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Comment by pstadler | Hacker News Reader

There's a YouTube channel[1] explaining the difference between North American cities and European ones. As a resident of Amsterdam he covers this city a lot.

I'm from Zurich, Switzerland. I don't own a car because everything I need is either in walking/cycling distance or reachable by public transport. While I've been well aware of the car dependency situation in North America, watching a few episodes from the mentioned YouTube channel, made me realize that this is a self-inflicted problem because of car centric zoning and development rules. The often cited "greater distances" are in fact the result of these, not the cause.

[1] https://youtube.com/@NotJustBikes

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And one of the root causes is the desire to create a greater distance between politically powerful populations and politically weak populations.

I'm in Chicago in Rogers Park and own no car. Everything I need is walking distance and I get to work via commuter rail that is a block from me. It's awesome.

Rogers Park is a great hood for sure. Do you know if that arcade bar is still open by the El station?

Very interesting link (@Not Just Bikes), didn't think it's so bad in the US with pedestrian walkways.

I mean like I live in the Romanian suburb and it's not great, but supermarkets everywhere and walkways alongside car roads is the norm. What we still try to catch up is Netherland-ish bike lanes, problem's when they do it at all, "they" (city roadworks) implement it in a very Balkan way: they made a bike lane allright but every 10 meters there's a crossing with a 10 cm bump, makes biking on the lane rather impractical if not impossible.

https://imgur.com/a/iCCQJRt

After having a look at the picture, it's obvious that bump is not by design, if you take the height of the asphalt layer into account, which is visible to the right side, but not there yet, where the bike lane is crossing the layer of compacted gravel.

So you are complaining about what is essentially an unfinished construction site ;-)

That aside, I tend to fly over such obstacles by jumping, since I can't remember anymore exactly. Early childhood, or such.

ottawa, canada. no car for 9 years, i live downtown but yeah everything is spread out pretty far outside the core dt area. Worst part though is the culture expects a car more than you actually need one in my exp.

in NYC, no car, but an ebike is necessary to help pickup food from further restaurants

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