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Comment by samiv | Hacker News Reader

3 miles is less than 5km. Perfectly fine by bicycle. Oh wait.. I guess you have too much freedom and no infrastructure other than highways so you gotta drive and burn all the fuel, time and money.

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I live in the EU: I pay at least half my income in taxes, have less freedom due to insane bureaucracy, and the infrastructure around me isn't great (highways or pedestrian/bicycle). On top of that, fuel is double what it is in the US.

Whatever shortcomings there are in US society, it's not perfect in the EU either. That US freedom and infrastructure looks OK to me.

If gas was free for EU, we'd still pay more than US for it, by the sheer amount of taxes. 25-30% of current price is gas cost itself, raw cost, the rest is taxes.

So if EU somehow magically got the same amount of gas for 100% free, we'd at most pay some 25% less than we do now, and it would still be more expensive than US.

Only if you can afford it. And if you could, you could do that in Europe, too :-)

Brother, I live in Austin. It's 40C outside and my kids are very young.

We do have bike paths over that routes but it's just not safe for my kids yet. The road they need to bike along allows up to 65mph.

In the Netherlands I just had to cross a 30km/h road (down to 20km during school hours and pedestrians always get first preference) to drop them. Netherlands is just too satisfactorily safe ♥

I rode my bike to school as a kid in the US. Kids still ride their bikes to school and to the parks/pool, I see them riding by my house every day.

This weird jingoism serves no one.

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