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That's only for those that life far from the office. Which, if I'm to believe "Not Just Bikes" YouTube channel¹ is common in the US due to broken city planning

by berkes 4y ago

That's only for those that life far from the office. Which, if I'm to believe "Not Just Bikes" YouTube channel¹ is common in the US due to broken city planning. But really not in most of Europe. My cycle to an office is 20 minutes. And in the Netherlands that is considered a long cycling journey. Europe has it's car infested traffic jams too, don't get me wrong. But many of those stuck in those jams could choose to work close to home, or live close to offices. Houses and offices most often are intermixed in European (and often asian) cities. ¹https://youtube.com/@NotJustBikes https://youtube.com/@NotJustBikes

radarsat1 4y ago
Come on now. Many people in the Netherlands live in one city and work in another. Cost of living prohibits most people from living right next to where they work. I do that 10 minute bike ride.. to the train station.. then I take the train 1h in each direction three times a week and consider myself lucky for not having to do it every day. The trains are packed.
- baby 4y ago
  I think it's mostly a problem in big cities in Europe, whereas it's everywhere in the US
  - radarsat1 4y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I think the situation with public transport is vastly better in (western) Europe compared to North America, for a variety of reasons, a major one being that especially in NL almost every street has a double-laned bike path next to it. It really does make a difference to have that infrastructure in place, because people use it and this has major lifestyle and health benefits. But a claim that some majority of people can just bike 10 or 20 minutes to the office was just a bit wild considering my experience living here in NL and taking the train so often. Having said that, it is true that I can bike anywhere in the city I live in within half an hour, and I don't own a car because I can get anywhere by bike or train. The fact that I can do these things allows me to work in another city, instead of being bound to live in a certain restricted location, without even owning a car. But many people do drive, don't be confused. There are times when it would be really convenient to use a car, and I would be using a car sharing service if it weren't for the fact that my license is not valid here and I need to pass tests which is a long process.
    - baby 4y ago
      I don’t think that’s the claim. I would spend 3 hours per day in commute living in the bay area. You’re underestimating US commute time.
  - clnq 4y ago
    Yeah, but it's still a universal problem in high paying tech because their offices are in big cities (and sometimes expensive small cities). Editing to clarify - by tech being centred around expensive cities I don’t mean that tech offices are in urban areas rather than suburban. I mean that the large tech companies generally are in cities and towns that are more expensive than many other cities and towns. For example, there are cheap and pleasant places big tech workers have moved to during WFH times instead of staying in the Silicon Valley-SF region of CA. But some of these towns don’t have a big office building in sight.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      >universal problem in high paying tech It's by no means universal. A lot of tech is out in suburban office parks, some of which admittedly has its own traffic problems, e.g. Silicon Valley and suburban Washington DC.
      - clnq 4y ago
        Hmm, I didn’t express myself clearly. I edited my comment to clarify what I meant.
    - berkes 4y ago
      It's not "universal". Suburban city-planning is a US thing, almost exclusively (I'm told Canada follows suit). Most cities allow mixed commerce-living. Meaning there's offices, shops, factories in-between and below housing. Yet US suburban planning -by law- disallows offices (and shops and factories) to be mixed with housing. You are often literally not allowed to live close to work (or work close to your home). that isn't universal at all.
- berkes 4y ago
  I said exactly that. Only that you can choose to work and live in Amsterdam, ~15 minutes cycling from work. Or Eindhoven, Nijmegen, even Enschede or Groningen. Yet many people choose to live 30 minutes car-commute (or train) from their work. E.g. because it's easier to find a place there (which suits their wishes). Reverse: I'm certain that if you live in, say, Nijmegen, you can find a job there, but many people choose to work in Arnhem, Eindhoven or Amsterdam instead travelling up and down every day. I know. I've been there done that. In all directions.
  - tigerlily 4y ago
    I had to work in Arnhem once, but I chose to live in Nijmegen. If I timed it right I could do 10 minutes on the bike, 12 minutes by train and another 10 minutes by bike again. Most commutes were 40 minutes all up, which I found pretty workable. I didn't want the hassle of owning a car.
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    It still sounds like you're sacrificing your personal life for the sake of a commute. Good commute? Crap living situation. Good living situation? Crappy commute. Or I could just work from home and have a good living situation and no commute.
    - berkes 4y ago
      You're missing my point. In the US, in most places, it is illegal to have work and home close to each other. You are forced to choose between commuting and WFH. In Europe no such laws exist. If anything, the opposite is cemented in laws. Meaning it's often possible to work close from where you live and vice versa. I often work from home. But can choose to get on my bike and be in an office with colleagues, beer, pingpong and noise when I need it. My point was that this choice is important. And that good city planning allows for such choices
      - ekianjo 4y ago
        > it is illegal to have work and home close to each other. What do you mean by illegal?
senko 4y ago
Not all European cities have bike lanes as good as im the Netherlands. Zagreb, for example, has narrow bits of sidewalks painted to be "bike lanes" with street lamps and signs usually planted in the middle, lanes just stopping, etc. Making a city more bike friendly for real (and not just checking off items on a politician todo list) is a long and painful process. It'll happen, but right now it's easier to get stuck in traffic in a car than have to wade through the same traffic on a bike.
- berkes 4y ago
  But Zagreb quite certainly does not have laws that prohibit living where offices and shops are. Or disallow offices and shops where people live. Yet this is what happens in the US. You can probably grab a tram, metro or bus to work. OFC leftovers from "city planning" under Tito/socialism means there's more distinction between "living" and "commercial" areas than most of Western Europe. But its quite certainly nowhere near as bad as the suburbanism in the US. Which was my point.
eecc 4y ago
Yeah but people are weird: I’m also contracting in the Amsterdam area and I once got a fella quite stubbornly insisting I should commute daily to their office in Leeuwarden to work on their AWS stack. He even suggested I rent a room for the week if I didn’t like sitting on the train that much. Crazy
- t0mas88 4y ago
  That’s crazy, the only worse commute would be something like Maastricht and even that train route is better. I guess you found another client quickly?
  - eecc 4y ago
    Ah, of course. But I dis find it a bit regretful, the project sounded cool and there was some Kafka involved at a time that it wasn’t as hyped/established as it is today. But no, it wasn’t worth such a crazy commute, just to have bad coffee together
refurb 4y ago
I think you have a pretty distorted view of Europe if you think most people live a 20 min bike rise from work.
- berkes 4y ago
  I live in Europe. Have lived in many places in Europe. I don't have a distorted view. Main point was that European cities, in general (Dublin being somewhat of an exception by my experience) don't have suburban city planning. You typically live and work in the same city. Like e.g. Downtown New York - which, I'm told is somewhat of an exception, being an "old" US city. Travel by bus, metro, bike or tram.
  - refurb 4y ago
    https://www.sdworx.com/en-en/about-sd-worx/press/2018-09-20-more-20-europeans-commute-least-90-minutes-daily https://www.sdworx.com/en-en/about-sd-worx/press/2018-09-20-... ”In terms of distance undertaken, one fifth of Europeans (23.3%) travel, on average, further than 40 km or even more each day” 24% of Americans have a 15 min or less commute versus Europe which is 29%. Not that different. Sure, the mode of transportation is different, but not time spent commuting.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    > I don't have a distorted view. Maybe you lived in a bubble in Europe
t344344 4y ago
I hate Netherlands for that. They force sick and disabled people to cycle in winter and rain. And it is so expensive you have to live like 1 hour from work!
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  What?
- _v7gu 4y ago
  As opposed to left to their own devices with almost no public transit infrastructure and unwalkable curbs if their condition does not allow them to drive a car? Also roads still exist in Europe, you know.
- berkes 4y ago
  "They"? Who is that "they" that are forcing people to cycle?
cowsandmilk 4y ago
EU commute times and US commute times are not that different. Average one way EU commute was 25 minutes in 2019, for Netherlands, it was 27 minutes. [0] Average one way US commute was 27.6 minutes in 2019. [1] Sure, there’s a 10% difference, but there are EU states over 30 minutes. The US isn’t that much of an outlier. [0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/4187653/10321620/commuting+time+map.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/4187653/10321620/com... [1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/commuting/guidance/acs-1yr/DY2019-Mean-travel-time.pdf https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/commuting/guidance/...
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I was in a back-and-forth, a couple of months ago, right here on HN. I was shocked at how people here, pretty much outright accused me of lying, because I mentioned that the typical commute time, from the area I live (and there are many, many more areas, even farther out) to the city, is measured in hours. They keep whipping out that census site, and telling me that my eyes and experience are wrong, because Teh Internets Tubes says it's only 27 minutes (to travel 35 miles). I have to assume that the vast majority of folks here, have never had to deal with a typical (and it is typical) US suburban commute. If folks want to get a real (as opposed to complete fiction) idea of what a US commute is like, most cites have traffic cams on their arteries.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    In the NE US, if I have to commute into the major city 45 miles or so away, whether by car or by the commuter rail that's about a 7 minute drive away, I'm almost 2 hours door to door. It's "only" about 75 minutes if I drive in after work. Not that I ever go into my closer office any longer but that's about a 30 minute drive to an industrial park which is a very typical sort of commute. (I had about the same with another job years ago.)
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      At my job, the commute was about 30 minutes, as I commuted to a suburban office park (10 miles, North-South). I was in the office, five days (at least) a week, so that was 100 miles per week. However, almost everyone that lives around me, works in the city. Many of them take the train. I know several that drive, though. They usually have highly skewed hours (they will drive in at 5AM, and come back at 3, but even then, there's a lot of traffic). When I lived in the DC suburbs, even the suburban local commutes were crazy. I had a six-mile commute, one town South, and it often took 45 minutes. It would have been faster to bike.

by berkes 4y ago

radarsat1 4y ago

Come on now. Many people in the Netherlands live in one city and work in another. Cost of living prohibits most people from living right next to where they work. I do that 10 minute bike ride.. to the train station.. then I take the train 1h in each direction three times a week and consider myself lucky for not having to do it every day. The trains are packed.

baby 4y ago
I think it's mostly a problem in big cities in Europe, whereas it's everywhere in the US
- radarsat1 4y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I think the situation with public transport is vastly better in (western) Europe compared to North America, for a variety of reasons, a major one being that especially in NL almost every street has a double-laned bike path next to it. It really does make a difference to have that infrastructure in place, because people use it and this has major lifestyle and health benefits. But a claim that some majority of people can just bike 10 or 20 minutes to the office was just a bit wild considering my experience living here in NL and taking the train so often. Having said that, it is true that I can bike anywhere in the city I live in within half an hour, and I don't own a car because I can get anywhere by bike or train. The fact that I can do these things allows me to work in another city, instead of being bound to live in a certain restricted location, without even owning a car. But many people do drive, don't be confused. There are times when it would be really convenient to use a car, and I would be using a car sharing service if it weren't for the fact that my license is not valid here and I need to pass tests which is a long process.
  - baby 4y ago
    I don’t think that’s the claim. I would spend 3 hours per day in commute living in the bay area. You’re underestimating US commute time.
- clnq 4y ago
  Yeah, but it's still a universal problem in high paying tech because their offices are in big cities (and sometimes expensive small cities). Editing to clarify - by tech being centred around expensive cities I don’t mean that tech offices are in urban areas rather than suburban. I mean that the large tech companies generally are in cities and towns that are more expensive than many other cities and towns. For example, there are cheap and pleasant places big tech workers have moved to during WFH times instead of staying in the Silicon Valley-SF region of CA. But some of these towns don’t have a big office building in sight.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >universal problem in high paying tech It's by no means universal. A lot of tech is out in suburban office parks, some of which admittedly has its own traffic problems, e.g. Silicon Valley and suburban Washington DC.
    - clnq 4y ago
      Hmm, I didn’t express myself clearly. I edited my comment to clarify what I meant.
  - berkes 4y ago
    It's not "universal". Suburban city-planning is a US thing, almost exclusively (I'm told Canada follows suit). Most cities allow mixed commerce-living. Meaning there's offices, shops, factories in-between and below housing. Yet US suburban planning -by law- disallows offices (and shops and factories) to be mixed with housing. You are often literally not allowed to live close to work (or work close to your home). that isn't universal at all.
berkes 4y ago
I said exactly that. Only that you can choose to work and live in Amsterdam, ~15 minutes cycling from work. Or Eindhoven, Nijmegen, even Enschede or Groningen. Yet many people choose to live 30 minutes car-commute (or train) from their work. E.g. because it's easier to find a place there (which suits their wishes). Reverse: I'm certain that if you live in, say, Nijmegen, you can find a job there, but many people choose to work in Arnhem, Eindhoven or Amsterdam instead travelling up and down every day. I know. I've been there done that. In all directions.
- tigerlily 4y ago
  I had to work in Arnhem once, but I chose to live in Nijmegen. If I timed it right I could do 10 minutes on the bike, 12 minutes by train and another 10 minutes by bike again. Most commutes were 40 minutes all up, which I found pretty workable. I didn't want the hassle of owning a car.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  It still sounds like you're sacrificing your personal life for the sake of a commute. Good commute? Crap living situation. Good living situation? Crappy commute. Or I could just work from home and have a good living situation and no commute.
  - berkes 4y ago
    You're missing my point. In the US, in most places, it is illegal to have work and home close to each other. You are forced to choose between commuting and WFH. In Europe no such laws exist. If anything, the opposite is cemented in laws. Meaning it's often possible to work close from where you live and vice versa. I often work from home. But can choose to get on my bike and be in an office with colleagues, beer, pingpong and noise when I need it. My point was that this choice is important. And that good city planning allows for such choices
    - ekianjo 4y ago
      > it is illegal to have work and home close to each other. What do you mean by illegal?

senko 4y ago

Not all European cities have bike lanes as good as im the Netherlands. Zagreb, for example, has narrow bits of sidewalks painted to be "bike lanes" with street lamps and signs usually planted in the middle, lanes just stopping, etc. Making a city more bike friendly for real (and not just checking off items on a politician todo list) is a long and painful process. It'll happen, but right now it's easier to get stuck in traffic in a car than have to wade through the same traffic on a bike.

berkes 4y ago
But Zagreb quite certainly does not have laws that prohibit living where offices and shops are. Or disallow offices and shops where people live. Yet this is what happens in the US. You can probably grab a tram, metro or bus to work. OFC leftovers from "city planning" under Tito/socialism means there's more distinction between "living" and "commercial" areas than most of Western Europe. But its quite certainly nowhere near as bad as the suburbanism in the US. Which was my point.

eecc 4y ago

Yeah but people are weird: I’m also contracting in the Amsterdam area and I once got a fella quite stubbornly insisting I should commute daily to their office in Leeuwarden to work on their AWS stack. He even suggested I rent a room for the week if I didn’t like sitting on the train that much. Crazy

t0mas88 4y ago
That’s crazy, the only worse commute would be something like Maastricht and even that train route is better. I guess you found another client quickly?
- eecc 4y ago
  Ah, of course. But I dis find it a bit regretful, the project sounded cool and there was some Kafka involved at a time that it wasn’t as hyped/established as it is today. But no, it wasn’t worth such a crazy commute, just to have bad coffee together

refurb 4y ago

I think you have a pretty distorted view of Europe if you think most people live a 20 min bike rise from work.

berkes 4y ago
I live in Europe. Have lived in many places in Europe. I don't have a distorted view. Main point was that European cities, in general (Dublin being somewhat of an exception by my experience) don't have suburban city planning. You typically live and work in the same city. Like e.g. Downtown New York - which, I'm told is somewhat of an exception, being an "old" US city. Travel by bus, metro, bike or tram.
- refurb 4y ago
  https://www.sdworx.com/en-en/about-sd-worx/press/2018-09-20-more-20-europeans-commute-least-90-minutes-daily https://www.sdworx.com/en-en/about-sd-worx/press/2018-09-20-... ”In terms of distance undertaken, one fifth of Europeans (23.3%) travel, on average, further than 40 km or even more each day” 24% of Americans have a 15 min or less commute versus Europe which is 29%. Not that different. Sure, the mode of transportation is different, but not time spent commuting.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  > I don't have a distorted view. Maybe you lived in a bubble in Europe

t344344 4y ago

I hate Netherlands for that. They force sick and disabled people to cycle in winter and rain. And it is so expensive you have to live like 1 hour from work!

lazyasciiart 4y ago
What?
_v7gu 4y ago
As opposed to left to their own devices with almost no public transit infrastructure and unwalkable curbs if their condition does not allow them to drive a car? Also roads still exist in Europe, you know.
berkes 4y ago
"They"? Who is that "they" that are forcing people to cycle?

cowsandmilk 4y ago

EU commute times and US commute times are not that different. Average one way EU commute was 25 minutes in 2019, for Netherlands, it was 27 minutes. [0] Average one way US commute was 27.6 minutes in 2019. [1] Sure, there’s a 10% difference, but there are EU states over 30 minutes. The US isn’t that much of an outlier. [0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/4187653/10321620/commuting+time+map.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/4187653/10321620/com... [1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/commuting/guidance/acs-1yr/DY2019-Mean-travel-time.pdf https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/commuting/guidance/...

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I was in a back-and-forth, a couple of months ago, right here on HN. I was shocked at how people here, pretty much outright accused me of lying, because I mentioned that the typical commute time, from the area I live (and there are many, many more areas, even farther out) to the city, is measured in hours. They keep whipping out that census site, and telling me that my eyes and experience are wrong, because Teh Internets Tubes says it's only 27 minutes (to travel 35 miles). I have to assume that the vast majority of folks here, have never had to deal with a typical (and it is typical) US suburban commute. If folks want to get a real (as opposed to complete fiction) idea of what a US commute is like, most cites have traffic cams on their arteries.
- ghaff 4y ago
  In the NE US, if I have to commute into the major city 45 miles or so away, whether by car or by the commuter rail that's about a 7 minute drive away, I'm almost 2 hours door to door. It's "only" about 75 minutes if I drive in after work. Not that I ever go into my closer office any longer but that's about a 30 minute drive to an industrial park which is a very typical sort of commute. (I had about the same with another job years ago.)
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    At my job, the commute was about 30 minutes, as I commuted to a suburban office park (10 miles, North-South). I was in the office, five days (at least) a week, so that was 100 miles per week. However, almost everyone that lives around me, works in the city. Many of them take the train. I know several that drive, though. They usually have highly skewed hours (they will drive in at 5AM, and come back at 3, but even then, there's a lot of traffic). When I lived in the DC suburbs, even the suburban local commutes were crazy. I had a six-mile commute, one town South, and it often took 45 minutes. It would have been faster to bike.