Here in post-collapse Argentina, I semi-regularly attend a free bike repair workshop run by a bunch of anarchists who occupied a pizzeria abandoned in the collapse, twelve years ago. They turned it into a library, a community garden, a clothing workshop, and a bike kitchen. So I have some insights to offer:
1. It's remarkable how quickly bicycles can break down, especially when they're not made to be ridden (US department-store bikes, all Argentine bikes) and when you repair them with improvised tools and improvised or substandard components.
2. There are a fair number of specialized tools that you need for bike repair that are pretty hard to do without. You can maybe cut a cone wrench from a flattened spoon, and you can "press" out chavetas (cotters) with a hammer and chunk of steel instead of a cotter press, and you can true your rims on the bike if you have to, but how are you going to unscrew your freewheel without the right shape of freewheel extractor? Or break your chain without a chain breaker?
3. A bit further afield, you have to patch or replace your inner tubes when they spring leaks. But it's increasingly difficult to get working vulcanizing fluid for patching after the economy collapses; that shit doesn't have an indefinite shelf life. Ultimately you need to put together some kind of chemistry lab, using chemicals of unknown quality, in order to renew your supply of bike patch kits.
4. More generally, bicycles, like other industrial machinery, are allergic to entropy. The crucial resource needed to repack your wheel bearing balls isn't the steel to make the balls or the dead cow to grease them with; it's the knowledge about which balls are the right size, and which ones are already subtly cracked. Buy them in bulk and they cost a fraction of a cent. Install a ball of the wrong size and you could wreck your cones or your hub or even your body.
So I think bicycles are an important part of post-apocalyptic transportation, but keeping bicycles running without an economy populated with specialized equipment, materials brought from far away, and people with specialized knowledge could be quite challenging indeed.
You make it sound like cars are somehow easier to repair. They are fantastically more complicated in comparison, with specialized tools required for particular models.
How popular were bikes in Argentina before the collapse? How popular after? They haven't really taken hold in the parts of central America I've visited even though the weather is almost always suitable and the roads aren't that bad. People just take the bus, drive their car, or at worst, a small motorbike.
It's like bicycles don't even come up as an option.
Speaking as someone who lives in the bike theft capital of North America, it's possible they're too easily stolen and therefore people don't bother buying them in the first place. Cars are harder to steal since the police will at least pretend to investigate an automobile theft. They're also tagged with license plates and VINs to provide a small deterrent to theft in the first place.
> You make it sound like cars are somehow easier to repair. They are fantastically more complicated in comparison, with specialized tools required for particular models.
Having rebuilt a Vanagon engine, I agree that cars are dramatically more difficult to maintain and repair.
> How popular were bikes in Argentina before the collapse? How popular after?
They're not very popular, although much more popular than in the US when I lived there. I don't know how popular they were before the last collapse; I assume about the same. Mostly the people who ride them do so because of some kind of antipathy to motorcycles. They are cheaper than even the cheapest motorcycles.
I should point out that if you have an income, bike repair services are cheap and abundant here in post-collapse Argentina, if often of low quality.
Is the collapse still influencing you in everyday life? I wasn't quite aware of that (sorry). For example in Sweden all signs of it seem to have long gone, then again it's been quite a bit longer in the past.
Because the world is a complicated place and I am ignorant, I was confused by this remark. So after ten minutes on wikipedia, I thought I'd share what I learned, to contextualize DeepDuh and kragen's references to economic collapse.
Note that I am not an expert, this is just what I gathered from WP and a few other sources.
Sweden had a financial crisis in the early 90s (perhaps 1990 to 1993). This was partly due to a real estate bubble in the 80s which collapsed. Unemployment "soared" (from ~2% to ~10%, which many countries would be fairly happy with). The central bank at one point set overnight interest rates at 500% (!!!). Yikes. At one point the federal deficit was 15% of GDP. Sweden recovered through the mid-90s. Their unemployment rate continues to be much higher than pre-1990, but they've run a budget surplus most years since 1998 (everyone is envious).
Argentina had a completely unrelated crash, about 10 years later. It started in 1998 (by which point Sweden was firmly recovered). There was an IMF bailout, but Argentina couldn't hold up their end of the deal, and the bailout collapsed. 20% economy shrink, 25% unemployment, peso devalued by 75%, rampant poverty, holy crap that sounds really really not fun at all. In 2002, there was a two week period with five different presidents, what the hell. Macroeconomic indicators start getting better by 2002; the government has run a small budget surplus for most of the time since then, and unemployment returned to the single digits by 2007 (still worse than a lot of countries, but 7% today is a hell of a lot better than 25% in 1999).
And that's what I learned this morning. Who knows what the afternoon will bring?
Thanks for the input. I didn't have the exact timeframe in mind either, I just knew it was longer ago at a time when I wasn't yet interested in political events ;-). Also, I wasn't quite aware that this stuff isn't common knowledge outside of Europe, so thanks for the reminder.
The GDP has recovered, the provincial currencies and barter meetups have fallen out of use, and most of the asambleas populares have become irrelevant. But the retirees are still being paid a pittance, the government still can't sell bonds at a reasonable price, the creditors seized a Navy boat in Ghana a couple of months ago, and there are still people sleeping in the streets and recycling cardboard from the garbage for a living. Also, I think adverse possession is much more difficult today.
The bike kitchen I'm talking about is La Fábricicleta, and it's hosted by the Asamblea Popular de Villa Urquiza, which is dominated by anarchists and is one of the few asambleas that hasn't become irrelevant.
They are more complicated to repair. But they are also more resilient. Broken glass is less likely to disable them.
If you have a fairly new car and you can get fuel, you might be able to travel thousands of miles without a repair. And they come with a spare tire. And you can carry tools and extra oil and a mechanic.
FWIW, you can carry more spare inner tubes on a bike than spare tires on a car, and although I've had bike inner tubes punctured by goatheads, maladjusted brake pads, tacks, and a burr on a spoke nipple that cut its way through my improvised post-apocalyptic rim strip made of electrical tape, I don't think I've ever had a broken-glass puncture.
I think both bikes and cars have highly variable resiience to hostile conditions. You can get bikes with big fat BMX tires, put Kevlar strips and thick inner tubes inside, and pour in a bit of Slime, and you probably don't have to worry much about punctures or pinch flats or blowouts, unless you have misadjusted rim brakes like the ones I mentioned before. And there are plenty of cars that aren't fairly new and can't travel even dozens of miles without a repair.
The last puncture I had was on the rim-side of the inner tube and probably was there when I bought the bike. Before that ... I think that was years ago. Most touring bikes these days also come with tyres that have a puncture-preventing layer [1]. Racing bicycles are probably not well-suited for post-apocalyptic duty.
But as far as repair equipment goes, I think I think a bicycle repair kit (should be good for half a dozen punctures and they last years) and a multitool (for removing wheels and the like) should suffice for a lot, even if certain occasions need special tools.
> Most touring bikes these days also come with tyres that have a puncture-preventing layer
And "airless" tires are starting to appear as well.
> Racing bicycles are probably not well-suited for post-apocalyptic duty.
Probably not, a touring or XC-type mountain bike is probably a better idea (or an hybrid, more efficient than an XC but with more "all terrains" abilities than a straight touring bike).
Airless tires are quite a lot older than pneumatic tires, actually. But the introduction of the pneumatic tire made bicycles practical for a much wider range of people and uses.
Yes, I meant airless tires which can actually compete with pneumatic on efficiency and comfort, obviously you could always have a back-breaking full cylinder of rubber.
Oh? How do those work? Obviously they're physically possible (you could fill a tire with Utility Fog) but I didn't realize they were yet technically feasible.
Although they still have the issue outlined in http://www.livestrong.com/article/222689-airless-bicycle-tir... (on the subject of the previous airless generation, using flexible foam instead of rubber fill): shocks can't be spread around as they are in pneumatic tires (where the tire gets overpressured all around and most of the shock's energy is spread around the tire unless it's so big it reaches — and damages — the wheel's rim)
Here in Amsterdam it looks like bikes don't really need that much maintenance. People mostly use "old-timers" - single speed, backpedal brakes, enclosed chain and low pressure 35+mm tires all help to improve the reliability. My friends don't maintain their bikes at all and they are driving them in the town with water and snow and salt everywhere until they get stolen.
Yes, the reliability of Dutch bikes is legendary. Beyond the features you described, I think there are other features that are less obvious that also contribute to reliability: good tolerances on bearings, good steel for bearing balls and axles, and perhaps other things I don't know about.
You can get a free wheel off with a rock and a nail, and break a chain with a rock and a knife. I've done both when stuck in the middle of nowhere without the appropriate tools.
Maybe it depends on how your freewheel is attached? I'm thinking of the ones where you have a splined tool you slide into the middle to twist it counterclockwise; I'm not sure how you'd twist that off with a rock and a nail.
2. There are a fair number of specialized tools that you need for bike repair that are pretty hard to do without.
I have every tool needed to repair my bike - I put it together from a frame and parts - and I'll bet that quite a lot of other cyclists do too. I could easily carry them all on my bike, too.
Quite a lot do, although even more don't. I regularly carry a multitool, cone wrenches, a universal spoke wrench, and an adjustable wrench, but not a file, freewheel spline tool, grease, chain tool (foolish, I know, I just haven't bought one yet), kerosene, vise, welder, taps and dies, that huge-ass wrench for tightening the headset, or heavy hammer, all of which I've needed at some time or other.
It really depends. In a lot of disaster novels, things like roads are destroyed or unusable (packed with crashed in cars). While a bike might seem convenient at first, it quickly becomes an impossible burden at the first blown out bridge or packed highway intersection with a massive pileup. Similarly any 'road junk' from crashed cars or nature can easily damage tires.
As others have mentioned, the resources to maintain bikes are not zero cost. Also, bikes rust in wetter areas fairly quickly if left outside/not maintained (your average chain is going to last ~ a year outside if not reoiled).
Bikes, mile per mile are more dangerous than walking, this might be because of cars etc, but with cracking roads and overgrowth, the risk to riding a bike becomes higher than walking. A single screw up on a bike is survivable in the modern world, it is less so in a post-apocalyptic one.
Bikes leave you vulnerable while travelling, you have to stick to main developed roads, you can only move so fast, you are easily taken out by a simple road trap. You have very little ability to 'take in surroundings' and you have to stop moving and abandon your bike to fight or hide. In a 'world gone mad' scenario someone on a bike moving overland is an easier target than someone on horse or on foot.
Bicyling long distances sucks a lot, especially for people who don't do it a lot. It's brutal on the body, hard to cross anything with elevation, and hurts the body in unique ways. Your average person might give up cycling fairly quickly for this reason. Horses, at least, travel with you when riding on them sucks.
Bikes don't work as well under non-ideal conditions. Heavy rain/snow/ice/elevation/heat all make bikes difficult to use or damage them.
Skateboards solve a lot of these (as they are easily portable). But the risk factor gets higher.
I'm not saying these items would be useless in a post-apocalyptic scenario. However, like most items, if someone wasn't extensively prepared to maintain and use them in a similar scenario, it's going to not work out for them except in the short term. (The same could be said about guns/cars/motorcycles).
> Bikes, mile per mile are more dangerous than walking, this might be because of cars etc,
It is because of cars. I went to FARS (http://www.nhtsa.gov/FARS) and queried accident causes for 2011. 42% of the accident causes start with the word "motorist". Many of the other causes would also simply not exist in a world without motor vehicle traffic, e.g., "Bicyclist Ride Through - Sign Controlled Intersection" -- this means running a stop sign, and it isn't something that would kill you in a post-apocalyptic world. In fact, the only cause I can see which is clearly not related to the presence of motor vehicles are the categories "head-on: bicyclist" and "head-on: unknown". When I click on cases with causes listed as "Bicyclist Ride Out" or others like that, I see a form that lists a motor vehicle as being involved.
I think you're missing the biggest point here, and that is the fact that biking burns less calories per mile than walking does. A quick Google search:
These sources say if you weigh 190 pounds, you burn 47 calories per mile on bike going 10-12 miles/hour, but at least 94 calories per mile when you walk 3.5 miles/hour. You cover the same distance in 1/3 the time and burning 1/2 the calories, or you cover 2x the distance with the same amount of energy, or you cover 3x the distance in the same amount of time for only 50% more calories. (Edit: I got the math wrong earlier.)
The fact is, modern city-dwellers are simply not used to walking or biking long distances. Walking long distances sucks a lot, it's brutal on the body. Far worse, per mile, than biking. At worst, you can walk your bike and load it down with more than you could carry, or you could abandon your bike.
Bicycling long distances may suck, but so does walking. If you can go about three times the speed of walking, you have a nice range of tradeoffs between get there in one third of the days of walking, or get there on the same day, but spend one third of the hours in the day traveling as when walking.
Unless the tires are flat, you can also walk with your weight on the bike and ease the burden of walking somewhat.
This isn't true. Many people bike on footpaths and surfaces that are completely unsuitable for motorised vehicles. Almost anywhere you can walk you could ride a bike and cross the terrain faster.
If walking turns into scrambling or climbing the bike becomes a bit of a hinderance, but they're not that heavy and the benefits across most terrain outweigh the inconvenience. In fact on a bike you could probably avoid it altogether, not losing a great deal of time just going around.
You're not likely to still be travelling long distances long enough after whatever event that the roads and paths are in such a state of disrepair. You'd be talking years for that to happen and you probably would have had to sort out some sort of place to live and grow food long before you had to worry about it.
As stated above, the other advantage of a bike that's often forgotten is that they are far better than a hand cart or wheel barrow for transporting stuff. If it's flat or down hit you can ride a bike carrying a huge load. If it's up hill you can drop to a low gear or just push the bike. For a few years now I've taken a bike to Glastonbury Festival - even in mud and hilly terrain I can carry everything for the 5 days on one bike, pushing where I need to freewheeling where I can. And get to site much faster than friends walking, and carrying far more.
Similarly for years I would ride a BMX to the supermarket, then load up the handlebars with shopping bags and walk it home - no struggling with heavy bags, and no need for a car or even a bus (which still leaves you struggling from the stop to your house) - I can easily do a full weeks shop for 2 on a bike. Now I have a proper shopper with panniers and baskets - even easier - but handlebars are all you really need!
Another advantage is that you can run machine tools off a bike. The traditional Argentine knife sharpener rides a bicycle around town blowing a sort of multitonal whistle; when you take your knives downstairs to him, he puts down a stand that lifts his rear wheel off the ground, engages a belt with the rear wheel (which is modified to enable this), and drives his grinding wheel off the belt. This is a substantial advantage over the medieval method of having your apprentices whip the lathe and pull the whip.
Really, bicycles have a lot of advantages in any kind of material shortage. I've just been a bit down on them because of the amount of work they need.
Only on a road bike. The cobblestone streets in parts of Buenos Aires are brutal on a bicycle, but I still pedal over them in preference to walking the bike.
I agree, cars and horses fail in many similar ways to bikes. Feet can handle a lot.
Horses and dogs take a lot of maintenance (more for horses obviously), but unlike a bike, car, or gun, anyone who owns one and thinks of taking it on a long trip is more likely to know how to keep it alive.
More importantly, horses and dogs require minimal industrial infrastructure to maintain, which isn't true of bikes and cars. As long as you can feed the horse really, and all you need is some land with grass. Minimal tech is required to shoe the horse, etc....
Bike couriers and hipsters will have an advantage in the post-apocalyptic future, as fixed gear bikes have fewer complex moving parts and break down less often.
Actually, the general populace will profit from well maintained hipster bikes, because hipsters will die in the apocalypse first. You know, before it becomes mainstream.
I'm curious: will this remark get upvoted because it's genuinely funny, or downvoted because it's too reddit like? Anyway, I smiled. Thanks for this :)
In my opinion, many reddit-esque comments are genuinely funny. I love pun threads. I'm amused by self-referential hipsterish humour. Etc. This, it turns out, is not relevant.
It's not relevant because funny joke comments are worse (from the perspective of ideal HN behaviour) than unfunny joke comments; it's the funny ones that get more replies, and that means more off-topic noise hiding the on-topic signal (where topicality is defined in newsguidelines.html).
I have the impression that disaster novelists think that as our technology level drop and lots of stuff become lost technology, society become something like medieval era instantly, with several common day use objects instantly disappearing or becoming unusable...
Yet, when I think about possible collapse I do worry about some interesting things, like, who will replace my glasses?
I never heard in a disaster novel of people having problem to find glasses, yet I believe glasses manufacturers will not be much...
Even the dark ages were not one day "perfectly working Roman Empire" and the next one could not even find fresh water. It was much more of a slow decline of things going into disrepair and people losing track of ideas and technology due to ever growing isolation and too busy to focus on academia from the lost of technology/infrastructure efficiencies/safety the Empire brought.
"I never heard in a disaster novel of people having problem to find glasses,"
Justin Cronin, The Passage.
It's a hundred years after the world ended, one minor character is terribly near-sighted. And he's gone through all of the glasses 'from the old days' his small community has in the storeroom and none of them help.
It stuck with me because, hey, he's about as near-sighted as I am.
I thought this was not much serious... Or would not work for me (I have 5D of hyperopia)
So... alright, I took a sheet of paper, a nail scissor, made several (square and low quality...) holes on it.
Removed my glasses.
Looked a computer screen, and could not see shit.
Looked through paper.
I could read.
OMGWTF!!!!! IT WORKS!!!
Sir thank you! I am much happier know knowing that I am not doomed to not be able to read anymore in case something happen and noone make glasses for me anymore!
When I bought the Zombie Survival Guide at my friendly neighborhood bookstore, the guy working there told me the bouncer at the bar next door bought both the Zombie Survival Guide and the Anarchist's Cookbook. He said the bouncer returned the Anarchist's Cookbook the following day because the Zombie Survival Guide was "more informative." :)
The Zombie Survival Guide also recommends motorcycles and machetes.
I know many of these comments are somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but really, there will not be a survivable apocalypse. Sorry, survivalists, just. not. gonna. happen.
I think another problem is suitable roadways. There's probably trails available everywhere but there is definitely going to be a reduction is available surfaces to ride bicycles on. I don't know if this changes the proposition, but it definitely introduces a new complexity that should be explored in fiction.
I just kind of think a bicycle may not be that useful in some parts of a zombie-infested rural Georgia.
Usually the metal tubes last a long time if you don't open them. Usually I can also poke a hole in the solid block with a safety pin and get to still-liquid superglue inside.
There are as many different answers as there are end of the world novels.
If we're just wanking along, what to me seems most likely is a 'Fall of Rome' deal where things gradually get worse but no one fully realizes it because it happens so slowly.
One doesn't know they're living in the ruins of an empire, it's just the way things are.
Still, would knowledge go away today? Interesting to consider what would be the minimum sensible size for a modern society? For example perhaps acquiring raw materials like iron would be a huge problem?
IIRC, medieval farmers in Gaul had crop yields a fraction of their Roman ancestors farming the same land. No soil depletion - they'd forgotten how to farm.
This seems silly - it's _food_. It would be like people in 21st century forgetting how to refrigerate their food. 'The meat goes bad so quickly now, I wonder why?'
But it happened.
"minimum sensible size for a modern society?"
The number 10,000 is in my head, but I don't know if that's an actual real number of something a scifi writer made up.
"cquiring raw materials like iron "
Well .. every guy at the mine face digging out ore is supported by .. well a whole lotta people. Someone makes the tools, generates electricity, makes lightbulbs, and pumps, and motors, and food, and builds and maintains the railroad getting the ore to the smelter. The guy at the smelter needs lights, and electricity, and food, and tools.
Border defense! If you've got civilization there are going to be people outside of it who want to rip off what you've got. Better make sure the army is fed, and supplied.
"My hope would be to find some books on farming..."
The local library was looted when the Empire withdrew from the outer provinces.
Big deal! You're a farmer speaking medieval French: the books are in Latin.
And you can't read anyway - no schools.
And even if there were schools you couldn't go. As soon as you could walk Dad needed you for a farm hand. For some reason we don't get the crop yields Gram'pa did and we gotta work can see to can't see just to get barely enough food to survive.
Although, with everyone else dead, it would be an ideal opportunity to ring the little handlebar bell all the time without worrying about a punch coming from the sidewalk :)
They're making zombies that can love and learn, so we're only one movie away from bikes and two from cars. At this point they don't even need the makeup - just show some folks going to work and call it a zombie movie.
Come to think of it, that's been done (some French indie award winner dealt pretty heavily with work & family reintegration of the risen.) The genre is thoroughly tapped.
> Come to think of it, that's been done (some French indie award winner dealt pretty heavily with work & family reintegration of the risen.) The genre is thoroughly tapped.
When I'm walking and a bicyclist passes me, I generally don't hear them coming until they're past. Likewise when I'm bicycling around a pedestrian, they don't hear me unless I deliberately make noise.
1. It's remarkable how quickly bicycles can break down, especially when they're not made to be ridden (US department-store bikes, all Argentine bikes) and when you repair them with improvised tools and improvised or substandard components.
2. There are a fair number of specialized tools that you need for bike repair that are pretty hard to do without. You can maybe cut a cone wrench from a flattened spoon, and you can "press" out chavetas (cotters) with a hammer and chunk of steel instead of a cotter press, and you can true your rims on the bike if you have to, but how are you going to unscrew your freewheel without the right shape of freewheel extractor? Or break your chain without a chain breaker?
3. A bit further afield, you have to patch or replace your inner tubes when they spring leaks. But it's increasingly difficult to get working vulcanizing fluid for patching after the economy collapses; that shit doesn't have an indefinite shelf life. Ultimately you need to put together some kind of chemistry lab, using chemicals of unknown quality, in order to renew your supply of bike patch kits.
4. More generally, bicycles, like other industrial machinery, are allergic to entropy. The crucial resource needed to repack your wheel bearing balls isn't the steel to make the balls or the dead cow to grease them with; it's the knowledge about which balls are the right size, and which ones are already subtly cracked. Buy them in bulk and they cost a fraction of a cent. Install a ball of the wrong size and you could wreck your cones or your hub or even your body.
So I think bicycles are an important part of post-apocalyptic transportation, but keeping bicycles running without an economy populated with specialized equipment, materials brought from far away, and people with specialized knowledge could be quite challenging indeed.