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.
OTOH continental Europe seems to be more prone to try to solve housing affordability with rent control, which basically results in NIMBY through the perverse incentives it imposes.
Except our distaste for flats has plummeted us into one of the worst housing crises of the entire world. Literally grinding our entire society to a halt, from students to young couples to prisoners to elders to cured long-term patients, everyone is trapped.
I don't actually think americans have a distaste for flats in general, but that some of them felt the need to impose their distaste for flats beyond the borders of their own land
The feasibility of widespread bike usage doesn't just depend on density. It depends a lot on a region's weather, too.
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.
No, it's really not a myth. Biking in the winter is not fun unless you have completely enclosed paths. Finnish culture means that people do it anyway, but that wouldn't fly in American culture, no matter how good the snow removal and bike lanes are. I say this as someone who bikes year round in a northern city, the vast majority of people have no interest in biking in the cold.
Calling Amsterdam an ideal city for cycling is a stretch.
It's coldish, it rains quite a lot and it's very windy.
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.
In general the farther north you go in North America the more people on bikes you find. Most people do not bike when it is near freezing or below, there are a few.
Even in perfect conditions there's a lot of reasons not to bike.
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'd be hard pressed to come up with a shopping load that won't fit on a cargo bike.
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!"
Yeah, I didn't want to get that far into it. For example, today I visited a store, my favourite coffee shop, a pharmacy, and two grocery stores in the span of a little more than an hour. I didn't even cycle, I just walked. The first store was 10 mins away from home.
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.
Imo, you are no longer talking about cycling once you're talking about ebikes and other motorized vehicles.
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.
> 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.
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).
This depends on legislation, but in a lot of countries ebikes that don't require pedaling are illegal. From personal experience, riding on an ebike still provides plenty of exercise, certainly more than the literally zero that you get when driving.
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.
My car is a lot less effort that my ebike. And the car is faster as well. I ride my ebike for the trips too long for the acoustic bike, but there are still a lot of trips not in reasonable ebike range that I make.
Hell, my motorcycle was enough of a hassle compared to my car to forgo riding it often. Wearing gear, packing my lunch and everything else for a days work into saddlebags, and dealing with the weather was a pain compared to just hopping in my car. It would be worse on a bicycle. At least in a car I can listen to a podcast without feeling like I'm making a tradeoff with safety.
No, we just hear more about the anglosphere's problems because... we sadly live in an anglosphere obsessed world :). English being the dominant language means that we all hear about their problems but it's harder to internationally hear about say, France's problems.
I would love to read more on that. It would also be interesting to look at the places in former english colonies that do have higher residential buildings to see if continental immigration there might have been involved. It sounds like spain had a brief love affair with sprawl as well. Perhaps some of it is just that when the population boom arrived for the US sprawl was in style and we had the room?
I think it's more about the political system, first past the post is looking archaic now. Not that proportional representation solves every problem but it would be a giant leap in the right direction.
It doesn't seem like cities need to coerce anyone to live in them. But when visiting cities it is better for the city, it's inhabitants and their visitors if they don't bring their negative externalities along from elsewhere.
They do need to coerce people for funding, which might as well be the same thing. That’s like saying “people aren’t forced to attend public schools” - well yeah, but by forcing them to pay for it anyways you leave many with little other option. Meanwhile a quarter of American roads are private. Private transportation would exist with or without force. And in anything other than a big city, private transportation continues to be superior than even the most well funded public transport.
Care to provide link proving your assumptions? Every time I checked stats for that for some particular country it was always cities subsidizing countryside/suburbs, not vice versa.
Care must be taken when evaluating those statistics because all the ones I've seen are done only in dollar terms and entirely discount the economic beneficiaries of the movement of people and goods.
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.
That is one way to look at it. Another way is that you are paying (indirectly) for infrastructure and (directly) with subsidies for some people to lace your soda with high fructose corn syrup. Or to dry up the land by siphoning all water to make some stupid almond milk.
Yes, the web of subsidy is wide and complex, but not all subsidies are for the same reason.
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.
Which assumptions? I said nothing about subsidizing cities or suburbs. I said cars and roads would exist without the government, but anything resembling public transport would not.
It's not about being 'comfortable with density', it's about having a society where neighbours respect each other, behave decently, and keep noise/mess under control, don't keep setting the fire alarm off, etc.
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 about compared to Europeans? Japanese have a totally different nearly pseudo-feudal culture that enforces submission and conformity ("the nail that sticks out gets hammered down"). Among western states which share a more individualist culture with the US, I don't think there's all that much difference in behavior.
