I moved here from Istanbul 12 years ago. the progress there was positive in this timeframe while in Randstad it was backwards to be honest. public transportation became more expensive and unreliable. busses are often empty and they seem to compensate this by increasing prices and cutting down the frequency, so it becomes less reliable for people to use it..
my commute to work is 15 km. it's 20 min by car without traffic but post-Covid traffic is so bad that it's 50 mins in average (1 hour+ on Tuesdays). bus is 30 mins with 1 connection but often I miss the connection and wait 15 mins, so it's 45 realistically. both are bad options, so I cycle instead in half an hour with my e-bike. if it's bad weather I take the car because busses are not on time so I can't plan being at the office for a meeting or so. plus, bus is much more expensive than my not so fuel efficient old car. go figure.
Another rough value of thumb for city buses is that they use roughly about 30 l/100 km, which adds about 0,50 €/km, so 2,30 €/km for driver + fuel.
A regular city bus holds about 100 passengers, and an average utilisation figure as averaged across the whole day and all routes might be somewhere around 20 %. So an average of 20 passengers per bus at all times, which means 11.5 cents per kilometre for driver and fuel. Now add-in capital cost for the bus itself, maintenance and other ancillary stuff and unfortunately 25 cents per kilometre isn't all that much all of a sudden.
(If you can read some German, somebody did a more complete modelling of costs at https://prof.bht-berlin.de/fileadmin/prof/jschlaich/200811_F..., and with some assumed fictitious but presumably plausible values ended up at 3,26 €/vehicle-km for a city bus operation in 2008 – and both (driver) pay and fuel have increased above inflation since then.)
People will wait in drive-thru lines that take twice as long as parking and walking in for coffee, food and even school/daycare/camp dropoff/pickup. It's baffling to me but, on the upside, I'll gladly pick up their slack and be in/out twice as fast.
Public transportation is not wide spread or serious but even in the places where it is an option (NE corridor), people often rather spend an extra 20/40/60 mins in a vehicle (theirs or a rideshare service) than use public transportation.
Nobody is trading a 20 minute drive for a 60 minute bus trip in order to create a better neighbourhood. Get that bus trip down to at most 30 minutes and people might reconsider.
Or remove/penalise the more convenient (but harmful) alternatives. We shouldn’t kid ourselves, we’re going to need sticks as well as carrots if we want to avoid disaster
A big part of the reason why automobiles are so successful is that the cost are externalized. If oil companies and automobile manufacturers were forced to pay the cost of climate degradation they'd starve. But they're essentially on a type of welfare - where the people, and gov, eat those costs instead.
If we're playing welfare anyway, we might as well use it for public transit. And, as an aside, climate change is a real thing. It's not even up for debate. And yes, in order to solve a problem, you need policies. The "try nothing and hope it works" approach has been our approach forever and surprise! It doesn't work.
The climate has not degraded, it has warmed slightly. It is not even as hot today as it was in the early Holocene. The earth has actually greened from the CO2 fertilization affect, increasing the leaf area index on one quarter to one half of earth's surface over the past 35 years (https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization...).
There are far less deaths from natural disasters today than there was 100 years ago (in large part thanks to automobiles enabling people to evacuate and emergency responders to be activated).
Welfare is paid for by the same tax payers that are paying for gas tax, property tax, income taxes, etc. By no means should they be forced into some ideologue's vision for how "a perfect society" should work.
If you put those costs on them instead of us, they would be in very hot water. And they may be motivated to change their business practices.
And I won't comment on the urgency or scale of the global climate. It's not worth an argument.
Exactly! Offering compelling alternatives is the only way to change behavior in a way that's a win-win for both you and the people who prefer the option you don't.
World is more complex mixture of various people than just similarly-minded people. Number of examples in the past where people feeling righteous and above the rest imposed pretty harsh things on general population. Not the way we should be heading.
We have serious issues with ecosystem, but even removing 100% of the cars alone won't solve any of those (plus it won't ever happen) so let's be a bit more smart.
No, you can also start by imposing restrictions on cars.
> If public transit was a good option to get to work for people, more people would use it.
The people that live in the city center probably already use public transit because, for them, public transit is probably a faster commute. That means that the cars congesting the center are driven by people that live in the periphery or even suburbs outside of the city.
So these people will want those nasty cars out, because they actually live there, and they will vote them out.
You can never accommodate the people from the suburbs, unless they have a station right next to their door and their office and a train coming every 5 minutes, a car will always be faster. They live in someone else's municipality, so the mayors can just ignore them.
People in the periphery are more delicate, but usually they are also tired of congestions, and it's much easier to make at least minor improvements to public transit for them.
But again, you can restrict and make improvements in parallel, and the improvement will almost never be perceived as matching the restrictions anyway.
Getting people into public transit by making car ownership worse is how you get unhappy people. That is just unproductive and destructive. Make public transit better, that is how you get people out of cars and happy.
> The people that live in the city center probably already use public transit
No they don't. The 74% of The Netherlands lives in a city yet 66% of people commute to work by car. That goes to show that even for people living in cities, going to work by car is still the preferred method. I'm one of them, in the example I gave above it was three times faster to go to work by car.
> because they actually live there, and they will vote them out
That is elitist "fuck you I got mine" mentality. Rich people in city centers able to afford expensive houses will make it harder for poor people in the affordable neighbouring cities to move around and get to work.
This is fantasy, you cannot snap your fingers and make this happen, nor are the people in charge incompetent. Never has a city "simply" made PT better at a pace that allowed for significant car reduction without making car users unhappy. Again, car users will always complain, unless the PT takes them less time to commute, which is physically impossible to accommodate for all car users.
> That is elitist "fuck you I got mine" mentality.
No, car users have the "fuck you I got mine" mentality: they have a short commute because they are rich enough to pay for car space in the city, and want a perpetual right to this.
> Rich people in city centers able to afford expensive houses will make it harder for poor people in the affordable neighbouring cities to move around and get to work.
Rich people live in the outskirts in big houses, but want to able to steamroll with their car right into the city center, regardless of the impact to people living in the center and along the way to it.
> Police officers, healthcare workers, sanitation workers, teachers. Those people don't live in the city and with their work schedules often can only go by car.
They absolutely can go by PT, or relocate, as it has been proven by all the cities that successfully have restricted cars.
We cannot increase density in cities anymore, cars are not the solution because they simply don't scale and are not actually accessible to poor people.
The top 5% earners are not the ultra rich. To even afford a 50 square meter apartment somewhat near the center of Amsterdam you need to be at least an engineer, lawyer or doctor earning six figures. Those people do not live in suburbs, that is where the people earning modal income live.
Is this some sort of American way of thinking you are projecting onto my country?
And where should those essential workers relocate to? They already live as close to the city as their lending/renting capabilities allow them. And no they can't all use public transit otherwise they likely would be using it already.
And yes we can increase density. Amsterdam only has 3700 people/km2. The metropole only has 900 people/km2.
You have a distorted view of what "modal income" is. If you can afford to live in the suburbs and drive one car (per worker) into the city, then you are rich. The poor live in the periphery and walk, use PT, or carpool. Then, the ultra-rich can afford to live in penthouses in the financial district and will always weasel a way in to be able to drive (or get driven) in a SUV, they are irrelevant to the discussion.
You are relatively rich and want to have your way with your car and driving, and are using the poor as a bad excuse.
What do you think will happen, that the system will collapse? Trains and buses spilling with people, no essential workers, police and healthcare unavailable, chaos, anarchy?
No! Everything goes on normally in cities that have restricted car traffic. Because restrictions are gradual. If a job offer in the city center becomes less competitive (considering time and money), then it will attract different workers from better locations. And same for housing.
> And yes we can increase density. Amsterdam only has 3700 people/km2. The metropole only has 900 people/km2.
Sure, if you want to make everything worse, you can keep dialing it up until it's too late. See any other major city in the world. There's an upper limit of what is acceptable, there not really a limit in decentralizing.
Every single survey I've seen across Netherlands, Slovenia, Switzerland and Germany showed big support AFTER the changes were made (but a lot of hand wringing like yours BEFORE they were made).
The people that are usually unhappy are the ones that want to drag their SUVs in front of people living in city apartments and leave them there.
Of course the people living in Amsterdam will answer the survey positively. It's not those people that are impacted. It's the poor person working at IKEA that now has an extra 30 minutes of commute because they imposed parking restrictions near their job. The rich Amsterdam city center person shopping at IKEA can take the metro because they can afford to live such a lifestyle.
Poor people will chose a job that is nearer, rents and salaries adjust to job opportunities - it's a good thing to decentralize, we cannot keep concentrating more jobs and dwellers around already problematic zones.
The inverse is also true. The public transport experience is bad now because the car experience is optimized.
That's really not universally true. If I'm going in and out during commuting hours and drive to the commuter rail station, it's about a wash whether I take the train into the city or drive depending upon where I'm going and what local subway connection/walk I need to do.
It's pretty much useless outside of commuting hours though given limited train schedule and the fact that driving is faster at those times than rush hour. So I'll basically never take the train for an evening event.
In the US you couldn’t realistically bike anywhere nor does public transport go everywhere. Not to mention the 10 minute walk to the bus stop is probably much worse, especially outside of big cities.
This does, of course, depend entirely on where in the US you live. People commute by bike year round in Minneapolis, and it’s a stereotype for people in New York City to not have driving licenses because they take transit everywhere.
NYC is an extreme outlier, we love to see it, but about 98% of the US doesn't live in the area served by NYC transit. I am sure the population of Minneapolis is much smaller, too.
The vast majority of the US is prohibitively difficult to traverse by any mode except car. (Actually, it's usually a highly frustrating and dangerous experience by car, too.) I see reports of more than 60% of the population living in suburbs, which are, as a general rule, designed to discourage non-car travel.
Twin Cities Normal Monthly Snowfall in inches (1981-2010)
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Annual
12.1 7.8 10.2 2.5 Trace 0 0 0 Trace 0.6 9.3 11.5 54.0
https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/climate/twin_cities/snowfall.htm...
First, I don't agree. Most of the suburbs I've lived in or near have extremely low bicycle traffic, even though kids do it sometimes.
But more importantly, where are those kids going? Usually either nowhere, or to another suburban house. They're probably not getting groceries or otherwise leaving the residential area.
And outside of Santa Monica / Venice / Hollywood / Downtown I would often not have sidewalks. It felt a bit like Spain in that regard.
edit: Meant twice, not half.
Either that or better city planning so you don't end up with two cities of 140k and 300k but instead have one city of 440k with better interconnects between neighbourhoods and more light rail.
I was curious about the statistics for this, and it looks like barely not to me, according to this data: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/84710ENG (the CSV you can download is much more readable than the table in the webpage)
0.44 trips/person/day travelling to/from work total in 2023, 0.21 of those by car. 2023 is the first year where that is the case though.
Edit: If you go to the Dutch version of the data it includes another category for cars (commuting as a passenger in a car) that the English data omitted, with 0.01 of the trips. Moving it from "majority not-by-car in 2023" to "rounding errors mean the data doesn't say which is in the majority": https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/84710NED
> Inwoners van Nederland legden in 2022 gemiddeld 7,4 kilometer per dag af om van en naar het werk te gaan. Ruim 70 procent van de reizigerskilometers van en naar het werk werd met de auto afgelegd, meestal als bestuurder. De trein werd gebruikt voor 10 procent van deze kilometers, de gemiddelde afstand per treinverplaatsing van en naar het werk was 42,8 kilometer. Fietsen was goed voor 29 procent van de verplaatsingen van en naar het werk en voor 8 procent van de afgelegde afstand voor dit doel. De gemiddelde verplaatsingsafstand op de fiets was 4,7 kilometer. Minder dan 0,6 procent van de totale afstand om van en naar het werk te gaan werd te voet overbrugd.
Google Translate:
> In 2022, residents of the Netherlands traveled an average of 7.4 kilometers per day to and from work. More than 70 percent of the passenger kilometers to and from work were covered by car, usually as a driver. The train was used for 10 percent of these kilometers, the average distance per train trip to and from work was 42.8 kilometers. Cycling accounted for 29 percent of the trips to and from work and for 8 percent of the distance traveled for this purpose. The average distance traveled by bike was 4.7 kilometers. Less than 0.6 percent of the total distance to and from work was covered on foot.
So if you remove the 15% WFH, I'm not awake enough to math that out but car travel is the overwhelming majority and bicycle commute is still negligible.
Agreed! Except for the 24/7. I mean, when it comes to commuting, you need public transport to end late enough for you to stay late, but you don't need it at midnight.
> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work.
Not the majority of city-dwellers in the Netherlands, I'm sure.
> They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub.
2-minute bike ride then. And I say that as someone who's lived in the Netherlands, albeit only for a few years. It was _such_ a joy to be able to commute without a car (which I am again stuck with these days).
Friday and Saturday public transit should at least run pretty late, unless you want people who don't want to pay for taxis driving home after drinking and partying.
Not if that walk is through a car neighborhood, but if it’s through a neighborhood where there are almost no cars, good sidewalks, trees and grass?
Also, aren’t many neighborhoods already somewhat like that in the Netherlands, with limited on-street parking? Even if there’s a parking garage under an apartment building, it likely already is a 5-10 minute walk to get there.
First, it is a dream, you have to do something to make it work. You are describing the status quo, I want us to move to something else. After decades of neoliberalism, even embraced by the centre-left party, we have eroded our actually quite decent public transport facilities. There is no reason it has to stay this way.
Second, I'm not talking about people commuting to work with public transport vs cars, even though it would be nice to get people out of the car into a much more efficient system. I'm talking about our neighbourhoods, the places where people actually live. I'm talking about going outside your house and not as a first thing having to face the noise, danger, pollution, ugliness, etc. of parked cars and cars moving on the road.
The neighbourhood could be a place where children play on the streets, where there is space to meet each other, with room for trees and other vegetation. If you just move all the tin out of the neighbourhood and to the edges on big solar covered parking lots, then it is easily done. It will create a lot of space and very little downsides. Of course we can't just rebuild all cities, but we can use this design for new ones.
I'm really not talking about parking along the edges of the city, so that you have to take a bus or bicycle in order to get to your car. I want people to park just on the edges of a block or neighbourhood (like 500 to 5000 people, depending on density). You should be able to walk to such a parking lot within 5 min. You would still be able to get to your house for things like groceries and stuff, just not park there. And disabled people would get an exception. Just this relatively simple change will reduce traffic immensely.
Third, it may feel now like you are entitled to be able to park in front of your house and drive to it by car. Everybody must naturally accommodate your wishes in this respect, because this is what the majority wants. However, if we change that and take that away from you, it will not take a lot of time before that changes. And then people will start to feel entitled to be able to have their children play on the streets again, and to enjoy such these carless spaces. In the same way, smokers used to feel entitled to be able to smoke in restaurants, in the train and even at the office. Things can and do change.
For the people who meticulously maxed out the total amount of minutes they are willing to commute, so that they really can't bear to add 2 x 5 minutes of healthy walks a day: they will eventually move jobs closer to home or vice versa, so we eventually again hit the same average of daily travel time which has been stable since medieval times. Reduced emissions is just a bonus.
Really, why are we not doing this? The Netherlands is often seen as a country which has their act together around transportation, but it could still be so much better. Cars are still way too dominant and there are way, way too many of them. We just don't have the space.
For me going to work is either a 20 minute car ride, with parking right in front of my house and right in front of work. Or it is a 10 minute walk, 45 minute bus ride where I likely have to stand and then another 5 minute walk. And I can't work past 20:00 because that's my last bus. Make it so public transit is less than 20 minutes, goes 24/7 and picks me up within 5 minutes walking of my home and I will use it.
And no I don't even live in a village. Population of 140.000 people and I work in a city of 300.000.