> So any [...] as some sort of [sarcastic overstatement] is really just idealized bullshit.
You made the pH of this discussion noticeably more acidic with this swipe, and the parent did not deserve it. It's not hard to make comments in a swipe-free way—for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29105572 is making a similar point to yours in a conversational style, as opposed to a cross-examining one. That's what we're going for here.
Or that is just a strawman of what is clearly true, but not literally universal in every single individual location. Biking/walking is utilized at least twice as much in Western European countries as in the US, and often 3 times or more [1]. European cities are, in general, more walkable and bikeable than US cities. If you want to read an in depth article about the many factors that led to US urban sprawl vs European cities, I’d recommend [2].
[1] http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/trnews/trnews280western...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/are-europes-cities-better...
What's it look like when you include eastern Europe in that comparison?
I'm sure the rich half of the US bikes a heck of a lot more than the poor half too.
I often think of a time in Sofia, Bulgaria where I saw an elderly woman trying to get around a car parked on the sidewalk, up against a wall, by walking on the car bumper with her groceries. It was terrifying and precarious.
Ouch, a bit harsh, that. I did not intend to claim Europe does not have unwalkable areas, but that walkable areas are not considered as such novelties. I should have used a more cautious tone.
Never the less, using Helsinki as an example, you can plan to purchase an apartment within one hours of commute from the Helsinki center and never get a car, as there are sufficient amount of neigbourhoods that facilitate that, even though every possible combination of housing and employment does not support not owning a car.
When you have to go home by midnight as a student / young professional living outside the city because public transport service ends (or even before that because you don't want to get stranded), or you live somewhere off the beaten path, or even the other party lives off the beaten path a little, getting a car to drive at least a part of that becomes more and more enticing.
I say this knowing that improving public transport to reduce the number of roads and cars on the road has been a topic for a few decades now, and even the most obvious national lines aren't being funded in my country, whereas there is money to create more roads and maintain older roads. I don't doubt The Netherlands is far better than the US, but while possible, there are still tons of hurdles to overcome in going car-less. Japan is another example, where the cities do it much better than we do, but the outskirts arguably do it worse.
In Västerås i lived in the rural outskirts when I was younger and missing the 2am bus meant I had to wait until 6am but I think it only happened once to me.
I also lived in Houston, Texas. I never took the bus because it would take 45 min to walk to the nearest stop. Biking was fun though because I lived near a large reserve but there was always the fear of getting hit by a boar or bit by something poisonous.
In Västerås walking or biking was always easy and felt integrated to the planning of the city. In Houston you had to seek out special areas where it would be nice to walk or ride your bike.
The only way I can understand someone complaining about the lack of such options in Northern Europe is that they haven't lived elsewhere, and seen how bad it could be.
My favorite personal US-is-for-cars anecdote: We once got into cars just to drive across the road, as there was no pedestrian crossing and six lanes of traffic.
https://www.google.fi/maps/@60.2791313,24.9709347,3a,75y,66....
There is usually a bike and pedestrian way also, and there are buses going there too. But it's not human scale. The inside is divorced from the outside. In the winter it's a pretty noir experience as you visit these places after you get out of work, when you need to buy some lumber etc. It's dark and it rains, it's +1 C, there's a highway close by and the orange light from street lights and the car head and tail lights are lighting up the place. Salty water and brown sleet is splashing there from the large mass of cars driving around, and the constant noise from the studded tires. There is no cover, no trees, nothing living really except some barely struggling grass on some traffic dividers. These are built outside city centers, near the outer ring roads. Land is cheap. It used to be a field 30 years ago.
And vice versa, some places in America are just like some nice places in Europe, like a lot of Boston.
But that's not true on the roads. We teach children to literally fear for their lives around cars. Right now a child is being taught to give way to cars because if they don't the car will kill them. Vehicles with enclosed cabs like cars are the worst because the drivers are completely removed from the road. Their experience is not human. They can't express themselves, which leads to anger and road rage. They can't feel the speed they are travelling at or the effort it is taking. And we just let them assume priority. They've taken the roads for themselves and they are not going to give them back.
https://www.dutchreach.org/car-child-murder-protests-safer-n...
Can you please come and do the same in Austria, this boomer-mentality country that's all about everyone owing cars and driving and parking everywhere, where cycling is seen as a sport or means of transportation for poor people who can't afford a house in the suburbs?
For a history of how this happened in the US see Fighting traffic: the dawn of the motor age in the American city by Peter Norton.
> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic
It's not cultural, motorized traffic wins because it's more powerful.
> Right now a child is being taught to give way to cars because if they don't the car will kill them. Vehicles with enclosed cabs like cars are the worst because the drivers are completely removed from the road. Their experience is not human.
Subways, trams and buses will also kill them, that's just as dangerous.
Do you have any source for this? AFAIK it's not true. Trams and subways specifically kill way less people than cars, even though in many places they transport more people than cars do.
For buses, IDK, but i would be surprised if a single bus was twice as likely or more to kill a person than a car. And a single bus transports way more people than a car.
And still we have expansive shopping malls outside of town which is heavily in favor or cars. We still have the downtown shopping but it can barely hang by, and parking is very expensive. It would not really have been possible to build all this shopping in the city center, so there is the physical limitations. I think this is the main problem, that the cities outgrow themselves, and it is just so much cheaper and economical to build mega-malls instead of smaller centres for shopping and amenities. They do exist here, but are very small. So you can often get by with walking of bicycling but the "big" shopping is done using a car, the local shops are 99% food-related or restaurants.
But this is a matter of chosen-lifestyle.
This was really brought home to me talking to my mother-in-law (who lives in Nyköping). She is a keen walker and owns a bike - but when I ranted about the incredible scale of traffic in what is a small and should be an eminently walkable town, she said "How else can people buy their weekly groceries?"
The point of walkable towns (which these small and quite intimate towns in central Sweden could be), is that the center of town would be full of flourishing small and specialized grocery and other stores, and people would buy food from their nearby store, and keep the center of the town alive and busy.
Instead of this, people prefer to sit alone in their car and drive at a snail's pace in a polluting traffic-jam, to a stadium-sized parking-lot where anonymous super-grocery chains are located out of reach of the 'poors' who have no car, and therefore no means of getting there.
Right. The change only works when you switch to a model of buying your daily groceries, because the market is close, and smaller, and quick to get in and out of. You may still make a weekly or bi-weekly trip to the big market in a car to get bulk stuff, but each day's meals are based around the perishables that you bought earlier that day or the day before.
(Yes, this is hard, and it only worked for us when we lived in Chicago, and the market was a few blocks away or we passed by grocers on the way to and from work, but it was a nice way to live.)
Driving to buy groceries may be necessary today, but maybe not tomorrow.
From Ruth Cowan's More Work for Mother: "Butchers, greengrocers, coffee merchants, and bakers employed delivery boys to take order from and then carry purchases back to the homes of their more prosperous customers. Smoked, dried, and pickled fish, fruits and vegetables, second-hand clothing, and linens were routinely sold from pushcarts that lined the curbs and traveled the back alleys of poor neighborhoods."
I'm in London, and use Ocado, which means if I can't even be bothered to open the app to decide what to order they'll populate the order for me based on my favourites and my past shops. I know I'll get something that's generally "close enough". When I can be bothered to open the app, I have a starting point that's ~90% right. My weekly shop takes me ~5 minutes.
I can't possibly imagine going back to doing grocery shopping - or pretty much any shopping - myself again. Ever. The exception is the very occasional urge, usually if I'm going for a walk anyway, or want something extra. But even most sudden urges is so much more convenient to handle via Deliveroo or similar.
The big out-of-town supermarkets will die soon enough, and be replaced by warehouses. The shift to deliveries has been steady in the UK at least. Small town centre grocery stores might survive to some extent for that occasionally extra shop.
One less reason to want to own a car for me at least.
I know, same here, it's so great. I used to have an annoying 30min detour 3 times per week, and now I do my grocery shopping on the phone for 5mins while I'm commuting. The time I save has gone into more cooking, and healthier meals. Delivery is definitely better than using a car. Nobody that already has a full time job should have to put up with such annoying chores.
But delivery services, and services related to house work has a big stigma in northern Europe, people think it's really important that "everyone cleans up their own mess" and you should not be able to "buy your way out". You see CEO:s in companies having kitchen duty doing dishes to get brownie points and you often get very negative reactions to using such services.
Personally don’t believe the supermarkets will go away. I don’t think the business model of these delivery platforms allows having qualified staff to do the shopping.
Ocado is increasingly licensing their warehousing platform internationally, so it's likely to show up near you.
I'd agree with you if we were talking about staff picking from a shop floor - that does not work reliably enough at all, but that model is several years outdated and the only reason some of those still survive is that the more automated systems like Ocado's and a few others are a lot more capital intensive to roll out as it means building dedicated specialized warehouses.
Not to pick on you but this sentiment is that sure I can handle groceries without driving to a store. I’ll just have some gig worker deliver it for me.
Personally I prefer shopping in person anyway. It’s not a big deal once a week and usually have multiple errands to run anyway.
I don't agree that it's straying from the topic. The shift towards getting groceries delivered is likely to start to kill off the big out-of-town super markets in certain markets, and it fundamentally changes the dynamics where grocery shopping was a big factor for people living in areas with few walkable shops with respect to their real or perceived need for cars.
E.g. my mums neighbourhood in Norway is one she'd likely have had to move away from when she gets a bit older than now if it wasn't for delivery services. She's close-ish to shops, but not close enough to be comfortable carrying lots of groceries any more. Having delivery services means the neighbourhood remains walkable enough for her for longer.
> Not to pick on you but this sentiment is that sure I can handle groceries without driving to a store. I’ll just have some gig worker deliver it for me.
No, my weekly shop is delivered by salaried drivers. They're not paid great (I've checked), but they're certainly not paid as poorly as the typical gig worker and thankfully they've recently been forced to up salaries to deal with the ongoing lack of delivery drivers in the UK. My very occasional extras via Deliveroo are delivered by gig workers, and I'm conscious they're paid shit so I generally tip heavily.
Personally I utterly hate shopping in person unless it's something that I like to look at, and I'm very happy to pay extra to avoid having to.
But to bring it back to the topic, if having someone deliver groceries takes away the main reason why people otherwise need a car, it's a net win. For me it e.g. makes a big difference in where I'd be prepared to live as I don't need to take into consideration whether it'd be a long walk with heavy bags any more. I enjoy long walks. I don't enjoy long walks with bags full of groceries.
Back in the states, I shop for groceries daily (again, choosing to live in a semi urban area with two grocery stores in easy walking distance) after dropping the toddler off at daycare. A stroller works wonders. Not sure how I will shop after he starts kindergarten next year.
Only if delivery was organized in a way to deliver to multiple households in the same area does it start to make sense from an ecological perspective: but your neighbourhood still has to have those delivery trucks in the walking/biking paths.
It's a bit like a bus vs. a car. They're not equal, even if they both drive on the same roads.
Despite the social consequences.
Ir seems to imply that it is a demand that technology not change things socially or if they will be bad. Both are flat out impossible as the inventor(s) don't even know what will change ahead of time. It is neither reasonable nor actionable.
If it doesn't imply that it is meaningless as the dumb luddite line "Science never sacrifices, it always murders." How the fuck is a process of discovery supposed to sacrifice anything when it isn't even an entity! Attributing responsibility of murders to it is similiarly daft - why not blame murders on violence instead?
Sure scientests should come out with ethical codes of "what not to do" after infamous incidents like say Harry Harlowe's gratitutousness monkey torture or human experimentation on the vulnerable but moral culpability is on the men responsible, not those who engage in a common different process. It would nonsensic like trying to declare eaters responsible for some depraved cannibal eating an infant!
If your only or main KPI ignores the social consequences , then you're doing it
> Despite de social consequences.
But I get your point, it's a well known school of thought based on selfishness, I'd guess.
What’s “bullshit” is using the example of satellite malls, a global phenomenon due to obvious reasons (land and real estate pricing) as somehow proof that Sweden or similar countries aren’t walkable, without mentioning the huge divide in the feasibility of using public transport.
It’s not equal if a mall is kilometers away from the city center, but in one case you have public transport available and in the other it’s for all practical purposes impossible to get there without a car.
In addition to that, even locations outside the city center are often safely walkable, if you would want to. This comes down to a difference in city planning and the assumed value of pedestrian traffic. I seriously don’t understand how that can be a contentious point, it’s well known that city planning in the US is more car-centric than that in Europe, and that consistent public transport is almost unheard of in the US outside of large cities. That doesn’t mean all of the US is impossible to access without a car, nor does it mean all of Europe is possible without one, but the difference in planning is completely obvious.
In smaller cities, you often have the same people setting lofty ambitions to become the bicycle capital of united federation of planets while at the same time greenlighting yet another massive mall at the edge of town because "oh my god $BIG_CHAIN_STORE wants to come here, we're gonna be like a big city now!", usually at the expense of the stores that are accessible by foot or by bicycle.
That's why 85% of German households own a car, even though many of their cities are more walkable. Being more walkable doesn't get you to being car free, it gets you to fewer miles driven. But if your goal is to be car free then you need to focus on a lot more than getting groceries.
But as long as a large majority have cars, you are going to have a car focused city, which is exactly what most European cities are once you get out of the touristy downtown areas. So at best the walkability metric will give you a small downtown area that is not car-focused. That downtown area will be populated primarily by tourists, and most locals will live outside it, in a more car accessible part of the city.
I listen to French people in documentaries and podcasts who can't go five minutes without using an analogy about cars and garages.
You can walk in the suburbs but there’s often no where local to go because the shops, schools, and workplaces need a level of scale to be efficient.
This is actually bullshit.
Europe is fundamentally more walkable, it's not even an argument.
So any characterization of USA vs Europe positing Europe as some sort of walkable-heaven is really just idealized bullshit.
[0] I've received (Swedish?) downvotes for this contention before - Swedish-speaking readers can see https://www.cyklistbloggen.se for good documentation.