111–120 of 699 posts
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Unless there's ice on the road, I ride my bike year-round in Berlin.
If there's ice on the road people in Norway just switch to studded tires.
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There won't be many pristine woods left if everybody lives like you though.
I think you’re underestimating the total acreage of “pristine” wilderness in the United States. Any realistic demand for a lifestyle like koolba‘s would find ample supply.
This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward. Cities get bigger and denser, and wasting a big % of land on parking spaces, roads, intersections and accepting a horrible air quality (that reduces citizen life spans and health quality) and noise pollution just does not make any sense anymore. Carse are effective in less dense…
privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society For people with a very limited lifestyle restricted to a few city blocks perhaps this is true. But the majority of people do not live that way and have use cases for cars that you have not considered in your analysis. change always requires some sacrifice, By other people, funnily eno…
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Roads, parking and other infrastructure that de facto subsidize and encourage private car usage but which often are considered "free". Taxes on fuel raise £50Bn/year for the exchequer, which is double the amount spent by the government on all transportation of all kinds. No one considers it to be “free”, and in fact drivers subsidise everything else.
How many of those £50Bn need to go to the NHS to treat illnesses caused by drivers?
How many lives has the road system saved, by the way? What do ambulances drive on? Or even ordinary drivers taking sick or injured relatives to the hospital themselves?
This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward. Cities get bigger and denser, and wasting a big % of land on parking spaces, roads, intersections and accepting a horrible air quality (that reduces citizen life spans and health quality) and noise pollution just does not make any sense anymore. Carse are effective in less dense…
In cities sure, but there’s plenty of us who do not want to live in cities. Heck, I don’t even want to live within eye sight of neighbors, stores, or really anything else except some pristine woods. That’s not possible without a car.
Hi! I'm living in one of the closes villages around Pontevedra, I'm heabilly use the city, and I'm doing some remote job for an SF startup. If you have questions, I'm happy to help and provide feedback.
What do you do when you have to buy a few boxes of beer for a party that are too heavy to carry?
How do emergency services work?
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I lived for a while in Berlin. Coming back to the U.S. the first thing I noticed were too many billboards and ugly parking lots. Each store has its own parking lot. Largely underused. No nice paths to traverse the bleak endless parking lot landscape. It’s ugly and wasteful. It’s hostile to pedestrians and discourages people from going outside to just wander. Even in relatively walkable communities like the one I live…
And then Berlin is rather car-friendly by Euro standards..
This allows the city to "breath" a lot more and there is not so much competition for the space between cars, bikes and people.
Compare that to dense cities like London, Paris or Barcelona, and there is a lot more to fight for.
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I was visiting a customer site near Miami, some years ago. I opted for not renting a car, I could easily go to the customer's site by taxi. But then some components got stuck in customs, and I had to stay the weekend. It turned out that the hotel was its own enclave if you didn't have a car! I couldn't walk to the shopping mall, or a nearby restaurant, I tried everything. Just couldn't get there. It was like being in…
You mean there were no sidewalks? That's the thing, often in the US I felt very boxed into a place, simply because I couldn't just do a Cartman and 'go home' (or someplace else).
Reminder: originally one (Roman) mile was a measure of thousand paces, while a Dutch, Russian and such miles were related to an hour of marching. (later rescaled in feet)
This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward. Cities get bigger and denser, and wasting a big % of land on parking spaces, roads, intersections and accepting a horrible air quality (that reduces citizen life spans and health quality) and noise pollution just does not make any sense anymore. Carse are effective in less dense…
I lived for a while in Berlin. Coming back to the U.S. the first thing I noticed were too many billboards and ugly parking lots. Each store has its own parking lot. Largely underused. No nice paths to traverse the bleak endless parking lot landscape. It’s ugly and wasteful. It’s hostile to pedestrians and discourages people from going outside to just wander. Even in relatively walkable communities like the one I live…
This is a good point. The leisurely stroll is practically nonexistent in my city. I'm in a more rural setting, but there is still a well-defined city hub. It just feels awkward walking down the sidewalk when people are zooming by at 35mph+.
The result is sidewalk cut offs, which is inconvenient to me as a biker. There are frequently plants starting to take over because no one cares to use the walks.
Makes sense that people gradually prefer to spend their free time with Netflix, video games, or in a gym.
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And then Berlin is rather car-friendly by Euro standards..
Berlin is the most car friendly city in Germany, both east and west (and the united city) spent a lot of money on car friendly streets - and still is. It's funny that the German political party SPD which is responsible for most of this now wants to rebrand itself as bicycle friendly. But the largest sausage producer in Germany is now also the largesg vegan 'meat' producer. And soon pigs will fly.
People realized that this approach wasn't sustainable and now more and more work is done to undo it, that's a good thing IMO. Ancient European cities simply were not built to accommodate cars, they don't fit.