How often do you consume some post-apocalyptic media and people slog it on empty highways or whatever for miles and miles on foot or revert back to fucking horses for some reason? Like I can suspend my disbelief that somehow there’s just shittons of fuel laying around everywhere that magically doesn’t spoil for decades but even then there’s so many scenes where the characters are struggling to walk a distance or take forever and you could literally do it in a quarter of the time on a bike.
They’re comparably easy to fix, they don’t require keeping a whole ass horse alive, they’re fairly abundant everywhere and the fuel is you. It just fucks with my disbelief. What, do these people walk through what remains of the suburbs, looting houses for supplies and just ignore every bike they see?
Bicycles are fine as long as your sidewalks and roads aren’t broken. Horses can’t pop a bicycle tube and can handle more types of terrain.
In the first few years of Nazi occupation in the Netherlands the Nazis took the rubber from everyone’s bicycle tires, and people modified their tires with wood . Kids could then still ride them to school. I’d like to see you replace your horses broken leg with wood. Bikes were also modified to generate power for resistance printing presses and to light peoples houses during outages/Nazi mandated blackouts.
FWIW a little later on in the war the whole bicycle would be confiscated, either for the steel or taken by German soldiers who wanted to flee. It’s the source of our national anti-German quip: “give us our bikes back”.
Dutch Jews were never allowed to own bicycles.
