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The US anti-car narrative often refers to the Netherlands as some kind of beacon of proper public infrastructure, whilst not knowing a damn thing about it. Fir

by fleddr 4y ago

The US anti-car narrative often refers to the Netherlands as some kind of beacon of proper public infrastructure, whilst not knowing a damn thing about it. First, let's establish that the Netherlands is a car country. We have 11 million cars on a population of 17 million. On a typical day, 1 million people use public transport. Cars are the norm, not trains or bicycles. Public transport is rarely faster, not even in the most idyllic example that you give where you go from big city to big city. The thing you conveniently forget to consider is that nobody lives near the station of city A and then also works very closely to the station of city B. It almost always includes additional travel towards A and from B. Cycling, trams, buses, multiple stops in both directions. It adds up. To illustrate how absurdly slow public transport can be, a personal example. I used to live directly behind a train station in a mid-sized city. Doesn't get much better than that, right? Let's explore the commute to work, some 60km away... I have to get up early and be there some 10 mins before departure to secure somewhat of a reasonable spot. Next, I'm on route to the first big city station. This route is slow, it stops 5 times along the way as everybody needs to connect to a big hub to get where they need to be. I arrive at the hub, where there's a 20 minute connection wait to take the train to the big city destination. This route is longer but fast, no stops along the way. I get out and have a 10 minute connection wait for the bus to take me to the place closest to work, after which there's a 5-10 minute work. Total commute time: 2.5 hours single way. To move 60km. And that's living behind a train station and working at one of the countries' largest employers. What works really well in the Netherlands is living within a cycling radius from work, every other option sucks.

tmnvix 4y ago
> Let's explore the commute to work, some 60km away... Well. There's your problem. The idea of travelling 60km to work is a very modern phenomenon. Like a lot of people you've built your life around car travel. It's hard to get back from that.
xputer 4y ago
Well it seems you're criticizing Americans' rosy view of Dutch public infrastructure without realizing how absurd the US is in terms of infrastructure. I challenge you to visit the US and not use a car at all. In many cities you wouldn't even be able to get out of the airport. Yet Schiphol has a massive station underneath it with trains that can take you, not only to Amsterdam, but to virtually any city and even small town in the country.
- fragmede 4y ago
  Not just in the county, but to other countries, which thanks to Shengen, means it's viable to live in one country and work in another. High speed rail ftw.
refurb 4y ago
It's similar in Singapore which arguably, because of its size has amazing public transport. But what do a lot of people do if they can afford it? Buy a car, especially if you want to live away from the city center and have kids. They even pay the $100,000 fee for a 10 year permit to have a car, on top of 100% import tax. That's close to $175,000 just to own some tiny 3-cylinder car for 10 years.
- iso1631 4y ago
  I spent a month in Singapore in 2015, staying at an apartment in Haugong, 10km from my office. Public transport took an hour to get to the office. A taxi was 20 minutes. I'd agree public transport isn't great by a long way. Riding a bike if I lived there permanently might have been better, even with the 32 degree heat.
- noobermin 4y ago
  Singapore was literally rebuilt for cars very much like America. It's not because cars are better, and even so drivers are miserable here they rank low on waze's rankings of happy drivers, with Netherlands much further up the pack. All new developments (HDB as well) are even more car centric. If you can drive, you are afforded privilege in some respects, and so that's why people do it. Also, "live away from the city center and have kids" ignores that still 89% of people in singapore don't own cars, and no, 89% of people in sg do not "live near the city center" or "don't have kids."
  - refurb 4y ago
    You kinda prove my point. 11% own cars because thats the government cap (no more cars allowed), but even middle class people are willing to spend hundreds of thousands for the benefits of driving. And to say Singapore was built for cars is kinda funny. It has one of the best public transit systems in the world.
- vel0city 4y ago
  When you make it incredibly expensive to own a car, few people own cars. Who would have guessed? I wonder what car ownership would look like if there was no fee and taxes were much lower?
ddevault 4y ago
This is a pretty unusual situation, where you presumably live in the sticks and commute to the city, or vice versa? In the cities, particularly Amsterdam, cars are not the favored option. In Amsterdam 38% of travel is by bike, Zwolle is 46%. Across the whole country the averages break down at 45% by car, 36% by bike, and 11% by transit. That is to say, a very slight majority prefers modes other than a car across the country as a whole, and within cities the difference is presumably more significant. These figures, even in their most conservative interpretation, are wildly different from the United States, where travel by bike is a rounding error and the public transit options are abysmal.
hgomersall 4y ago
I think the question that anyone that rejects cars would ask is "why do you choose to live 60km from your work?".
- davidMC1982 4y ago
  Because his partner works 60km in the opposite direction?
  - mcv 4y ago
    It's generally better to live close to one person's workplace than right in between the two.
    - HardlyCurious 4y ago
      Why?
      - mcv 4y ago
        So only one person instead of two has to suffer through a dreadful commute, you need only one car instead of two, one parent works close to where the kids go to school, etc. If you live in the middle, everything is far away for everybody. That doesn't mean it's not viable to live in the middle, but I think these are some pretty good arguments why it's often preferable to live close to at least one partner's workplace. Obviously it's not going to work for everybody, but if you're thinking about where to buy your house, this may be worth taking into consideration.
        HardlyCurious 4y ago
        Would you volunteer to have twice the dreadful commute for the benefit of your partner, or do you see yourself being the beneficiary of this configuration?
        mcv 4y ago
speeder 4y ago
That is not a car country. São Paulo has more car than population, and has so many cars that their area summed is bigger than the area of all streets in the city. It is so many cars that sometimes walking 1 hour to your workplace is faster than a car route where you can spend 2, 3 hours to go to a neighborhood next to yours during rush hour. So many cars that the city became also the city with most helicopters, because as ludicrously expensive they are, for people that need to reach their workplace really fast (CEO, firemen, medics...) helicopters are good idea. Situation got so bad that the government wants to heavily restrict the use of helicopters because private helicopters were causing literally airborne traffic jams along the normal traffic jam, blocking public services like police from moving to emergency sites. EDIT: indeed I was talking about adults, forgot to make it clear. Still the percentage of cars to people in Brazil tends to be high. It is one of the reasons car companies love Brazil. There are historical reasons for that. Mostly politics related.
- HardlyCurious 4y ago
  If that is your standard for being a 'car country'. What is your standard for being a 'public transport country' or 'train country'?
- jononomo 4y ago
  Does São Paulo have more cars than people even if you include children? Surely there must also be an underclass of very poor or homeless people who do not own cars. What accounts for the fact that there are more cars than people? Is it common for a household of four (mother, father, son, daughter) to own five or six cars?
  - bluGill 4y ago
    I don't know Brazil, but based on what I know of the US I wouldn't be surprised. A couple will often own 3 cars, 2 daily drivers and one for some other odd task (truck, or the sports car) that is used as a backup. It will be one car per kid of driving age, though most kids are not old enough to drive. Then there are work cars, which for tax/legal reasons can't be used for personal trips so those who have them will also have a personal car for non-work trips. There are people who keep a car at their vacation house. Rental cars also add a fair number of cars. Plus collectors who have a dozen cars that they only drive to shows. It all adds up.
goodpoint 4y ago
> The US anti-car narrative often refers to the Netherlands as some kind of beacon of proper public infrastructure No, you are confusing the Netherlands an a whole with cities like Amsterdam. People refer to the latter as an example of walkable cities.
rexpress 4y ago
>First, let's establish that the Netherlands is a car country...On a typical day, 1 million people use public transport. Cars are the norm, not trains or bicycles. Anyone visiting a Dutch city can see what a distortion this comment is. The sheer volume of bike traffic on largely safe infrastructure is phenomenal. Imagine if even half of these people took to cars instead, it would be gridlock. Life may be good for Dutch drivers, but only because so many others leave their cars at home.
- hintymad 4y ago
  It seems you're assuming that majority of the people live in the city or would love in a city? Many people, me included, do not want to live in a city, at least not in an American city. What a city boasts to offer are not relevant to my life: bars, shops, boutique stores, fancy restaurants, active social circles, loud parties, fashion shows, you name it. All those activities are just either too noisy or too crowded. On the other hand, there's not enough outdoor activities in a city. Things are so small in a city too. I want to stay in a spacious coffee shop talking to my friends without raising my voice. I want to have a huge gym instead of those crammed multi-floor ones in a city. I want to have a house that has large enough backyard and front yard and quiet streets for my kids to play around. I want to be able to play drum on my front yard and my neighbors won't hear a thing (I'm exaggerating but you get the idea). I want to be able to hop on a vehicle to ski in a place no more than 30 minutes away from my home whenever I want to. And I certainly don't want to take a bus for grocery shopping for a family of 6. The only thing in a city that I miss is those amazing huge libraries. God I enjoy spending my whole day there. And if I can afford such life without a car, I'm all for it. But I don't know how.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  How is that a distortion? It seems like you’re violently agreeing with the parent that many people bike to work but far, far fewer than the majority (which is essentially what the American anti-car rhetoric suggests). > Imagine if even half of these people took to cars instead, it would be gridlock. There are 10 million employed Dutch (Statista) of whom 65% drive (Statista), so an additional half a million would be a 10% traffic increase, which is probably not “gridlock”, but in any case I don’t see how this refutes the original claim that Netherlands is a car country.
mcv 4y ago
> We have 11 million cars on a population of 17 million. Yeah, but we have 23 million bikes. It's true that our public transport has been neglected. The privatisation of the 1990s was a bad idea in my opinion, and public transport should be run for the public good, not for profit. Like roads, it's part of the nation's infrastructure. And better public transport means less people on the road, which means less traffic jams, which will also mean better travel times for people who really do need cars. The number of bike trips and car trips aren't that far apart (25% and 32%). Public transport still lags way behind at 3%.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  All of that is true but it doesn’t seem to refute the parent’s claim that the American anti-car rhetoric envisions a nation where cycling and taking public transit to work is the norm because the Dutch have figured out how to make cycling and public transit faster than driving.
  - dashundchen 4y ago
    It doesn't refute it because I think it's a mischaracterization of what "anti-car" or bike/transit/pedestrians advocates are typically asking for What I and many other advocates in the US want is for anything besides cars to be even considered in public infrastructure and urban design. Living without access to a car is near impossible in lots of US cities. The default is to design around the car, if bikes or pedestrians are mentioned it's tacked on as an afterthought. An example I had just last night was my US city presented their first phase of the "bike master plan". Essentially the engineers told us they didn't want to maintain protected bike infrastructure or interfere with traffic. About half of the "improvements" they listed out were "sharrows", bike symbols painted in the travel lane. The other half were striped bike lanes with no protection from vehicles. And this is in a city that's inherited some bike/ped/transit friendliness by the nature of it being built pre-war. Good luck in the exurban sprawl, South and Sunbelt - you'll be lucky to even have a sidewalk, nevermind a bike lane on the 8 lane road. The car is default in the US.
  - mcv 4y ago
    Not Just Bikes on youtube (strongly recommended) loves to point out that Netherland is not just better for bikes, but also for cars, exactly because so many people travel by bike, leaving the road available for those who really do need a car. And the roads here are far better maintained than in any of our neighbouring countries. For some trips, cycling or public transport really is faster than driving, but for others obviously not. The most important thing is that all three are viable options. Forcing everybody into only one of those three will hurt everybody.
vel0city 4y ago
Traveling 60km, even in traffic near me, would take like 45 minutes by car. It's a bit of a long commute by US norms (I think average is 20mi, 32km) but not too crazy compared to what some people do.
chasely 4y ago
The Netherlands ranks 36th on the list of cars per capita [0]. This is higher than I thought it would be but it's still quite a ways away from the countries I would consider to be car-centric like the US and Canada (ranked 6th and 8th, respectively). I also found this plot interesting relating vehicles and GDP [1], though the data seems outdated compared to the first link. I'd also guess, though I can't find the data, that the US is one the highest cars per capita rates in its cities. Outside of NYC and Chicago, there is a real lack of public transport infrastructure in most US cities. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_... [1]
thesuitonym 4y ago
My guy, nobody thinks the Netherlands is a perfect beacon of transit, but you just can't understand what it's like living in the US. Even if you live in a large metro, unless it's NYC or you live and work in the right parts of Chicago, public transit just isn't even an option--unless an hour and a half commute on a bus is worth it to you. Let's compare your commute to work to a commute in the US: >I have to get up early and be there some 10 mins before departure to secure somewhat of a reasonable spot. In the US, you have to be there at least 30 minutes early, because the parking lot will be absolutely packed, and the busses don't run on time, so it might get there too soon. >Next, I'm on route to the first big city station. We don't even have this in the US. You would have had to already be in the city to get on the bus. >This route is slow, it stops 5 times along the way as everybody needs to connect to a big hub to get where they need to be. In the US, this route stops the same five times, but also gets stuck in rush hour traffic, because we rarely have dedicated transit lanes. I arrive at the hub, where there's a 20 minute connection wait to take the train to the big city destination. The connection in the US would be at least 30 minutes, if you're lucky it will be scheduled at 20 during rush hour, but the bus is probably late. Also, again, it's not going into the city, you were already there, you just need to get on a different route. >I get out and have a 10 minute connection wait for the bus to take me to the place closest to work, after which there's a 5-10 minute work. If you have to make another connection outside the hub, you're probably waiting at least 45 minutes, in addition to the bus being late. The closest bus stop to where you work is another 30 minute walk away, along a 45 mph highway with no bike lanes and a sidewalk that just randomly ends occasionally. >Total commute time: 2.5 hours single way. To move 60km. And that's living behind a train station and working at one of the countries' largest employers. In the US, this was actually entire hypothetical. The route just doesn't actually exist. Hope this helps you see why we place NL on a pedestal. We know it's not perfect, but it's so much better than what we have. Unless you live in an incredibly small portion of the country, it's just not an option.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >In the US, this was actually entire hypothetical. The route just doesn't actually exist. Drag your butt over to Google maps and punch in a route from Lowell, Leominster, Worcester or Taunton Massachusetts (outlying cities in the Boston area people many commute in from) to any portion of the Boston area just inside I95 but not downtown and eyeball the times. The route exists in the US and the times are in line with his estimates.
cscurmudgeon 4y ago
Well said. The pro-EU narrative hypes up everything in the EU or Europe zone ignoring data. For e.g., US rail infra is more than that of Netherlands per capita: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Transport/Railways/Total/Per-capita https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Transport/Ra... Usage (totals): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...

by fleddr 4y ago

tmnvix 4y ago

> Let's explore the commute to work, some 60km away... Well. There's your problem. The idea of travelling 60km to work is a very modern phenomenon. Like a lot of people you've built your life around car travel. It's hard to get back from that.

xputer 4y ago

Well it seems you're criticizing Americans' rosy view of Dutch public infrastructure without realizing how absurd the US is in terms of infrastructure. I challenge you to visit the US and not use a car at all. In many cities you wouldn't even be able to get out of the airport. Yet Schiphol has a massive station underneath it with trains that can take you, not only to Amsterdam, but to virtually any city and even small town in the country.

fragmede 4y ago
Not just in the county, but to other countries, which thanks to Shengen, means it's viable to live in one country and work in another. High speed rail ftw.

refurb 4y ago

It's similar in Singapore which arguably, because of its size has amazing public transport. But what do a lot of people do if they can afford it? Buy a car, especially if you want to live away from the city center and have kids. They even pay the $100,000 fee for a 10 year permit to have a car, on top of 100% import tax. That's close to $175,000 just to own some tiny 3-cylinder car for 10 years.

iso1631 4y ago
I spent a month in Singapore in 2015, staying at an apartment in Haugong, 10km from my office. Public transport took an hour to get to the office. A taxi was 20 minutes. I'd agree public transport isn't great by a long way. Riding a bike if I lived there permanently might have been better, even with the 32 degree heat.
noobermin 4y ago
Singapore was literally rebuilt for cars very much like America. It's not because cars are better, and even so drivers are miserable here they rank low on waze's rankings of happy drivers, with Netherlands much further up the pack. All new developments (HDB as well) are even more car centric. If you can drive, you are afforded privilege in some respects, and so that's why people do it. Also, "live away from the city center and have kids" ignores that still 89% of people in singapore don't own cars, and no, 89% of people in sg do not "live near the city center" or "don't have kids."
- refurb 4y ago
  You kinda prove my point. 11% own cars because thats the government cap (no more cars allowed), but even middle class people are willing to spend hundreds of thousands for the benefits of driving. And to say Singapore was built for cars is kinda funny. It has one of the best public transit systems in the world.
vel0city 4y ago
When you make it incredibly expensive to own a car, few people own cars. Who would have guessed? I wonder what car ownership would look like if there was no fee and taxes were much lower?

ddevault 4y ago

This is a pretty unusual situation, where you presumably live in the sticks and commute to the city, or vice versa? In the cities, particularly Amsterdam, cars are not the favored option. In Amsterdam 38% of travel is by bike, Zwolle is 46%. Across the whole country the averages break down at 45% by car, 36% by bike, and 11% by transit. That is to say, a very slight majority prefers modes other than a car across the country as a whole, and within cities the difference is presumably more significant. These figures, even in their most conservative interpretation, are wildly different from the United States, where travel by bike is a rounding error and the public transit options are abysmal.

hgomersall 4y ago

I think the question that anyone that rejects cars would ask is "why do you choose to live 60km from your work?".

davidMC1982 4y ago
Because his partner works 60km in the opposite direction?
- mcv 4y ago
  It's generally better to live close to one person's workplace than right in between the two.
  - HardlyCurious 4y ago
    Why?
    - mcv 4y ago
      So only one person instead of two has to suffer through a dreadful commute, you need only one car instead of two, one parent works close to where the kids go to school, etc. If you live in the middle, everything is far away for everybody. That doesn't mean it's not viable to live in the middle, but I think these are some pretty good arguments why it's often preferable to live close to at least one partner's workplace. Obviously it's not going to work for everybody, but if you're thinking about where to buy your house, this may be worth taking into consideration.
      - HardlyCurious 4y ago
        Would you volunteer to have twice the dreadful commute for the benefit of your partner, or do you see yourself being the beneficiary of this configuration?
        mcv 4y ago

speeder 4y ago

That is not a car country. São Paulo has more car than population, and has so many cars that their area summed is bigger than the area of all streets in the city. It is so many cars that sometimes walking 1 hour to your workplace is faster than a car route where you can spend 2, 3 hours to go to a neighborhood next to yours during rush hour. So many cars that the city became also the city with most helicopters, because as ludicrously expensive they are, for people that need to reach their workplace really fast (CEO, firemen, medics...) helicopters are good idea. Situation got so bad that the government wants to heavily restrict the use of helicopters because private helicopters were causing literally airborne traffic jams along the normal traffic jam, blocking public services like police from moving to emergency sites. EDIT: indeed I was talking about adults, forgot to make it clear. Still the percentage of cars to people in Brazil tends to be high. It is one of the reasons car companies love Brazil. There are historical reasons for that. Mostly politics related.

HardlyCurious 4y ago
If that is your standard for being a 'car country'. What is your standard for being a 'public transport country' or 'train country'?
jononomo 4y ago
Does São Paulo have more cars than people even if you include children? Surely there must also be an underclass of very poor or homeless people who do not own cars. What accounts for the fact that there are more cars than people? Is it common for a household of four (mother, father, son, daughter) to own five or six cars?
- bluGill 4y ago
  I don't know Brazil, but based on what I know of the US I wouldn't be surprised. A couple will often own 3 cars, 2 daily drivers and one for some other odd task (truck, or the sports car) that is used as a backup. It will be one car per kid of driving age, though most kids are not old enough to drive. Then there are work cars, which for tax/legal reasons can't be used for personal trips so those who have them will also have a personal car for non-work trips. There are people who keep a car at their vacation house. Rental cars also add a fair number of cars. Plus collectors who have a dozen cars that they only drive to shows. It all adds up.

goodpoint 4y ago

> The US anti-car narrative often refers to the Netherlands as some kind of beacon of proper public infrastructure No, you are confusing the Netherlands an a whole with cities like Amsterdam. People refer to the latter as an example of walkable cities.

rexpress 4y ago

>First, let's establish that the Netherlands is a car country...On a typical day, 1 million people use public transport. Cars are the norm, not trains or bicycles. Anyone visiting a Dutch city can see what a distortion this comment is. The sheer volume of bike traffic on largely safe infrastructure is phenomenal. Imagine if even half of these people took to cars instead, it would be gridlock. Life may be good for Dutch drivers, but only because so many others leave their cars at home.

hintymad 4y ago
It seems you're assuming that majority of the people live in the city or would love in a city? Many people, me included, do not want to live in a city, at least not in an American city. What a city boasts to offer are not relevant to my life: bars, shops, boutique stores, fancy restaurants, active social circles, loud parties, fashion shows, you name it. All those activities are just either too noisy or too crowded. On the other hand, there's not enough outdoor activities in a city. Things are so small in a city too. I want to stay in a spacious coffee shop talking to my friends without raising my voice. I want to have a huge gym instead of those crammed multi-floor ones in a city. I want to have a house that has large enough backyard and front yard and quiet streets for my kids to play around. I want to be able to play drum on my front yard and my neighbors won't hear a thing (I'm exaggerating but you get the idea). I want to be able to hop on a vehicle to ski in a place no more than 30 minutes away from my home whenever I want to. And I certainly don't want to take a bus for grocery shopping for a family of 6. The only thing in a city that I miss is those amazing huge libraries. God I enjoy spending my whole day there. And if I can afford such life without a car, I'm all for it. But I don't know how.
throwaway894345 4y ago
How is that a distortion? It seems like you’re violently agreeing with the parent that many people bike to work but far, far fewer than the majority (which is essentially what the American anti-car rhetoric suggests). > Imagine if even half of these people took to cars instead, it would be gridlock. There are 10 million employed Dutch (Statista) of whom 65% drive (Statista), so an additional half a million would be a 10% traffic increase, which is probably not “gridlock”, but in any case I don’t see how this refutes the original claim that Netherlands is a car country.

mcv 4y ago

> We have 11 million cars on a population of 17 million. Yeah, but we have 23 million bikes. It's true that our public transport has been neglected. The privatisation of the 1990s was a bad idea in my opinion, and public transport should be run for the public good, not for profit. Like roads, it's part of the nation's infrastructure. And better public transport means less people on the road, which means less traffic jams, which will also mean better travel times for people who really do need cars. The number of bike trips and car trips aren't that far apart (25% and 32%). Public transport still lags way behind at 3%.

throwaway894345 4y ago
All of that is true but it doesn’t seem to refute the parent’s claim that the American anti-car rhetoric envisions a nation where cycling and taking public transit to work is the norm because the Dutch have figured out how to make cycling and public transit faster than driving.
- dashundchen 4y ago
  It doesn't refute it because I think it's a mischaracterization of what "anti-car" or bike/transit/pedestrians advocates are typically asking for What I and many other advocates in the US want is for anything besides cars to be even considered in public infrastructure and urban design. Living without access to a car is near impossible in lots of US cities. The default is to design around the car, if bikes or pedestrians are mentioned it's tacked on as an afterthought. An example I had just last night was my US city presented their first phase of the "bike master plan". Essentially the engineers told us they didn't want to maintain protected bike infrastructure or interfere with traffic. About half of the "improvements" they listed out were "sharrows", bike symbols painted in the travel lane. The other half were striped bike lanes with no protection from vehicles. And this is in a city that's inherited some bike/ped/transit friendliness by the nature of it being built pre-war. Good luck in the exurban sprawl, South and Sunbelt - you'll be lucky to even have a sidewalk, nevermind a bike lane on the 8 lane road. The car is default in the US.
- mcv 4y ago
  Not Just Bikes on youtube (strongly recommended) loves to point out that Netherland is not just better for bikes, but also for cars, exactly because so many people travel by bike, leaving the road available for those who really do need a car. And the roads here are far better maintained than in any of our neighbouring countries. For some trips, cycling or public transport really is faster than driving, but for others obviously not. The most important thing is that all three are viable options. Forcing everybody into only one of those three will hurt everybody.

vel0city 4y ago

Traveling 60km, even in traffic near me, would take like 45 minutes by car. It's a bit of a long commute by US norms (I think average is 20mi, 32km) but not too crazy compared to what some people do.

chasely 4y ago

The Netherlands ranks 36th on the list of cars per capita [0]. This is higher than I thought it would be but it's still quite a ways away from the countries I would consider to be car-centric like the US and Canada (ranked 6th and 8th, respectively). I also found this plot interesting relating vehicles and GDP [1], though the data seems outdated compared to the first link. I'd also guess, though I can't find the data, that the US is one the highest cars per capita rates in its cities. Outside of NYC and Chicago, there is a real lack of public transport infrastructure in most US cities. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_... [1]

thesuitonym 4y ago

My guy, nobody thinks the Netherlands is a perfect beacon of transit, but you just can't understand what it's like living in the US. Even if you live in a large metro, unless it's NYC or you live and work in the right parts of Chicago, public transit just isn't even an option--unless an hour and a half commute on a bus is worth it to you. Let's compare your commute to work to a commute in the US: >I have to get up early and be there some 10 mins before departure to secure somewhat of a reasonable spot. In the US, you have to be there at least 30 minutes early, because the parking lot will be absolutely packed, and the busses don't run on time, so it might get there too soon. >Next, I'm on route to the first big city station. We don't even have this in the US. You would have had to already be in the city to get on the bus. >This route is slow, it stops 5 times along the way as everybody needs to connect to a big hub to get where they need to be. In the US, this route stops the same five times, but also gets stuck in rush hour traffic, because we rarely have dedicated transit lanes. I arrive at the hub, where there's a 20 minute connection wait to take the train to the big city destination. The connection in the US would be at least 30 minutes, if you're lucky it will be scheduled at 20 during rush hour, but the bus is probably late. Also, again, it's not going into the city, you were already there, you just need to get on a different route. >I get out and have a 10 minute connection wait for the bus to take me to the place closest to work, after which there's a 5-10 minute work. If you have to make another connection outside the hub, you're probably waiting at least 45 minutes, in addition to the bus being late. The closest bus stop to where you work is another 30 minute walk away, along a 45 mph highway with no bike lanes and a sidewalk that just randomly ends occasionally. >Total commute time: 2.5 hours single way. To move 60km. And that's living behind a train station and working at one of the countries' largest employers. In the US, this was actually entire hypothetical. The route just doesn't actually exist. Hope this helps you see why we place NL on a pedestal. We know it's not perfect, but it's so much better than what we have. Unless you live in an incredibly small portion of the country, it's just not an option.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>In the US, this was actually entire hypothetical. The route just doesn't actually exist. Drag your butt over to Google maps and punch in a route from Lowell, Leominster, Worcester or Taunton Massachusetts (outlying cities in the Boston area people many commute in from) to any portion of the Boston area just inside I95 but not downtown and eyeball the times. The route exists in the US and the times are in line with his estimates.

cscurmudgeon 4y ago

Well said. The pro-EU narrative hypes up everything in the EU or Europe zone ignoring data. For e.g., US rail infra is more than that of Netherlands per capita: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Transport/Railways/Total/Per-capita https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Transport/Ra... Usage (totals): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...