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I'm totally confident that we could replicate Amsterdam in any US city if we wanted to. But before we get there, I need an article about what to do about the fa

I'm totally confident that we could replicate Amsterdam in any US city if we wanted to. But before we get there, I need an article about what to do about the fact that so many of my fellow Denver Coloradans hate: bike lanes, buses, trains, places to live, sidewalks, wind turbines, solar panels (but also normal road maintenance and traffic). It's like there is a conscious effort to create more smog and traffic jams. It is boggling. We can't even start to think about having nice things until we diagnose this particular social disorder affecting America.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mfoy_ 9y ago
Call me cynical, but: Anything that threatens the current way of life, the current status quo, or is representative of a school of thought that clashes with the aforementioned can cause cognitive dissonance. Simple as that. Many people don't really believe that driving is wrong, or harmful. But supporting radical infrastructure changes to accommodate an alternative means admitting to that to a further extent that most people are comfortable with.
- mrybczyn 9y ago
  Nothing wrong with driving. Just drive appropriately. Car sharing. Taxi / Uber. Hybrids. Electric cars. Self driving cars. The freedom to transport yourself is a powerful force for good, and socialized public transport and bikes are not a real solution in many / most places. (am a biker, love biking, only commute by bike to work 3 months of the year)
  - yason 9y ago
    Driving with shared cars, Uber, hybrids, evs, and self-driving cars doesn't fix the one and ultimate problem with cars in cities: space. A person walking needs maybe 0.5m². Self-driving electric Uber still needs ~50-60 m² of space per vehicle in moving traffic. Plus parking. And if we allocate enough space for people to drive in the first place they can only drive to places. The distances grow too long for biking and walking.
  - ufo 9y ago
    Cheaper taxis and self driving cars should reduce the need for parking space but I would expect that it would result in more cars using the road overall.
  - photojosh 9y ago
    > (am a biker, love biking, only commute by bike to work 3 months of the year) Living somewhere where I commute by bike (or run!) every single workday, I'm curious as to what limits you to 3 months.
    - keerthiko 9y ago
      Weather. Boston for example has three months that the casual commuter would find tolerable.
      - pen2l 9y ago
        But that's not because of the weather, but rather what the conditions are of the bike infrastructure in that weather. I think Amsterdam weather isn't very substantially different from Boston's... but in Boston winter weather bike lanes are practically un-existent when snow-plowing trucks have cleared the snow for cars to the area where bike lane would be (if it even exists to begin with). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam#Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam#Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston#Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston#Climate
        photojosh 9y ago
        Thanks for the info. I can imagine you do NOT want to share the roads with cars in those conditions.
- watwut 9y ago
  Driving is neither wrong nor harmful. And if you want that bike acceptance, maybe talk about advantages without framing everyone else as "bad". If you do, you are guaranteed to create yet another pointless culture war instead of damm bike lane.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    Driving in anything but mass transport or bikes is vastly energy inefficient. Even if you're driving a fully electric vehicle. If you wish to explore how much, check out the good site: withouthotair.com chapter 3.
  - fulafel 9y ago
    Driving is wrong and harmful because it advances global warming.
  - latch 9y ago
    It is harmful, isn't it? It pollutes, impacting health and the environment. It requires a lot of infrastructure (roads, parking, salting, ....) that is costly to maintain. I feel like I could go on (road-related injuries, manufacturing sustainability, ...).
  - Fricken 9y ago
    If you play good cop, then you're easy to dismiss. If you play bad cop, then you're 'guaranteed to create another pointless culture war'. You can't win. But jumping the shark with the personal automobile is certainly wrong and harmful. From a social standpoint it manufactures inequality. Access to effective transportation is the single greatest factor in determining an individual's opportunity for upward economic mobility. And if you live in a world built for cars and can't drive, well, fuck you. It's environmentally destructive. This one's easy, but it's important to note that it isn't just the emissions from the tailpipe, it's all the sprawl and infrastructure built to accomodate the car. Mankind has chalked up a lot of black marks in it's short history, but rendering the biosphere uninhabitable? That takes the cake. In the grand scheme of things, what the hell are we doing if we aren't at least making a nominal effort to leave the place in better condition than it was when we arrived? Economically it's bad for us too. James Kunstler called the suburbs 'the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of western civilization'. When I first read that it struck me as a sensational and hyperbolic statement, but after having it knock around in my head for a few years, I don't think it is an outrageous claim to make. One of the inherent contradictions of human nature is that we're surprisingly adaptable, yet stubbornly resistant to change. Nobody likes to be told they're doing it wrong, but what else is there to say? You're doing it wrong.
ballenf 9y ago
Do they hate those things when traveling to European or Asian cities with those things in abundance? Or just the way those things are currently implemented in their home city? In my suburban American town, there is one total bike lane on one single road in town and it's super, super annoying because it's rarely used and therefore an annoying distraction with very little positive impact. It doesn't really connect to anything or go anywhere useful. I moved here from Munich where I rode my bike to work daily for 4 years and didn't own a car for much of the time. I've also vacationed in Amsterdam a few times and loved renting the city bikes there. The volume of vehicle traffic there surprised me, however, and the stats in the article I think kind of downplay the feeling of the number of cars on the road there. Point is, people's annoyance with how these things are implemented in the US is totally legitimate. They are usually half-assed bridges to nowhere kind of projects. And, yes, done that way they probably hold back real progress in implementing full-fledged viable bike/bus/rail projects. But that doesn't mean people criticizing their current form are not right.
Brakenshire 9y ago
I think this is going to be very difficult in much of the US, to be honest, simply because of the density of settlement. European towns and cities have been constrained by their historic footprint, and the car has been clumsily imposed on that, but most of the US has been built from scratch around the car. You cannot serve low-density suburbs, built for cars, using bikes or public transport, the people need to move or the houses need to be redeveloped at a higher density. Although, one of the interesting things about the US is that a lot of the population of cities lives outside the city jurisdiction, for a variety of reasons including tax avoidance. The people who actually need to be persuaded aren't the people who drive into the city from the suburbs every day, they are the people who live inside the actual city, and those people need to make a judgment whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks of this kind of approach (the risk being that the suburbs will simply develop new centres and bypass the city).
- sambe 9y ago
  What kind of parts of the US are you talking about? Amsterdam is reasonably dense (not compared to say, NYC, but that isn't "much of the US"). People often commute 30-60 minutes by bike there.
Tiktaalik 9y ago
> I'm totally confident that we could replicate Amsterdam in any US city if we wanted to. Of course. Amsterdam and other cycling friendly cities didn't start out that way. They had to be redesigned as such. You can find plenty of historical photos of a car dominant Amsterdam. https://www.fastcompany.com/3052699/these-historical-photos-show-how-amsterdam-turned-itself-into-a-bike-riders-paradise https://www.fastcompany.com/3052699/these-historical-photos-...
- mmjaa 9y ago
  Amsterdam has the advantage that its history predates automobiles, and it has continually adapted, multiple times, to modernity. Americans seem unwilling to do that for some reason .. Its a pity because there are so many wonderful aspects of transportation process in the American world - I'm looking at the "Jet/Air Parks" that have managed to survive, for example. The Dutch may have their bicycle advantage, but nobody does flight like America does. So its really somehow quaint that Americans appear to be enslaved to their cars. Personally I blame designers of car interiors - these gilded thrones appear to have inflicted a mass neurosis on the customer.
rayiner 9y ago
It's not a "social disorder," it's a bootstrapping problem caused by American cities being very different in nature that European cities. Look at Amsterdam: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Amsterdam/52.3683298,4.8955082/@52.3232603,4.6976106,41731m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m9!4m8!1m5!1m1!1s0x47c63fb5949a7755:0x6600fd4cb7c0af8d!2m2!1d4.8951679!2d52.3702157!1m0!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Amsterdam/52.3683298,4.89550.... It's a little bundle of urbanization about 4-5 miles in radius, surrounded by farms. Compare Washington, D.C., which is a smaller city: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Washington,+DC/@38.914686,-77.1415304,42147m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x89b7c6de5af6e45b:0xc2524522d4885d2a!8m2!3d38.9071923!4d-77.0368707 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Washington,+DC/@38.914686,.... The urban core is smaller, more like 2-3 miles in radius, but it's part of a large metro area with urban clusters connected by highways. The total population of the metro area is substantially more than double that of Amsterdam's. If you work in Amsterdam, you probably live in Amsterdam. If you work in D.C., there is a good chance you're commuting in from some suburb. After spending more than an hour in traffic to get to the city, how do you feel about bikers whizzing around in a city with no separated bike lanes? How do you feel about losing traffic lanes to bikes in an already gridlocked city? How do you feel about spending billions on a train (much more than Europeans do on a per mile/per ride basis) that doesn't stop anywhere near your house, or run on time? I don't think it's possible to redesign a city. It's like trying to rewrite software while its still running. Yeah, it's possible to do hot patches here and there, but you're not rewriting the guts.
- crzwdjk 9y ago
  The thing is, Amsterdam in the 70s looked a lot like DC does today, with no protected bike lanes and cars parking all over the place. So change is possible, as evidenced by Amsterdam and Copenhagen, but any shift away from driving and cars requires better alternatives, including bikes but also including trains and buses and metros. And DC isn't doing to great with that last one.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    Did Amsterdam go from a 50/50 urban/suburban configuration to a 90/10 urban/suburban configuration? Or did it just do a better job of managing it's already 90/10 population?
dep_b 9y ago
Bike lanes are a result not the reason of having so many people driving bicycles in Amsterdam. Being a shitty town to drive in let alone parking even when the car was still king really helped pushing people towards bicycles, but you can't retroactively apply medieval road structures and canals to US cities. On the other hand Rotterdam has a post war road structure and still a lot of people use their bicycle, perhaps that's not even a hard requirement. What you really see is that because so many people were using bicycles everywhere people just got fed up having cyclists criss-crossing between cars and pedestrians and finally gave them their own lanes - out of pure annoyance. So every US citizen that wants to have those nice lanes simply needs to make sure enough people on bicycles annoy the shit out of everybody else in the streets and you will get your lanes. Be sure to ride like a real asshole and practice flashing vulgar gestures while riding. Pretend you're invulnerable. Learn sequences of insults with lots of hard sounds in them. Nothing beats swearing in Dutch though. Every tourist almost hit by a cyclist in Amsterdam knows exactly what I mean! ;)
- raarts 9y ago
  It had nothing to do with annoyance. The real reason for separate lanes is safety. There is so much attention for traffic safety amongst the Dutch, especially towards kids in traffic. 50 years ago traffic in the Netherlands was not unlike the US now. Until in the 70s an action group called Stop de Kindermoord (“stop the child murder”) succeeded in getting the government to pay attention and make a turnaround. I remember this from my own childhood. Many kids died in traffic accidents. The attention to the safety of children is still present today, more bike lanes are being bult, kids need to do a traffic exam (on bikes) in 7th grade, existing roads are being remodeled for safety. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bicycle-capital-world-transport-cycling-kindermoord https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...
  - dep_b 9y ago
    Of course it's about safety as well. Several of the children I knew when I grew up were killed in traffic, all roads it happened on have separate bike lanes now. But sharing the roads with kids that go to school can also be an annoyance, tending to ride with three kids next to eachother and making sudden movements because they're fighting/playing.
foxyv 9y ago
The problem is lack of trust for local and county government to run public transit. People don't want to lose their job because they depended on poorly run public transit. I've met more than a few people who have lost jobs or were going to lose jobs due to poor transit services. Here in So. Cal, Metrolink trains are expensive and run very rarely. I have yet to go a week without a major delay or cancelled train. Bus and train schedules are essentially one way and leave early. Meaning I usually have to leave work around 3:30 to get home. Not to mention that despite driving through some of the worst traffic in the state, trains and buses take two or three times as long to get me to my destination than my car. This is despite massive funding increases and bonds for public transit in our state.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mfoy_ 9y ago

Call me cynical, but: Anything that threatens the current way of life, the current status quo, or is representative of a school of thought that clashes with the aforementioned can cause cognitive dissonance. Simple as that. Many people don't really believe that driving is wrong, or harmful. But supporting radical infrastructure changes to accommodate an alternative means admitting to that to a further extent that most people are comfortable with.

mrybczyn 9y ago
Nothing wrong with driving. Just drive appropriately. Car sharing. Taxi / Uber. Hybrids. Electric cars. Self driving cars. The freedom to transport yourself is a powerful force for good, and socialized public transport and bikes are not a real solution in many / most places. (am a biker, love biking, only commute by bike to work 3 months of the year)
- yason 9y ago
  Driving with shared cars, Uber, hybrids, evs, and self-driving cars doesn't fix the one and ultimate problem with cars in cities: space. A person walking needs maybe 0.5m². Self-driving electric Uber still needs ~50-60 m² of space per vehicle in moving traffic. Plus parking. And if we allocate enough space for people to drive in the first place they can only drive to places. The distances grow too long for biking and walking.
- ufo 9y ago
  Cheaper taxis and self driving cars should reduce the need for parking space but I would expect that it would result in more cars using the road overall.
- photojosh 9y ago
  > (am a biker, love biking, only commute by bike to work 3 months of the year) Living somewhere where I commute by bike (or run!) every single workday, I'm curious as to what limits you to 3 months.
  - keerthiko 9y ago
    Weather. Boston for example has three months that the casual commuter would find tolerable.
    - pen2l 9y ago
      But that's not because of the weather, but rather what the conditions are of the bike infrastructure in that weather. I think Amsterdam weather isn't very substantially different from Boston's... but in Boston winter weather bike lanes are practically un-existent when snow-plowing trucks have cleared the snow for cars to the area where bike lane would be (if it even exists to begin with). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam#Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam#Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston#Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston#Climate
      - photojosh 9y ago
        Thanks for the info. I can imagine you do NOT want to share the roads with cars in those conditions.
watwut 9y ago
Driving is neither wrong nor harmful. And if you want that bike acceptance, maybe talk about advantages without framing everyone else as "bad". If you do, you are guaranteed to create yet another pointless culture war instead of damm bike lane.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Driving in anything but mass transport or bikes is vastly energy inefficient. Even if you're driving a fully electric vehicle. If you wish to explore how much, check out the good site: withouthotair.com chapter 3.
- fulafel 9y ago
  Driving is wrong and harmful because it advances global warming.
- latch 9y ago
  It is harmful, isn't it? It pollutes, impacting health and the environment. It requires a lot of infrastructure (roads, parking, salting, ....) that is costly to maintain. I feel like I could go on (road-related injuries, manufacturing sustainability, ...).
- Fricken 9y ago
  If you play good cop, then you're easy to dismiss. If you play bad cop, then you're 'guaranteed to create another pointless culture war'. You can't win. But jumping the shark with the personal automobile is certainly wrong and harmful. From a social standpoint it manufactures inequality. Access to effective transportation is the single greatest factor in determining an individual's opportunity for upward economic mobility. And if you live in a world built for cars and can't drive, well, fuck you. It's environmentally destructive. This one's easy, but it's important to note that it isn't just the emissions from the tailpipe, it's all the sprawl and infrastructure built to accomodate the car. Mankind has chalked up a lot of black marks in it's short history, but rendering the biosphere uninhabitable? That takes the cake. In the grand scheme of things, what the hell are we doing if we aren't at least making a nominal effort to leave the place in better condition than it was when we arrived? Economically it's bad for us too. James Kunstler called the suburbs 'the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of western civilization'. When I first read that it struck me as a sensational and hyperbolic statement, but after having it knock around in my head for a few years, I don't think it is an outrageous claim to make. One of the inherent contradictions of human nature is that we're surprisingly adaptable, yet stubbornly resistant to change. Nobody likes to be told they're doing it wrong, but what else is there to say? You're doing it wrong.

ballenf 9y ago

Do they hate those things when traveling to European or Asian cities with those things in abundance? Or just the way those things are currently implemented in their home city? In my suburban American town, there is one total bike lane on one single road in town and it's super, super annoying because it's rarely used and therefore an annoying distraction with very little positive impact. It doesn't really connect to anything or go anywhere useful. I moved here from Munich where I rode my bike to work daily for 4 years and didn't own a car for much of the time. I've also vacationed in Amsterdam a few times and loved renting the city bikes there. The volume of vehicle traffic there surprised me, however, and the stats in the article I think kind of downplay the feeling of the number of cars on the road there. Point is, people's annoyance with how these things are implemented in the US is totally legitimate. They are usually half-assed bridges to nowhere kind of projects. And, yes, done that way they probably hold back real progress in implementing full-fledged viable bike/bus/rail projects. But that doesn't mean people criticizing their current form are not right.

Brakenshire 9y ago

I think this is going to be very difficult in much of the US, to be honest, simply because of the density of settlement. European towns and cities have been constrained by their historic footprint, and the car has been clumsily imposed on that, but most of the US has been built from scratch around the car. You cannot serve low-density suburbs, built for cars, using bikes or public transport, the people need to move or the houses need to be redeveloped at a higher density. Although, one of the interesting things about the US is that a lot of the population of cities lives outside the city jurisdiction, for a variety of reasons including tax avoidance. The people who actually need to be persuaded aren't the people who drive into the city from the suburbs every day, they are the people who live inside the actual city, and those people need to make a judgment whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks of this kind of approach (the risk being that the suburbs will simply develop new centres and bypass the city).

sambe 9y ago
What kind of parts of the US are you talking about? Amsterdam is reasonably dense (not compared to say, NYC, but that isn't "much of the US"). People often commute 30-60 minutes by bike there.

Tiktaalik 9y ago

> I'm totally confident that we could replicate Amsterdam in any US city if we wanted to. Of course. Amsterdam and other cycling friendly cities didn't start out that way. They had to be redesigned as such. You can find plenty of historical photos of a car dominant Amsterdam. https://www.fastcompany.com/3052699/these-historical-photos-show-how-amsterdam-turned-itself-into-a-bike-riders-paradise https://www.fastcompany.com/3052699/these-historical-photos-...

mmjaa 9y ago
Amsterdam has the advantage that its history predates automobiles, and it has continually adapted, multiple times, to modernity. Americans seem unwilling to do that for some reason .. Its a pity because there are so many wonderful aspects of transportation process in the American world - I'm looking at the "Jet/Air Parks" that have managed to survive, for example. The Dutch may have their bicycle advantage, but nobody does flight like America does. So its really somehow quaint that Americans appear to be enslaved to their cars. Personally I blame designers of car interiors - these gilded thrones appear to have inflicted a mass neurosis on the customer.

rayiner 9y ago

It's not a "social disorder," it's a bootstrapping problem caused by American cities being very different in nature that European cities. Look at Amsterdam: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Amsterdam/52.3683298,4.8955082/@52.3232603,4.6976106,41731m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m9!4m8!1m5!1m1!1s0x47c63fb5949a7755:0x6600fd4cb7c0af8d!2m2!1d4.8951679!2d52.3702157!1m0!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Amsterdam/52.3683298,4.89550.... It's a little bundle of urbanization about 4-5 miles in radius, surrounded by farms. Compare Washington, D.C., which is a smaller city: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Washington,+DC/@38.914686,-77.1415304,42147m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x89b7c6de5af6e45b:0xc2524522d4885d2a!8m2!3d38.9071923!4d-77.0368707 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Washington,+DC/@38.914686,.... The urban core is smaller, more like 2-3 miles in radius, but it's part of a large metro area with urban clusters connected by highways. The total population of the metro area is substantially more than double that of Amsterdam's. If you work in Amsterdam, you probably live in Amsterdam. If you work in D.C., there is a good chance you're commuting in from some suburb. After spending more than an hour in traffic to get to the city, how do you feel about bikers whizzing around in a city with no separated bike lanes? How do you feel about losing traffic lanes to bikes in an already gridlocked city? How do you feel about spending billions on a train (much more than Europeans do on a per mile/per ride basis) that doesn't stop anywhere near your house, or run on time? I don't think it's possible to redesign a city. It's like trying to rewrite software while its still running. Yeah, it's possible to do hot patches here and there, but you're not rewriting the guts.

crzwdjk 9y ago
The thing is, Amsterdam in the 70s looked a lot like DC does today, with no protected bike lanes and cars parking all over the place. So change is possible, as evidenced by Amsterdam and Copenhagen, but any shift away from driving and cars requires better alternatives, including bikes but also including trains and buses and metros. And DC isn't doing to great with that last one.
- tptacek 9y ago
  Did Amsterdam go from a 50/50 urban/suburban configuration to a 90/10 urban/suburban configuration? Or did it just do a better job of managing it's already 90/10 population?

dep_b 9y ago

Bike lanes are a result not the reason of having so many people driving bicycles in Amsterdam. Being a shitty town to drive in let alone parking even when the car was still king really helped pushing people towards bicycles, but you can't retroactively apply medieval road structures and canals to US cities. On the other hand Rotterdam has a post war road structure and still a lot of people use their bicycle, perhaps that's not even a hard requirement. What you really see is that because so many people were using bicycles everywhere people just got fed up having cyclists criss-crossing between cars and pedestrians and finally gave them their own lanes - out of pure annoyance. So every US citizen that wants to have those nice lanes simply needs to make sure enough people on bicycles annoy the shit out of everybody else in the streets and you will get your lanes. Be sure to ride like a real asshole and practice flashing vulgar gestures while riding. Pretend you're invulnerable. Learn sequences of insults with lots of hard sounds in them. Nothing beats swearing in Dutch though. Every tourist almost hit by a cyclist in Amsterdam knows exactly what I mean! ;)

raarts 9y ago
It had nothing to do with annoyance. The real reason for separate lanes is safety. There is so much attention for traffic safety amongst the Dutch, especially towards kids in traffic. 50 years ago traffic in the Netherlands was not unlike the US now. Until in the 70s an action group called Stop de Kindermoord (“stop the child murder”) succeeded in getting the government to pay attention and make a turnaround. I remember this from my own childhood. Many kids died in traffic accidents. The attention to the safety of children is still present today, more bike lanes are being bult, kids need to do a traffic exam (on bikes) in 7th grade, existing roads are being remodeled for safety. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bicycle-capital-world-transport-cycling-kindermoord https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...
- dep_b 9y ago
  Of course it's about safety as well. Several of the children I knew when I grew up were killed in traffic, all roads it happened on have separate bike lanes now. But sharing the roads with kids that go to school can also be an annoyance, tending to ride with three kids next to eachother and making sudden movements because they're fighting/playing.

foxyv 9y ago

The problem is lack of trust for local and county government to run public transit. People don't want to lose their job because they depended on poorly run public transit. I've met more than a few people who have lost jobs or were going to lose jobs due to poor transit services. Here in So. Cal, Metrolink trains are expensive and run very rarely. I have yet to go a week without a major delay or cancelled train. Bus and train schedules are essentially one way and leave early. Meaning I usually have to leave work around 3:30 to get home. Not to mention that despite driving through some of the worst traffic in the state, trains and buses take two or three times as long to get me to my destination than my car. This is despite massive funding increases and bonds for public transit in our state.