Oslo got pedestrian and cyclist deaths down to zero. Here’s how

Possibly, if you're able bodied enough to ride one of those.

I've noticed that in the Netherlands a lot of the infrastructure for cyclists is also useful for people with mobility scooters. There are a lot of people unable to drive that benefit from decent cycle paths.

The US is much better on this front than the UK. Not great for affording treatment, but there are curb cuts everywhere (in cities at least where there are sidewalks) and very few businesses are not handicap accessible.

They can handle a little bit but they can also be very uncomfortable in Oslo. The sidewalks are not completely level with drains for roof water/ice melting to run through, some sidewalks are not very scooter friendly and some streets are cobblestones and rattle quite hard any scooter or bike.

Apart from that you have loads of tram tracks going through the inner city, dangerous for bikes and there are very few bike lanes, most of the time bikes are sharing streets with cars, busses and trams at the same time.

You're right -- the new bike paths etc have not affected this. It's more a function of how parking in downtown is virtually non-existent. So if you want to go there, you need to take a taxi or public transport (or have someone drive you, which is a luxury most people don't have).

Taxis here are insanely expensive and, while the public transport system is very good, it doesn't go everywhere. So, even if your destination is only, say, 300 meters from the bus stop, that can effectively be insurmountable distance for someone with mobility issues, especially in the winter.

I've noticed a variety of small support vehicles in old city centers of Europe. Think of a small parts truck or forklift you might see in a factory. They're be sized to fit on sidewalks and between bollards. Larger trucks/vans unload as close as possible and these support vehicles handle take over for the last few meters.

> How does someone moving schlep their furniture around the city center?

It's still possible to get just about anywhere with a car, it's just made less convenient. The roads aren't physically blocked, ambulances and such have to be able to get everywhere. Moving day is a pretty rare event for any individual, so you just have to accept that you'll be a bit inconvenienced that day. If you don't own a car yourself you rent a moving van for the day. Street parking downtown is expensive, but it's just for that day. But since it's expensive there's hopefully less competition for the spaces. Then you have to navigate the streets to your new place with your car. It might be slow and you may have to take some detours because some streets are only for pedestrians, bikes and public transportation. But it's just for that day, the other days you are the pedestrian/biker/bus rider that can get around without worrying about cars on that street.

This is my whole experience in Europe. People complaining about their "late" [impeccable] trains.

I'm like eehhh, okay, wait till you see the United States!

The only culture shock to me is that union strikes can actually have an affect on convenience or quality of life, they're more like mosquitos buzzing in your ear if a protest has gone on for over a week in the US. I don't have an opinion, and that's part of the privilege!

I think that part of the human condition is that we are smart enough to quite easily imagine perfectly operating systems. It is simple to imagine the train that is always on time to the second, the politician who is 100% ethical, a good judge of character, works hard, and has broad relevant knowledge. It is possible to imagine the construction company that always finishes the roads on time and with high quality.

But for humans to actually do all of these things is extremely hard. We only recently were very much like a primate we see in the wild. We have tons of ambition and imagination but all the flaws of a prototype intelligent creature. We can't always think clearly, emotions often get in the way when we can, we get tired, we have conflicting drives and feedback loops that mean we are never truly satisfied no matter how good we have it.

such is life.

I imagine that there are very few places in the world where people universally love their public transit if they're dependent on it day-to-day. Whether it's cost, frequency, coverage, reliability, frequency, comfort, etc., something that seems perfectly adequate or even pretty great to a sometimes visitor seems less so if you're commuting at rush hour every day in all sorts of weather.

You mention Swiss train service for example which seemed pretty great as a visitor--but it sure wasn't cheap as is true of a lot of European train service. Ditto for the Shinkanzen in Japan.

My personal experience is Boston. As someone who takes rail into the city and then the subway maybe a few times a year, it seems just fine. When I depended on it for regular commuting, I did not love it.

That is probably because you look at it from too narrow a position. Yes, the public transport inside Oslo may be brilliant. That is very good for transporting people around who lives inside Oslo, but chances are that a lot of people cannot afford or want to live there. For probably each kilometer extra you move away from the city center, the difficulty using public transport increases exponentially. Once you get to 50-100km away from the city center, then your options look very bleak.

I live in Copenhagen myself, but I grew up 100km outside of Copenhagen. Using a car to go back and forth from there to Copenhagen takes approximately 1 hour each way. Using public transportation all the way takes closer to 2 hours. Using a combination takes 1h 30min on a good day.

Some people move out of cities because they want the countryside. But other people are forced to do so because of prices. Banning cars from cities seems to only think of people who lives inside it and not how difficult it will be for a lot of people already "taxed" with hour long commutes because of stupidly expensive housing combined with centralization of workplaces.

People always complain. What matters is their behavior. In most bigger cities, getting around by car stopped being a thing as it is time consuming and not much fun. Places like London, Amsterdam, Paris, etc. outright ban cars from a lot of streets and make it stupidly expensive to park. A weird side effect of that is that a lot of the remaining cars tend to be of the expensive/oversized variety.

But the reality for most is that people get around by bike and public transport and tend to prefer that to getting stuck in traffic and then having to hunt for parking space.

I live in Berlin which is unusually car friendly for a European city because of the German car lobby. You can literally drive up to places like the Alexanderplatz and expect to find a spot to park there (with some difficulty). But even in Berlin, owning a car is not a given for most people that live there. It's just not very practical. I've never bothered owning one and probably never will. With what I save on not owning a car, I can easily afford to rent cars or use taxis/ubers when I need to; which is not that often actually.

Berlin is comparatively unorganized when it comes to protecting bike traffic. Coming from the Netherlands, it feels a bit like a third world country on this front. Infrastructure is poor/non existent and Berlin excels at creating safety challenged situations for cyclists where you randomly get to mingle with heavy traffic, deal with delivery vans using the bike lanes as parking areas, etc. Mostly places like Oslo and other bike friendly cities differ from this by separating flows of traffic systematically. Of course compared to the US, Germany is still pretty good.

> (but then again, I moved here from the train heaven that is Switzerland)

I hiked the Haute Route last year, and while we were only on the trains and buses a handful of times, it was flawless every time. Like, they had things scheduled down to the minute, and no, not some multiple of 5 minutes, literal "train arrives at 10:42, train leaves at 10:44". Clean too. So nice.

That's a weird conspiracy theory, the FNB actually has valid complaints, although I disagree with them overall.

The way the green change has been implemented here in Norway has unfortunately often been extremely conservative (instead of progressive) - the well-off living centrally in the cities gets massive subsidies for purchasing their Teslas while the less fortunate needs to pay hefty tolls for their old gasoline cars.

> impingement on their freedoms.

It's funny what terms we choose (framing) can do. "death tax" instead of "inheritance tax", "driver's rights" instead of "driver's privileges." People all too often forget that driving in public places requires a license, it's not a right, it's a privilege that has to be earned.

FNB is about "bompenger", basically a fee paid when crossing certain spots with your motor vehicle, often used to pay for road maintenance etc. Usually you have to cross one or more of these spots before getting into any major city. Since it's a flat fee, it disproportionally affects less affluent families, who often need their car more than the average family. These fees are often quite expensive. You might have to pay €5-10 to deliver the kids to kindergarten, and then get to work, if you live outside the city. That can be as much as €400 a month, just passive, unavoidable expanses for a lot of families. The reason FNB was founded is because these fees have increased substantially in recent years. The camel's back finally broke, and FNB became an actual political block in like a year.

I would argue FNB is a prime example of democracy working for the people. The two established ruling parties kept wringing money from people using bompenger until they had enough and took a lot of power for themselves.

No, but Oslo is tiny compared to most US cities.

It is actually comparing Apples and Oranges.

Maybe cities of different size cannot be compared 1 to 1 and due to it’s size it’s London being orders of magnitude better?

We don’t know that, so it doesn’t really make sense yo compare them.

Not that simple. I have a hunch that network effects play huge role too. Chances of london having two orders of magnitude car/pedestrian interactions more than also are not low. So the chances of fatality per interaction could be comparable. But you have shitload more of them in london since everything is bigger there so you clock more miles.

Speed humps make a huge difference. I lived on a road where it was 25 but naturally you would want to go 35. After installing speed humps people would slow down instead of coasting down a hill gaining speed.

Yeah, a lot of people visiting NYC never leave a relatively small area of Manhattan. I don't mind walking relatively long distances (and I'm fine with taking the NYC subway) but on my typical NYC visit I never use anything other than my feet to get around. The same is somewhat true of London though I'm more likely to get on the tube there.

Added: It depends too on where you're going in the city. There are a fair number of US cities where walking works fine so long as you restrict your travel mostly to the city core, which people often do on a short trip.

Perhaps I'm being a little pedantic here, but NYC is not bounded on all sides by water - the Bronx is part of mainland NYS. But yes - for the most part NYC is geographically constrained.

If retail still exists, just not in inner cities, then it wasn't the Internet.

Both. It’s enjoyable to go shopping once in a while. If you get treated properly and it’s easy to go there, why not? Even a small increase in price is totally acceptable. But if none of those things apply, Amazon it is. This seems to have happened with my rather small city next to the Ruhrgebiet

Pedestrian-only zones probably help specific types of retail--"tourist" (using the term broadly) type of stuff for people walking around the pedestrian area for fun. But, honestly, cities aren't great for heavy/bulky shopping anyway.

I normally go into the tourist area of my nearest major city maybe a few times a year and mostly because my company has an office nearby. But I appreciate pedestrian zones when I travel. (Last time I was in Brussels, the new pedestrian zone almost made that area of one of my least favorite European capitals almost pleasant.)

The problem with pedestrian only zones is how to haul the bounty to the place you live. There are rarely good scalable solutions.

>people getting their groceries locally instead of driving in to the centre of a city is a good outcome,

No this is not. It limits competition (increases prices) raising the cost of living and reducing everyone's standard of living. When it gets so bad that the options for groceries start vanishing (because groceries are low margin) we call that a "food desert".

People shopping locally because the opportunity cost of shopping elsewhere is too high (as opposed to willingly doing it for the convenience factor) is very much not a good thing, regardless of the mode of transportation those people are using.