the way I see US infrastructure, I feel like they (like most of the world) will never be able to claw their way back out of car dependence.
Even the Dutch had to fight tooth and nail for it. I've lived in Germany for a while and there are cities here where even I would be snubbing taking kids to school with a bakfiets, because the biking infra is not good enough, or in other words the mingling I'd have to do with other traffic would be too out of my comfort zone.
Urban planning should prioritize walking and biking very first, and cars and other utilitarian-but-dangerous/harmful transport methods should be integrated in a way that's not engulfing the more human-scale side of things. But I think the costs (both monetary and in terms of "cognitive shift") are so high that I don't think I'll see this change in my lifetime. And that's before accounting for the power of corporate interest
It is amazing how resistant people are to having their children walk to school in my neighbourhood.
They will complain endlessly about having nowhere to park, traffic, and dangerous driving but would never consider having their child walk. It is too dangerous.
It's really astonishing how virtually every single quality of life indicator is negatively correlated with number of cars in the road. One of the most effective things you / your city / your nation can do do improve your live in every dimension is to take measures to reduce the number of cars.
Thank you for sharing this. It brought together things I had suspected but not from his perspective. Also pleasant to read something that used rhetorical devices in a cohesive way instead of just as sprinkled on flavor packets.
Eh I don't think so. Commutes are as clean and peaceful as they can be in the Netherlands or Switzerland and people are no less buried in their phones with noise-cancelling earbuds on.
The Netherlands has plenty of crazies using public transport. Every other window on the train has the emergency number on it for a reason. I refuse to travel in second class, hate being close to people that blast music, use drugs, puke or eat a broodje pindakaas.
The Netherlands even has segregated busses for asylum seekers because there was too much violence. Dutch people have their own busses and asylum seekers are required to use a separate bus with extra security. Upside is that asylum seekers don’t have to pay for a ticket.
You make it sound like it's an absolute warzone (your demographic certainly likes to push that narrative even in the most uneventful of places!). Yes I've taken trains back home from nights out at 4:30 in the morning where there were drunk girls talking loudly and (gasp!) trash on the floor. There's certainly no-one "blasting loud music" in the average train and definitely not "doing drugs".
Ofc there's a non-zero number of crazies, violent people, sexual harassers, etc. That's a certainty in a system with 400 million trips a year! But then please don't leave your home, there can be an ax murderer lying in wait at any corner!
Can confirm. Traveling via public transport in Switzerland is remarkably uneventful. It's a stark contrast to my Eastern European home country, where it is a gamble due to a certain demographic's anti-social behavior.
I commute every day in Switzerland, and we have people blasting music, shouting, putting feet on seats, taking 3 seats etc, including in 1st. I actually stopped traveling in 1st, it could be more noisy and chaotic than 2nd and the price difference wasn't worth it.
On the other hand, no charges mean you can get rid of a lot of cruft: no tickets, no gates/turnstiles, no machines, no payments, no paperwork thereof, no ticket inspectors, etc etc. So in fact having 0 charge is unequivocally better than having a residual charge.
In other words: charge price = cost, or don't charge at all and get funded by public revenue.
In every city I know of, the fares for public transit more than pays for the cost of collecting. Also, in every city I'm aware of, even the ones with high transit ridership (Tokyo), there is lots of room for adding more transit and getting even more people on, but money is lacking to do that.
I'm also aware of no place where people who use transit to consider cost one of the major barriers to using it more. The barrier, even for the poorest people, is almost always not cause, but the service just doesn't meet their needs. Which is to say most transit systems need to raise their fares a little more and use that extra money to give people the service they actually want.
Note that 128€ is the monthly price for 100% discount, but 6€ is the monthly price for 40% discount. It brings the prices of rail travel in the Netherlands from "fucking ludicrous" to just "reasonably expensive".
> It brings the prices of rail travel in the Netherlands from "fucking ludicrous"
Haha I can't help but feel the Dutch firmly believe rail should be completely free
Isn't it fairly common for your employer to pay half to all of your commuting cost too...? (Almost unheard of in the UK for comparison, with people regularly paying £2,000-£10,000/year to commute)
And the Netherlands is like 10th in Europe for on-the-day return costs per km
Though to be fare I think it's some shorter journeys that are quite expensive right? Eg Utrecht to Amsterdam is 20 EUR return which is pricey. But paying €6/mo to save 40% seems a pretty good deal if you travel a lot off peak
Well that's exactly the trip I had in mind. 20€ return for a 35km trip just sounds crazy expensive to me. That's over 25€/100km; driving a car (even at the high gas prices of the Netherlands) should be 10-15€/100km. The balance just seems out of whack.
But then again I'm not Dutch :) I come from a much lower cost-of-living country so that may skew my perspective a bit.
> paying €6/mo to save 40% seems a pretty good deal if you travel a lot off peak
Not really if you "travel a lot", it's just a no-brainer deal if you travel at all. In that one return trip Amsterdam—Utrecht it's already worth it for the entire month :) Plus you can take 3 more people with you and you all get the discount!
Kids under 12 free, too. I don't look forward to having to pay for both of them. Utrecht to Amsterdam round trip for a family of 4 is €80 for a family of 4, or €48 with the discount.
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