Hacker News Reader

Comment by mapleoin | Hacker News Reader

I would draw it facing left and I think that's because of the way I learned to mount a bike: the bike-stand is on the left side so you need to have your last foot on the ground on the left side in order to pull it up.

View on HN

Yes, this is my guess too. Are all bikes mounted from the left even in areas with left traffic? Haven't thought about that before.

I believe this goes all the way back to horse-mounting - mounting from the left is easier, as your primary hand weapon (sword, mace, club, whatever) is likely to hang at your left side, where you can easily reach it with your right hand; this makes mounting from the right considerably harder, as the weapon gets betwween . (It would probably reverse for left-handed fighters; this had very little impact on today's bike mounting and kickstands, however)

This. It's the way you approach a bike to mount so that's the way it looks inviting in advertisements too. I'm not sure if "stand fixed to left side" is a rhs traffic thing or something global?

Same with horses, boats and airplanes... and yes, I think in all these cases it's the global convention.

Including England, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, etc?

>the bike-stand is on the left side

Obviously that's just if the bike is positioned facing left.

Nothing inherent about it, you could just as well mount a bike facing right, and it would be on the other side.

A bike stand is only attached to one side of the bike. So it's always on either the left or the right, no matter which direction the bike is facing.

That's compared to the bike -- I meant compared to the road.

Compared to the bike yes, the stand is on a specific side (e.g. left) -- but how/why would that affect whether you draw the bike facing to the right or left?

Nice explanation! I'd also paint it that way and thought this was because bikes on advertisement materials are usually shown that way around.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com