8 ms·

I’ve been to Oslo a couple of times now and both times I was amazed by the quality and cost of public transportation. The busses run frequently and go where you

I’ve been to Oslo a couple of times now and both times I was amazed by the quality and cost of public transportation. The busses run frequently and go where you need them to go. There is a train that takes you to the outer areas and the airport. There’s really no excuse for most cities not to follow this model.

gspr 6y ago
Yet people complain. I don't get it. I'm quite new to the city myself, but I'm quite surprised by how much people complain about public transit and about cars getting increasingly banned from the city center. I would agree that the train service leaves something to be desired (but then again, I moved here from the train heaven that is Switzerland). But the subway, busses and trams are A+.
- vmception 6y ago
  This is my whole experience in Europe. People complaining about their "late" [impeccable] trains. I'm like eehhh, okay, wait till you see the United States! The only culture shock to me is that union strikes can actually have an affect on convenience or quality of life, they're more like mosquitos buzzing in your ear if a protest has gone on for over a week in the US. I don't have an opinion, and that's part of the privilege!
  - hypertele-Xii 6y ago
    Especially in Finland with a single government-run train company that routinely makes announcements like "the trains are late because we didn't anticipate it raining snow". In winter. In Finland. Try Japan. Trains run on time to the second, so precisely that time tables printed on paper to the second are accurate.
  - gspr 6y ago
    Hehe, I remember my first train journey in the US. I believe it was Philly to NYC. I remember thinking "hey, what are they complaining about!? This is totally fine!" before I was told that together with like one other corridor like this in California(?), that's essentially full the extent of usable US rail service?
    - prox 6y ago
      I wonder if Joe Biden “Amtrak Joe” will make a change, since he is such a big fan of trains.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        Well, no. And one wonders to what degree Amtrak plans will be pushed out because of the plunge in travel. It's also easy to be a fan of trains if you live in the Northeast Corridor. More or less uniquely in the US other than a handful of other city pairs.
    - vmception 6y ago
      That's the full extent of tolerable long distance commuter rail service. The issue is that it can't be modernized to be faster and quieter in an economical way. Actually the issue is that its too uneconomical to do so, the current trains are not economical. This is whether we are referring to that high traffic corridor or to anywhere else.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        The NE Corridor is actually profitable for Amtrak (in normal times). The problem is that Amtrak then proceeds to lose its NE Corridor profits on pretty much every other train route in the country.
        volkl48 6y ago
        Amtrak basically is 3 different types of services, especially after PRRIA 2008 changed the funding structure. - Northeast Corridor - Makes a solid operating profit (normally), run by Amtrak. - State-supported corridor services - The states are basically paying the subsidy required to run the service and deciding what they want. If the state wants to upgrade the line for faster service, run more trains, etc, and they want to pay for it, Amtrak will run it. In some cases, the states (WA + CA come to mind) own or part-own the equipment being run as well. This is most other "practical" services (NY Empire Service, WA/OR Cascades, etc) and where you're seeing most improvements/investments. - Long-distance network - They run once a day or less, they're where most of the hours/days late horror stories come from, they almost all lose money, federal government pays and dictates that they run it. Mostly impractical as transportation for people who have any other option for how to get somewhere. That said, the loss isn't that big as a financial number (in part, because there's not that much service), and it's basically a matter of political calculus as well....lots of rural senators who sign off on Amtrak funding in substantial part because of their one or two trains a day.
  - ck425 6y ago
    I mean in the UK ours are terrible. We dream of European efficiency as much as you do.
    - neffy 6y ago
      Erm... when the trains are late in the US it can be by hours (NY -- Boston), or even a day or so (on the transcontinental route). Amtrak gets severely outcompeted on most routes by a somewhat informal "chinatown" bus network.
      - pmyteh 6y ago
        Yeah. I'm British, and a few years ago spent several weeks travelling around the US by Amtrak. Not one of my trains was actually on time, and the Sunset Limited (LA -> New Orleans) was over a day late. Our trains aren't great for punctuality, but they're nowhere near that bad. Of course, the reasons are somewhat different, too. In the UK the problem is mostly that the tracks are very heavily timetabled with passenger trains, such that there's very little slack: an issue with one service can screw up an entire chunk of the network with effects that last for hours. In the US, freight trains have priority outside the Northeast Corridor, so we would get looped for several hours to wait for a train of oil tankers going the other way.
      - cr1895 6y ago
        Doesn't this have something to do with priority given to freight rail in the US?
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      Having moved from Germany to the UK I'm actually positively surprised by public transport which I rely on every day. (living in London). The only thing I've noticed is that it is quite expensive.
  - pmontra 6y ago
    > union strikes can actually have an affect on convenience or quality of life I never understood why transport unions effectively run their strikes against the passengers instead of against the governments (most of them are state owned or heavily subsidized here in Europe.) They should go to protest in front of the government offices and not jeopardizing the lives of citizens, who could be their allies. Instead everybody ends up hating transport workers. My bet: a traditional strike helps the careers inside the unions. Going against the government doesn't.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  I think that part of the human condition is that we are smart enough to quite easily imagine perfectly operating systems. It is simple to imagine the train that is always on time to the second, the politician who is 100% ethical, a good judge of character, works hard, and has broad relevant knowledge. It is possible to imagine the construction company that always finishes the roads on time and with high quality. But for humans to actually do all of these things is extremely hard. We only recently were very much like a primate we see in the wild. We have tons of ambition and imagination but all the flaws of a prototype intelligent creature. We can't always think clearly, emotions often get in the way when we can, we get tired, we have conflicting drives and feedback loops that mean we are never truly satisfied no matter how good we have it. such is life.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I imagine that there are very few places in the world where people universally love their public transit if they're dependent on it day-to-day. Whether it's cost, frequency, coverage, reliability, frequency, comfort, etc., something that seems perfectly adequate or even pretty great to a sometimes visitor seems less so if you're commuting at rush hour every day in all sorts of weather. You mention Swiss train service for example which seemed pretty great as a visitor--but it sure wasn't cheap as is true of a lot of European train service. Ditto for the Shinkanzen in Japan. My personal experience is Boston. As someone who takes rail into the city and then the subway maybe a few times a year, it seems just fine. When I depended on it for regular commuting, I did not love it.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    To be fair though you probably wouldn't have loved commuting into the city in a car either.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I certainly did not. I took the train by preference if I was going into the city "9-5"; my office was a short walk from the station. But the train was useless if I was doing something in the evening because it ran so infrequently outside of commuting hours. Frankly it was not a commute I could have handled long term--about 90 minutes door to door--even though I didn't have to do it every day.
  - gspr 6y ago
    > You mention Swiss train service for example which seemed pretty great as a visitor--but it sure wasn't cheap as is true of a lot of European train service. The thing is, if you're not a visitor, you'd buy an AG or a demi-tarif (perhaps with a contribution from your employer). The former gives you free unlimited use on almost all public transit (including trains and busses), or alternatively, the latter gives you approximately a 50% discount on the price you paid as a tourist. The latter is quite commonly sponsored by your employer – and even if not, both types pay off very quickly if you actually commute by public transit.
- q-base 6y ago
  That is probably because you look at it from too narrow a position. Yes, the public transport inside Oslo may be brilliant. That is very good for transporting people around who lives inside Oslo, but chances are that a lot of people cannot afford or want to live there. For probably each kilometer extra you move away from the city center, the difficulty using public transport increases exponentially. Once you get to 50-100km away from the city center, then your options look very bleak. I live in Copenhagen myself, but I grew up 100km outside of Copenhagen. Using a car to go back and forth from there to Copenhagen takes approximately 1 hour each way. Using public transportation all the way takes closer to 2 hours. Using a combination takes 1h 30min on a good day. Some people move out of cities because they want the countryside. But other people are forced to do so because of prices. Banning cars from cities seems to only think of people who lives inside it and not how difficult it will be for a lot of people already "taxed" with hour long commutes because of stupidly expensive housing combined with centralization of workplaces.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I'm in the same situation with the nearest major city. The train actually makes sense to go in and out on a work day if I need to for some reason given how bad rush hour traffic is. But it's a non-starter for an evening event. I just wouldn't go in if you made it too hard for me to drive and park. (Which the city can absolutely do of course.)
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Why wouldn't you use the train for the non-work event? I don't know where you live. What I do know is in many cities they run 2-4 train in for those who start work at 8am, and then run them back out at 5 pm after the people get off work. If this is your case, as it is for many, then I agree. They don't want you to take the train to those evening events. It doesn't have to be this way. A train could run every 5 minutes all day long. If your city did this would you still insist on driving?
      - fogihujy 6y ago
        Well, see my Copenhagen example abuve for one reason. The Metro goes every 5 minutes, but if you need to go somewhere where you need to switch between the metro and some other form of public transport then you'll usually double the time required. The fact that it's cheaper for three people to take a taxi instead of going with public transport doesn't help either.
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  People always complain. What matters is their behavior. In most bigger cities, getting around by car stopped being a thing as it is time consuming and not much fun. Places like London, Amsterdam, Paris, etc. outright ban cars from a lot of streets and make it stupidly expensive to park. A weird side effect of that is that a lot of the remaining cars tend to be of the expensive/oversized variety. But the reality for most is that people get around by bike and public transport and tend to prefer that to getting stuck in traffic and then having to hunt for parking space. I live in Berlin which is unusually car friendly for a European city because of the German car lobby. You can literally drive up to places like the Alexanderplatz and expect to find a spot to park there (with some difficulty). But even in Berlin, owning a car is not a given for most people that live there. It's just not very practical. I've never bothered owning one and probably never will. With what I save on not owning a car, I can easily afford to rent cars or use taxis/ubers when I need to; which is not that often actually. Berlin is comparatively unorganized when it comes to protecting bike traffic. Coming from the Netherlands, it feels a bit like a third world country on this front. Infrastructure is poor/non existent and Berlin excels at creating safety challenged situations for cyclists where you randomly get to mingle with heavy traffic, deal with delivery vans using the bike lanes as parking areas, etc. Mostly places like Oslo and other bike friendly cities differ from this by separating flows of traffic systematically. Of course compared to the US, Germany is still pretty good.
- npsimons 6y ago
  > (but then again, I moved here from the train heaven that is Switzerland) I hiked the Haute Route last year, and while we were only on the trains and buses a handful of times, it was flawless every time. Like, they had things scheduled down to the minute, and no, not some multiple of 5 minutes, literal "train arrives at 10:42, train leaves at 10:44". Clean too. So nice.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Switzerland is well known for this. Part of this is they run the trains slower than they can go which gives plenty of ability to go faster if needed to meet the schedule. The schedule in turn is carefully designed so that where trains they all meet at the same time, thus ensuring you can switch trains and so you wouldn't want your train to go faster even though it could in theory. There are two good ways to run a good transport system: a carefully planned timetable so that you always know when your train arrives, and once you get on all your connections are easy to make. The other is as fast and frequent as possible, you never know when your next train will arrive but it will be soon enough that you don't care anyway. The second is somewhat better, but vastly more expensive.
OscarTheGrinch 6y ago
Cities struggle to build better public transport because car owners complain en masse about any impingement on their freedoms. Car supremacy is a big wedge issue in Norway, which is paradoxically a big oil exporter, and the worlds leader in electric vehicle usage. It even has has its own single issue political party, I wonder if big oil money is behind it? https://www.lifeinnorway.net/norways-drivers-rally-against-road-tolls/ https://www.lifeinnorway.net/norways-drivers-rally-against-r...
- kristofferR 6y ago
  That's a weird conspiracy theory, the FNB actually has valid complaints, although I disagree with them overall. The way the green change has been implemented here in Norway has unfortunately often been extremely conservative (instead of progressive) - the well-off living centrally in the cities gets massive subsidies for purchasing their Teslas while the less fortunate needs to pay hefty tolls for their old gasoline cars.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- npsimons 6y ago
  > impingement on their freedoms. It's funny what terms we choose (framing) can do. "death tax" instead of "inheritance tax", "driver's rights" instead of "driver's privileges." People all too often forget that driving in public places requires a license, it's not a right, it's a privilege that has to be earned.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- hhjinks 6y ago
  FNB is about "bompenger", basically a fee paid when crossing certain spots with your motor vehicle, often used to pay for road maintenance etc. Usually you have to cross one or more of these spots before getting into any major city. Since it's a flat fee, it disproportionally affects less affluent families, who often need their car more than the average family. These fees are often quite expensive. You might have to pay €5-10 to deliver the kids to kindergarten, and then get to work, if you live outside the city. That can be as much as €400 a month, just passive, unavoidable expanses for a lot of families. The reason FNB was founded is because these fees have increased substantially in recent years. The camel's back finally broke, and FNB became an actual political block in like a year. I would argue FNB is a prime example of democracy working for the people. The two established ruling parties kept wringing money from people using bompenger until they had enough and took a lot of power for themselves.
jariel 6y ago
"t. There’s really no excuse for most cities not to follow this model." Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund owns 2% of the entire world's publicly traded stocks. They have so much money the fight over what to do with it. They are an Oil rich state, like Qatar, Kuwait. When you have that kind of surplus, a lot of things become easy. For the rest of the world, the issue is money: either you raise taxes, increase fares, take on more debt (or invade a rich country), none of which are good options.
addicted 6y ago
Yeah but Oslo is in dense Europe not in undense USA so obviously the greatest country in the world cannot achieve this. /sarcasm
- cbmuser 6y ago
  No, but Oslo is tiny compared to most US cities. It is actually comparing Apples and Oranges.
cbmuser 6y ago
It’s actually not that good. I lived in Oslo for a year and the main problem is that service stops at around midnight so you either have to walk or take a taxi which is incredibly expensive. Luckily, the city isn’t that large so walking works most of the time.

gspr 6y ago

Yet people complain. I don't get it. I'm quite new to the city myself, but I'm quite surprised by how much people complain about public transit and about cars getting increasingly banned from the city center. I would agree that the train service leaves something to be desired (but then again, I moved here from the train heaven that is Switzerland). But the subway, busses and trams are A+.

vmception 6y ago
This is my whole experience in Europe. People complaining about their "late" [impeccable] trains. I'm like eehhh, okay, wait till you see the United States! The only culture shock to me is that union strikes can actually have an affect on convenience or quality of life, they're more like mosquitos buzzing in your ear if a protest has gone on for over a week in the US. I don't have an opinion, and that's part of the privilege!
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  Especially in Finland with a single government-run train company that routinely makes announcements like "the trains are late because we didn't anticipate it raining snow". In winter. In Finland. Try Japan. Trains run on time to the second, so precisely that time tables printed on paper to the second are accurate.
- gspr 6y ago
  Hehe, I remember my first train journey in the US. I believe it was Philly to NYC. I remember thinking "hey, what are they complaining about!? This is totally fine!" before I was told that together with like one other corridor like this in California(?), that's essentially full the extent of usable US rail service?
  - prox 6y ago
    I wonder if Joe Biden “Amtrak Joe” will make a change, since he is such a big fan of trains.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Well, no. And one wonders to what degree Amtrak plans will be pushed out because of the plunge in travel. It's also easy to be a fan of trains if you live in the Northeast Corridor. More or less uniquely in the US other than a handful of other city pairs.
  - vmception 6y ago
    That's the full extent of tolerable long distance commuter rail service. The issue is that it can't be modernized to be faster and quieter in an economical way. Actually the issue is that its too uneconomical to do so, the current trains are not economical. This is whether we are referring to that high traffic corridor or to anywhere else.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      The NE Corridor is actually profitable for Amtrak (in normal times). The problem is that Amtrak then proceeds to lose its NE Corridor profits on pretty much every other train route in the country.
      - volkl48 6y ago
        Amtrak basically is 3 different types of services, especially after PRRIA 2008 changed the funding structure. - Northeast Corridor - Makes a solid operating profit (normally), run by Amtrak. - State-supported corridor services - The states are basically paying the subsidy required to run the service and deciding what they want. If the state wants to upgrade the line for faster service, run more trains, etc, and they want to pay for it, Amtrak will run it. In some cases, the states (WA + CA come to mind) own or part-own the equipment being run as well. This is most other "practical" services (NY Empire Service, WA/OR Cascades, etc) and where you're seeing most improvements/investments. - Long-distance network - They run once a day or less, they're where most of the hours/days late horror stories come from, they almost all lose money, federal government pays and dictates that they run it. Mostly impractical as transportation for people who have any other option for how to get somewhere. That said, the loss isn't that big as a financial number (in part, because there's not that much service), and it's basically a matter of political calculus as well....lots of rural senators who sign off on Amtrak funding in substantial part because of their one or two trains a day.
- ck425 6y ago
  I mean in the UK ours are terrible. We dream of European efficiency as much as you do.
  - neffy 6y ago
    Erm... when the trains are late in the US it can be by hours (NY -- Boston), or even a day or so (on the transcontinental route). Amtrak gets severely outcompeted on most routes by a somewhat informal "chinatown" bus network.
    - pmyteh 6y ago
      Yeah. I'm British, and a few years ago spent several weeks travelling around the US by Amtrak. Not one of my trains was actually on time, and the Sunset Limited (LA -> New Orleans) was over a day late. Our trains aren't great for punctuality, but they're nowhere near that bad. Of course, the reasons are somewhat different, too. In the UK the problem is mostly that the tracks are very heavily timetabled with passenger trains, such that there's very little slack: an issue with one service can screw up an entire chunk of the network with effects that last for hours. In the US, freight trains have priority outside the Northeast Corridor, so we would get looped for several hours to wait for a train of oil tankers going the other way.
    - cr1895 6y ago
      Doesn't this have something to do with priority given to freight rail in the US?
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    Having moved from Germany to the UK I'm actually positively surprised by public transport which I rely on every day. (living in London). The only thing I've noticed is that it is quite expensive.
- pmontra 6y ago
  > union strikes can actually have an affect on convenience or quality of life I never understood why transport unions effectively run their strikes against the passengers instead of against the governments (most of them are state owned or heavily subsidized here in Europe.) They should go to protest in front of the government offices and not jeopardizing the lives of citizens, who could be their allies. Instead everybody ends up hating transport workers. My bet: a traditional strike helps the careers inside the unions. Going against the government doesn't.
gameswithgo 6y ago
I think that part of the human condition is that we are smart enough to quite easily imagine perfectly operating systems. It is simple to imagine the train that is always on time to the second, the politician who is 100% ethical, a good judge of character, works hard, and has broad relevant knowledge. It is possible to imagine the construction company that always finishes the roads on time and with high quality. But for humans to actually do all of these things is extremely hard. We only recently were very much like a primate we see in the wild. We have tons of ambition and imagination but all the flaws of a prototype intelligent creature. We can't always think clearly, emotions often get in the way when we can, we get tired, we have conflicting drives and feedback loops that mean we are never truly satisfied no matter how good we have it. such is life.
ghaff 6y ago
I imagine that there are very few places in the world where people universally love their public transit if they're dependent on it day-to-day. Whether it's cost, frequency, coverage, reliability, frequency, comfort, etc., something that seems perfectly adequate or even pretty great to a sometimes visitor seems less so if you're commuting at rush hour every day in all sorts of weather. You mention Swiss train service for example which seemed pretty great as a visitor--but it sure wasn't cheap as is true of a lot of European train service. Ditto for the Shinkanzen in Japan. My personal experience is Boston. As someone who takes rail into the city and then the subway maybe a few times a year, it seems just fine. When I depended on it for regular commuting, I did not love it.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  To be fair though you probably wouldn't have loved commuting into the city in a car either.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I certainly did not. I took the train by preference if I was going into the city "9-5"; my office was a short walk from the station. But the train was useless if I was doing something in the evening because it ran so infrequently outside of commuting hours. Frankly it was not a commute I could have handled long term--about 90 minutes door to door--even though I didn't have to do it every day.
- gspr 6y ago
  > You mention Swiss train service for example which seemed pretty great as a visitor--but it sure wasn't cheap as is true of a lot of European train service. The thing is, if you're not a visitor, you'd buy an AG or a demi-tarif (perhaps with a contribution from your employer). The former gives you free unlimited use on almost all public transit (including trains and busses), or alternatively, the latter gives you approximately a 50% discount on the price you paid as a tourist. The latter is quite commonly sponsored by your employer – and even if not, both types pay off very quickly if you actually commute by public transit.
q-base 6y ago
That is probably because you look at it from too narrow a position. Yes, the public transport inside Oslo may be brilliant. That is very good for transporting people around who lives inside Oslo, but chances are that a lot of people cannot afford or want to live there. For probably each kilometer extra you move away from the city center, the difficulty using public transport increases exponentially. Once you get to 50-100km away from the city center, then your options look very bleak. I live in Copenhagen myself, but I grew up 100km outside of Copenhagen. Using a car to go back and forth from there to Copenhagen takes approximately 1 hour each way. Using public transportation all the way takes closer to 2 hours. Using a combination takes 1h 30min on a good day. Some people move out of cities because they want the countryside. But other people are forced to do so because of prices. Banning cars from cities seems to only think of people who lives inside it and not how difficult it will be for a lot of people already "taxed" with hour long commutes because of stupidly expensive housing combined with centralization of workplaces.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I'm in the same situation with the nearest major city. The train actually makes sense to go in and out on a work day if I need to for some reason given how bad rush hour traffic is. But it's a non-starter for an evening event. I just wouldn't go in if you made it too hard for me to drive and park. (Which the city can absolutely do of course.)
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Why wouldn't you use the train for the non-work event? I don't know where you live. What I do know is in many cities they run 2-4 train in for those who start work at 8am, and then run them back out at 5 pm after the people get off work. If this is your case, as it is for many, then I agree. They don't want you to take the train to those evening events. It doesn't have to be this way. A train could run every 5 minutes all day long. If your city did this would you still insist on driving?
    - fogihujy 6y ago
      Well, see my Copenhagen example abuve for one reason. The Metro goes every 5 minutes, but if you need to go somewhere where you need to switch between the metro and some other form of public transport then you'll usually double the time required. The fact that it's cheaper for three people to take a taxi instead of going with public transport doesn't help either.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
People always complain. What matters is their behavior. In most bigger cities, getting around by car stopped being a thing as it is time consuming and not much fun. Places like London, Amsterdam, Paris, etc. outright ban cars from a lot of streets and make it stupidly expensive to park. A weird side effect of that is that a lot of the remaining cars tend to be of the expensive/oversized variety. But the reality for most is that people get around by bike and public transport and tend to prefer that to getting stuck in traffic and then having to hunt for parking space. I live in Berlin which is unusually car friendly for a European city because of the German car lobby. You can literally drive up to places like the Alexanderplatz and expect to find a spot to park there (with some difficulty). But even in Berlin, owning a car is not a given for most people that live there. It's just not very practical. I've never bothered owning one and probably never will. With what I save on not owning a car, I can easily afford to rent cars or use taxis/ubers when I need to; which is not that often actually. Berlin is comparatively unorganized when it comes to protecting bike traffic. Coming from the Netherlands, it feels a bit like a third world country on this front. Infrastructure is poor/non existent and Berlin excels at creating safety challenged situations for cyclists where you randomly get to mingle with heavy traffic, deal with delivery vans using the bike lanes as parking areas, etc. Mostly places like Oslo and other bike friendly cities differ from this by separating flows of traffic systematically. Of course compared to the US, Germany is still pretty good.
npsimons 6y ago
> (but then again, I moved here from the train heaven that is Switzerland) I hiked the Haute Route last year, and while we were only on the trains and buses a handful of times, it was flawless every time. Like, they had things scheduled down to the minute, and no, not some multiple of 5 minutes, literal "train arrives at 10:42, train leaves at 10:44". Clean too. So nice.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Switzerland is well known for this. Part of this is they run the trains slower than they can go which gives plenty of ability to go faster if needed to meet the schedule. The schedule in turn is carefully designed so that where trains they all meet at the same time, thus ensuring you can switch trains and so you wouldn't want your train to go faster even though it could in theory. There are two good ways to run a good transport system: a carefully planned timetable so that you always know when your train arrives, and once you get on all your connections are easy to make. The other is as fast and frequent as possible, you never know when your next train will arrive but it will be soon enough that you don't care anyway. The second is somewhat better, but vastly more expensive.

OscarTheGrinch 6y ago

Cities struggle to build better public transport because car owners complain en masse about any impingement on their freedoms. Car supremacy is a big wedge issue in Norway, which is paradoxically a big oil exporter, and the worlds leader in electric vehicle usage. It even has has its own single issue political party, I wonder if big oil money is behind it? https://www.lifeinnorway.net/norways-drivers-rally-against-road-tolls/ https://www.lifeinnorway.net/norways-drivers-rally-against-r...

kristofferR 6y ago
That's a weird conspiracy theory, the FNB actually has valid complaints, although I disagree with them overall. The way the green change has been implemented here in Norway has unfortunately often been extremely conservative (instead of progressive) - the well-off living centrally in the cities gets massive subsidies for purchasing their Teslas while the less fortunate needs to pay hefty tolls for their old gasoline cars.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
npsimons 6y ago
> impingement on their freedoms. It's funny what terms we choose (framing) can do. "death tax" instead of "inheritance tax", "driver's rights" instead of "driver's privileges." People all too often forget that driving in public places requires a license, it's not a right, it's a privilege that has to be earned.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
hhjinks 6y ago
FNB is about "bompenger", basically a fee paid when crossing certain spots with your motor vehicle, often used to pay for road maintenance etc. Usually you have to cross one or more of these spots before getting into any major city. Since it's a flat fee, it disproportionally affects less affluent families, who often need their car more than the average family. These fees are often quite expensive. You might have to pay €5-10 to deliver the kids to kindergarten, and then get to work, if you live outside the city. That can be as much as €400 a month, just passive, unavoidable expanses for a lot of families. The reason FNB was founded is because these fees have increased substantially in recent years. The camel's back finally broke, and FNB became an actual political block in like a year. I would argue FNB is a prime example of democracy working for the people. The two established ruling parties kept wringing money from people using bompenger until they had enough and took a lot of power for themselves.

jariel 6y ago

"t. There’s really no excuse for most cities not to follow this model." Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund owns 2% of the entire world's publicly traded stocks. They have so much money the fight over what to do with it. They are an Oil rich state, like Qatar, Kuwait. When you have that kind of surplus, a lot of things become easy. For the rest of the world, the issue is money: either you raise taxes, increase fares, take on more debt (or invade a rich country), none of which are good options.

addicted 6y ago

Yeah but Oslo is in dense Europe not in undense USA so obviously the greatest country in the world cannot achieve this. /sarcasm

cbmuser 6y ago
No, but Oslo is tiny compared to most US cities. It is actually comparing Apples and Oranges.

cbmuser 6y ago

It’s actually not that good. I lived in Oslo for a year and the main problem is that service stops at around midnight so you either have to walk or take a taxi which is incredibly expensive. Luckily, the city isn’t that large so walking works most of the time.