Comment by sammorrowdrums | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sammorrowdrums | Hacker News Reader

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I live in the Netherlands. We bike rather than just walk everywhere, and generally people do more frequent small shops rather than big weekly shop. It takes some imagination and a lot of urban planning work, but quality of life improves dramatically, it’s life-changing.

Much Urban planning was involved in making it better for cycling though, and it wasn’t always great for it. Off-road cycle paths being a mainstay for the country with separate lights is the biggest differentiator, and took a lot work to get there, but now you can safely cycle the entire country!

Even Cambridge in England where I used to live (and is famous for thousands of cycling students and locals) Is laughably bad compared.

Northern Ireland where my family live has also transformed large parts with Greenways projects and it has been transformational, I ran along them, walked along them to shops and cycled a long way and it was amazing I thought.

https://nigreenways.com/

> We bike rather than just walk everywhere, and generally people do more frequent small shops rather than big weekly shop. It takes some imagination and a lot of urban planning work, but quality of life improves dramatically, it’s life-changing.

Yeah which means that you spend a lot more time and energy on grocery shopping. That is for me directly inverse to quality of life. The more time I spend in traffic (cycling is also sitting in traffic) and queueing in crowded grocery stores, the lower my quality of life is. Who are you to decide that cycling and grocery shopping is automatically the best quality of life for everyone? Some people prefer to play tennis, or paint, or read books or whatever. No freedom, only inefficient transportation.

> The more time I spend in traffic

Where I live, walking to a small grocery store is literally faster than driving plus the ancillary annoyances of driving (finding parking, loading and unloading, etc).

To come out ahead in the time side of the equation while driving I would need to make significantly larger shopping trips spaced further apart... which would each then eat up significantly more time in loading, unloading, carrying, and putting food away.

> and queueing in crowded grocery stores

Walkable neighborhood grocery stores have smaller queues than big-box stores, as a mostly-even distribution of customers across multiple stores and floors on staffing (e.g. you can't have less than one register) mean an average of more staff per customer.

It takes me less time to bike to the shop from my home then it takes to find a parking spot in the underground parking garage and walk from the parking spot to the shop.

Same for walking to a smaller shop if I am not feeling like biking that day (so most likely taking metro to work that day). Though the chances of finding a place to park that is closer to that shop than my home is almost 0.

It is not automatically inefficient. In Zurich, I have around 5 supermarkets near by, walkable in about 5-10 minutes. Don't even need a bike. Taking the car would increase my travel time, not decrease it.

So my walkable city is more time efficient and has health benefits for using your own body instead of a machine to do the traveling. It's better if we measure for time efficiency and health. And it shows. Looking around, 95% of the people here, at least those not in cars, are healthy, slim and fit. All as it should be. What else would you optimize for?

No because you only have to take the car once a week, and you have to walk 3 times per week. If you want to force physical exercise by inefficiency like that, what exactly are the machines that should be forbidden and which should be allowed? You can do a million things from scratch which gives you physical exercise, we all rely on using machines that saves us from this poor life, why put the walking/cycling on a pedestal?

Just no. It is more efficient for me. Really don't care that you don't want to accept that. So take your efficiency argument and scrap it. You want cars and want everything to be optimized for it. That is your actual point and we both know it.

No, I want as much free time and energy as possible, and don't want to waste my life carrying water in buckets when I can have a tap. Likewise I also don't want to waste any time carrying milk either

Waling is free, you need the exercise anyway so time spent walking isn't wasted. Driving however is a waste of time.

I live really remote, as in driving 25 minutes up a mountain on a one way street remote. I still don't have a driving license. I can get everywhere by public transport, I have no stress.

Also I am talking about me, I guess most people still do their daily grocery runs.

However I buy 90% of our food online. 9% in nearby farmer shops. The relatively high population density makes next day delivery a normal thing even in the most remote places. There is literally no reason to waste time for grocery shopping these days.

How you think about exercise and time may influence whether driving increases your quality of life. To me, time spent driving is a pure waste with no redeeming value and I make every effort to minimize it. Whereas time spent engaged in physical activity (up to about an hour a day) isn't wasted at all since it improves my mood and energy levels. If that physical activity happens to save me a car trip then it's doubly useful.

For example, this morning I drove a kid to school because we were running behind and it was a ~10m round trip. Usually we bike and it's a ~20m round trip. I saved 10m of clock time but lost ~20m of exercise. Now I can choose whether to make up that exercise later and end up net ~10m poorer or skip today's exercise and end up slightly fatter and lazier.

(I agree about grocery shopping though.)

The quality of like is a personal reflection, but cycling is not inefficient, for door to door short trips bike is literally faster than public transport (which is also specifically pretty good in Amsterdam) and driving.

The layout out cities to accommodate lots of cars and easy parking is a huge cause of inefficiency often.

I’m not saying it’s for everyone, but I would go as far as to say most people don’t accurately imagine how it would be, when they haven’t lived somewhere like Amsterdam.

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