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Comment by idle_zealot | Hacker News Reader

"Driving to work" is hardly a "vote with your wallet" style consumer choice. Our housing, building, and transportation policies have been geared towards encouraging car-dependence for nearly a century. In places with better public transit and bike lanes, people spontaneously choose to use those modes of transport. Just like with companies dumping as much plastic waste/CO2 as they can get away with, this is a policy problem, plain and simple. No amount of pro-environment metal straw campaigns will solve it. At best environmentally-conscious messaging could encourage changes in voting behavior which influence policy. At worst people could be convinced that they're "doing their part" and fail to consider systemic changes.

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Regular voting is usually what affects things such as the transportation infrastructure in your country or city. It’s a slow proceed though.

Here in Oslo there has been a lot of investment in bike lanes, but just because one part of the local government builds more bike lanes doesn’t mean that other parts of the government will follow suit. Police still doesn’t care about cars illegally blocking the bike lanes. The people ploughing snow see bike lanes as the last thing that should need ploughing, preferably no earlier than 2 weeks after it snowed. A dedicated bike path I use to work is supposed to be ploughed within 2 hours of snow, but it took a week before anything was done and now three weeks later it’s still not to the standard that the government has set.

Speaking of Oslo and bicycles, I just want to add an amazing statistic that surfaced a couple of years ago here on Hacker News:

Oslo has a zero pedestrian and bicycle mortality rate!

https://thecityfix.com/blog/how-oslo-achieved-zero-pedestria...

> In 2015, the political climate and public will in the City of Oslo changed the tone on accepting continued surface transportation fatalities. The mayor, city council and transport division staff all supported a shift in roadway decision-making from car-centric to people-centric. [...]

Neighboring capitals with similar progressive bicycle cultures (Denmark, Sweden) have somewhat low but non-zero mortality rate as Oslo had 6 years ago. So the policies definitely make a change, but it's the consequence of a culture. You won't see American politicians suggesting a ban on cars in big cities.

We’ve had at least one cyclist killed since that article came out.

I would agree with you, but Americans intentionally reinforce car dependence whenever it's discussed.

It's bad enough that even non-US people regurgitate those talking points despite them being significantly less true for them; because they see it so much online.

> I would agree with you, but Americans intentionally reinforce car dependence whenever it's discussed.

They do, because their experience is that transit and biking really do suck and are useless. Which is accurate, for where they've lived.

The problem is that you have to convince people that things could be better, when their lived experience is that it's always terrible.

I live in place known for its rainy weather, 15 km from work (because of the housing crisis). Being overweight, biking to work never crossed my mind for two years. Once I tried to commute during weekend, as a challenge. I realized a few things: - same duration as the train - it give me the exercise I needed - it relaxes me - it is free since I already have a bike

Yes, it still take me 50 min to commute, but now I enjoy it and even volunteerly go to the office more often. It have been 6 months.

My point is: those who complain about biking being terrible or impractical should give it a real try. It may fit you.

And if you need help and can afford it, ebikes exist. Some of them really cheap. Hopefully not skimping on safeties though.

Ebikes are really great and I often ride one to work. They do help with speed, range, motivation, and of course, hills.

They don't do anything about unsafe infrastructure though, which is by far the US' biggest problem for biking. To say that American bike infrastructure is garbage tier is an insult to garbage, that's how bad it typically is. It's extremely unsafe, and people can feel it, they can tell, hence why hardly anyone actually bikes to work.

I've biked around in a bunch places in the US, and the reality is that it really is terrible. Bike infrastructure is F-tier almost everywhere, rising to D-Tier in supposedly bike friendly cities like Portland.

Bike infrastructure generally

* Is designed to be unsafe. Door zones are common, actual physical protection or segregation is rare, ESPECIALLY for intersections.

* Stops and starts randomly. Just look at Google maps for a city, you'll be able to see that the bike network is completely fragmented, with many bike lane suddenly disappearing on a road for no apparent reason.

* Randomly changes style/design principles even within the same city, so both you and drivers are constantly confused unless you're already used to a route.

* Is poorly enforced, with drivers routinely driving or parking in bike lanes with punishment being a rarity.

Now, some spots have good bike trails that work for their commute, and that's a great option when it's available. But I'm a bit tired of the "biking is actually okay in the US!" gaslighting.

Some people still manage, I do sometimes, but after getting hit by cars a couple times I tired of making excuses for it. There's a reason hardly anyone bikes for their commute in the states: overall, biking in the US is simply awful, and that's the truth.

I ride a bike, and doing so has saved me about $450k in transportation costs over 3 decades. The effort it takes to earn $450k is something to include amongst the unpleasantries and pathologies associated with driving.

Now, of course, I've had my whole life to set up my whole life the way I want it, and with a little foresight it really wasn't that difficult to set it up in a way that facilitates getting around on a bicycle. It involved making choices. Choices about where to work and live. If more people made such choices, there would be more options available to facilitate them.

450k tax-free, too, because it's a cost saving and those aren't taxable*.

Myself I've not driven at least since late 2017, thanks to excellent and cheap public transport; even before the Germany-wide €58/month ticket, the more expensive Berlin-AB ticket that I used to get was much much less than your $15k/year.

Do most people plan like that?

* usually, though IIRC buying a house in Switzerland gets you a tax equal to the money you saved from not renting it?

We also have a carbon tax where I’m from. Since I don’t own a car I don’t pay much into it. However I get a nice big rebate on my tax return. I basically get paid a small amount to not own a car.

I've ridden bikes for transportation in a handful of regions in the US. It is essentially always bad, it's just a matter of some people being able to look past or tolerate the awfulness.

Yes, some people are okay sharing a lane with cars, or using a strip of paint for protection, but accepting a poor status quo doesn't stop the status quo from being poor.

Occasionally there's a route that's legitimately good, almost always due to having an off street trail you can use for the bulk of the commute. Those can be great.

But once you hit bike lanes in an urban area, it's virtually always terrible. A lot of Americans are just used to the terribleness and don't notice it anymore, the same way they don't notice how almost every neighborhood is designed to be unwalkable (and how most are designed to be economically segregated besides).

> The problem is that you have to convince people that things could be better, when their lived experience is that it's always terrible.

Ironically, international air travel to places where it works great may help with this.

For some people yes.

But a lot of people are mentally stubborn, and seem to have inbuilt excuses of, "it wouldn't work here!" despite not spending even ten seconds thinking about it.

See, my point is that everyone first goes “it’s not me”, then they understand it is them and go “but it’s not my policies” and then they vote in the policies which are the problem. It’s totally fine to go “we need collective action to fix this”. But you have to actually join the collective action. You think billionaires are getting rich by committing environmental arbitrage? Then don’t oppose attempts to make the costs appropriate, even if you must now pay your fair share too.

Sure, recognizing that the problem is political is step one. Step two is... political activism, I guess? Lack of local political engagement and organizing is part of what allows problems like these to form.

Not just lack but outright apathy and villainizing of these attempts. If you try to tax gas some oil CEO will run a campaign explaining to the working class that their commute will now cost 10% more, which obviously makes people upset. Part of it is that we, unfortunately, can’t actually subsidize car commuters anymore. But part of it is that CEO is going to incur a cost of 50%, as he should, which is why he’s bothering to spend money riling people up.

It is not feasible to take a bike or public transportation to work in many parts of the world so a policy change like that would just incur an additional cost to those who have no alternative.

A better idea is to encourage other types of transportation in private companies rather than penalize existing companies with taxes. If taxing the companies will raise prices on consumers, you might as well consider it an additional tax on the people.

Redistribute the tax back to the people. That way you're eliminating the price externality but offsetting the cost to individuals. The fossil fuel industry can't continue to plug their ears and ignore the costs associated with putting more and more carbon in the atmosphere. We need to hold them to account.

The point is that you make the other alternatives affordable with such a fee. You can take the tax and put it directly into improving that infrastructure.

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