It’s pretty trivial for any out of shape schlub to get a garden variety bicycle up to 30 or 35 MPH with the aid of a hill, but only if you don’t go by averages and discount the several minutes spent huffing and puffing up the other side first. I used the big hill in our town to crack 40 MPH once when I was a teenager, complete with no helmet and probably while wearing flip-flops.
Back then the pearl-clutchers screeched about pedal bikes at exactly the same tone and pitch as they’re doing now about e-bikes and electric kick scooters, but analog bikes have since been normalized. The ones now clearly have no idea of the types of shenanigans we got up to with our pedal bikes when we were kids. Back then if you were truly a cool cat you’d fit a little two stroke engine to your bicycle. If you weren’t, we’d skitch on the backs of tractor trailers as they passed through through town, preferably starting by grabbing one that was stopped at a (or rather at the time the) red light.
What it really boils down to is that adults absolutely cannot stand young people having access to personal transportation because it makes said young people harder to control. It was the same shit with skateboards, and before that it was the same shit with roller skates, and before that probably penny farthings. I’ll bet you the first time some caveman’s kid took a carved stone wheel and rolled across the village on it his parents complained about it.
It’s pretty trivial for any out of shape schlub to get a garden variety bicycle up to 30 or 35 MPH with the aid of a hill, but only if you don’t go by averages and discount the several minutes spent huffing and puffing up the other side first. I used the big hill in our town to crack 40 MPH once when I was a teenager, complete with no helmet and probably while wearing flip-flops.
Back then the pearl-clutchers screeched about pedal bikes at exactly the same tone and pitch as they’re doing now about e-bikes and electric kick scooters, but analog bikes have since been normalized. The ones now clearly have no idea of the types of shenanigans we got up to with our pedal bikes when we were kids. Back then if you were truly a cool cat you’d fit a little two stroke engine to your bicycle. If you weren’t, we’d skitch on the backs of tractor trailers as they passed through through town, preferably starting by grabbing one that was stopped at a (or rather at the time the) red light.
What it really boils down to is that adults absolutely cannot stand young people having access to personal transportation because it makes said young people harder to control. It was the same shit with skateboards, and before that it was the same shit with roller skates, and before that probably penny farthings. I’ll bet you the first time some caveman’s kid took a carved stone wheel and rolled across the village on it his parents complained about it.