Society's got priorities wrong.
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most car travels are 1 person or sometimes 2 person
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the majority of car travels are quite short, less than 40km.
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many car travels are just to get some groceries or drop of a little package or just say "hi" to someone, carrying nothing but themselves.
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cars are fucking expensive, to buy and to maintain
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accidents become way worse with heavier vehicles
Microcar is a valid answer to all of these, while still being sheltered from weather.
How are urban places (i'm in Belgium) with almost permanent super heavy road traffic congestion, bad climate statistics, high polution values, very limited available space left, no self-sustaining energy production and high traffic accident statistics still pooring in billions and billions in subsidies year after year into "regular" big heavy SUV-like vehicles instead of these? It's beyond my comprehension. The only real valid reason i somewhat get is the collective scare of being in a crash and not wanting to be in the smaller vehicle. We could save the climate, we choose not to.
- MICROLINO: 17.990 €
- OPEL ROCKS: 8.699 €
- CITROEN AMI: 7.790 €
- RENAULT TWIZY: 13.000 €
- FIAT TOPOLINO: 9.890 €
A lot of people here casually spend more on a sunday racing bike every few years for fucks sake.
maybe it's prejudice, but i would never buy a decathlon bicycle. Local bike repair shops here don't want to touch them so you need to get them to a decathlon for a fix. Kinda shitty when you're bike's broken. Because to get your bike there you need... a car.
Not sure how many bike shops would refuse a bike based on the brand, its. Even the Decathlon ones are using branded components(Shimano, Sram, Microshift) which are 99% of the time needs servicing and everyone is familiar with them(and quality-wise they are waaaay above the "supermarket" brands).
I am not saying your experience is not valid, just cant see why a repair shop would turn away a customer based on what is written on the bike.
Well their reasoning is "if you buy crap, go to the crap store you bought it". Some also refuse cheap online bought bikes. They say the parts are inferior and no fixing can fix that, and they have plenty of work.
Tho I now see that decathlon recently started offering fix your bike at your home, so I guess my point became moot!
Sounds like you go to some snobby shops, the kind of place that will look down their nose at anything that costs less than 3 months salary.
In many places it's not like you can choose between 10 bike shops. There's 1 or 2 within walk/bike reach.
My bike cost just 600 € 5 years ago FYI. I didn't buy a decathlon one because of the bike shops refusing them. Appearantly that's not a reason to not buy decathlon anymore, but it for sure was before.