261–270 of 392 posts
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The difference in severity of a crash between a car and a bicycle is on the order of 20x. Are you seeing 20x more agressive cyclists than motorists? Anyhow, talking about the hospitalization rate without the mortality rate is very odd and smells of manipulation one way or the other.
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I was more comfortable living in Paris than living in a Dutch city because I was able to live in a banlieue. Biking here is more developed, and that's a plus. But having my job, my living space, my friends and my favorite weekend activities spread across Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague does take a bit of a toll. I wish The Netherlands did have a much less restrictive housing policy.
Interesting ! My comparison was indeed limited, I only lived in center of Den Haag as a foreigner. Decentralization has its pros and cons, but Paris is way too centralized around Chatelet sometimes.
Before reading this book I always thought Germany (where I grew up) was the exception for being more decentralized. But it looks like actually France is way more centralized even compared to other pretty centralized countries.
This article has such a weird framing. It keeps repeating how the cleaner air is so good for tourists. But tourists visiting Paris for a week don’t get the majority of the benefit from cleaner air. The Parisian residents living there throughout the year do. Maybe because it’s CNN, an American outlet, they’re focused on the “tourist”, but these benefits have mostly accrued to Parisians. Also, the 4% increase in traffi…
I thought the above needed a /s, but a check shows 30% of the people in France smoke. (I can't find city stastics)
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Throughput in congestion is determined mostly by how quickly drivers react to the opportunity to move and how many points of attrition are in a path. Both of what are impacted by the number of cars and how well they break or accelerate, not by their size. There's space to claim large car cause attrition, but that's completely dependent of the local properties of the streets.
The footprint of the car matters. When cars get 5% longer, the same number of people in cars takes 5% more roadway, which adds up quickly, because the difference between smoothly-flowing traffic and jammed traffic is a fragile equilibrium dominated by breakpoints. Furthermore, heavier cars accelerate and decelerate slower than lighter cars, which has a compounding effect on decreasing overall throughput.
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The new large cycling strips that appeared in the last 5-6 years are so good. At commute time there are frequently jammed with /cyclists/, but let's face it it's miles better than being stuck in a car. I shudder to think about the alternative where each cyclist was instead alone in a small car, this wouldn't even fit on the roads.
> At commute time there are frequently jammed with /cyclists/, but let's face it it's miles better than being stuck in a car. Cycling is wonderful, except when it rains, when it's cold, when it's hot, when it's windy, or when you want to carry stuff. So it's not a practical solution 80% of the year.
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Electric cars tend to be heavier than ICE cars. This means their tyres wear out faster, which is plastic dust being thrown up in the air. (We're still not sure of the health impacts of microplastics, but we do know they accumulate in various organs, including the brain.) They also throw up road dust, and we know that rock dust is really bad to breathe in. Air pollution is still present. Compared to ICE cars fitted wi…
We don’t really know if eating microplastics is particularly bad, but we do know breathing any pm2.5 and below dust is.
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I think it’s no easy task to reform a city away from being car-centric. In my home town of Ghent (in Belgium), we’ve had several iterations of a traffic plan that gradually reduces the number of parking spaces, rises taxes and car related costs, makes streets one way or deprioritises cars (e.g. a car doesn’t have priority over a bike anymore) etc. It’s not easy but the city today is a lot more liveable than it was wh…
Honest question: What is the hard part? If you took all of that stuff and did it as quickly as you could somewhere else, what's would be the biggest issue? People + resistance to change of any kind? The outcome seems so obviously good. I have never heard of anyone complaining about a city becoming less car centric, but maybe somehow it's an under-represented story?
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As a European who moved to the US for 20+ years then moved back to Europe, any idea that Europe is a shithole or has fallen is ludicrous. If anything, the US degraded far more over the time I spent there than Europe did while I was away.
I am EU too and I know Europe is doing quite fine on average with some good and bad places but I wonder if all this is propaganda for the Americans or if the Americans genuinely expect something else from life.
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Bicycles have had gears for almost a century, and they allow to tackle hilly areas easily. Also, the Netherlands is notoriously windy, and a headwind is just as difficult as a hill. No, what makes the Netherlands different is their street design prioritizing safety rather than speed at all costs. When the streets feel safe from speeding drivers, more people choose to ride a bike.
> Bicycles have had gears for almost a century, and they allow to tackle hilly areas easily. Assuming everyone but you is retarded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands#His...
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Because there has to be a place where the bus stop could sensibly be. A history of car-centric design often eliminates those opportunities.
I see. I think you're talking about stop placement on a higher level? Removing street parking can free up room for lots of extra stops, which can help with bus bunching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching