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Discussed in 2019:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20443822 (498 comments)

Roads were absolutely, definitely the issue, and the article slides that in while pretending to refute it - bicycles 'called for improved roads' not because they didn't need them, but because they did.

Ever try to take a beater bike out on a rough trail with washouts and rocks? Its murder on the rider and the bike. You end up carrying it half the time while hopping from rock to rock or trudging through washouts.

Here's a more interesting question: why are bicycles nonexistant on post-apocalyptic stories? Its like, nuclear war vaporizes all the bicycles. Where in reality in a fuel-exhausted world they would last for generations and provide rapid transport and communications for decades.

> why are bicycles nonexistant on post-apocalyptic stories?

Because most post-apocalyptic media is individualism wish fulfillment porn. In most of those stories, the world has been destroyed because being that way serves to elevate the power and agency of the hero(es). Look at how bad ass they are to be able to thrive even in a world that bad!

Mowing down zombies in a Winnebago tricked out to be a rolling prepper bomb shelter is empowering and fun. Squeaking down a deserted highway in a rickety ill-fitting bike, knees akimbo, does not cut quite as dramatic a figure even if it is infintely more realistic.

Anyone who’s tried to shoot a sawed off shotgun from a bicycle knows how right you are. Thinking about the highway scenes in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and my own run-ins with gangs of street urchins in Berlin, you’re also vulnerable to attack on a bicycle in a way that you’re not in a vehicle or even on a horse. Post apocalyptic literature is as much about the fear of being hunted as being the hunter.
> Squeaking down a deserted highway in a rickety ill-fitting bike, knees akimbo, does not cut quite as dramatic a figure even if it is infintely more realistic.

This is basically how Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts starts. :P

North of the Mason Dixon line roads require resurfacing every ten to twenty years due to winter freeze-thaw cycles which requires vast resources.

South of the Mason Dixon line roads require annual landscaping to prevent overgrowth.

Much like technology is spread very unevenly, post-apocalyptic is spread very unevenly. There is a large subculture of urban explorers on youtube, interesting stuff to watch. Interesting to see them explore sites abandoned around the turn of the century, driveways / roads and such are essentially impassible.

There are exceptions. Youtube abandoned mine explorers visit sites abandoned a century ago out west and other than the occasional landslide desert roads can remain clear for a century or so. Of course without massive fossil fuel burning, Vegas can't exist, so great roads aren't very useful without any population to travel them... Similar problem with the deep south USA, before air conditioning the number of people living down there was low.

Definitely regional. But the average post-apoclyptic movie is set in dry or desert environment, not a jungle!

And a bike doesn't need a road 2-rod wide. Just a path as wide as a bike tire. Even a good shoulder. And cement roads can last far longer than asphalt. Definitely situational.

Anywhere a car could go, a bike could go further I think.

How long would roads last without cars and especially large trucks driving on them?
> Of course without massive fossil fuel burning, Vegas can't exist

Doesn't it run from energy generated by the Hoover dam?

why are bicycles nonexistant on post-apocalyptic stories?

Bikes are present (and maybe even integral to) some post-apocalyptic films like, Testament, Turbo Kid, The Stand. There are some media with no gas powered cars, like Adventure Time, and probably more.

However, for better or worse, Mad Max set the trope that the fight for fuel is often an interesting conflict. It's easy for a gas hungry viewing public to understand, at least!

Yeah, Max Max would certainly have a different feel to it if he rode a folding bicycle throughout the movie.
One thing I never understood about Mad Max, is where did they get the gasoline for their spiked-up cars from?

Plot hole.

"Conroy sent a runner in with the software package that

would allow Turner to pilot the jet that would carry Mitchell

to Hosaka's Mexico City compound. The runner was a wild-

eyed, sun-blackened man Lynch called Hariy, a rope-muscled

apparition who came cycling in from the direction of Tucson

on a sand-scoured bike with balding lug tires and bone-yellow

rawhide laced around its handlebars. Lynch led Harry across

the parking lot. Harry was singing to himself, a strange sound

in the enforced quiet of the site, and his song, if you could

call it that, was like someone randomly tuning a broken radio

up and down midnight miles of dial, bringing in gospel shouts

and snatches of twenty years of international pop. Harry had

his bike slung across one burnt, bird-thin shoulder.

"Harry's got something for you from Tucson," Lynch

said.

"You two know each other?" Turner asked, looking at

Lynch "Maybe have a friend in common?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Lynch asked.

Turner held his stare. "You know his name."

"He told me his fucking name, Turner."

"Name's Harry," the burnt man said. He tossed the bicy-

cle down on a clump of brush. He smiled vacantly, exposing

badly spaced, eroded teeth. His bare chest was filmed with

sweat and dust, and hung with loops of fine steel chain,

rawhide, bits of animal horn and fur, brass cartridge casings,

copper coins worn smooth and faceless with use, and a small

pouch made of soft brown leather."

-W. Gibson, Count Zero.

I don't think you are giving much credit to ancient roads. The Appian way was built in 312 BC and you can tour it on a regular old bike today. Major ancient cities and trade routes were paved pretty well to accommodate cargo transported on carts. No one likes a broken wheel along the way when they have a buyer at the other end expecting goods. I think a crude bike wouldn't have had trouble like a cart, plus unlike a cart you could hop it up over a bad spot like you do over a curb today or dismount entirely for particularly hairy stretches.
It's the 'last mile' issue. Every village was down some track a mile from a good road. Just the place you needed the bike to work. Most weren't going to Rome; just around the village.

And a modern 'regular bike' is maybe 100x better than the original wooden, wooden-wheeled non-steerable chainless coaster bikes they started with. Made of local wood that could split and swell and snap at a bad bounce.

I ride bikes off-road and come across stuck or broken down vehicles occasionally. Always surprises me how precarious driving a 4x4 can be on fairly mild terrain. You need two tracks whilst a bike only needs one. You need vertical clearance between the wheels in both directions. And there is no way to just get off and push a few metres. Trying to navigate between obstructions and zombies on a deteriorating road surface would be challenging. Although I don't fancy changing an inner tube in that world.
>Roads were absolutely, definitely the issue, and the article slides that in while pretending to refute it - bicycles 'called for improved roads' not because they didn't need them, but because they did. Ever try to take a beater bike out on a rough trail with washouts and rocks? Its murder on the rider and the bike.

I don't know about that. I pretty much grew up only having crappy second hand bikes and spent more time riding through forests and trails than streets. There was a couple summers where pretty much every day was wake up, get on yhe bike, meet my cousins and friends and spend all day riding through the forest.

I never had an actual mountain bike, or even bikes with working brakes sometimes, i've taken bmx's through mountain trails, bikes where the chain pops off every half hour, some pretty sketchy bikes. Street riding actually freaks me out more. I don't like being on roads and sharing lanes with cars. Give me a rough forest trail on a bike any day over that.

>Here's a more interesting question: why are bicycles nonexistant on post-apocalyptic stories?

Bikes are pretty handy in Cataclysm DDA for town raids.

I guess a logical, in universe reason could be the extra calories spent on riding a bike wouldn't be worth burning in an environment where food is scarce and conditions may be brutal.

Its calories per mile, and I think the bike wins by a landslide!

The speed of a bike ride is roughly proportional to the smoothness or the trail. So to be economical, the bike would need to beat walking etc. So a smooth(er) trail would be a win.

You definitely want smooth, packed surfaces to bike on, and you want these to be reasonable straight / curvy ('differentiable' may be a sufficient definition, although it's been a while since I've looked at calc).

That said - you don't need modern car-caliber roads.

I've ridden 10's of miles on packed dirt trails (in upstate NY, near one of the canals) and it worked great. Smooth, level, no sharp corners, and waaaaay cheaper than paving.

There's a trail I like to ride on in Utah that's an old railroad grade. It's part of the Great Western Trail now, but is not heavily traveled by hikers. I've never seen a single other hiker or biker on the trail. It's overgrown now, and has narrowed down to a singletrack trail. But it's easy to ride on, even without a fancy full suspension bike, because over 100 years ago, it was graded for a railroad, so it's a gentle slope, and all of the big boulders were removed. Even though it's been derelict for a century, it's still gentle sloped and mostly free of big rocks. Most of it is overgrown with shrubs, but the occasional hiker is enough to keep a footpath clear. It could be ridden even with a city commuter bike along most of it.

In a post-apocalyptic world, bicycles would definitely be a great way to get around. The roads would get cracked and overgrown, but with moderate traffic, they'd develop into smooth single track trails. What to do once you run out of tires and tubes would be the bigger problem.

The Walking Dead has a bicycle for I think two initial episodes but bicycles would run out of consumables (tires/inner tubes/chains/cables) though it might be better situation than automobiles running out of non spoiled gasoline in a year once industrialized manufacturing stops. The rubber in tires/tubes can rot/degrade with uv exposure and cables rust. Different use case from post apocalypse but I have to replace multiple chains/cables/tires per year on multiple bikes.
And that's different from cars, how?

I think cars have 100X the moving parts, and 100X the issue. Bikes would outlast cars by a decade, minimum.

> Roads were absolutely, definitely the issue

Maybe. The article didn't touch on more modern developments, like suspensions.

But not all ancient roads were all that bad. Cities specially. You can ride on dirt just fine. Which is arguably a more realistic use-case, riding on cities.

Tires don't last forever...I could see this being an issue.
True, but I'd expect them to last longer than gasoline, yet that's something some post-apocalyptic hellscapes seem to have plenty of.
You can make tires quite easily with simple tools.

You can't make gasoline as easily - or extract oil.

How would bicycles last for generations? One summer in the sun and most of the tires and tubes would be rotted out.

In Stephen King's The Stand, at least one of the groups of survivors tools around on bicycles, mostly because of all the gridlock of abandoned cars on the highways.

I’d say it’s in the middle. Bike tyres last way longer than one summer, but certainly not more than a decade, let alone generations. A bike without rubber tyres is a pretty miserable ride.
Bicycles called for improved roads because bicycles arrived before improved roads. Bicycles arrived because the tech for bicycles became possible.

Without the tech, you can't even make a bicycle that can be ridden on a level, shiny smooth, concrete floor.

> why are bicycles nonexistant on post-apocalyptic stories?

Couple reasons by my guess: * Bikes aren't cool. Cars are cool, horses are cool. Bikes, trikes, scooters, etc., aren't cool, and don't provide much besides efficiency. * Terrain - as you say, roads are an issue and require maintenance. Trees drop some branches on the road? A car could push it (maybe), horse could walk over it, while a bike has to be carried. Not much fun, and probably makes up for the efficiency you get from riding it. * Carrying stuff. Hauling things in a car? Easy. Horse? Easy. Bike? Hope you have a backpack, and you're probably still capped at ~40 pounds. And the more weight you have, the worse a time you'll have on rough terrain or falling.

• Car companies have a much higher marketing budget, and will sponsor their cars appearing in mass-market films.

• Good luck getting your car around a fallen tree. A bicycle is far better in this situation. In what situation would you risk serious damage to a car by driving into a tree?!

• Bicycles used for transport (as opposed to sport/exercise) have a rack over the rear wheel, which can support two or three pannier bags. On a flat journey, it's easy to carry 20kg+ of goods this way.

The cargo issue is real. A backpack or shoulder pack is about it on a bike. Maybe baskets on the back for light stuff (straw, pots).
To summarise the previous 498-comment-long discussion of this article on HN: this is a bad article.

I'd normally try to give the benefit of the doubt and not open with such a negative assessment, but the opening paragraph of the article is so unbelievably arrogant in tone that I really find it difficult.

Correct me if I’m wrong but the materials science and the actual design of a bicycle aren’t actually that simple, right? That’s why there were so many zany iterations of bicycles until we landed on the most common form we see today?
Yup.

https://www.liveabout.com/bikes-an-illustrated-history-36577...

For one thing, iron is pretty much a minimum requirement for bikes. Iron was really expensive right up till the point where we learned out to use coal forges. That meant that early bikes were going to be made out of wood. That's pretty much a non-starter. You can't have wooden peddles.

But then, if you want to talk about really modern bikes, you need chains. Chains aren't simple to manufacture, particularly by hand. You need uniformity and consistency. For that, you need manufacturing machines.

And let's not forget the tires. Wooden tires simply don't work well or last for too terribly long (no good having tires that rot. Not to mention how incredibly rough that ride must have been). Rubber is a relatively late invention that was needed to make inflatable tires.

I think the article glosses over a few critical points. Pedals and cranks break today on cheap bicycles. The cost of good steel decreased by a factor of 6 between about 1855 and 1875.
Can't have bicycles without either a railroad or truck nationwide logistics system. They simply require too many specialized and exotic parts. VERY high maintenance demands per mile compared to shoes or automobiles, or even old automobiles.

A decent carpenter working with a decent blacksmith can produce and maintain a horse cart in a village with minimal external commerce; some iron ore imports would be nice, but can be worked around at great effort.

But composition rubber brake pads and steel cables to run the brakes and rubber pneumatic wheels and ball bearings everywhere will require at minimum a nationwide rail network. Even the very concept of national or world standardized screw sizes is a very modern phenonomena.

Also a pretty solid argument for a lack of destinations. For centuries if something was not sustainable with the population inside a walking radius, it would rapidly disappear. Today I can ride to a big box store, a shopping mall, a library... there was nowhere to go for the vast majority of the population in, perhaps 1021 AD. The next village over isn't all that more exciting than mine. Pre-pubescent kids seem to enjoy bicycle riding for no purpose other than the sensation of movement, although in 1021 AD a bicycle would be an unaffordable toy for a child.

You're describing a 21st century bicycle. A 19th century bicycle wasn't so complicated a machine. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle
> VERY high maintenance demands per mile compared to [...] automobiles, or even old automobiles.

Why? Isn't an automobile a superset of a bicycle in terms of parts? It has a frame, rubber tires, wheels with spokes, and gears (for the engine/transmission).

I can imagine making a really crude bike out of wood. make the frame and wheels out of wood, make the crank and rear hub like a miniature ships wheel with pegs sticking out, then jam those pegs into rope to make your chain. Heck, skip that and peddle the drive wheel directly like a big wheel tricycle or a penny farthing. No need for brakes when you have no gearing or freewheel hub: you just slow down your peddling just like a fixed gear bike today.
> Can't have bicycles without either a railroad

I know this isn’t where you’re going, but it would be awesome to have a system of bikes on rails with steel wheels.

About a quarter of the rolling resistance, but it is only ~11% of all resistance.

Braking and accelerating would become really fun, but wheels would last forever.

Yes, it really is about the tech.

Firstly, bicycles need pneumatic tires. They need serious pneumatic tires that hold pressure, and withstand temperature changes. Not having good roads is a factor; but you can address that with good, wide, durable tires. The inner tubes have to be reliable, and reparable. Tires are not feasible without vulcanized rubber. Rubber that is not vulcanized turns soft when hot, and when it's cold, it hardens and cracks. It is not durable for road use; it will quickly abrade and peel away under braking.

A bicycle made using wooden wagon wheels with steel rims is not feasible. It's not just the atrocious ride quality. It would not be safe. A bicycle tilts when it turns; it needs a wheel with a rounded profile, not square. The wheel must provide traction, otherwise the unit will skid easily. Hard wheels are suitable only for vehicles with axles: carriages and trains. A bike without tires could not only not be used on a dirt road; it wouldn't even work on a varnished wooden deck.

The drive train of a bicycle, such as the chain, requires considerable skill and tooling in machining. This was not available until well into the industrial revolution.

Ball bearings used in bicycle bearings, such as the bottom bracket hub, have to be manufactured to ridiculous precision.

You might as well ask why did we wait for so long for zipper fasteners---those teeth are so darned accurately shaped and clamped onto the cloth tape.

For a good part of the bicycle era, bicycles were commonly used on dirt roads. Their tech had to be good enough for it, though.

Before you can even solve the tech issues, someone has to get the idea: the idea that it's feasible for a human to ride a single-track vehicle. It's obvious now; almost anyone can learn to ride a bicycle, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. You would not suspect such a thing, in a world in which bicycles don't exist. (Physicists likely knew that a rolling wheel is stable, with equations to prove it, but that doesn't translate to an intuition that people could easily become riders of a contraption based on that stability.) However, the idea didn't take long to arrive after the technological feasibility. It's not the case that we had a feasible design for bicycles in place for hundreds of years, which only waited for the industrial revolution to arrive. The ideas come from experiments which are enabled by the tech.

I'm speculating here, but I wonder if cargo is another factor. None of the early cycles had any obvious place for carrying anything. Regular people didn't have much reason to go anywhere by themselves. They lived at or near their workplace. Their social circles were small. Church happened once a week, if they attended that often. If you needed a vehicle, it wasn't to transport yourself, but to transport stuff.

I just read a couple of novels by Jane Austen. She describes the activities of the upper class, I believe in the 18th century. Now those people did transport themselves to visit other people, but her text makes it sound like a mile was a long journey -- if a woman walked that far by herself, it was talked about. Of course that doesn't tell us much about the lower classes.

Dickens sheds more light on the common people, at least in cities. Again, a person needed a reason to go further than their own neighborhood, and transportation in London seemed to have been seen as a service, rather than a product. If you rode in a cab, its technological drawbacks were someone else's problem.

Perhaps a reason to own and ride a bike would be if you worked in a factory that was some distance from where you lived, or for recreation. I've seen pictures of workers coming and going from factories, from early 20th century, and it's a sea of bikes.

The balance idea is raised and rejected, but as I understand it it's a huge part. The issue isn't about humans balancing on the thing (as with the examples of canoes or horses that are already stable at rest), but rather that a bicycle _does not balance unless it is moving_, and moreover making it balance depends on the fact that it has steering – fix the front wheel in place and you can't ride it.

This is not intuitive, except with the benefit of hindsight.

I was riding a horse the other day and wondered to myself, why was there never a bicycle era between the horse and automobile eras?

Now I realize I only wondered this because I've only lived in a world with really good bicycles!

And why did we wait 6,000 years for wheeled luggage?

(note: wheeled handcarts seem to date back some 4,000 years but putting wheels directly on a case or basket seems like a great idea.)

(TIL some ancient wheelbarrows in China had a center-placed wheel and could carry 6 passengers.)[1]

[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/who-invented-the-wheelbarrow-19916...