When it comes to deciding whether to take the bike to the grocery store, to do errands, or to ride to work, it’s pretty easy to come up with excuses to take the car instead. 

The photos below, found at this site, may help you re-think excuses like - my bike’s not good enough or I have too much to carry. Don’t know about you, but after looking at these, my excuses seem quite princess like!

While googling for these photo examples, I came across a fantastic article that address’s all the common reasons someone might have as to why they don’t commute to work or school. It’s a fantastic article, and very thorough. The intro encourages you to be honest with yourself about the reasons why you don’t commute; honest self reflection always goes a long way. Here’s the link to the full article, and the intro is below:

“More people indicate a desire to get to work by bicycle than ever try. There are three kinds of reasons given for not trying: unsolvable problems, unresolved problems, and excuses. While some would consider any problem resolvable, I don’t. Some hardy soul may be able to trailer three kids to daycare before riding another 35 miles to work, but most people can’t. While I will be providing solutions to all kinds of problems, I do not expect all solutions to work for all people. Excuses are at the other end of the spectrum, but most people’s interpretation of an excuse is incorrect: an excuse is given when we don’t know (or don’t want the other person to know) what the real problem is. I’m not going to accuse anyone of making excuses. This is between you and yourself. But look at your own reasons for not riding with a hairy eyeball. Perhaps the reason you have been giving yourself is not your real reason at all. Discover what your real reason is, because bike commuting will be impossible until you identify the real problem. Finally, there are the resolvable problems. I’m going to include a very wide spectrum, not only practical problems but social and mental ones as well. I can’t guarantee that these solutions will work for you, but they may give you ideas which can lead to something that will work.

Unlike my usual practice, I am going to list all the problems and excuses for which I think I have solutions, and you can click on your problem and jump straight down the page to it (don’t do this if you intend to read them all): Bicycling to work is too dangerous. The trip would be too slow; you don’t have that much time. There are no usable routes anyway. The distance from home to the job is too far. You have to take the kids to daycare or school. You could die of heat stroke, freeze to death, or be drowned in torrential rains along the way. If you ride a bike to work, you will arrive too dirty or smelly, and you have no place to change and clean up. Besides, you could have a flat along the way and be late for work. You can’t carry your important papers, your laptop, and/or extra clothing on a bicycle. There’s no safe place to park the bicycle. Bicycling is socially unacceptable anyway.”

Please read the full article here!!!

Happy Biking Everyone!

Ryan

Tags: bicycle commuting, Bicycles, bike racks, excuses, ride to work, Ryan Leech, third world bikes

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Bikes, Life, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.