Total revenue of Germany's bike sector in 2022: 7 bn €
Employees: 5300
Total revenue of Germany's car sector in 2022: 400 bn €
Employees: 780'000
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
87 points (88.5% liked)
Fuck Cars
9624 readers
894 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
And I'm honestly impressed it's 7 bn 😅
Ah yes, the immense lobbying power of “big bike”
Big Bike is behind the plan to keep us trapped inside these 15 minute cities... WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!!!
“Big bike” also called the Netherlands.
Now that's corporate power that I can get behind!
@SpiceDealer my guess is the bike companies don't have as much profit for lobbying, but I like the direction of this. I'd love to see a grassroots movement demanding infrastructure for active travel.
I certainly don't. It's just as possible for us to make the same mistakes with bike infrastructure as we did with car infrastructure. The purpose of all types of traffic should be getting people from where they are to where they want to go, but these "bike superhighways" are the same bullshit we're fighting against with cars.
Out of curiosity, what are bike-highways like where you are? The most I've seen are bike streets where cars need to yield to bikes, or one way streets that work for bikes both ways
There aren't any bike highways near me at the moment, though some cities are starting to design bike highways the same way they made highways for cars. I want cities to thoughtfully design their bike infrastructure, instead of designing infrastructure to benefit lobbyists.
That's fair. I am also completely in favour of well thought out bike infrastructure solutions. Bike lanes just for the sake of bike ways with no connection to people's lives and usage patterns will do us no favours
But we should eliminate the worst forms of transit, shouldn't we?
Absolutely. But we also need to do thoughtful planning in rolling out our next forms of infrastructure
@rockSlayer why do you assume "active travel" is only bikes? what about walkable communities? what if I like to roller skate? why can't we collaborate in each community on how we want to get around and what the rules are?
Why are you assuming that I don't want mixed use travel? This conversation is specifically about bikes, and I was pointing out a specific design trend that's appearing in cities that is antithetical to the point of reducing car travel.
@rockSlayer I see later in the thread that you've talked about thoughtful infrastructure, which I starred. Unfortunately, that wasn't in my notifications, which is what I replied to.
In Washington DC there is
WABA
Washington Area Bicyclists Association
the bicycling movement and community and infrastructure are all pretty excellent over there.
Many people have mentioned good reasons in this thread, but another thing too is that Oil and car companies are still making a bunch of money now, they would and probably continue to lobby against better walking and biking infrastructure. Bike companies would need to get a bunch of support to overcome them.
Very good point. Many here have also mentioned that car companies had the help of oil companies to pressure governments. When thinking of a potential "partner-in-crime" that could help bike companies lobby governments I thought of tire companies. But my dumbass later realized that those same tire companies also work with car companies. I mentioned shoe companies in my post but as @cinnamonTea@lemmy.ml mentioned shoe companies could care less if cities are walkable or not. It's a real shame that "big bike" (as @weasel5053@lemmy.world puts it) doesn't have an aforementioned "parnter-in-crime" that could help them get more bike infrastructure made. Back to the drawing board.
Maybe Big Tram...
There are very few 'bike companies.' Schwinn bikes in the US is owned by a Dutch company with numerous other interests. Most other makers are the same, a company name that is a small cog in a much bigger enterprise. Lobbying is incredibly expensive and these corporations have other irons in the fire.
Bike companies sell a much less expensive product and don't, I would assume, sell that much more of it than car companies do. Thus they have a lot less money to spend on lobbying efforts. Also, they don't tend to be well-known. My assumption is that having a base of support or popularity in the population, or at least having politicians be aware of your brand and your market share is important to have your voice heard in lobbying.
It also helps car companies that, as someone else mentioned, oil companies lobby with them. For many of the reasons we like the idea of bikes - they don't use oil, they are generally easy to fix, sustainable, last a while, etc., they are harder to lobby for, because they don't lobby with anyone and they'd have to lobby against the profit motive.
As for shoe companies, I'm not sure they would benefit from better walkability of cities. My feeling is, they make money mostly for aesthetic reasons or explicitly for gym shoes - neither of which would change much if people walked more. Their money is probably better spent on advertising.
I like the direction of your thinking in the sense of "Hey, there's a power imbalance here, how do we tip it in our favor?" Others have pointed out good reasons why bike manufacturers probably aren't going to move the needle. I do think it's worth thinking about how we build power.
A basic boring answer might be better democracy - eliminate gerrymandering, prohibit lobbying, prohibit legalized bribery, ranked choice voting/proportional representation.
My experience working on anti gerrymandering campaigns is they can be demoralizing because as individuals we really don't have much power and any change is slow. In terms of gaining more tangible power there's also unionizing and worker cooperatives. Basically any kind of organized group is going to be more effective.