldn’t get anywhere without getting a ride from my parents. The internet was the only escape really.
Their point is that developers are legally forced to build SFH even if demand says otherwise. Detached homes are a major tax burden on cities; their cost should reflect their real cost. If you want one, go ahead and get one (I will be doing the same!), but cities genuinely cannot be built to handle most of its land being single family, detached homes.
I may want a detached home for hobbies and space, but the most fun I’ve had to date was when I lived in a townhouse in the middle of the city and didn’t need a car to get anywhere. Exploration and discovery is impossible in suburbia.
Hell, you can have suburbia, but it should still be walkable. And you do that by increasing the taxes on them (rightfully), adding regular busses, having bike lanes, including businesses in the mix, and having them not be so sprawling so that you are closer to the city itself.
I don’t live in suburbia, I live in a tiny hamlet with cows for neighbours.
I agree that cities cannot be all detached homes, but likewise they cannot be all high-rise either. Where my wife and I come from ( France and UK respectively) high-rise experiments have always ended in poverty and decay.
I could buy a crappy little flat in a city with junkies for neighbours, or I could buy a massive house with space for a pool 40 minutes drive away. Which would any sane person choose? Am I saving the environment driving around in my SUV? Yes, because we hardly use it thanks to the internet and us being fit.
My feeling is the current status quo will continue:
Young people live in flats in town. Kid #1 comes along and it seems fine. Then #2 arrives (plus they start having a bit mor £€$) and things start getting a little tight. Also the downsides of city life start outweighing the upsides (people drinking and shouting at 2am is more annoying when you and your kids have work/school).
Obviously that is a gross generalisation, but I have seen the pattern all over the place.
Part of the thing is humans aren’t rats, so we can’t necessarily extrapolate from rat behavior to humans.
Actually the study was specifically being done to study humans. We are similar enough when it comes to the factors being studied to be able to be used for studying, as the scientists did.
The actual scientist who did the study were confident that the results could be correlated and used for human behavior.
I think it’s safe to say for all of us that we don’t like being crowded in. And when we’re crowded in for a very long time then we get cranky. It’s biological.
And another thing is space is 3-dimensional. If people have spacious apartments and access to good parks and public spaces, we don’t necessarily need as much private acreage.
The experiment actually had the rat cages set up with up and downs areas and small cordoned off areas as well. Some of what they found was just the congestion of moving around from area to area was enough to cause conflict.
And a final thing is different people have different preferences. Some people enjoy and prefer those tiny houses. Some people prefer a homestead with acreage. Some people are happy with a condo in a high-rise. Some people want a rowhouse with a little space for a garden in the back.
I honestly don’t think you can be confident in saying that long-term crowding would only affect a small subset of humans though, because of human nature, that affects, well, all humans.
You crowd us in too much and we don’t like it, and we act upon it. And that tolerance between the two ends on the bell curve of people’s crowding tolerance is not that great.
Right, but the experiment was in an actual, literal cage, right? With no ability to walk outside to get groceries or stroll through the park.
So long as we’re not cramming people into Hong Kong’s cage homes (which only happens because of a thoroughly fucked housing market in Hong Kong), I think our efforts should be spent on making there be abundant housing supply – particularly of dense, walkable urbanism – so that the most economically vulnerable amongst us aren’t left with no other option besides horrible, inhumane conditions.
Essentially, if we unfuck our housing market by legally allowing development denser than ultra low-density sprawl, there’s no reason to think the market can’t decide what level of density people are comfortable with. That is, if the poorest among us have enough money, and there are ample housing options available even at the price level affordable to them, too-dense development will disappear of its own accord from pure market forces. After all, if you feel cramped and miserable, and you have the means to leave for someplace better, you will.
But if we don’t legalize density, people will end up crowding themselves in with too many roommates, with abusive partners or overbearing family, in wholly inadequate quality housing, or just straight-up homeless.
Because if we set out at the onset to dictate what constitutes “too much” density, well, many of the commenters in here are of the opinion that even rowhouses are too dense. If we empower them to decide what constitutes “too much” density for the rest of us, we’ll end up with the laws we currently have on the books. The very laws that cripple the economy and exacerbate inequality. This will just create the conditions we have now, where a housing shortage and widening inequality push people into really sub-par living arrangements.
Because if we set out at the onset to dictate what constitutes “too much” density, well, many of the commenters in here are of the opinion that even rowhouses are too dense.
You’ve nailed the crux of the problem right there. And yeah, like with everything else with human beings, you’ll get a big range of people who have different tolerances for density.
But besides their own individual opinions of what is too much density, there’s a biological/psychological definition as well, that all humans in common have, and that’s what the scientists were studying.
This is EXACTLY the kind of point I’m trying to make. Humans keep packing more and more into the same forever-growing cities and it makes the formerly-pleasant harsh, foreign, and unwelcoming.
There exist nice places that have balance - green spaces, slow pace of life, nice local restaurants, uncrowded trails, minimal traffic and short commutes.
Then they become discovered, become popular, and become overcrowded in a way that ruins what made them special to begin with. But they still look small to people from the big cities, who keep moving there. Now increasingly expensive, congested, and losing their original character, the urban zealots who invaded start screeching about cars, walkability, bikeability, and transit. It was perfectly bikeable, and there was no traffic before everyone tried to pile in.
The enemy is GROWTH, and OVERCROWDING, not single family homes and cars.
That jogger is a fucking idiot, never ever run on a road with your back to traffic, run on other side and face cars coming at you so you can get the fuck out of the way in event of an accident, if it happens behind your dumb ass, you are fucking dead.
Edit: Also, why the fuck are you linking to reddit???
It’s not just the softness of the material… Sidewalks have lots of undulations and uneven angles every time you cross a driveway or a junction. Also gaps and cracks
Jogging 2km on a sidwalk is fine
Running at a serious speed over 10k on an uneven, hard surface like sidewalk is a high chance of injury
“Tires” may not be the strongest argument against electric cars, but it’s certainly succinct. Personally, I’d probably pick “traffic”, at the cost of an extra syllable
Tires, 8 lane roadways, massive swathes of parking lots often taking valuable land, the electricity powering it has to be green, road maintainance/resurfacing.
EVs only really solve the gasoline problem with cars, they solve little else.
fuckcars
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