For me it was sitting in traffic watching people on their bikes around me in Toronto. I had biked everywhere as a kid and for me too it was the best way to get around in university, but as an adult I got caught in the rat-race car-commute grind. I’d be driving to get downtown and right near me would be people on their bikes in the summer. At stop lights or whatever I found myself staring at them wishing I was on a bike, remembering how free it felt when I was younger. Took me a few weeks to muster up the courage, and once I did I couldn’t believe it took me that long. :). Wouldn’t have it any other way now!

i can’t drive

Came across NotJustBikes on youtube and my carbrain thought “there’s no way I can do my commute on a bike, this only works in the Netherlands”. So I checked google maps and it turned out to actually be a bit faster, mostly on shared paths. So I thought I’d get an ebike to help with the hills and on nice days, when I feel like it, I could save a little time and emissions. Turns out exercise does wonders for your psyche and riding in rain with the right gear is still more pleasant than driving. So now I don’t own a car anymore.

For me it was because of our national car sharing company stopping the free float service during Covid (free float means cars are everywhere on normal parking spaces and you can leave them anywhere else in the city).

I used that when working night shifts in order to get back home cause there’s no more public transport at that time.

After they stopped, I started using rental bikes, then bought a cheap one, then bought a better one. Now I own 4 different bikes and do everything by bike…

That’s a good question. I love riding my bike, and always enjoyed those days when I would commute by bike, but those were rare, like when my car was in the shop. Then one day, I just thought, why don’t I commit to it a bit more seriously? Get a good backpack (started with that, moved to a pannier relatively quickly) rehab my old 90’s MTB with slicks and fenders, and do it as long as the weather isn’t terrible
A decade later, I drive to commute less than 10 times a year, usually when I have to go somewhere far right after work (I don’t really live near any good public transport)

I’ve been using my bicycle as my main form of transportation since late 2019, when I had just recently moved into a tiny dorm room and had independence for the first time. I was put off of learning the bus system at the time because uncertainty about employment made me hesitant about even a $2 fare and the routes I would need to take before the 2021 systen redesign were significantly slower than biking. That, along with not really knowing many people at the time (for carpooling), meant I pretty much had to bike everywhere, putting up to 30 miles a day on the bicycle depending on what I was doing. Thankfully, I already had the leg strength from years of purely recreational biking.

Since then, I usually only pick the bicycle for trips of up to about six miles in length (per direction), plus or minus a couple miles depending on how suitable of a route I have for biking. The majority of my trips fall within that range. Anything longer than that or any trip where I need to bring a ton of stuff with me and I’ll take a bus, train, or carpool to my destination. The end result is that I went from thinking “I’ll get a car once I get situated” to “I don’t need to get a car for the forseeable future”.

I bike commute in warmer parts of the year, and catch the bus in winter. It takes about 45 minutes by bike, about 30-40 by bus, and the bike route is nicer than the bus or car route

I started for health reasons, but really got motivated when the bus system went crap, I could at the time go by bus in 1 hr 14 minutes or by bike in an hour flat. I can’t beat the bus anymore, since they’ve become much faster not than me