Bikeworld (imaginary thread)

[Bigtallfatbloke]

The internal combustion engine hasn't been discovered yet and never will be....what would the world be like if there were no cars, just bicycles to get around? Imagine what life would be like in BIKEWORLD. How would things be better, worse? Safer, more dangerous? How would your town look? Where would you work, what would you do?

I think this imaginary world could be fun

 

[zimzum42]

We'd all still be living in hovels, eating warm mud and cabbage, cold and wet.....

a bit like Wales.....

 

[frog]

There'd be a lot less fat people. Kids would be helping out on the allotment rather than hanging about on the streets. You'd actually know the name of the local copper. Horse ownership would rise.

 

[zimzum42]

It all sounded so good until the horse thing.....

 

[Will1985]

Well with humans having a fascination for speed, I think the risks would be the similar and lots of pedestrians would get hit. Of course, you would still need traffic lights, and jumping them would be a criminal offence . Hospitals would have more specialist skin units to cope with riders crashing and getting road rash!

Taxis would be rickshaws, so I suppose you can imagine Delhi as how the volume of traffic would appear. Only the few fat people would use them.
Sports cars would be sleek lined HPVs and a poor-man's sports car would be a recumbent.
SUVs being for the school run, I'll say we would see lots of MTB tyred triplet, quad and quints to take the kids to school. The tyres will never see a drop of mud, but owners will consider it an important bling factor. For these bikes, drafting solo riders would be prohibited.

I would hope that bike theft be non-existent, or go heavily punished.

 

[alecstilleyedye]

just imagine 1970s beijing or 1950s amsterdam and you about have it.

 

[Bigtallfatbloke]

I think we may see the demise of the hypermarket culture and a return to the high street shops and village life. I think each village would have a much stronger community. We wouldnt need the likes of the M25, and as such I would hope the wildlife would benefit. I agree that we'd probably all be into grow your own a lot more...maybe we wouls see an increase in the local farms importance to the community.
Air travel doesn't exist, so we'd all have to think a lot harder about those foreign holidays. For my money, life would be better in many ways.

 

[sloe]

The first stabs at space-travel would come back with their rocket powered bicycles riders dead from...

...a variety of causes.


Bicycling scientists would then search lower and lower down the evolutionary tree to find a lifeform that can survive in space.

We would eventually evolve into space-faring cockroaches that can ride a bicycle.

So hopefully that would be the end of war, seeing as cockroaches aren't famous for it.

Hope you're glad you asked.

 

[col]

I was watching a programme with jeremy clarkson,i cant remember the name of the city,but aparentally it has a population of three million? and most used cycles,they were going to start producing cars,and even clarkson said,it would ruin what they have with cycles.

 

[Intelligenthamster]

In my house he's known as "Jeremy Clar-". When we hear the announcer say his name, that's how long it takes one of us to get to the remote and turn him off!

 

[stevenb]

I was watching a programme with jeremy clarkson,i cant remember the name of the city,but aparentally it has a population of three million? and most used cycles,they were going to start producing cars,and even clarkson said,it would ruin what they have with cycles.

I remember that program.
It was in Vietnam and they had lots of old US and USSR cars there.
BMW were going to build a production line assembley plant there.

Crazy.....
mind you...look how many scooters they had......and buses.....so sticking with bikes would be a laugh....the whole city would be a giant peleton....

 

[col]

Yeah thats the place,and they were making toys out of old coke cans,saying how handy they were with theyre hands.doesnt bode well for the cars i think?

 

[Keith Oates]

The number of Toyota's and BMW's you see now shows that things are moving on quite quickly, although not necessarily for the better!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[barq]

I think it would change many of our careers since most people would choose to work relatively close to home. Not many people would be up for a 80 mile round trip commute into London from the home counties. It would also make moving house far harder. People would stay in their own communities more and we'd probably have less diversity.

The roads might be quite different in design and probably wouldn't have kerbs. I wonder if they'd still have a white line down the middle or would we just assume that a stay left (or right) rule applied? I don't think we'd have roundabouts at all. I imagine bike parking would be integral to most buildings, but I'm sad to say bike theft would still be a problem (after all we live in a car dominated society now, and they get nicked all the time!).

Of course local bike shops would be almost as common as newsagents. And our food shopping would be done far more regularly, but in smaller quantities.

 

[Big Bren]

Following on from Barq's point about roads looking different, hopefully there'd be about a tenth of the bloody street furniture we have to put up with now. There's a veritable forest of the stuff everywhere you go, a lot of which I think is a distraction from driving rather than an aid to safety.

What would be the cycle equivalent of the vehicular status symbols we see now I wonder? For example, the wives of the wealthy who currently lumber around ineptly in over-equipped, under-utilised 4x4's - what would they ride? Equally, what would the cycle equivalent of a mid-life crisismobile like a Lotus Elise or a Porsche Boxster be?

Bren