Can the argument that Citi Bikes are perfect for the apocalypse make them cool? Maybe!

Despite the fact that there have definitely been more people using Citi Bike out there, it’s kind of tough for the bikes themselves to escape the fact that they’re sorta lame. We mean, they work, and that’s good, but give us a good solid road bike any day of the week over those glorified spin class bikes. Or so we thought, until a writer at Slate brought up the perfectly cromulent point that Citi Bikes would be great if civilization collapsed.

In an article for the site blessedly free of any #slatepitches farty contrarianism, Paul Ford lays out the reasons why Citi Bike bikes would be great if there was no more gasoline. The lack of gears on the bike make for easy uphill riding, the gear ratio also makes it easy to tow things on the back, like say a laser cannon, as Ford posits. Ford even manages to turn the advertising into a positive, noting that there’s nothing that makes an apocalyptic scenario feel that much more correct than with incongruous branding surviving the bombs.

Ford even points out the charging stations would have use:

As reliable sources of a steady flow of electricity, it’s pretty easy to imagine local chieftains taking those over, and lines of desperate people lining up to charge their cracked mobile devices so that they can look one last time at pictures of the people they lost, trading whatever of value they still possess for one last hour with their smartphones. It will be like the blackout, but forever.

The argument is almost enough to welcome the blessed end of everything. At the very least, it’d probably mean people would stop complaining about hipsters.

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