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If everyone bicycled like the Danes, we’d avoid a UK’s worth of emissions
- Bancakes 4y agoIs it really worth getting to work all sweaty and smelly, and carrying a bag of work clothes?
- FullyFunctional 4y ago? You don’t have to race (unless you are always late). I never brought change of clothes (except for rain) or smelled sweaty when I biked to work.
- smegsicle 4y agowow your non sweaty privilege is showing
- rabf 4y agoI you are cycling to work everyday your fitness will very quickly get to a level where you don't break sweat on that ride.
- verbify 4y agoElectric bikes solve that particular problem
- Eupolemos 4y agoCoworker next to me rides 15km to work every day. Works fine, he just bathes at work rather than at home. He always shows up with a big smile, sqeeky clean. Also, he gets to eat more cake without getting fat. Bastard.
- mns 4y agoAnd would your company provide showers for everyone, if at least half the people would decide to bike? When I was around 10Km from work, I mostly used public transport, as even a mild summer day in central Europe was quite intense, and I'm not one to race through the city.
- drran 4y agoTake the bath at home before the ride, so you will start smelling next day only. Use CoolMax-like underclothes, for better cooling when ridding, so you will sweat less and stay dry for a whole day. Use deodorants with anti-respiratory effect. And so on.
- markvdb 4y agoChances are that less than half would come by bike, but even if they would, ik could still make a lot of sense: - Cycling employees are healthier. Belgian stats say they average more than one sick day less per year. - Cycling employees are less stressed. You can squeeze more productivity out of them before they burn out. - Cycling employees take up less parking space with their vehicles. - Compensating cycling employees for their mobility needs- a fiscally friendly form of compensation in many countries - is often more tax advantageous than doing the same with their car driving colleagues. - ...and a ton more reasons.
- _dain_ 4y agoVisit Copenhagen sometime, you'll see most people on bikes just do it in normal clothes. They just ride at a comfortable speed. They're not racing.
- orangetuba 4y agoYeah, we just have to make all the other cities completely flat like Copenhagen.
- _dain_ 4y agoEbikes.
- smegsicle 4y agoand lug toxic batteries around for no reason? why not everyone just work from home and conduct all interaction in some kind of Meta Verse ?
- Tade0 4y agoYeah, we just have to make all the other cities completely safe like Copenhagen. I mean, it's a nice concept, but Denmark appears to be one of the few places in the world where you don't have to worry too much about bike theft.
- mollerhoj 4y agoBikes are frequently stolen here in Copenhagen. But bikes are just so convenient that we just go buy a new one right away. Also, bike insurance/bike subscription is pretty common.
- refactor_master 4y agoIs it really worth wrecking the climate in order to smell fresh? Also, office buildings in industrialized nations usually have the necessary plumbing for a shower.
- Bancakes 4y agoThe climate is not my choice and not my responsibility. I have space-time constraints, and I'm solving for them. I don't see the point in living like it's a post-apocalyptic world just to avoid a post-apocalyptic world.
- Tade0 4y agoI think the question should be: is it really worth getting to work daily? The pandemic showed that in many cases it's possible to work remotely - at least some of the time. ~30% of positions are desk jobs. Imagine 30% less people commuting daily.
- Eavolution 4y agoRight and how does this work for people who are in the country? I'm a country lad and quite frankly a car will always be necessary. I'm not cycling half an hour there and half an hour back to the nearest shop and 2 hours there and 2 hours back to school every day
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- beej71 4y agoI don't think the article is saying that it works work for everyone. I doubt even the Danes all ride bicycles everywhere.
- joaonmatos 4y agoWell, you may still end up needing a faster vehicle, and perhaps a BEV is indeed better for you. The fun thing is: most people live or are projected to live in cities, so this is still applicable to them. Different people may use different modes of transportation.
- bArray 4y agoIf everybody sailed their parcels across the Sea, we'd avoid 4.5% of global emissions [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/feb/13/climatechange.pollution https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/feb/13/climatec...
- taylodl 4y agoIf everybody had the flat land and moderate climate of the Danes then there would be many more people bicycling
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoIf only anyplace else on earth was as flat as where the Danes live...
- crnkofe 4y agoAs someone who's cycled around Copenhagen I have to say biking there is not just easy due to flatness but also very enjoyable. Wide biking lanes, long straight stretches without signposts in the way, cars paying due respect to bikers, place to put the bike after use, showers at work etc. etc. The experience is much much better than every other city I've been to. Sadly I don't see this transferring to other countries any time soon. Infra was built for the car and a cyclist is often a 2nd grade participant. All the steep inclinations in cities also don't help. CPH is really flat. My hometown has so many hills a lot of people (especially elderly) are not fit to even climb them. It's also really hard to drive at decent speed on narrow lanes built as an afterthought next to the main road. Things are changing though so at least biking is doable despite many downsides.
- VBprogrammer 4y agoIs it just me or is that a depressing fact? The Danes have a rather sweet setup with a good cycling infrastructure, mostly flat terrain and a rather mild temperate climate. It's difficult to reproduce that everywhere.
- Youden 4y agoI think that's an overly pessimistic way of looking at things. Denmark may be warm compared to say Minnesota but it's further north than a very large chunk of the world's population. Denmark, The Netherlands, Germany and basically all of Europe didn't always have the cycling infrastructure they have now, it's a relatively recent thing. If there's support, it can be built. For hills, there are e-bikes. Yes they're more expensive than a regular bicycle but they're still a pretty recent invention. They'll surely get cheaper as they mature.
- archi42 4y agoI'm not quite sure about the fact that ebikes become cheaper. Theoretically yes and practically "somewhat": But a lot of people are convinced that e.g. the 1k€ ebike sold by Aldi must be crap and you need to get one of the more expensive brands. Probably the same kind of people who would buy an Alienware Laptop just for email correspondence or a Ferrari for their commute, but with ebikes I'm under the impression that the average person is more gullible for this kind of thinking. So in effect people are spending more on ebikes even though they technically become cheaper. SRC: Recent discussion on golem.de regarding the Aldi ebike & personal experience from friends &family buying much more expensive bikes than necessary for their use.
- mustafa_pasi 4y agoI find it depressing that reducing all global commuting related carbon emissions would reduce global emissions by just 1%. And then the EV is supposed to be poster child for "doing something about the climate" and in that best case it would be much worse than this.
- kyriakos 4y agoClimate and infrastructure is what keeping me from using a bike for non recreational purposes. Continuous bike lanes, driver culture where bicycles are treated as equal on the road and temperatures that don't hit 40c.
- FullyFunctional 4y agoDane here: essential bit of info is missing in the discussion. Cars are MUCH more expensive to buy and own (sales tax used to be 180%, but I’m expat). I knew very few < 24 yo who could afford a car. Personally I got my first at 32 … when I moved to USA. But cars here are dirt cheap to buy and own.
- lazyjones 4y agoDanes still own as many cars as everyone else, it's not really an outlier and the number of cars per capita is growing. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/road_eqs_carhab/default/table?lang=en https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/road_eqs_carh...
- cato_the_elder 4y agoTheir cars per capita is about 2/3 of the US [1]. I bet if you correct for the effect of GDP per capita, they will rank near the bottom among European countries too. [1]: 0.540 for Denmark vs 0.868 for the US (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle...)
- lazyjones 4y ago> I bet if you correct for the effect of GDP per capita, they will rank near the bottom among European countries too. If you start correcting for other variables, you'll have to look at demographics, size and flatness of the country, prices, public transport availability, population distribution between rural and urban areas etc. etc. Relatively poor Romania has a lower number of cars per capita and if you live in Bucharest like me, you'd believe everyone owns a car (half being Dacias), nobody rides a bicycle.
- runeks 4y agoAnother Dane here. > Cars are MUCH more expensive to buy and own (sales tax used to be 180%, but I’m expat). The 180% tax rate is the highest bracket. So you don’t pay that rate on the first $x of the car’s price. So really expensive cars are almost three times as expensive, but cheap cars are about as expensive as in all other countries. Which is why you see a lot of cheap/small cars in Denmark.
- smegsicle 4y ago"if everyone bicycled as much as the most bicycling country, we'd save the emissions of an island nation" is arstechnica doing right wing comedy news now ?
- lazyjones 4y agoBicycles compete with public transport, not cars. Also: > The Vehicles per 1000 people of Denmark is similar to that of United Kingdom, Qatar, Czech Republic, Estonia, Ireland, Dominica, Barbados, Bermuda, Bulgaria, Slovak Republic with a respective Vehicles per 1000 people of 516, 514, 495, 494, 491, 470, 439, 422, 417, 382 (per 1,000 people) and a global rank of 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43. http://mecometer.com/whats/denmark/vehicles-per-thousand-people/ http://mecometer.com/whats/denmark/vehicles-per-thousand-peo... Therefore, this article is just the usual activism without substance.
- eesmith 4y agoThe underlying paper comments the Czech Republic has high car ownership but relatively low use because of good public transport: > The few exceptions where car modal share remains low and car ownership is relatively high, such as Switzerland, Japan, and the Czech Republic, have well-developed and efficient public transportation systems (e.g., public buses and subways) to satisfy their main mobility demand. Thus, a ranking of "Vehicles per 1000 people" isn't necessarily indicative of vehicle use, and it's the latter which generates CO2 (for IC engines) and other pollutants, not mere ownership. The paper calculates the effect of changing the modal share of bike use world-wide to match that of Denmark, and presents the first ever (to the authors' knowledge) substance for that calculation.
- sokoloff 4y agoBicycles compete with other modes of transport in varying degrees. Critically, bicycles have very close to the same random route ability as cars. They’re excluded from most limited-access highways but otherwise can go directly to a place 2 miles away by traveling approximately 2 miles and without significant waiting times for the user. Contrast that with public transit that might need to go 5+ miles and involve a transfer, multiple waits, and walking on both ends to cover that same 2 mile journey. It was practically possible for me to cycle to my old office. It was comically impractical (though technically possible) to use a combination of multiple buses and multiple subway lines to get there. For that commute (and I think many other journeys), bikes are competing with cars not public transit.
- tromp 4y agoEven though Copenhagen is often credited as being the most bike-friendly city, overall the Dutch bike more than the Danes: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/dutch-cycling-figures/ https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/dutch-cycling-...
- t_mann 4y ago* UK's worth of emissions in 2015. More concretely, 400-700mn tons of CO2 would reduce global emissions (currently about 35bn tons: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions ) by 1-2%.
- MezzoDelCammin 4y agosure, but it's also pretty easy to implement / low hanging fruit. In the beginning, bike paths can be just painted on the ground / plastic barriers in riskier places. It can be improved upon later as the roads are going through more thorough maintenance / renovations. Once some reasonably safe infrastructure is in place, the bike traffic often picks up pretty quickly on its own.
- _dain_ 4y ago> That said, the vulnerability of cyclists to cars poses its own lethal risks. But these aren't anywhere close enough to outweigh the benefits from lower obesity. (They'd add about 90,000 and 160,000 additional deaths per year for the two levels of use.) And, if fewer drivers are using cars, there's a chance that these numbers would come in even lower. Are they using the existing car->cyclist kill risk for this? The only way you would actually get people to bike more is by making it safer via dedicated infrastructure, so this figure would necessarily be lower.
- speedgoose 4y agoCan’t we simply get rid of UK instead?
- aspyct 4y agoCan we keep Scotland though?
- orangetuba 4y agoNow we just have to make all the other countries entirely flat. Here in Norway, going to work by bike is like a triathlon in terms of effort.
- otabdeveloper4 4y agoAwesome, now we just need to move everyone to someplace without snow or hot weather.
- _dain_ 4y agopeople bike in finland and spain
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cato_the_elder 4y agoWell, Denmark has a draconian tax on cars [1]. I assume for many Danes, it's not like they have access to a car and are biking to work by choices. [1]: https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/denmark-agrees-green-conversion-road-transport/ https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/denmark-agrees-g...
- Proven 4y ago
- runeks 4y agoFrom the link: > The parties have agreed that an extra tier will be introduced, whereby a lower 25% tax rate will be applied to the car’s value up to DKK 65,000 in 2021. The 85% tax rate will then be applied up to the slightly higher value of DKK 202,200 in 2021, with the 150% rate above that level. So you can buy a 80k DKK car and pay only 25% tax. (Which is the sales tax rate in Denmark for all consumer goods)
- cato_the_elder 4y agoAs of today, 65,000 DKK amounts to about 8,800 USD. I don't know of any (new) regular cars you could buy at that price. Also, I'm not sure where did that 80k number came from. If you're using it just as an example, then I think the effective tax rate on that would be 36.25%. [1]. [1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%280.25*65000%2B0.85*15000%29%2F80000 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%280.25*65000%2B0.85*15...
- runeks 4y agoThe 80k DKK is the price you pay including tax. So 65k is the price before tax, plus 25% which is 81.25k. Regarding car prices, many Danes drive cars that cost a bit over DKK 100k, on which the effective sales tax isn’t much higher than 25%.
- cato_the_elder 4y ago
- aspyct 4y agoWhat a terrible, terrible title. Makes it seem not worth it...
- fzfaa 4y ago
- mercy_dude 4y agoI have always felt analysis like these are missing some details useful for the context? For example, how does it scale to a population size of UK and is it comparing the entire UK pollution (including industrial)?
- cato_the_elder 4y agoT̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶m̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶i̶n̶k̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶p̶e̶c̶i̶f̶i̶c̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶e̶a̶r̶c̶h̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶p̶o̶r̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶t̶i̶c̶l̶e̶.̶
- markvdb 4y agohttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00497-4 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00497-4 . It's linked at the bottom of the article.
- cato_the_elder 4y agoOh, I see. Thank you.
- asalahli 4y agoI'd be curious to see how this compares to cutting or reducing emissions from other sources, like private jets or burning coal. At a glance, without knowing much about greenhouse emissions, this seems like an extremely high effort low impact measure. Surely there must be lower hanging fruits?
- eesmith 4y ago> like private jets When that comes up, people make comments like "The problem with banning private jets for reasons of climate change: it is nothing but symbolism." and "Good intention but in my opinion this is a non-starter." and "This seems like the worst kind of envy politics.", to quote three of many HN comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32342021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32342021 from 16 days ago.
- CaptArmchair 4y agoI think these articles are doing alternatives to car use - be it CE or electric - a disservice. Why? Because they seem to confound cause and effect. This isn't about "geography" or "wealth". It's about infrastructure, urban planning and lifestyle. In the western world, the architecture of cities and regions has been redesigned during the 20th century to accommodate car use as the primary mode of transport. And it happen as a complex interplay between business interests, market demand and public governance, creating intricate feedback loops. At the start of the 20th century, when the automobile was still in it's infancy, car use was looked down upon and there was even an anti-car sentiment. e.g. https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history It's worth paying attention to history and wonder how cars became so dominant a transportation mode in the first place. In that regard, this statement: > So, the biggest barrier is likely to remain the social will to rethink transportation. Should have been the premise of the article. Not its conclusion.