A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
Just to compare, this is the utopian dream for Toronto:
There are approx. 18 cars and trucks in that image.
They are taking up SIGNIFICANTLY more space, and are causing traffic.
Still, we keep saying, "give us more of this, please!".
Insanity or stupidity?
In a random US city a lot of these bikes would probably be abandoned / with parts missing. Does Amsterdam have that problem? I've heard a lot of bikes go into the canal but I can't imagine this is a big problem. How does Amsterdam deal with theft / vandalism / bike abandonment?
I live in another very bike centric city, Copenhagen, and bike theft is ~0.5% of bikes every year. Many people lock the bike wheels here, some lock them to a rack/something else as well. It's a lot less locky than the US (where I used to live), but theft still exists.
Since everyone has more support and means here, there is a lot less incentive to steal a bike. It's of course punished harshly but rarely caught.
No clue how Amsterdam handles it or how prevalent it is
That sounds like a non-issue.
Where I live, in Canada, I basically have to use two locks and an alarm on my bike.
Hell, thieves around here will break into garages or backyard sheds to steal a bike. Or right out of your apartment's bike storage.
I guess the point is, more bikes won't equal more problems 😂
There's plenty of theft, most people have a city/shitty bike with decent locks (chained to a solid object). Vandalism does occur, like bikes thrown in the canal, but theft is more of a problem.
When i was there, a lot of them weren't fancy bikes, just get around bikes. Even if there was theft they weren't much to lose.
...in my north american experience, those bikes would either be stolen or stripped within a day...
No it would take a while, more like a week.
But on day 1 there would already be at least one stripped bike already there.
After a quick Google search, snowfall average per year in Amsterdam is 6.1cm
Toronto is apparently 121.5cm
Biking in the snow is significantly harder, and the accumulation of snow in the road in winter makes it even worse.
I don't thin that's the best comparison to make
Just to counter that:
Snow in Toronto would rarely cause someone to not be able to bike. In fact, the only time it might be too risky to bike, is when it's also too risky to drive.
That said, Montreal gets more than twice the snow and colder winters compared to Toronto.
Yet they have been making an effort to encourage active transportation, and cycling over the winter has been increasing.
Even their ride share runs in the winter (it doesn't in Toronto).
If Montreal has a few bad snow days out of a few months in the year, and is still very bikable, then we should stop making excuses that people in Amsterdam can do it only because the weather is nice and the land is flat.
Also, the least bike friendly places in North America have great weather most of the year, and snow is never a concern (Dallas, Miami, Raleigh, etc.).
I think we're too used to making excuses to drive everywhere. It doesn't have to be this one-sided, favouring only cars.
Edit: I posted this in another reply, but I was biking in this the other day, and I live close to Toronto (close enough to bike):
I work in Montreal.
People biking year round are very rare, and dping so require significant effort compared to using public transit.
I'm all for reducing car usage, but what I am saying is that solutions should be tailored to location.
Bike work for Amsterdam, great!
But I think cities where snowstorm are somewhat frequent should probably focus on public transit instead.
( I'll admit tough that I assumed Toronto weather was similar to here and didn't expect that much less snow! )
But I think cities where snowstorm are somewhat frequent should probably focus on public transit instead.
For sure, this could be a good option, too. Anything to lessen car dependency would benefit those cities, and the people who live in them!
we should stop making excuses that people in Amsterdam can do it only because the weather is nice and the land is flat
The land is definitely flat, but I don't think anyone would ever describe Dutch winters as nice. It's not as cold as in many Canadian cities, but the wind from the North Sea and the lashings of sidewise rain aren't easy to get used to.
And every other building would have been knocked down to make room for parking