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Comment by ath3nd | Hacker News Reader

> So they hurt quality of life by making it more painful to get anywhere, taking time away from everyone’s lives

The average American mind can't comprehend European public transport and not sitting in a traffic jam and smog for 1 hr to go to their workplace. Some of us walk or cycle for 15 min on our commutes, and some of us even ride bicycles with our children to school. It takes me as much time to reach my workplace with a bike as with a car if you take parking, and one of those things makes me fitter and is for free.

I guess that's one of the reasons people in the US live shorter and sadder than us Europeans. Being stuck in traffic sure makes people grumpy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...

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Take better from both worlds -- 1 hour bike commute and save on healthcare costs too.

Very entitled comment. The food worker who has to stand up for the whole day to make your matcha frappuccino could enjoy some rest on the way home.

Another problem that exists only in the US as they don't treat you as a slave and make you stand the whole day elsewhere. People have chairs and do use them.

Service workers in coffee shops stand all day here in enlightened Europe too.

Driving a car in the isn’t restful in the slightest.

The parent was talking about public transport. Sitting in a bus is restful, you can read a book or watch a movie, or just dream away.

It really depends on the city. In Paris, I saw crackheads shooting next to me, people defecating in the train, licking the handle bars (true!), and so on, so yeah...Paris subway is great in theory, in practice, at 8AM, it's war, but smellier.

And the air pollution in the French subway is much worse than what you have outside. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S143846392...

I suspect that most of the bike drivers are affluent service workers who can't be arsed to share the public transport with the plebs.

> I suspect that most of the bike drivers are affluent service workers who can't be arsed to share the public transport with the plebs.

Fairly often they are postal or delivery workers. Are those the affluent service workers that we keep hearing about?

My comment was not about those people, who are minimum-wage temp workers and a tiny minority compared to the mass of cyclists in Paris.

In the case of Helsinki, they don't have a particularly outstanding biking infrastructure, but they have stellar public transports. And clean, very clean. I'd choose that everyday, which is much more inclusive and far less dangerous for everyone. Especially in a aging society.

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