I’m honestly concerned by the number of you who don’t seem to be able to understand the points above. Unfortunately, no, in a car dependent system, the purchase of a cargo bike over a car will always be less practical, even if it can be used practically. You cannot use it to travel between cities or suburbs easily, construction zones are not managed with them in mind, the very scale of our public space is designed around cars, which means that every distance will cost more in time and labour with the cargo bike even if your necessities and some luxuries are within the distance you are able to travel with it in the time that you have; good luck working 50hr swing shifts with this as your only transportation. Regardless of what city you’re in and what options you have available, the reality that this system is car-dependent means that anyone who must maximize the value in large purchases because they do not have money to spare is coerced into purchasing a car as they simply cannot afford the loss in utility that comes with a cargo bike. You can tell that most people in this community are middle-class are above, because so many of you have clearly never had to actually worry about how you’ll get around and still get everything you need to get done done. Even if there are merits, every person who buys these does so out of privilege. People who cannot buy cars do not buy three thousand dollar bikes (for a cheap one, mind you). If you cannot get everything you need with this thing (which is over 90% of the people in this country), you need to be able to afford it as well as another form of transportation, what sorts of people do you think can do that? Getting really tired of you people pretending that the working poor, or even average people, do not exist.

Yes, I and many other people understand that car-dependency is bad, which is why it is concerning that so many of you seem so self-satisfied with the notion that individualized moral consumerism somehow contributes to ending car-dependency. Most people in this country do not live in these cities. We all know bikes cause less pollution across the board, we all watched Captain Planet in the fuckin’ '90s; people do not make choices differently from you just because they are ignorant, stupid, or less moral than you are. You think this hasn’t ended yet why, because everyone in this society is just so morally corrupt and apathetic that they just choose for this to continue?

Car-dependency is precarity, it is vulnerability. It exists because it makes this system more effectively coercive over workers exactly because it is so expensive and transformative of space. Great for you that you can afford to pretend you can change it by buying a product; I wonder who benefits from such an easy solution.

Wouldn’t that be nice? Must be scary for you to confront the realities of the world without privilege.

I hate to say it because I’m on the side of cars being both an effect and a cause of major negative social issues, but he’s right that you’re dismissing the fact that society forces people to interact with it as it dictates unless you have the money to force otherwise, whether that’s building a whole-ass off-grid house because you have the money, taking a helicopter instead of a car because you have the money, or taking a bike instead of a car because you have the time (which is only going to be the case if you have the money to not have to rely on a time-sensitive wage-based job).

The alternative is often being jobless, which usually means being unhoused, which has so many negative knock-on effects involved that it certainly should not be held up as a reasonable alternative.