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Comment by Saline9515 | Hacker News Reader

Dutch people using bikes for everything is a meme, they have as many cars per inhabitants as most of the developed nations. Anecdotically, they are a small, dense, flat country, with an oceanic weather.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territ...

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But those cars, as has been explained to you, don’t do nearly as many trips per year.

Mobility in families is actually higher, since each individual has sturdy legs, and highly likely, a bike after they’re about 5 years old. Kids often travel to school, after school events etc on foot, bike or public transport, not dependent as in many car-centric places on parents and their cars.

Grandma is as likely to bike over for dinner with the grandkids as drive.

Yes, but they still own them. In Paris, and many commenters here argue that you shouldn't own one.

That’s certainly not being posited in this particular thread.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

You're comparing a city with a country. Yes, you generally speaking shouldn't need a car if you live in a city.

85% of travels in Netherlands happens using car https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/TRAN_HV_MS_PS...

While disappointingly high, that figure ignores walking and cycling. There is no need to misrepresent the data to make your point.

Even the Dutch haven't invested nearly as much money into bike infrastructure as car infrastructure.

It's funny how much the car-dominance folks do their best to ignore that countries invariably have spent at least an order of magnitude more on cars than bikes, and typically more like two orders of magnitude.

The bike infrastructure the Dutch do have is very cool, but let's be real, one of those fancy "bike interchanges" is absolutely dwarfed by the cost of a highway interchange, and there are far more of the latter than the former.

We have cars here, but you're not dependent on them to get everywhere unless you live in the countryside (and even then, I knew plenty of kids who lived up in the North who biked 10+ km 1 way to school) or one of the super small cities where the sprinters are sparse. And isn't that the point most people make? It's not about complete eradication of cars, it's about having viable transport alternatives and the infrastructure to support those. It's just that we live in such a world where it's unthinkable to not have half our countries paved in asphalt to make sure cars can get places, so things like these always end up falling into a 2-sided extremist camp.

But...you still have cars fr when you need one. What many commenters argue here, and what the Paris administration is arguing is that you shouldn't own one.

I mean if you live in a city like Paris, then yeah I'd say that's legitimate. I see nothing wrong with making such dense urban centers car-free other than what's necessary like deliveries or ambulances and such, but for the former these days you've got tiny electric trucks that even fit on bike paths without causing a ruckus, usually you'll see those grocery delivery services use them.

Yes, people outside of urban cities like that (which, basically by definition means the majority of people in the country) still need cars to get around most likely, but at least we can ensure that inside the cities themselves, there are good alternatives for people to get around that benefits every single person who finds themselves in the city not inside a car, which will be the overwhelming majority of people.

I live in Utrecht in the Netherlands, and the single best thing the gov't did a few years ago is rip out the highway that was in the city center and instead turned it back into a canal surrounded by parks [1]. Literally nobody who has ever been to Utrecht would argue we were better off with the highway.

[1] https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2020/09/16/utrecht-correc...

You should be able to comfortably not own one, without it being a real problem.

We lived in Munich for five years as a family of three with no car and it was fine. There were definitely some times where a car would be more convenient (going to Ikea or the mountains) but overall getting around with our electric cargo bike or public transit was fine.

A meme you say?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQSwQLDIK8

As for the excuses:

> they are a small

What does a size of a country have to do with how their cities are designed?

> dense

Same as above, unless you mean city density in which case there's nothing special about Dutch cities.

> flat

Yes, and?

> an oceanic weather

Yeah, it rains all the time and yet they cycle.

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