The Anglosphere is more car dependent and more prone to NIMBY policies and housing shortages than continental Europe, because continental Europeans are more comfortable with density. Density is the solution to many land management problems.
It's a nice stabilizing mechanism because nobody wants to move every year just to get the best rent, but most people can handle a move every 5 years.
Bikes, not cars, please.
Amsterdam, for example, happens to have weather that's relatively compatible with biking, all throughout the year.
On the other hand, for four to six months of the year, most areas of Canada, and even a good portion of the US, definitely don't.
While a very small handful of people can handle biking when it's consistently -10 °C (14 °F) or colder out, possibly through 10 cm (4") or more of uncleared snow/slush, and possibly on ice, the vast majority of people can't and won't.
The summer isn't necessarily any better. The cities in southern Ontario, for example, where many Canadians live, can become surprisingly hot and humid for weeks at a time, and biking isn't pleasant then.
Given those conditions, people will definitely try to drive instead of biking.
Distances are more difficult, you can't bring someone with you, your carrying capacity is much smaller for shopping trips. It also just plain takes longer to get anywhere and people just don't like spending more time than they have to on errands.
- You can have someone ride on the backseat or in the cargo space of a cargo bike. [1]
- You'd be hard pressed to come up with a shopping load that won't fit on a cargo bike. [1]
Then there's the cost vs a car [2], which will likely make up for any inconvenience.
Of course, you do need at least decent bike infrastructure for this to be realistic.
You're talking about convincing people to buy worse cars.
Motorbikes and mopeds and scooters already exist and people largely don't choose them over cars. Changing it to "electric scooter" or ebike doesn't suddenly make it more appealing.
And you certainly lose the "it's better for physical fitness and health" aspect once you're talking about motorized vehicles.
> Because electric bikes are less physically demanding on joints and muscles, they not only bring in riders who might otherwise be inactive, but they also offer the opportunity for people to ride longer periods of time and go greater distances. That leads to more folks using e-bikes as an option for commuting or running errands. Although users won’t find themselves doing the sort of vigorous physical activity uphill mountain biking or even hot yoga entails, e-bike use has been shown to deliver the sort of moderate physical activity most doctors recommend.
https://www.peopleforbikes.org/news/the-health-benefits-of-e...
The exercise provided by ebikes when all things are equal is lower than regular bikes, but all things are not equal as people with ebikes tend to ride more day to day (on aggregate).
In any case, I only brought up ebikes in the context of arduous journeys. Most people will not travel by ebike, they're too expensive.
It's not about trying to persuade people in car-dependent places to go against the grain and bike everywhere. Rather, a network of bike infrastructure should be built, making biking a viable choice. In time biking would become normalized, nobody would need to be explicitly persuaded. After all, Americans don't drive everywhere because they've been convinced to, they do it because the ever-present car infrastructure makes it the most convenient option.
There's a side effect of car prevalence and land use in the US: everyone can be "expected" to have a car, so grocery shops tend to locate in places further away with cheaper land, which make it more convenient to make big shops, which require a car...
I find that most Americans are not comfortable or even familiar with "I'll pop into the shop to buy milk a block away". Some neighborhoods in cities don't have local grocery shops. So if you're used to that built environment your first thought is "I can't fit a month's worth of food in a cargo bike, let alone ride for 10 miles!?"
But if you propose letting a grocery shop in the neighborhood people think "parking, traffic and noise are gonna be terrible!"
And that's an abnormal trip for me, I usually just pop into a grocery store on my walk home from work. If all I wanted to buy was milk, the overhead would be 5 mins.
Not because I'm lazy, but because the nearby grocery store often cost more than double for the same items.
And it was a grocery store, not a convenience store. Convenience stores were even worse.
Myth.
Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Things would be a lot easier for people on bikes here in Milan, Italy where I live... except that they are not.
It's not so safe during rush hour, and it's full of people who would rather take their stupid car instead of walking half a mile.
Distances are larger in North America, but climate-wise people cycle more in NYC or in Minneapolis than they do in Atlanta or in Dallas.
To sum it up: make cycling as safe as possible, and discourage car use, and especially car abuse -- picking up kids from school with an SUV, for example.
For example, consider a paved rural road into farmland. In dollar terms paving that road is a subsidy from the nearest city to the people living in that rural area. However, in part the road is paved rather than gravel only to support heavier trucks to more efficiently transport agricultural products destined for the city. It is also paved in part to support larger, faster, heavier agricultural equipment which brings economies of scale to agriculture and reduces the per-unit price of the result -- again destined mostly for the city.
Residents themselves don't need the more expensive paved and it isn't their relatively light private vehicles causing most of the wear on the road in the first place.
Considered this way, a not insubstantial fraction of the cost of non-city areas is the city indirectly subsidizing itself. The full costs could be incorporated directly into the goods sourced from the supposedly subsidized areas, but that would be less efficient overall. For example, good roads reduces the cost of agricultural products for, say, three months a year. Instead of directly paying capital costs to pave the rural road the city could pay operational costs in higher food prices while missing the other cost advantages of the paved road the rest of the year in reduced recreational costs, policing costs, education costs, etc. If those other costs were higher there would be less of them and people would be less willing to live in those areas, increasing wage and commuting costs.
For example, the fructose corn syrup subsidies exist, as far as I can tell, in order to on-shore agricultural profits and ensure sufficient slack in the domestic agricultural system to ensure that restrictions on imports of food, such as in the case of war, would not seriously affect the USA. That is, it's a subsidy towards food security.
The noise problem isn't limited to loud music and parties, just the noise of kids playing loudly and running around in communal areas can become infuriating to neighbours.
Even if you've got good neighbours, there's other downsides with flats - a lack of parking/EV charging, often nowhere to safely store a bicycle even. No space to install personal 'green tech' such as solar or a heat pump. No garage/shed to store tools/bikes/hobby equipment.
how much piss and shit and trash and grafitti do they have in their public transit system