331–340 of 451 posts
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What were your long commutes? 1-2 hours? Why would people accept that when a car can do that in a quarter the time?
They will if car taxes increase. And if ridership increases enough, then bus commute times will be reduced a great deal.
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> I was 16 at the time. I.e. you weren't driving a car and you were underage. I'm not saying that the legal system in The Netherlands is unreasonable or anything, but I feel like your case doesn't really represent the kind of case people are thinking of in this thread.
Why you are being downvoted is strange to me as it is a valid point to make. Low velocity hits with a pedestrian and a bike or moped without serious injuries are not something to give heavy fines to or involve the legal system as basic injuries are covered by general insurance and in this case the pedestrian was at least partially at fault. And otherwise the cost to society would be bigger than the medical and admini…
If you ask a person on the street why they don't exchange a quick car ride with riding a bike or walking, they may tell you that they're scared of getting hit by a car - and this is probably before getting hit by a car.
I can't really quantify the emotional stress riding bikes costs me now each, and every time a car almost hits me (which is a regular basis), but it's something I have to now live with. And I friggin' love riding bikes.
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well, i did claim that if i can live without a car in san diego i can do it anywhere. dannyw does have a point about places like montana likely being a lot worse. i can't think of any places like that in europe. european cities are simply not that spread out. so unless you live on a farm far from everywhere, you should be fine.
In Europe, urban centers are prohibitively expensive to live in if you want to avoid living in a slum. Imagine if every city was San Francisco, especially in realtion to income. In the end, I can live somewhat comfortably if I commute, essentially trading my time for lower crime rates and nicer surroundings.
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I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, or you think that's actually feasible and simple.
You need to have the political will. There is nothing in the previous comment that is physically impossible.
Just because you can raze entire cities, displace their populations, and embark on "clean slate" urban planning projects doesn't mean you should. That's the civil engineering equivalent of rewriting the entire codebase from scratch.
Another result of this culture that I wish the author would have addressed is how cars have changed how we raise our children. We are forced to keep our children inside because all our houses are surrounded by rivers of death. Why are we surprised that young kids spend all their time sedating themselves with screens? What choice have we given them? We have designed our living spaces to be ideal for cars, not humans.…
I was aware of this in the abstract before I had kids. Now that I have them, it can be really terrifying. We go for walks even in places with big wide sidewalks and they are oblivious, they would jump out in the street at just about any moment if we weren’t holding hands and teaching them constantly to be afraid of cars. It’s really sad. Kids nature is to want to run around and burn off energy, and right outside our…
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That's because you don't live in a country as big as the US is and don't need to move around like we do in the US. I am from Denmark who also have plenty of bikes and it's a thing. The reality is however that thats fine as long as you live in the cities, it's not way to get around if you live in the suburbs and have to drive 30 miles to work and take care of your picking up the kids and drive 20 miles to the nearest…
Of course you can. That's pretty much the whole point of the article. You live in a suburb and have to drive 30 minutes because America decided decades ago that sprawl was preferable to dense urban cores. American decided 3000sqft McMansions on 1/2 acre lots was preferable to 1000sqft flats in the city. And that spending billions on road infrastructure and subsidized parking was a fair trade-off for that personal spa…
The car is the perfect combination of flexibility, scale, speed, utility and so on.
Sprawls are a byproduct of what the car made possible, they where not created to promote the car they where created because the car made it possible and gave a number of benefits for the individual families.
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A relative in France hit a pedestrian outside of a crosswalk, the aged man died after a few days at the hospital. It was night time, rainy and the victim popped out from the space between two parked cars and ran just in front of the motorbike to quickly cross the road. There was automatically a trial anyway for manslaughter and my relative was not found guilty of anything. I think it's a good thing to automatically h…
What do you mean by "full control"? The average driver does not have the experience nor the training to maintain full control at all times. For example, consider a situation where the driver has to correct understeer, or lift-off oversteer, both relatively easy to achieve in cold, wet conditions.
If you're going to use something that can kill people if mishandled, you take on a lot of responsibilities, one of which is to maintain attention / control.
Same goes for many such objects, really: power tools, guns, industrial machinery, medical equipment, etc.
Let's just take the two examples in the article. First single family zoning. I would argue that before cars (and cities) people lived on farms and ranches. Cars were not to blame. The trend has been towards smaller living areas, not larger. Second, parking requirements. I think parking requirements came after cars, not the other way around.