The law of camping/holidays: whatever your storage space, you’ll need all of it. Applies to cars, suitcases, backpacks, houses.

You don’t even need a car. In countries with decent cycling infrastructure, it is possible to go on a weekend with young kids on a bicycle. Kids go in the trailer, or if over ≈4, on the trail-a-bike or, if over ≈7, on their own bicycle.

I would never expose my children to that risk on a day to day basis... Maybe if you live somewhere with very good cycling culture and bike lanes, etc. But still cycling fatalities are higher than driving, and that's for adult riders - children aged 4-7 ? They don't even have the coordinaton to land properly - it feels about as reckless as taking a child on a motorcycle - but I guess a bycicle is more "hip"

When the mundane task of cycling is seen as some risk activity, there is something wrong. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the health benefits of regular cycling far outweighs the relative risk of cycling, even in places that is hostile to bikes.

This obviously depends on where you are and where you’re going, but for example the region I come from (western Plalatina) has a full second road network built by farmers for farm machines. It’s even denser than the “regular” road network. And it’s open to cyclists. You can go pretty much anywhere on paved roads and you’ll only occasionally meet a farmer.

Other regions have discovered cycling tourists as income source. I’ve made the entire stretch from the Baltic Sea to Berlin by cargo bike with our 18 month toddler without major stretches on any public road. A large chunk is on the service roads for the oder river flood dam works. A similar path exists on long stretches of the Rhine river - my parents and I made the treck up the Rhine to the Bodensee when I was like 14 or so. And that was like 30 years ago, things have considerably improved since then.

Sure, it does take some planning and consulting maps, but it’s not impossible. Especially since mapping applications have started to support bike-friendly routing. There’s also companies offering per-planned trecks where they transport your luggage and you just take the ride.

And then there’s the Netherlands where they probably wouldn’t even be able to parse your statement. I sometimes have the feeling they get born on wheels.

Notice the danger does not lie in the bycicle itself, but rather in the cars surrounding it.

> I would never expose my children to that risk on a day to day basis

but while driving a car you are exposing others to that risk.

> They don't even have the coordinaton to land properly

yes they do

You don't let your children ride on the highway.

Children aged 7 can drive on the sidewalk in many countries. You can transport bikes on public transit to get to something that resembles nature, then ride there (with no cars in sight).

There’s not that many European families with 3 kids any more. The reproduction rate is somewhat below 2 kids per family - hence all that discussion about shrinking population. Then there’s quite a few options. I can easily hop on the train and go to the beach. It’s even faster than by car and less stressful when traveling with small kids. Or take one of the many rental or car-sharing cars . In Berlin, car owning households are actually a minority.

I live next to an NJ transit train station with a 1 hour ride to downtown Manhattan. I can drive into NYC faster because of the time savings from not stopping along the way and waiting on train transfers. I'm also not trapped by the limited service intervals on my line. This is a region with the best train service in the US and driving still is a better option for non-trivial trips.

Do you not have express trains? We have some in chicago and for example, the naperville to downtown express takes 34 minutes to go 30 miles downtown because it literally goes straight downtown without stopping at any other stations.

My line is shared with MTA and has/had express trains for their stops further out. Those trains save 15 minutes but are of no use to me and "steal" a time slot for a normal train I could use. Most have been removed in the past two years due to service reductions.

You ignore the fact that the MTA has been neglected but roads haven't. Also the mayor is extremely pro-car and has let things degrade for everyone else (the majority of NYC residents do not own cars).

A normal hatchback will accommodate two adults and three kids.

Also, of course, few families actually _have_ three kids: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Larger cars, SUVs and people carriers do exist in Europe, but the average family won't need one.

And you can take kids on the bus/train.

I have two kids and a large dog. A small hatchback would turn a day trip to the beach into a civil war.

I’ve got a Skoda Fabia, can’t get three car seats in the back, nor two and an adult, so assuming a kid every 2 years you need something bigger for most of a decade. An Octavia might do

I want to see three car seats in a hatchback.

I have 4 kids so we had 3 car seats for a while. We're in the UK and we have a Vauxhall (Opel) Zafira which is a 7 seat minivan, very small by US standards, built on the chassis of the Astra small hatchback. I believe we have used this car to do everything we might do with an SUV, including taking our 6 person family on extended camping trips (with a small trailer) and across Europe as far as Lyon, Geneva and Luxembourg (with a roof box).

Sounds nice.

But living standards are higher in the US, and our trips are longer. To drive my family across Texas is nearly as far as driving across France and Germany, and I have three other states to cross.

If I can afford to pay more to get a bigger, faster, safer vehicle for the trip, it’s my money.

Us Americans use our vehicles to pick up a Hot Wheels jungle gym at Toys R Us, then we spend 3 hours on the freeway driving to another state to pick up some In N Out. We keep 8 large dogs in the back 4 rows, and have to hit Wal Mart to pick up a pallet of toilet paper to clean up. You can't understand our lifestyle requirements.

EDIT: Yesterday I had to run to the store to pick up a vat of queso. I'd like to see you Europeans do that in your Mr. Bean cars.

Living standards in the US are higher than the UK? What?

Yes?

I doubt there is any conventional metric for "standard of living" (which basically means per capita wealth/income) where the UK would be higher than the US, at almost any point on the income scale (even adjusted for the imputed value of the more extensive public health system in the UK).

That doesn't mean the UK is "worse" than the US, or that it has a lower quality of life, just that it has (and has had) a lower standard of living for decades. Few countries car match the standard of living of the US.

while agreeing to your point about living standards, i would add that there are almost no countries matching US military spending, foreign debt levels or energy consumption per capita

Well given the fact that Western Europe barely has a military outside of all the US troops there, it’s a lot easier to keep those debt levels low.

I suspect one factor here is that the US has, for practical purposes, no passenger intercity rail network, and has a somewhat less developed budget airline market.

That said, I find it notable that the average price of new cars in the US has typically been rising faster than income over the last decade or so. This would indicate, bluntly, effective advertising, rather than resources, being a big driver of the huge car thing. Average new car price in the US is creeping up on average annual income. This isn’t just an American problem, incidentally; it’s happening in a good few countries.

Longer term loans are also more common now. 5 years was typical but now 7 years is becoming even more common.

Safety features have added a lot to prices.

Not sure that’s right. Base prices don’t really seem to have risen; people are just buying higher end cars.

I'd reference https://carsgenius.com/are-new-high-tech-car-safety-features...

Now you're talking about three kids within a very short window of time, which is even less common.

But... my own youngest and oldest are almost exactly three years apart, so I can tell you that even a Toyota Camry was incapable of handling three American-standard carseats side-by-side.

However, in countries with lower speed limits, less bulky carseats are required to keep kids safe even in the unusual case of three closely-spaced kids.

Very short window? What is your car seat age range there? Current trend in the US is car seats till age 8 give or take. 3 kids within 8 years is very expected if you are having 3 or more.

Booster seats are often required for kids up to age 8 or so, often only if they are shorter than 4' 9". But booster seats easily fit in small cars.

The age limit recommendation are a rear-facing seat until 2, then a front-facing seat until they reach something like 65 pounds, then a booster seat.

From experience, three car seats cannot fit side-by-side in really any car, whether front-facing or rear-facing. But booster seats are fine, even in my tiny Fiat 500e. Back in the day, I leased a minivan for a while and then the kids started to outgrow bulky carseats.

The range in which all three are in car seats is still very small. Even with one child a year, the quickest "regular" speed, you would have a five year period with three child seats of the fifteen years that all three would be underage.

A Toyota Camry isn’t a small car.

That’s why they said “even a Camery”

It's a bit "squishy", to use my youngest's word, but you can easily put three car seats in one. Helps if at least one of them is only a booster though.

Very possible with the right seats. https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-...

A kia rio can so I don't see your issue.

Most families won't need a "larger cars/SUV's" but are they not the prime focus of car companies now? I assume due to higher demand and margins?

I live in an urban area and they are prevalent. Dumb@sses trying to do a three point turn in an urban area with their tank-people-carrier.

People are just stup!d. Let's be honest.

So either no one with a car does anything in Europe or it's possible with a smaller car.

It may be worth saying that everything in America is bigger than its European counterpart, to a first approximation. You can tell that Tesla's are designed for an American market by just how fat the back is compared to (say) a Mercedes S-class - it still fits on the road but it's very voluptuous

The Tesla Model S is 77" (196 cm), and the Mercedes S-Class is 75" (190 cm).

it wasn't a model S, and I don't mean the width I mean the amount of junk in the trunk(volume) the thing had.

Mercedes S class is 510l boot. A Tesla model 3 is 425. Also smaller than an Audi A4 or BMW 3 series.

Not hard. We have taken the whole family camping by bike-train-bike. Even a small car would be a doddle.

The four year old is towed using a follow-me, all the gear goes in a couple of panniers.

We have spent a small part of our car-money on some very high quality gear, through. Small and light equipment is much easier to pack than Walmart camping gear.

Real example: my family could not afford a car when I was a kid. We used 2 options: cycling (with all the gear, picnic blanket etc) or a regular bus. There were also organized summer outings in a chartered bus. Later we I also managed to go to weekend outings in a mazda 323 with 2 kids. You just take less stuff.

I did it just fine in a Fiat Panda, for instance 3 adults, 2 French bulldogs and luggage for 2 weeks, 6 hour drive.

Going home, we added a cat, its transport box and toys/accessories/food. Not a problem.

In the Peugeot 406 (midsize sedan) I had after that, we were 5 adults going to weight lifting competitions, so you can probably guess that none of us were exactly tiny. Also not a problem.