Cargo bikes need to become more common. It would have easily carried a laser printer ... and a second laser printer ... and your groceries for the week ... and a kitchen appliance.
Edit: Here are the examples from the Not Just Bikes video on cargo bikes:
Hench why they said they should become more common.
There's a few pilot projects for cargobike shares popping up in my city, and I hope they become more prolific to allow everyone easy access without having to own.
I could care less if it goes vroom vroom or not. I can't take a bike on a school bus to get to school, and I can't always take the bus home. It wouldn't have been a problem if I wasn't carrying a printer home, I'd just walk, but God damn was it heavy.
Nowhere to place the printer. No basket, no cargo spots, etc. It's a mountain bike, meant for mountains, not moving cargo. Although it does seem like an interesting concept for a mountain bike to be a cargo bike, but it all boils down to money.
I gotta hand it to you, kid, you're the perfect specimen why communities like fuck cars exist, and why nothing is changing.
Even presented with a fucking wishing well you cannot come up with anything but "CAaAaR", because your imagination spans from wall to wallpaper.
You could have imagined and wished for e.g. a working infrastructure of cargo bike sharing, but nope!, car it is!
You don't understand why people hate cars, you're part of the reason people hate cars.
I don't have money, I don't make money, so I couldn't get an Uber/Lyft/Taxi (Not to mention that we don't have taxis where I live).
Ah, a car is free, of course, it just drops out of nowhere and runs on unicorn dust. Tonight, please ask mommy and daddy what they're paying for their car(s). Full cost: down payment, monthly payments, fuel, repairs, insurance, loss of value, everything.
I'm gonna tl;dr it for you: if you cannot afford a taxi/uber/whatever even once, you cannot afford a car. There, that was easy, wasn't it?
I ruled a bike out as an option as I CANNOT take a bike onto a school bus, so I can get to school.
I thought the printer was just 3 miles away? Did it ever occur to you you could have just gone home, pick up the cargo bike, ride the 3 miles to the printer which literally takes 10 minutes and pick it up?
I used to say things like this when I lived without a car, but it took me way too long to realize other people walking to the grocery would take a taxi/Uber home. It makes it a lot easier to carry the load and it’s not too expensive in one direction for a short distance
That's such a contrived example why would we even bother with it?
Typically when people purchase or obtain items that they need to transport home or to someplace, they do some sort of planning ahead. Also, when I was a kid and needed transportation I typically could just ask an adult to help out with this. Or, another option would be to ask the school to hold the object until you could arrange transportation.
In any case, three miles is not a particularly long distance to traverse, and as you pointed out above you were actually able to walk that distance while carrying it. Well laser printers are somewhat heavy, I'm sure it was a little annoying to carry and you probably had to stop several times and rest. By myself had to carry 30 lb of lumber about 3 mi home from the lumber store years ago when I didn't have a car. And yes I was able to manage.
However, cargo bicycles exist and are quite popular in many parts of the world including the United States and can carry up to 400 lbs, so it is not true that the only means of transporting moderately weighty items is by automobile.
In fact, I would be willing to bet that you would not even need a cargo bicycle but a normal bicycle with a rear rack and a couple of bungee cords would probably suffice. I know this because I got away without having a bicycle for 6 years as an adult American in a city and even went bicycle camping a few times with my friends.
@dog_@Potatos_are_not_friends ok, but how often do you carry a laser printer? Should all urban design be made to prioritize cars just so someone can carry something heavy once every three years? Wouldn't it be better if you only had to use a car when you actually needed it?
Alright look, y'all have great arguments that I cannot answer, but that doesn't stop the fact that I wish I had a car available to me at that point in time. It may not be the best solution, but that would've been a solution already available to me without having to spend money on another solution just so I could possibly do the same thing, like you said "once every three years." We all have our opinions and things like that, and while I agree that we shouldn't rely on cars like that, sometimes you just need one for spur of the moment things without planning ahead of time.
@dog_ yes, it's fine to use cars from time to time. But is it fine to absolutely destroy our cities to prioritize space for cars? That's the point of this community. It's not "never use a car", it's "cities should belong to people, we shouldn't have to give up so much space for cars".
They shouldn't, and I get that, but where I'm from, a lot of people come from out of state to work. While that doesn't personally affect me in any way, people can't just bike from one state to another (depending on where you live of course, and how far away the state line is from your workplace and/or house).
Most of the time, people aren't going to utilize it anyways, and especially for how spaced out many places are around me, it's not as easy to do it with a bike or other things like it.
@dog_ replying to your edit: if you live in a place that forces you to drive, that's not your fault. We're all striving here so more places can be places where you're, actually, not forced to drive a car.
And I wish it wasn't raining when my daughter had her 8th birthday party in the park. We don't always get what we want in this world, even when we're doing something we want to do.