30mph is extremely fast unassisted without a downhill or massive tailwind. Its doable, for short distances, by very fit cyclists, but absolutely nobody is sustaining that for long.
You have to scroll back a bit and see that I was responding to someone who mistakenly asserted the speed was "virtually impossible to achieve" which I know to be wrong because I have done it versus just talking about it. And I wasn't the 'world class pro' he qualified his internet-smart-only assertion with. So, I was
never saying anything about being able to do that all day long (or whatever), merely countering a keyboard rider's claims with bicycle rider experience.
And yes, I was pretty good at that time. At 6'0" and about 135 lbs, with a 33 inseam, a sub-20 lb 59cm bike (built in I think 1984 so that weight was on par with the pro level at the time) 175mm crankarms and a top gear of 53-12. Me and the bike were built for it. I was riding something like 300 miles a week at the time, and when I was still single and living on campus I was also riding mornings in a tight pace line with pro and top club riders.
We don't need to resort to online calculators to figure out whats normal for humans, we can just look at what professional cyclists maintain. World tour professional cyclists in a pack are averaging mid 20s on flat stages, and maybe 30mph during short time trials. The current hour world record is ~35mph.
I was chasing a car, them on the road and me in the bike lane. At the end of it I was absolutely demo'd. The thing I remember most was not the pain in the legs but the breathing, which is what really stopped me. Distance for the run according to Google Maps (I just checked) was about 3.2 miles. So hardly a stage on the Tour, but again remember the (false) claim was it was a speed that could not be reached in the first place
it sounds like you should have been doing professional time trials or something. Thats very, very fast.
My life at that time was work and school, with work funding school (and rent+food) and the bike being my sole means of transportation. If I could have had more training time before I had to join the workforce, I'd have had a shot but thats not how the chips fell.
This is all well and good, but we have always had a perfectly legal way to ride two wheel bikes without power or speed limits. They are called motorcycles.
Yes but that is not reflective of the choices available NOW versus the past. At one time we always had horses for perfectly legal transport too. But when something better came along we changed what we did (and there was mighty resistance for a time in the shift away from horses).
I get that everyone wants to spend less time commuting, but I also get that pedestrians, runners, cyclists etc don't particularly want to share their off-road infrastructure with motor vehicles.
Again yes BUT... in our country only a tiny fraction of the population uses that infrastructure. Look at that Google Maps pic I posted earlier. A bike lane on the street,. A very nice 2-lane path off-street... and both are empty. Which is normal even when the road is packed with traffic. Without the potential for growth offered by ebikes, in our auto-centric society its going to stay that way. Long term, the gasoline-era cycling mentality is inevitably going away, just as the scorn for derailleurs went away a century ago. Derailleurs similarly democratized cycling for the 'soft'... but the meek inherited the earth. And like it or not, its happening again. The question is only how much time it takes.
In fact, that infrastructure was built specifically so they had a place to walk/ride without having to deal with motor vehicles. Surely you understand that retorting "but I have s*it to do and need to go fast" doesn't assuage those concerns.
The hard truth is, in the USA at least there aren't enough daily cyclists to make that a priority for society, versus the benefits to that society of automobile replacement. Yes, analog riders are going to be displaced. But from what I am seeing here in a very bike-friendly community, the analog commuters largely replaced their bikes with ebikes. Riders are still on the paths, but the old-school muscle-power bikes seemed to disappear. The only analog riders left in quantity are the dedicated road bike riders and they stay on the streets here, since the paths are too crowded with foot traffic.
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