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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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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.)

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.

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.

what makes them choose other modes of transportation than driving (spoiler: most of the time it is simply the cost).

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.

Outdoors. It depends which city you live in but crime tends to be significantly lower than in the US generally speaking.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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