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Comment by zppln | Hacker News Reader

I think one needs to be a bit careful about copying this. I've noticed a similar anti-car trend (I don't mind bike lanes) in my country in recent years, but the cities are kind of too small for it to work. When they make it impossible to park in the city centers people who already rely on their cars for their daily lives just stop going there and go to the malls in the outskirts of the city instead. And once the customers stop coming to the city centers, the shops go out of business and you no longer find anything but coffee shops and supermarkets there anymore.

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I wonder where you live, in that cities are smaller than Dutch ones.

The photos are from Utrecht, population 360,000, and Amsterdam, population 1,2M.

Looking at https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities, Amsterdam is #469 and Utrecht is #1053 (Dallas is #383, Tucson #1047). Amsterdam is the largest city in the Netherlands.

And that’s by population. Area-wise, I expect many US cities to be even larger.

Area-wise, most US cities are much bigger than European ones, but that's actually part of the problem. Huge amounts of our housing stock is kind of far from everything else, making biking much less appealing.

Sweden. A city with the same population of Utrecht would make it the 4th largest in the country. The cities I had in mind are much smaller than that.

Utrecht also is 4th in the Netherlands. Comparing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Largest_cities_of_the... to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_in_Sweden_..., the curve drops off a bit faster in Sweden.

I think the main difference is population density, though. At about 1/25th that of the Netherlands, if all else would be equal, distances between cities and villages will be 5 times as large.

That would make many cycling trips that are doable in the Netherlands (say from a 25,000 population village to the nearest 100,000 population area) impractical.

Yes, I would agree. Making it "difficult" to drive or more attractive to ride a bike in city centers aren't enough to make people get ditch their cars here, as people rely on them for so many other reasons.

People don't ditch their cars in the Netherlands though, they just use it for inter-city transportation. Transport within a town (e.g. the one I grew up in, with a population in the order of 25.000 people) is overwhelmingly (but not exclusively) by bicycle or foot though.

What will be harder to replicate in Sweden is what's starting to happen now in the Netherlands, which is that electric bicycles are also starting to be used from inter-city transportation more and more often, and infrastructure being designed around that.

Size and density are different things. You can have a very dense little hamlet, or a sparse urban sprawl.

Yes, once you have large malls on the outskirts of towns, it's hard to recover from that. You see it a lot in France as well. In the Netherlands they're rare, zoning laws usually say no.

It seems there is a misconception I see here more often. For daily shopping, you can stay in your neighbourhood. Every neighbourhood of 10,000 people has a supermarket and some additional shops. Many primary schools as well.

Going to the inner city of Utrecht would be for bigger shopping, like clothes or anything. And have a drink or go out for dinner. Often you can go by bicycle from your neighbourhood or by bus. If you want to go by car you can park close by for a small amount of money (yes, small, people like complaining :) ) or park more on the edge of the city centre and go for a walk towards it. The city centre hardly has supermarkets, the real estate is too expensive and there is no free parking.

Sure, but I don't see how that has anything to do with what I wrote. I'm sure Utrecht have found a good balance. My point was about smaller cities adopting the same kind of ideas (removing parking space, closing roads to cars), where people can just choose to drive the cars they already own elsewhere. I've seen this happening to my old hometown, where commerce is increasingly moving to the city outskirts. Which ironically results in people living in the centers having to either get cars themselves if they don't own one, or use public transport to get there.

Could it be you wrote about this some weeks ago?

It seems Sweden didn't really copy Dutch planning. We do have some furniture boulevards on the edge of cities, also other bigger stores, like hardware stores and IKEA. But supermarkets are in the neighbourhoods where people live. And regular shops are in the city centers, clothing, electronics, warehouses, eye glasses, etc. Combined with bars, lunchrooms and restaurants and also historic buildings, inner centers are great to spend an afternoon or evening with good company.

> The city centre hardly has supermarkets

As far as I can see there are lots of supermarkets in the city centre of Utrecht though: https://www.qwant.com/maps/places/?type=supermarket#map=14.3...

I wouldn't go there by car probably, but I do most of my groceries by bike or walking anyway.

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