Come to the Netherlands. Sell your car. Buy a bike.
A car is not really a status symbol here. Its more like a liability.
A car is not really a status symbol here. Its more like a liability.
The Netherlands stands out for its excellent biking facilities so that people who cannot afford a car are not screwed like they are in many places, and people with a car don't have to use it is as often, but car ownership there is in the same ballpark as most of the rest of Europe.
If you need a car for a construction job, we have autobuses like VW Sprinter or Caddy for that
This is only true if you live in an inner city bubble. Cars are pretty popular ways of getting about in the suburbs and rural areas.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nImFJ7KKjAo
> Cars are pretty popular ways of getting about in the suburbs and rural areas.
But how much are cars needed on a day-to-day basis for day-to-day errands? I don't think any is saying that they are not useful (at times), but you can have them be less necessary.
Still, the average number of cars per household is more than 1 in the suburbs. And that's no surprise really, because work is not in the suburbs. Especially not the jobs that pay enough to live in suburbia.
If you're lucky the one bus line or tram line in your suburb goes to near your job. More commonly, it doesn't.
Look, people use cars because they are practical. They are fucking expensive, so anyone who reasonably can do without, will. People in inner cities do not use cars that often, because a car is a heavier burden there. Parking is expensive and difficult in the city.
Yes, fully on board with the narrower streets, "hiding" parking, having some shared public space like playgrounds. These are all good things.
But there's a flip side to this coin. This isn't necessarily a desired "way of life", it's what naturally evolved due to severe space constraints.
I specifically take offense at high cost dense suburbia. You pay through the nose but still are not in some cool city. You have a tiny house and possibly noisy neighbors as well as less privacy.
Suburbia can be denser but than it must be cheap. Dense expensive suburbia is the worst of all worlds.
There is nothing 'natural' about the evolution of NL cities as demonstrated by the fact that (e.g.) Amsterdam started to go down the car-centric route:
* https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in...
It was a policy choice to not go in that direction—or rather to stop and turn away—as opposed to some kind of physical law of the universe. Not Just Bikes uses Rotterdam as an example of how even in NL† policy can go in other directions:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22ovt1EMULY
My dad used to work at the post office facility in this area:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/4577+Eglinton+Ave+E,+Missi...
In the early 1990s there used to be strawberries fields across the street, and now the entire area is filled with generic suburb strip malls. Perhaps agriculture would have gone away eventually, but there's no reason why it had car-centric, low-density development that replaced it. How close is agriculture to some NL cities?
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6txCZpbsQ&t=9m28s
> Suburbia can be denser but than it must be cheap. Dense expensive suburbia is the worst of all worlds.
No: low-density expensive suburbia is the worst of all worlds because it necessitates cars, which has leads to all sorts of externality costs. The total OpEx is also much more expensive with low densities:
* https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...
And just because you have sprawl doesn't mean you have cheap housing:
* https://thetyee.ca/News/2018/03/23/Urban-Sprawl-Not-More-Aff...
See LA and even the Greater Toronto area (GTA) as examples:
* https://dailyhive.com/toronto/toronto-ranked-least-affordabl...
† I use "NL" in the international ccTLD sense, and not in my Canadian sense of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. :)
I can ensure you that the typical Dutch person would love to have a US style suburbian home.
The same channel (Oh the Urbanity) just came out with another video yesterday explaining why we should try to use more examples than just Amsterdam and/or The Netherlands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIcwzqRlZ68
The funny thing is I think they address your point about density. Many places (in NL) are less dense and still have infrastructure, and other places are more dense (in other countries) and could support the biking infrastructure but don't.
(This is intended as humor)
The best take on this topic so far I've seen has been from "Not Just Cars": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nZh7A7qTPo
cold season: if the lines are covered by snow, all bets are off. Some capacity is lost to The Pile, but even more is lost due to nobody knowing how to just park next to somebody else.
Get yourself bikes asap, also your children. No need for electrical bikes generally (depends on where you are going to live).
I'm delighted there's a lively Halloween group :-)
Netherlands has 38th highest cars/capita. Austria, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Hungary all have lower car ownership numbers. Though not that much lower. Why is this?
People have enough disposable income to be able to afford one of their own, and avoid whatever real or perceived annoyances they associate with renting, but are not getting in them every morning.
People I know in the suburbs and rural areas are much more likely to drive, but if they commute to a large city and have a train station in biking distance of their house then that's still how they do their daily.
The Amsterdam metro was very comfortable though and I can’t wait to ride it again.