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?
I guess it's also largely because you can just use cars in most situations. They offer more protection, storage space, and speed, while using less of your own energy (food).
But it may also be because the entire "wasteland apocalypse" genre exists as an American fantasy of settler-colonial type stuff. Lawless people in a sparsely populated land where they can do whatever they want to 'survive'. Bikes aren't part of the American conception of "freedom" that the apocalypse is really about. Because apocalypse shows rarely seem to be about densely populated places or ever really explore anything more interesting than "What if there were no cops or government and you spent your time roaming around awful sprawling US suburbia". Bikes don't work when everything is so far apart like in the US. They'd mainly be useful in cities (which apocalypse movies in the tradition sense don't usually take place in). And apocalypse movies are often about suburbia, because of that deeply-ingrained with that "American heartland" trope we're all now very familiar with. The "heartland" is the places that are empty, because the places with people have "too many blacks and jews" (like the :the-podcast: folks pointed out)
That's sort of the joke, tho. Nothing works, absent our incredibly energy-hungry infrastructure, in the US. That's why a natural disaster or a public disturbance or a bottleneck in the Suez Canal can result in store shelves hollowed out inside a week.
In an apocalypse, the things that would disappear wouldn't be bicycles but suburbs.
I mean if I stick with The Last of Us example, Joel and Ellie hoof it from coast to coast over a year, many times on foot. That's sort of my issue. Of course you'd take a car (and of course disbelief can be suspended about magic fuel with no shelf life) but like just toss two bikes in the back of your pickup truck.
This gets even more egregious when it comes to fucking horses. You have no cars or ability to keep them running, you revert back to horses?
OwO