European weather is still mild relative to the US. It will be so long as the Gulf Stream doesn't shut down.

Americans are fatter and less healthy.

Americans are busy and work longer and harder. ("Work hard, play hard.")

Americans buy more stuff. Big stuff. Lots of stuff. Frequently. (This is actually a superpower of our consumer economy.)

And more than anything else, America is fucking huge.

I know you Europeans love your model, but it doesn't apply to us. The proponents in the US trying to make it happen misunderstand the fundamental differences.

> I know you Europeans love your model, but it doesn't apply to us.

lol. You're what we call "carbrained".

Explain how the climate of the coastal West coast is unsuitable for year-round bicycling. Much of it is nicer than the Netherlands and has several times the population.

You do realize most of the US doesn't live on the West coast, right?

Your sampling is skewed.

It's been freezing cold here and any destination within our major city you want to reach is 30+ minutes away by bike.

> Car usage is going to 2-10x.

What a bleak vision of the future.

It's beautiful.

Automated conveyance from front door to anywhere.

Perfectly comfortable, unscheduled, private.

I cannot fathom the bleak pessimistic perspective of wanting fixed trains and busses over this. Crying babies, rude people.

American transit sucks and it's not getting better. It's tolerable in cities like NYC, but even so it's a far cry from Asia. If you're not American, please don't project. We'll never have that here. We are not dense enough for it.

I vote for the "bleak" interpretation.

The main problems with cars are not about the fuel they run on, or the level of automation. They're the space they occupy per passenger and duration of use, the mass they have to move around, the materials required to build them, tire particulates, and the danger they pose to other traffic participants. None of these are alleviated by the thing-du-jour the car industry presents as a solution to all the problems on any given day. The real issues are all endemic to the concept of a car in the first place.

And, maybe, if more people stopped seeing random encounters with some of their co-humans as just an annoying moment of having to deal with icky other people, we'd make some progress on our loneliness, aggravation and political polarisation problems.

It’s not about the climate. Cities are just too big.

Not big, sprawled - because of cars. In terms of population, most US cities are not very impressive.

That's because you're using planned economy principles for your cities.

Remove all zoning but for industrial zoning, and remove prop 13, like it is in most of Europe, and the invisible hand of the market will transform most of cities into medium-density mixed-use like in Europe, though in your case likely accomplished with 5-over-1s instead.

And with increased density, maybe you'd even have space for some public parks again.

There are two main reasons for what you describe: very flat terrain in Netherlands and people living in multi-family buildings mostly. Thus people don't ride any substantial distance according to Netherland's own statistics [1] and don't physically exert while doing so.

In the US average commute is 42 miles daily, that's over 67 km, or more than two weeks of riding a Dutch 12-18 y.o. does, or a month of riding of a Dutch 35-50 y.o. I'd like to invite any Dutch, who believes it's the same in the US, to ride 67km daily for 5 days straight, even in their own flat neighborhood. It might enlighten them why cyclists elsewhere wear special clothes too! And this is without hills...

1. https://longreads.cbs.nl/the-netherlands-in-numbers-2022/how...