Something that you can buy for 300 Euro outsells something else that costs 30,000 Euro. The two things can be roughly used for the same purpose.
I would not be surprised to hear that more paper and pens are sold in Europe than computers.
I would not be surprised to hear that more paper and pens are sold in Europe than computers.
In Barcelona we're suffering a process of making the whole city available for bikes and its one of the most wonderful things you can see. Almost everyone uses bikes to go work. It's healthy, it's confortable, and you don't need to pay taxes or insurance. I think it's a brainless option.
BTW: I forgot to mention my city runs a public bycicle program since 8 years and it's a total success. For 40€/year you get full access to a bicycle to move around the city without restrictions. I think it was the smartest move the city did.
Besides, you cannot accidentally spend £30 to fill up a small drawer unit with bikes, cars or computers, which you can do quite easily with paper and pens, I have found.
Also, the prices are not quite as you present. Some people with not much money manage to buy old cars that cost £100 and some people with a lot of money buy new pushbikes that cost over £5000.
The article doesn't address these statistics. Or kid bikes. Also not seeing motorbikes, which seem quite popular in Europe.
I'm surprised that bike sales are that far off from car sales anyway. Expected most people that grow old enough to ride to buy one.
Very informative otherwise.
Yes, mopeds are very, very, popular in Italy.
Are you kidding me? Of course it happened! How many cars do you think were sold in 1900?
Having cycled Copenhagen, I have to say it's wonderful. Everyone is on bikes all the time, and the city always prioritizes bicycles over other vehicles. I'd love for the same to be true in Palo Alto, but realistically a high vehicle tax would have to be done at a state level. The problem is that California is so diverse, that there is no way a farmer in Fresno or Bakersfield is going to be able to handle a large auto tax.
The only way we're going to be able to get people out of cars here in the Bay Area is to increase spending on cycling infrastructure, as well as transit. Thankfully with cycling infrastructure, many cities, including Palo Alto, are finally getting serious about making more bicycle boulevards and bike lanes. For a long time cities in the Bay Area have either just payed lip service to the idea, or have been mired in red tape so that they couldn't roll out new cycling infrastructure without an environmental review.
On the transit front, I'm not so optimistic. There's just such a quagmire of competing transit services in the region, that it's impossible to get any kind of a cohesive system together. Either you have a central authority which dictates the entire route map which will tend to neglect various regions, or you get what we have now which is hyper-localized transit authorities which don't service the needs of the region very well. As a result, companies just implement their own systems (ala Google, Facebook, Apple, Box, etc.) which are exclusionary and have become icons of gentrification.
True, but Danes buy cars nonetheless (especially if they have kids). It's fairly typical to only have one car per family, though.
I have a friend who bought a used VW Passat wagon (5 or 6 years old) in Denmark for $90,000 USD.
A used Passat from 2008 will cost you roughly $30,000 USD [1]. Expensive, I know, but nowhere near $90,000.
1) http://www.bilbasen.dk/brugt/bil?Category=P&PriceFrom=0&Pric...
I almost feel like this article is misleading because bicycle production is much higher than automotive production. See the following link under "Bicycle vs. car production"
And repair yourself when something goes wrong.
I have a car, it works well. I haven't taken it to go to work since end of may. I don't plan on buying a new one until this one dies of old age, hopefully in a decade or so.
I'm a cyclist, but I know how to fix the common things on my vehicle.
I'm sure there are people that own bikes that are clueless in fixing them, much the same as there are people that own cars that haven't a clue. That doesn't mean there aren't people out there that could strip and rebuild either on their own.