Comment by panick21_
3 days ago
There are plenty of places in the Netherlands with much lower density. They have great cycling and urban design even in tiny towns.
3 days ago
There are plenty of places in the Netherlands with much lower density. They have great cycling and urban design even in tiny towns.
Those are just two out of many points. I stand corrected on the second, but the first holds - road safety has been improving for 20 years now, why bother?
Why bother to improve the safety of a transportation system? Road safety has been improving since the 1940. Would you have said 'why bother' in 1970? Or 1980?
And the trend of less people dying isn't some magical automated machine, you have to continue to improve, otherwise the trend can reverse, see the US as an example.
And even if you don't care about people and children dying, even if you don't care about 1000s of people being injured impacting their lives and their families, about the massive amount of property damage, about the massive amount of tax payer cost for policy and firefighter, all the money sucked up by insurance companies that can be used to do something useful.
Even if you don't care about any of those things, it simply makes the system more efficient. By literally any way you look at, its one of the single best money invested compared to return you can get.
> Those are just two out of many points.
Both points you mentioned are nonsense, but I guess you have other points in your head that you don't want to tell. I mean if you said what they are, people might bring up facts in response.
> Road safety has been improving since the 1940.
In the west. Over here it has only been a thing since the 90s.
> And the trend of less people dying isn't some magical automated machine, you have to continue to improve,
Which is happening without the involvement of cycling infrastructure and arguably the mentioned isn't that much of a factor. A while ago here pedestrians finally gained right of way when approaching crossings - there was some groaning, but safety improved. This is the level of legislation we're at.
Case in point: the traffic fatality rate in Poland is currently at the level seen in the Netherlands around 20 years ago, but by then the Dutch had a much more robust cycling network.
> Even if you don't care about any of those things, it simply makes the system more efficient.
Efficiency for efficiency's sake is not enough of an argument, especially if you optimise for only a subset of factors. There's always a tradeoff and people here are unwilling to make it.
> Both points you mentioned are nonsense
Perhaps to you, but they're relevant here.
Anyway, other points:
-Smog in the winter, heatwaves in the summer. In 2018 the sale of furnaces where you could throw just anything was banned, but much of the heating is still done using solid fuels, particularly coal ash. Meanwhile summer heatwaves lately have been approaching 36°C - I've attempted commuting by bike in such an environment - not worth the trouble.
-Urbanisation having peaked in the early 2000s at 62% and falling since(~60% currently). Many factors contributing to that, but the two main being generational trauma of living in cramped commie blocks along with barely anyone having the credit score to live within city limits. Dense living is a (dubious) privilege of those who have generational wealth. In the EU only Romania has the same trend and likely for similar reasons.
-Demographics. My city of 650k people has a shortage of 100 bus/tram drivers. Financial incentives that the city can afford don't work as the people who are qualified moved west long ago, when the west was solving such problems with immigration. We can't compete with say Germany on that front.
I could do this all day, but none of us has the time for that.
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I do imagine those places benefited from the cultural mindshift originating in dense areas. Just a guess, of course.