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And it only gets worse when you get married and have kids. I briefly had to bike to the supermarket almost daily to buy meat and vegetables and other sundries for our family of five. It was a short bike ride, but the sheer amount of stuff required ghetto engineering to get home. Several time I had to lash a box of diapers to the back of my bike because my basket and backpack were full. First world problem, perhaps, but simply living close isn't always enough to make walking or biking convenient. We have a car now and life is way easier.
Sorry that's just a poor excuse. There are plenty of bikes in Europe which have cargo space.
https://electrek.co/2020/11/21/bunch-the-coupe-cargo-e-bike-dutch-design/
The fundamental problem is that the US is a car-centric society and too many Americans try to find ways to keep it that way.
There's a good intro/overview of these bikes, which are quite common in the Netherlands, here:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA
Sorry, but no, it's really not. I was living in Tokyo at the time, and Japan is not really a car-centric society. Not only do they not sell bikes like that in Japan (never seen one in years living there) but the sidewalks and parking areas are way too small for something like that.
Congrats to the Netherlands I guess, but not every country has been built around bikes in the same way and so you can't extrapolate what works in the Netherlands to other non-car-centric countries.
Also not to get personal but I'm tempted to ask whether you have personally spent a year carting groceries back and forth on a giant tricycle for your spouse and children. Have you done it with a 39 degree fever? Have you done it when it's raining? Freezing cold and snowing? While heavily pregnant? When your spouse is travelling and you've got no one to watch the kids? It's not as easy as "get a giant trike bro."
I don't know much about cargo bikes, nor do I care about them in particular. But either way, I'm sure most people who use them are villagers who have their own closed yards.
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Would you be surprised to know that urbanists scoff at most of those things? Here's NJB saying "cold weather is just an excuse; the real problem is inadequate bike infrastructure". Here's him again saying "it sucks to have to walk or bike in the rain, but by golly, it's simply better to force me to exercise". I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with other defenses against objections of someone being pregnant or has a 39-degree fever. And that's if they consider them at all and don't just say "okay but most of the time you don't have these conditions; really you're just being lazy".
For the record, I agree with you and do not agree with NJB; I'm presenting this because I've spent way too long trying to get into the headspace of online urbanists and can recite most of their arguments from memory.
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There might be a lot of them in Europe, but they certainly are not evenly distributed. For one thing, nobody is riding a cargo bicycle in Eastern Europe. It’s simply not a thing. Babushkas are pushing carts like in these photos, middle aged drunkards carry vodka in plastic shopping bags hanging from the handlebars of their bicycles. Everyone who can afford it drives. If you can’t drive, and live in a city, you can walk 5 minutes to a grocery store that carries extremely limited selection of food, which is fine, because you can’t afford much anyway (otherwise you’d have driven to a proper supermarket).
Frankly, I often get a feeling that Americans seriously underestimate how much Europeans actually drive (especially ones outside London, Paris or Amsterdam, which is to say, overwhelming majority of them), and what makes them choose other modes of transportation than driving (spoiler: most of the time it is simply the cost).
Also, forgot to mention: where do you think people are supposed to keep those big, heavy cargo bikes? Most of the apartment buildings in Europe don’t even have elevators.
This probably varies by country, but all the apartment buildings I've lived in have had an elevator, and only a handful of the ones I've even visited would have lacked one, generally older buildings in city centres.
If I had a cargo bike I'd keep it in the same place as my regular bike, the bike storage room in the basement (which is where we keep our two-seater pram, which is too big to fit our elevator.)
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Outdoors. It depends which city you live in but crime tends to be significantly lower than in the US generally speaking. That said, I agree with your points that some naïve center-left Americans have a very rose-tinted view of how car-dependent cities are in Europe, even in fairly progressive cities. But there has certainly been a huge amount of progress and it just keeps snowballing.
This isn't so obvious anymore, depending on your class situation. There's more than enough of "climate conscious" middle-class families with fairly comfortable incomes who may have a car for occasional usage, but who typically use bikes and public transportation for most daily needs. It also depends whether we're talking about someone owning a house or not. Most families in big cities live in large apartments.
Nobody does this. Use Google Street View to walk through a random residential neighborhood in Europe, and count bicycles outside. Check out Torino, or Bielefeld, or Bydgoszcz, or Ghent... wait, actually, unlike the other places, Ghent does seem to have a lot of bicycles everywhere I check. After more searching, it seems to me that some cities do have outdoors bicycles everywhere, and other places have basically zero bicycles, and it very much depends on the country more so than on the crime rate. No cargo bikes, though, even in places which have lots of bikes in general. In any case, outdoors bicycle are not a thing at Europe in general, though they are common in Belgium, Netherlands and Denmark.
I think a lot of it is that even if they have first hand experience with Europe, it is in places that are highly atypical, like Paris, London, Copenhagen, etc. Places like Bielefeld or Bydgoszcz are much closer to what the typical European lifestyle is like, and it does involve a whole lot of driving to get to places.
This is somewhat true about people living in top metros, because driving and parking there is simply hell, but in more typical places (like Bielefeld or Bydgoszcz), public transit is shit compared to driving, and is only used by students and retirees.
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I don't really like to bike for groceries but that is mostly because I dislike biking not because of the issue you had which is easily solvable by getting some kind of side bags.
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