I'm from the Netherlands and use a bicycle for most of my daily commute. What isn't mentioned in the article: cycling is also dirt cheap. I bought a new bicycle 8 years ago for 500 euro, needed two times a repair of around 100 euro in total. That's like 3 months of owning a cheap car
500 Euro?!
Luxury!
When I lived in The Netherlands I would buy my bicycles second hand (well, more likely 3rd or 4th hand) from a bicycle shop at the train station for less than €100.
It would've been cheaper to buy from the fishy looking guy near the Red Light District but those source their bicycles in "special" ways (and I don't mean "drag it up from the canal").
Granted, this was maybe 2 decades ago, but still, €500 sounds like treating oneself with an extra nice brand new bicycle.
Curiously I kept doing the same thing - buying my bicycles second hand from the bicycle shop - in both London and Berlin.
And of course it's your responsibility as opposed to the people designing infrastructure, the politicians approving their plans, and the corporations lobbying the latter
/s
Having to only go as far as the Dutch for travel would be helpful for transitioning to bicycles. The moment American city distances ( hundreds of km) are applied, everyone scraps bikes. Buses and trains and cars and planes become the conversation - bikes aren't realistic for actual travel but nice for local commutes like groceries.
Spreading out like that was a deliberate choice on the part of American city planners. It was an unnatural experiment that failed, and which can and should be undone.
https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburban-experiment
Are you suggesting time travel as a solution?
Bike lines to commuter hubs for mass transit is the answer I'd go with, personally.
No, I'm suggesting zoning law reform. Right now, it is very often literally illegal to build in a sustainable way, and that has to stop.
I mean... It's not like Dutch people use their bikes to go between cities (maybe sometimes, but they got buses and trains, too). The bikes are for local trips, which make up the vast majority of trips you'll do. It sure helps that cities in Europe are laid out in a less spacious manner, but that's not an unfixable situation for the US.
10-20 km is an easy bike commute distance if the infrastructure allows it. Especially with electric bicycles. I'd guess that most people in the US don't travel more than that for their daily routes.
People shit all over 15 minute cities. I miss it moving to Canada from the UK.
Why do they shit on them? I love them.
Because they think it's a conspiracy to eventually lock people down into their 15 minute block and not let them leave. Once 15 minute cities have been established, they're going to create another "plandemic" like COVID to initiate another lockdown.
Not kidding. Source: my family
I don't even understand the logic behind that one. Although looking for logic might be optimistic.
It's not something people reasoned their way towards, it's constructed propaganda from the Fox News or Prager U crowd (I forget which). They discovered a long time ago that if they want their audiences to hate something that they can just straight up lie about what it is.
My guess is not enough bathrooms.
Rebuild the whole of society, place affordable houses around work centers and we could.
Cities need to be build around this concept
They were. America bulldozed them. Just do it again
there is NO solution to climate change that doesn't involve a > 80% reduction in car use (and banning flying) Even the IPCC has said e-cars aren't an answer (they embed urban sprawl).
There's is a persistent myth that we can't inconvenience anyone, which is patently nonsense as the destruction of civilisation from climate change is more than inconvenient.
The Dutch also have a very flat country
If everybody cycled as much as the Dutch, global carbon emissions would drop by nearly 700 million tonnes per year.
For context, Wikipedia puts annual global carbon emissions in 2023 at 39,024 million tonnes. That's a 2% slash. I suppose if you find a lot of these it could add up, but without a fix for the original problem of unregulated capital expansion it's just going to fill the void.
I got 54kms to get to work every day and no place to park that's safe between.
I would be happy as a Clam to save my morning run and go to my car but it's not feasible unfortunately.
Maybe stop putting the buck on people trying to make a living and give it to politicians who fly privately or massive shipping companies.
Nobody's asking you to cycle for 110 km per day, and the Dutch don't fo that either. It's about building cities that are bicycle-friendly, and where people can live in reasonable proximity to their job and all services.
If you're in the US or Canada the problem is likely zoning and suburbia.
Or - we could just say it’s illegal for these billionaire crybaby warcrime shitheads to fly like they do. Same emissions savings, and the world gets infinitely better.
redesigning cities to be more bikeable (and less car centric) would have an infinitely better effect on your quality of life than stopping billionaires from using private jets tbh
not that we shouldn’t do both, obviously. we should prevent billionaires from existing in the first place even
I'm all for more biking. I will remind everyone that the Netherlands is almost completely, absolutely, flat. probably the most conducive place for biking in the entire world
I always say my "dream car" is good public transit and walkable cities with good bike infrastructure.
It might not work everywhere, but it's a nice goal and it would have the secondary effect in America of making most of us a lot healthier.
It’s also fun. I always have a smile on my face when riding back from a grocery run or dinner out. Driving a car used to just make me aggravated.
but what's in it for the shareholders?
Would also make people much healthier.
Then build us cities like the dutch.
I am strongly leaning toward beginning to take practical steps to someday move to the Netherlands because, even ignoring the ugly US political climate (which let's be real, is probably not going anywhere good anytime soon), I came to realize as a bike commute lover that I will always be miserable in this country unless I relocate somewhere where I can bike more freely.
I don't know how swearing at pedestrians walking in the bike lane more would help reduce my carbon emissions. Satisfying though.
Well in the USA that wouldn't be a problem because people don't walk, either
Even if they did, they'd be hard pressed to find a bike lane to walk in
People are not aware how wasteful cars with combustion engines are. If you go by a car to the next supermarket to buy a veggie pizza, the emissions from the car are likely higher than from your whole meal - 220 grams per person-kilometer.
Per kilometer, the carbon footprint of a car is about as high as seat in a passenger plane.
Trains are at a tenth of that.
Bikes practically at zero.
And bikes are the means of transport which statistically make your life longer , not shorter - cars mostly kill people by lack of movement.
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.