Norway's capital is the latest city to declare war on cars

Buses are ok, not always according to schedule but so frequent during the day it hardly matters to me.

Trains are a bit of both:

- most regional ones are brand new

- the other aren't to bad either: old fashioned but clean and well maintained. In fact a number of commuters prefer the older ones.

- they are expensive (if you teamed up with three others you'd finance a Tesla in 10 years I guess. The downside is you can't expect everyone to go to work and home at the exact same time every day or even stay in their job for ten years)

- while they might be reasonably precise for weeks on end it is never a surprise when they are delayed.

- information is poor (my guess is because they have to pay alternative transport if they are more than 30 minutes delayed so they'll try to avoid announcing delays as long as possible. Again this is just my guess.)

- the commuter trains are always crowded in the Oslo area. Sometimes they are so crowded you literally cannot move around. Having seen and read about stadium fires and other disasters involving crowds I wonder how this is even allowed.

Are you really implying that in these countries many people use bikes because the public transport is not good enough ? In Spain nobody (?) uses bikes because the public transport is perfect ? Do you have sources for both or is this just your very subjective opinion ?

I experienced the public transport system in Denmark largely as exceptionally reliable, at least in the cities. Where have you made different experiences?

The reason many people in copenhagen (and other danish cities, but none comes close to copenhagen) use bikes is that the biking infrastructure is just also exceptional.

For germany the story is indeed different (though just both - public transport and biking infra - are much worse).

I very highly doubt your narrative that biking somehow is only popular because of insufficient public transport.

My commute takes 17min by bike and 26 by subway, due to the stops, during rush hour. The same journey takes well over 50 min with car during that time.

i don’t take the bike over the subway because the subway is bad I take it because it is the fastest way to get there.

I know several people living in Oslo even with 3 kids not needing a car. But on the other hand this is only true for Oslo in Norway. Every other city/town public transport sucks. Cars are a must in all other cities.

Whatever comes out of these modern transformations might as well leave the city centers economically deserted, or at least less attractive to their current citizen.

While I never understood the urge to live in the cities, I do understand the call for more space and in particular less car traffic from those who do live there. But they also should understand that cities do come with downsides and there is no guarantee that you can have the cake and eat it.

For instance, the street I am on is one way and lined with these tin silver box things on either side. A fair bit of the traffic is playing the game of musical chairs, as it is driving round and round looking for a space to park.

If one side was made into a bike lane then that would be a huge bonus to cyclists who should be able to get into town rather than deflected out onto a horrid ring road.

When you count the cars and when you count the bikes being inconvenienced, you wonder how it would work if there was already a bike lane there, used by locals and people on commutes.

Would my neighbours be able to petition the council to close down the bike lane in order for them to park their SUV cars there? Nope, and they would not have the organisational ability to get together to petition the council to close down the bike lane.

As things stand the car owners have squatters rights. So there is no bike lane, just a continual stream of cyclists holding up traffic by riding slowly on the tarmac remaining between the walls of steel each side of the road. Or there are cyclists bombing down the pavement (sidewalk) to piss off pedestrians. All because some people have a god given right to park their SUVs.

So unless there is some revolution the only way to reclaim such space is with a council that sneakily reclaims the spaces. One way this could be done is to mandate more clear road by side junctions for 'safety reasons'. This would benefit motorists as they could see better around the corners. So nobody could object to that. Next, do the same around private drive-ways that join the road, put more double yellow lines down. Then, when there are only a few spots left to park in the council could push the big idea and get a decent cycle lane in so 'kids could safely cycle to school'.

That being said, I don't know you so of course I don't known how important cars and driving is to you. But in general I would recommend not bringing a car to Oslo unless you have a good reason to bring it. Even if you have a lot of luggage you should have no significant problem transporting it on the train from the airport outside of Oslo on the train and then bring it to the hotel or wherever you are staying by jumping on to a bus for example.