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Comment by jtr1 | Hacker News Reader

What sort of civil society groups are there advocating for this kind of infrastructure in Norway?

I’m always curious how people organize to achieve these outcomes. I live in a medium sized city in the US that is badly in need of better cycling infrastructure. There are a few organizations here, but vision is lacking or has been beaten out of them. I’d love to have some sort of organizing / policy toolkit that factors in experience from successful campaigns for systems like this.

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The civil society groups and local governments that advocate for this sort of thing exist in the US too.

What Norway doesn't have (and much of Europe) is a powerful auto lobby that has prevented this sort of infrastructure for decades and forced cities to be built in giant suburban sprawls.

In germany, the car industry is way more important and powerful then in the US and it was able to prevent the EU ban on combustion engines, and yet germany has more walkable cities then the US.

There was also a specific path of development that many cities took in the mid-20th century that make public transit development now very difficult. Carving up downtown areas of cities with Parkways/Expressways/Highways, pushed heavily by influential urban planner Robert Moses in New York State, and copied in many other major US cities, makes it difficult to move from one area of a city to another without a car. The building of massive, unattractive public housing projects, and the hollowing out of urban areas due to redlining and “white flight” to the suburbs, now leave huge swaths of urban cities with decades of underinvestment. And finally, you have the massive suburbs, that take more money to build and maintain than they put back in through taxes, which causes a parasitic drain on the urban centers funds to spend on improved transit that isn’t focused on more car infrastructure to “keep up” with more and more cars streaming in and out from those suburbs.

I’m well aware those groups. I’m asking about solutions here.

In my experience in the US, every bike trail/walking trail success has been local; a local group in the area that can benefit from it, getting support from businesses and people in the community and working with the local government.

They sell it as an "option" not as "let's ban all cars" which helps people either support or ignore it, instead of being opposed. Often they work for years, talking to the railroads (lots of these are rail conversions, see https://www.railstotrails.org/policy/ ), etc. They work on plans that slowly take shape (for example, widening sidewalks when they're replaced, modifying roads when replaced, etc). After 10 to 20 years, it all starts coming together.

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