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Comment by medoed | Hacker News Reader

I live in the Netherlands and I can confirm that. In just a couple of decades they transformed all their car friendly cities and made cars second rate citizens

Cycling infrastructure is amazing. It is almost always faster to travel by bike than by car.

They did it so long ago and the world still hasn’t caught up. I’m very sad about that.

Also somehow the amount of cars per capita is still very high in NL.

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> Also somehow the amount of cars per capita is still very high in NL.

That's OK. We can keep up the consumerist "Everybody needs a car" mentality as long as the amount of driving per capita stays low.

The manufacturing of a car still consumes a lot of resources and lets out a lot of CO2 though, right?

A good alternative to this is carsharing. Lots of people in Vancouver don't own a car, they just take one from one of the 5 car-shares when they need one

Parked cars take up a lot of space in city centres that could be used more productively.

How big of a problem is bike theft in the Netherlands?

I live in the UK and I probably wouldn't consider getting a bike again, simply because I know it would be nicked within a month.

Pretty common in big cities. That's why everyone in Amsterdam rides cheap old omafietsen ("granny bikes") with huge locks that often cost more than the bike itself.

I personally had 4 bikes stolen in 5 years.

Not so bigi would say. Lived ~3 years in Amsterdam with an average bike always loosely locked in the street and it has never been stolen. But to be honest, poverty in NL is also a problem that's been managed quite well ; which does not mean there is no crime (I've had 3 burglary attempts) but maybe crimes that paya bit more than stealing average bikes in the street.

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