Hacker News Reader

Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

> Do you have kids? I don't think so (correct me if I'm wrong). Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density.

I hear this all the time yet right now am traveling in Amsterdam and see many parents trucking their kids around in bicycles without issue. Actually I remember seeing this in SF as well, and in Taiwan and Japan I see incredibly young children riding public transit on their own.

View on HN

Most of these bike moms/dads still have a car at home.

As long as those cars are at home in the garage instead of on the road that's fine. The point is having fewer cars on the road, not fewer cars in general. Riding around on a bicycle and having a car for exceptional circumstances and a once a year road trip is healthier and safer than driving that car around every single day.

That also depends on weather around the year in a given country. Here in Poland travelling on a bike ranges from uncomfortable to impossible for 1/3 of the year.

It must be much worse than the weather in Norway and Finland, then. Or perhaps just an infrastructure problem? I imagine if they didn't clear the roads then driving could get pretty challenging too.

In Amsterdam I guarantee you they don’t.

Source: grew up there.

How do you know? I know many parents who move their kids around in bikes (many of those live in cities with less than 200k people) who specifically opted not own cars.

I particular I know that many schools in Germany have car free zones around them due to the problems that car drop offs cause (there is nothing worse as a rushed parent in an SUV dropping their kids off at school. The number of near misses I have seen and experienced makes we want to globally forbid cars within 2 km of a school).

That is definitely not true in many parts of Japan.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com