Comment by idle_zealot
17 hours ago
"Driving to work" is hardly a "vote with your wallet" style consumer choice. Our housing, building, and transportation policies have been geared towards encouraging car-dependence for nearly a century. In places with better public transit and bike lanes, people spontaneously choose to use those modes of transport. Just like with companies dumping as much plastic waste/CO2 as they can get away with, this is a policy problem, plain and simple. No amount of pro-environment metal straw campaigns will solve it. At best environmentally-conscious messaging could encourage changes in voting behavior which influence policy. At worst people could be convinced that they're "doing their part" and fail to consider systemic changes.
Regular voting is usually what affects things such as the transportation infrastructure in your country or city. It’s a slow proceed though.
Here in Oslo there has been a lot of investment in bike lanes, but just because one part of the local government builds more bike lanes doesn’t mean that other parts of the government will follow suit. Police still doesn’t care about cars illegally blocking the bike lanes. The people ploughing snow see bike lanes as the last thing that should need ploughing, preferably no earlier than 2 weeks after it snowed. A dedicated bike path I use to work is supposed to be ploughed within 2 hours of snow, but it took a week before anything was done and now three weeks later it’s still not to the standard that the government has set.
Speaking of Oslo and bicycles, I just want to add an amazing statistic that surfaced a couple of years ago here on Hacker News:
Oslo has a zero pedestrian and bicycle mortality rate!
https://thecityfix.com/blog/how-oslo-achieved-zero-pedestria...
> In 2015, the political climate and public will in the City of Oslo changed the tone on accepting continued surface transportation fatalities. The mayor, city council and transport division staff all supported a shift in roadway decision-making from car-centric to people-centric. [...]
Neighboring capitals with similar progressive bicycle cultures (Denmark, Sweden) have somewhat low but non-zero mortality rate as Oslo had 6 years ago. So the policies definitely make a change, but it's the consequence of a culture. You won't see American politicians suggesting a ban on cars in big cities.
We’ve had at least one cyclist killed since that article came out.
I would agree with you, but Americans intentionally reinforce car dependence whenever it's discussed.
It's bad enough that even non-US people regurgitate those talking points despite them being significantly less true for them; because they see it so much online.
> I would agree with you, but Americans intentionally reinforce car dependence whenever it's discussed.
They do, because their experience is that transit and biking really do suck and are useless. Which is accurate, for where they've lived.
The problem is that you have to convince people that things could be better, when their lived experience is that it's always terrible.
I live in place known for its rainy weather, 15 km from work (because of the housing crisis). Being overweight, biking to work never crossed my mind for two years. Once I tried to commute during weekend, as a challenge. I realized a few things: - same duration as the train - it give me the exercise I needed - it relaxes me - it is free since I already have a bike
Yes, it still take me 50 min to commute, but now I enjoy it and even volunteerly go to the office more often. It have been 6 months.
My point is: those who complain about biking being terrible or impractical should give it a real try. It may fit you.
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I ride a bike, and doing so has saved me about $450k in transportation costs over 3 decades. The effort it takes to earn $450k is something to include amongst the unpleasantries and pathologies associated with driving.
Now, of course, I've had my whole life to set up my whole life the way I want it, and with a little foresight it really wasn't that difficult to set it up in a way that facilitates getting around on a bicycle. It involved making choices. Choices about where to work and live. If more people made such choices, there would be more options available to facilitate them.
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> The problem is that you have to convince people that things could be better, when their lived experience is that it's always terrible.
Ironically, international air travel to places where it works great may help with this.
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See, my point is that everyone first goes “it’s not me”, then they understand it is them and go “but it’s not my policies” and then they vote in the policies which are the problem. It’s totally fine to go “we need collective action to fix this”. But you have to actually join the collective action. You think billionaires are getting rich by committing environmental arbitrage? Then don’t oppose attempts to make the costs appropriate, even if you must now pay your fair share too.
Sure, recognizing that the problem is political is step one. Step two is... political activism, I guess? Lack of local political engagement and organizing is part of what allows problems like these to form.
Not just lack but outright apathy and villainizing of these attempts. If you try to tax gas some oil CEO will run a campaign explaining to the working class that their commute will now cost 10% more, which obviously makes people upset. Part of it is that we, unfortunately, can’t actually subsidize car commuters anymore. But part of it is that CEO is going to incur a cost of 50%, as he should, which is why he’s bothering to spend money riling people up.
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