7 ms·

The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work. They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub. If we want

The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work. They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub. If we want to lower cars in neighbourhoods, or want people to get rid of cars, our public transit system needs to be come a lot better first. If public transit was a good option to get to work for people, more people would use it. For me going to work is either a 20 minute car ride, with parking right in front of my house and right in front of work. Or it is a 10 minute walk, 45 minute bus ride where I likely have to stand and then another 5 minute walk. And I can't work past 20:00 because that's my last bus. Make it so public transit is less than 20 minutes, goes 24/7 and picks me up within 5 minutes walking of my home and I will use it. And no I don't even live in a village. Population of 140.000 people and I work in a city of 300.000.

bgnn 2y ago
busses are so bad here to be honest. a lot of metropolitan cities solved this problem by having frequent and efficient bus lines connecting to major train/tram/metro lines. Randstad is one big metropolis without a coherent public transportation planning. I moved here from Istanbul 12 years ago. the progress there was positive in this timeframe while in Randstad it was backwards to be honest. public transportation became more expensive and unreliable. busses are often empty and they seem to compensate this by increasing prices and cutting down the frequency, so it becomes less reliable for people to use it.. my commute to work is 15 km. it's 20 min by car without traffic but post-Covid traffic is so bad that it's 50 mins in average (1 hour+ on Tuesdays). bus is 30 mins with 1 connection but often I miss the connection and wait 15 mins, so it's 45 realistically. both are bad options, so I cycle instead in half an hour with my e-bike. if it's bad weather I take the car because busses are not on time so I can't plan being at the office for a meeting or so. plus, bus is much more expensive than my not so fuel efficient old car. go figure.
- systemtest 2y ago
  Yes prices are problematic. The above mentioned 20 kilometers to work is a 5 euro bus ticket. A bus full of people should not cost 25 cents per kilometer per person. It's slightly cheaper than my car but it should be a lot cheaper because so many people share one vehicle.
  - briandear 2y ago
    You have to pay the driver, benefits, maintenance of stops, and subsidize all the miles where the bus is below capacity.
    - systemtest 2y ago
      And we have to pay the shareholders of Connexxion, Qbuzz, Keolis and Arriva.
      - bgnn 2y ago
        This!
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - iggldiggl 2y ago
    Let's assume a driver's salary of 18 €/h. A rule of thumb I've heard is that vacation, sick days, social security etc. etc. approximately double that cost to the company, so 36 €/h. 20 kph average speed is already a somewhat generous value for a regular non-BRT city bus line, but let's use it for simplicity's sake, which gives 1,80 €/km driver's costs. Another rough value of thumb for city buses is that they use roughly about 30 l/100 km, which adds about 0,50 €/km, so 2,30 €/km for driver + fuel. A regular city bus holds about 100 passengers, and an average utilisation figure as averaged across the whole day and all routes might be somewhere around 20 %. So an average of 20 passengers per bus at all times, which means 11.5 cents per kilometre for driver and fuel. Now add-in capital cost for the bus itself, maintenance and other ancillary stuff and unfortunately 25 cents per kilometre isn't all that much all of a sudden. (If you can read some German, somebody did a more complete modelling of costs at https://prof.bht-berlin.de/fileadmin/prof/jschlaich/200811_Fr_JS_Kostenmodelle_NAHVERKEHR.pdf https://prof.bht-berlin.de/fileadmin/prof/jschlaich/200811_F..., and with some assumed fictitious but presumably plausible values ended up at 3,26 €/vehicle-km for a city bus operation in 2008 – and both (driver) pay and fuel have increased above inflation since then.)
papa-whisky 2y ago
Give me convenience or give me death...
- jajko 2y ago
  Extremist approach will never win any popularity and sway masses in such direction, so if you want to position some push for greener cities from extremist or even eco-terrorism perspective (so popular among young in western Europe these days), good luck seeing any results that would make you happy and actually achieve anything you wish for. World is more complex mixture of various people than just similarly-minded people. Number of examples in the past where people feeling righteous and above the rest imposed pretty harsh things on general population. Not the way we should be heading. We have serious issues with ecosystem, but even removing 100% of the cars alone won't solve any of those (plus it won't ever happen) so let's be a bit more smart.
- systemtest 2y ago
  In an individualistic country like The Netherlands people will typically pick what is best for themselves. You need to give them a better alternative if you want to influence their decision making. Nobody is trading a 20 minute drive for a 60 minute bus trip in order to create a better neighbourhood. Get that bus trip down to at most 30 minutes and people might reconsider.
  - namdnay 2y ago
    > people will typically pick what is best for themselves. You need to give them a better alternative if you want to influence their decision making Or remove/penalise the more convenient (but harmful) alternatives. We shouldn’t kid ourselves, we’re going to need sticks as well as carrots if we want to avoid disaster
    - rahen 2y ago
      What disaster?
      - 2y ago
the_gipsy 2y ago
> If we want to lower cars in neighbourhoods, or want people to get rid of cars, our public transit system needs to be come a lot better first. No, you can also start by imposing restrictions on cars. > If public transit was a good option to get to work for people, more people would use it. The people that live in the city center probably already use public transit because, for them, public transit is probably a faster commute. That means that the cars congesting the center are driven by people that live in the periphery or even suburbs outside of the city. So these people will want those nasty cars out, because they actually live there, and they will vote them out. You can never accommodate the people from the suburbs, unless they have a station right next to their door and their office and a train coming every 5 minutes, a car will always be faster. They live in someone else's municipality, so the mayors can just ignore them. People in the periphery are more delicate, but usually they are also tired of congestions, and it's much easier to make at least minor improvements to public transit for them. But again, you can restrict and make improvements in parallel, and the improvement will almost never be perceived as matching the restrictions anyway.
- systemtest 2y ago
  > No, you can also start by imposing restrictions on cars. Getting people into public transit by making car ownership worse is how you get unhappy people. That is just unproductive and destructive. Make public transit better, that is how you get people out of cars and happy. > The people that live in the city center probably already use public transit No they don't. The 74% of The Netherlands lives in a city yet 66% of people commute to work by car. That goes to show that even for people living in cities, going to work by car is still the preferred method. I'm one of them, in the example I gave above it was three times faster to go to work by car. > because they actually live there, and they will vote them out That is elitist "fuck you I got mine" mentality. Rich people in city centers able to afford expensive houses will make it harder for poor people in the affordable neighbouring cities to move around and get to work.
  - izacus 2y ago
    Can you provide a single study where people living in cities that reduced car dependency were "unhappy"? Every single survey I've seen across Netherlands, Slovenia, Switzerland and Germany showed big support AFTER the changes were made (but a lot of hand wringing like yours BEFORE they were made). The people that are usually unhappy are the ones that want to drag their SUVs in front of people living in city apartments and leave them there.
tizzy 2y ago
You guys are lucky in the NL that you have the _option_ to bike, drive, public transport. Maybe driving is still the fastest but the others are still treated as first class citizens. In the US you couldn’t realistically bike anywhere nor does public transport go everywhere. Not to mention the 10 minute walk to the bus stop is probably much worse, especially outside of big cities.
- systemtest 2y ago
  Agreed, on my recent trip to Los Angeles a 45 minute car trip would often turn into a 2 hours bus trip. And outside of Santa Monica / Venice / Hollywood / Downtown I would often not have sidewalks. It felt a bit like Spain in that regard.
- germinalphrase 2y ago
  “ In the US you couldn’t realistically bike anywhere nor does public transport go everywhere.” This does, of course, depend entirely on where in the US you live. People commute by bike year round in Minneapolis, and it’s a stereotype for people in New York City to not have driving licenses because they take transit everywhere.
  - digging 2y ago
    I'm unfamiliar with Minneapolis - sounds pretty amazing if there's a strong bicycle culture there, but not if "people" only means <1% of commuters. Bicycle enthusiasts live everywhere and are willing to make difficult or risky trips; we can't judge a city by whether or not hardcore bicyclists can survive there. NYC is an extreme outlier, we love to see it, but about 98% of the US doesn't live in the area served by NYC transit. I am sure the population of Minneapolis is much smaller, too. The vast majority of the US is prohibitively difficult to traverse by any mode except car. (Actually, it's usually a highly frustrating and dangerous experience by car, too.) I see reports of more than 60% of the population living in suburbs, which are, as a general rule, designed to discourage non-car travel.
    - ghaff 2y ago
rightbyte 2y ago
Unless it is some express buss I think it might be hard to get buss travel time to less than twice that of a car. edit: Meant twice, not half.
- systemtest 2y ago
  Didn't say bus, I meant public transit overal. Living and working in two cities of that size there should be faster public transit between them. Either that or better city planning so you don't end up with two cities of 140k and 300k but instead have one city of 440k with better interconnects between neighbourhoods and more light rail.
- its_bbq 2y ago
  Travel by bus in London and your opinion may change
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  BRT can do interesting things though, since it can skip traffic without skipping stops.
travisporter 2y ago
Honestly, even with the cost and the time I would take the bus. I hate driving so much lol.
gpm 2y ago
> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work I was curious about the statistics for this, and it looks like barely not to me, according to this data: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/84710ENG https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/84710ENG (the CSV you can download is much more readable than the table in the webpage) 0.44 trips/person/day travelling to/from work total in 2023, 0.21 of those by car. 2023 is the first year where that is the case though. Edit: If you go to the Dutch version of the data it includes another category for cars (commuting as a passenger in a car) that the English data omitted, with 0.01 of the trips. Moving it from "majority not-by-car in 2023" to "rounding errors mean the data doesn't say which is in the majority": https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/84710NED https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/84710NED
- systemtest 2y ago
  https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-vervoer/personen/van-en-naar-werk https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-vervoer/pe... > Inwoners van Nederland legden in 2022 gemiddeld 7,4 kilometer per dag af om van en naar het werk te gaan. Ruim 70 procent van de reizigerskilometers van en naar het werk werd met de auto afgelegd, meestal als bestuurder. De trein werd gebruikt voor 10 procent van deze kilometers, de gemiddelde afstand per treinverplaatsing van en naar het werk was 42,8 kilometer. Fietsen was goed voor 29 procent van de verplaatsingen van en naar het werk en voor 8 procent van de afgelegde afstand voor dit doel. De gemiddelde verplaatsingsafstand op de fiets was 4,7 kilometer. Minder dan 0,6 procent van de totale afstand om van en naar het werk te gaan werd te voet overbrugd. Google Translate: > In 2022, residents of the Netherlands traveled an average of 7.4 kilometers per day to and from work. More than 70 percent of the passenger kilometers to and from work were covered by car, usually as a driver. The train was used for 10 percent of these kilometers, the average distance per train trip to and from work was 42.8 kilometers. Cycling accounted for 29 percent of the trips to and from work and for 8 percent of the distance traveled for this purpose. The average distance traveled by bike was 4.7 kilometers. Less than 0.6 percent of the total distance to and from work was covered on foot.
  - gpm 2y ago
    I assume that's the same data. Cars go further than the average bicycle/pedestrian so while ~50% of the trips were by car ~70% of the distance was.
einpoklum 2y ago
> Make it so public transit is less than 20 minutes, goes 24/7 and picks me up within 5 minutes walking of my home and I will use it. Agreed! Except for the 24/7. I mean, when it comes to commuting, you need public transport to end late enough for you to stay late, but you don't need it at midnight. > The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work. Not the majority of city-dwellers in the Netherlands, I'm sure. > They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub. 2-minute bike ride then. And I say that as someone who's lived in the Netherlands, albeit only for a few years. It was _such_ a joy to be able to commute without a car (which I am again stuck with these days).
- TylerE 2y ago
  Their shift workers exist, as well as people with varying schedules like doctors/nurses. 24/7 is nessesary. Edit: Plus it could probably be justified by the reduction in drunk driving alone.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  >Agreed! Except for the 24/7. I mean, when it comes to commuting, you need public transport to end late enough for you to stay late, but you don't need it at midnight. Friday and Saturday public transit should at least run pretty late, unless you want people who don't want to pay for taxis driving home after drinking and partying.
Someone 2y ago
> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work. They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub. Not if that walk is through a car neighborhood, but if it’s through a neighborhood where there are almost no cars, good sidewalks, trees and grass? Also, aren’t many neighborhoods already somewhat like that in the Netherlands, with limited on-street parking? Even if there’s a parking garage under an apartment building, it likely already is a 5-10 minute walk to get there.
- kristjank 2y ago
  A pleasing aesthetic will not reimburse me for time lost.
globular-toast 2y ago
They don't want to walk because cars make walking less pleasant, more difficult and more dangerous. Everywhere you look things are made slightly easier for cars and slightly harder for everyone else.
Lutger 2y ago
I understand, but your points aren't really relevant for a number of reasons: First, it is a dream, you have to do something to make it work. You are describing the status quo, I want us to move to something else. After decades of neoliberalism, even embraced by the centre-left party, we have eroded our actually quite decent public transport facilities. There is no reason it has to stay this way. Second, I'm not talking about people commuting to work with public transport vs cars, even though it would be nice to get people out of the car into a much more efficient system. I'm talking about our neighbourhoods, the places where people actually live. I'm talking about going outside your house and not as a first thing having to face the noise, danger, pollution, ugliness, etc. of parked cars and cars moving on the road. The neighbourhood could be a place where children play on the streets, where there is space to meet each other, with room for trees and other vegetation. If you just move all the tin out of the neighbourhood and to the edges on big solar covered parking lots, then it is easily done. It will create a lot of space and very little downsides. Of course we can't just rebuild all cities, but we can use this design for new ones. I'm really not talking about parking along the edges of the city, so that you have to take a bus or bicycle in order to get to your car. I want people to park just on the edges of a block or neighbourhood (like 500 to 5000 people, depending on density). You should be able to walk to such a parking lot within 5 min. You would still be able to get to your house for things like groceries and stuff, just not park there. And disabled people would get an exception. Just this relatively simple change will reduce traffic immensely. Third, it may feel now like you are entitled to be able to park in front of your house and drive to it by car. Everybody must naturally accommodate your wishes in this respect, because this is what the majority wants. However, if we change that and take that away from you, it will not take a lot of time before that changes. And then people will start to feel entitled to be able to have their children play on the streets again, and to enjoy such these carless spaces. In the same way, smokers used to feel entitled to be able to smoke in restaurants, in the train and even at the office. Things can and do change. For the people who meticulously maxed out the total amount of minutes they are willing to commute, so that they really can't bear to add 2 x 5 minutes of healthy walks a day: they will eventually move jobs closer to home or vice versa, so we eventually again hit the same average of daily travel time which has been stable since medieval times. Reduced emissions is just a bonus. Really, why are we not doing this? The Netherlands is often seen as a country which has their act together around transportation, but it could still be so much better. Cars are still way too dominant and there are way, way too many of them. We just don't have the space.

bgnn 2y ago

busses are so bad here to be honest. a lot of metropolitan cities solved this problem by having frequent and efficient bus lines connecting to major train/tram/metro lines. Randstad is one big metropolis without a coherent public transportation planning. I moved here from Istanbul 12 years ago. the progress there was positive in this timeframe while in Randstad it was backwards to be honest. public transportation became more expensive and unreliable. busses are often empty and they seem to compensate this by increasing prices and cutting down the frequency, so it becomes less reliable for people to use it.. my commute to work is 15 km. it's 20 min by car without traffic but post-Covid traffic is so bad that it's 50 mins in average (1 hour+ on Tuesdays). bus is 30 mins with 1 connection but often I miss the connection and wait 15 mins, so it's 45 realistically. both are bad options, so I cycle instead in half an hour with my e-bike. if it's bad weather I take the car because busses are not on time so I can't plan being at the office for a meeting or so. plus, bus is much more expensive than my not so fuel efficient old car. go figure.

systemtest 2y ago
Yes prices are problematic. The above mentioned 20 kilometers to work is a 5 euro bus ticket. A bus full of people should not cost 25 cents per kilometer per person. It's slightly cheaper than my car but it should be a lot cheaper because so many people share one vehicle.
- briandear 2y ago
  You have to pay the driver, benefits, maintenance of stops, and subsidize all the miles where the bus is below capacity.
  - systemtest 2y ago
    And we have to pay the shareholders of Connexxion, Qbuzz, Keolis and Arriva.
    - bgnn 2y ago
      This!
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- iggldiggl 2y ago
  Let's assume a driver's salary of 18 €/h. A rule of thumb I've heard is that vacation, sick days, social security etc. etc. approximately double that cost to the company, so 36 €/h. 20 kph average speed is already a somewhat generous value for a regular non-BRT city bus line, but let's use it for simplicity's sake, which gives 1,80 €/km driver's costs. Another rough value of thumb for city buses is that they use roughly about 30 l/100 km, which adds about 0,50 €/km, so 2,30 €/km for driver + fuel. A regular city bus holds about 100 passengers, and an average utilisation figure as averaged across the whole day and all routes might be somewhere around 20 %. So an average of 20 passengers per bus at all times, which means 11.5 cents per kilometre for driver and fuel. Now add-in capital cost for the bus itself, maintenance and other ancillary stuff and unfortunately 25 cents per kilometre isn't all that much all of a sudden. (If you can read some German, somebody did a more complete modelling of costs at https://prof.bht-berlin.de/fileadmin/prof/jschlaich/200811_Fr_JS_Kostenmodelle_NAHVERKEHR.pdf https://prof.bht-berlin.de/fileadmin/prof/jschlaich/200811_F..., and with some assumed fictitious but presumably plausible values ended up at 3,26 €/vehicle-km for a city bus operation in 2008 – and both (driver) pay and fuel have increased above inflation since then.)

papa-whisky 2y ago

Give me convenience or give me death...

jajko 2y ago
Extremist approach will never win any popularity and sway masses in such direction, so if you want to position some push for greener cities from extremist or even eco-terrorism perspective (so popular among young in western Europe these days), good luck seeing any results that would make you happy and actually achieve anything you wish for. World is more complex mixture of various people than just similarly-minded people. Number of examples in the past where people feeling righteous and above the rest imposed pretty harsh things on general population. Not the way we should be heading. We have serious issues with ecosystem, but even removing 100% of the cars alone won't solve any of those (plus it won't ever happen) so let's be a bit more smart.
systemtest 2y ago
In an individualistic country like The Netherlands people will typically pick what is best for themselves. You need to give them a better alternative if you want to influence their decision making. Nobody is trading a 20 minute drive for a 60 minute bus trip in order to create a better neighbourhood. Get that bus trip down to at most 30 minutes and people might reconsider.
- namdnay 2y ago
  > people will typically pick what is best for themselves. You need to give them a better alternative if you want to influence their decision making Or remove/penalise the more convenient (but harmful) alternatives. We shouldn’t kid ourselves, we’re going to need sticks as well as carrots if we want to avoid disaster
  - rahen 2y ago
    What disaster?
    - 2y ago

the_gipsy 2y ago

> If we want to lower cars in neighbourhoods, or want people to get rid of cars, our public transit system needs to be come a lot better first. No, you can also start by imposing restrictions on cars. > If public transit was a good option to get to work for people, more people would use it. The people that live in the city center probably already use public transit because, for them, public transit is probably a faster commute. That means that the cars congesting the center are driven by people that live in the periphery or even suburbs outside of the city. So these people will want those nasty cars out, because they actually live there, and they will vote them out. You can never accommodate the people from the suburbs, unless they have a station right next to their door and their office and a train coming every 5 minutes, a car will always be faster. They live in someone else's municipality, so the mayors can just ignore them. People in the periphery are more delicate, but usually they are also tired of congestions, and it's much easier to make at least minor improvements to public transit for them. But again, you can restrict and make improvements in parallel, and the improvement will almost never be perceived as matching the restrictions anyway.

systemtest 2y ago
> No, you can also start by imposing restrictions on cars. Getting people into public transit by making car ownership worse is how you get unhappy people. That is just unproductive and destructive. Make public transit better, that is how you get people out of cars and happy. > The people that live in the city center probably already use public transit No they don't. The 74% of The Netherlands lives in a city yet 66% of people commute to work by car. That goes to show that even for people living in cities, going to work by car is still the preferred method. I'm one of them, in the example I gave above it was three times faster to go to work by car. > because they actually live there, and they will vote them out That is elitist "fuck you I got mine" mentality. Rich people in city centers able to afford expensive houses will make it harder for poor people in the affordable neighbouring cities to move around and get to work.
- izacus 2y ago
  Can you provide a single study where people living in cities that reduced car dependency were "unhappy"? Every single survey I've seen across Netherlands, Slovenia, Switzerland and Germany showed big support AFTER the changes were made (but a lot of hand wringing like yours BEFORE they were made). The people that are usually unhappy are the ones that want to drag their SUVs in front of people living in city apartments and leave them there.

tizzy 2y ago

You guys are lucky in the NL that you have the _option_ to bike, drive, public transport. Maybe driving is still the fastest but the others are still treated as first class citizens. In the US you couldn’t realistically bike anywhere nor does public transport go everywhere. Not to mention the 10 minute walk to the bus stop is probably much worse, especially outside of big cities.

systemtest 2y ago
Agreed, on my recent trip to Los Angeles a 45 minute car trip would often turn into a 2 hours bus trip. And outside of Santa Monica / Venice / Hollywood / Downtown I would often not have sidewalks. It felt a bit like Spain in that regard.
germinalphrase 2y ago
“ In the US you couldn’t realistically bike anywhere nor does public transport go everywhere.” This does, of course, depend entirely on where in the US you live. People commute by bike year round in Minneapolis, and it’s a stereotype for people in New York City to not have driving licenses because they take transit everywhere.
- digging 2y ago
  I'm unfamiliar with Minneapolis - sounds pretty amazing if there's a strong bicycle culture there, but not if "people" only means <1% of commuters. Bicycle enthusiasts live everywhere and are willing to make difficult or risky trips; we can't judge a city by whether or not hardcore bicyclists can survive there. NYC is an extreme outlier, we love to see it, but about 98% of the US doesn't live in the area served by NYC transit. I am sure the population of Minneapolis is much smaller, too. The vast majority of the US is prohibitively difficult to traverse by any mode except car. (Actually, it's usually a highly frustrating and dangerous experience by car, too.) I see reports of more than 60% of the population living in suburbs, which are, as a general rule, designed to discourage non-car travel.
  - ghaff 2y ago

rightbyte 2y ago

Unless it is some express buss I think it might be hard to get buss travel time to less than twice that of a car. edit: Meant twice, not half.

systemtest 2y ago
Didn't say bus, I meant public transit overal. Living and working in two cities of that size there should be faster public transit between them. Either that or better city planning so you don't end up with two cities of 140k and 300k but instead have one city of 440k with better interconnects between neighbourhoods and more light rail.
its_bbq 2y ago
Travel by bus in London and your opinion may change
BobaFloutist 2y ago
BRT can do interesting things though, since it can skip traffic without skipping stops.

travisporter 2y ago

Honestly, even with the cost and the time I would take the bus. I hate driving so much lol.

gpm 2y ago

> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work I was curious about the statistics for this, and it looks like barely not to me, according to this data: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/84710ENG https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/84710ENG (the CSV you can download is much more readable than the table in the webpage) 0.44 trips/person/day travelling to/from work total in 2023, 0.21 of those by car. 2023 is the first year where that is the case though. Edit: If you go to the Dutch version of the data it includes another category for cars (commuting as a passenger in a car) that the English data omitted, with 0.01 of the trips. Moving it from "majority not-by-car in 2023" to "rounding errors mean the data doesn't say which is in the majority": https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/84710NED https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/84710NED

systemtest 2y ago
https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-vervoer/personen/van-en-naar-werk https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-vervoer/pe... > Inwoners van Nederland legden in 2022 gemiddeld 7,4 kilometer per dag af om van en naar het werk te gaan. Ruim 70 procent van de reizigerskilometers van en naar het werk werd met de auto afgelegd, meestal als bestuurder. De trein werd gebruikt voor 10 procent van deze kilometers, de gemiddelde afstand per treinverplaatsing van en naar het werk was 42,8 kilometer. Fietsen was goed voor 29 procent van de verplaatsingen van en naar het werk en voor 8 procent van de afgelegde afstand voor dit doel. De gemiddelde verplaatsingsafstand op de fiets was 4,7 kilometer. Minder dan 0,6 procent van de totale afstand om van en naar het werk te gaan werd te voet overbrugd. Google Translate: > In 2022, residents of the Netherlands traveled an average of 7.4 kilometers per day to and from work. More than 70 percent of the passenger kilometers to and from work were covered by car, usually as a driver. The train was used for 10 percent of these kilometers, the average distance per train trip to and from work was 42.8 kilometers. Cycling accounted for 29 percent of the trips to and from work and for 8 percent of the distance traveled for this purpose. The average distance traveled by bike was 4.7 kilometers. Less than 0.6 percent of the total distance to and from work was covered on foot.
- gpm 2y ago
  I assume that's the same data. Cars go further than the average bicycle/pedestrian so while ~50% of the trips were by car ~70% of the distance was.

einpoklum 2y ago

> Make it so public transit is less than 20 minutes, goes 24/7 and picks me up within 5 minutes walking of my home and I will use it. Agreed! Except for the 24/7. I mean, when it comes to commuting, you need public transport to end late enough for you to stay late, but you don't need it at midnight. > The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work. Not the majority of city-dwellers in the Netherlands, I'm sure. > They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub. 2-minute bike ride then. And I say that as someone who's lived in the Netherlands, albeit only for a few years. It was _such_ a joy to be able to commute without a car (which I am again stuck with these days).

TylerE 2y ago
Their shift workers exist, as well as people with varying schedules like doctors/nurses. 24/7 is nessesary. Edit: Plus it could probably be justified by the reduction in drunk driving alone.
BobaFloutist 2y ago
>Agreed! Except for the 24/7. I mean, when it comes to commuting, you need public transport to end late enough for you to stay late, but you don't need it at midnight. Friday and Saturday public transit should at least run pretty late, unless you want people who don't want to pay for taxis driving home after drinking and partying.

Someone 2y ago

> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work. They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub. Not if that walk is through a car neighborhood, but if it’s through a neighborhood where there are almost no cars, good sidewalks, trees and grass? Also, aren’t many neighborhoods already somewhat like that in the Netherlands, with limited on-street parking? Even if there’s a parking garage under an apartment building, it likely already is a 5-10 minute walk to get there.

kristjank 2y ago
A pleasing aesthetic will not reimburse me for time lost.

globular-toast 2y ago

They don't want to walk because cars make walking less pleasant, more difficult and more dangerous. Everywhere you look things are made slightly easier for cars and slightly harder for everyone else.

Lutger 2y ago

I understand, but your points aren't really relevant for a number of reasons: First, it is a dream, you have to do something to make it work. You are describing the status quo, I want us to move to something else. After decades of neoliberalism, even embraced by the centre-left party, we have eroded our actually quite decent public transport facilities. There is no reason it has to stay this way. Second, I'm not talking about people commuting to work with public transport vs cars, even though it would be nice to get people out of the car into a much more efficient system. I'm talking about our neighbourhoods, the places where people actually live. I'm talking about going outside your house and not as a first thing having to face the noise, danger, pollution, ugliness, etc. of parked cars and cars moving on the road. The neighbourhood could be a place where children play on the streets, where there is space to meet each other, with room for trees and other vegetation. If you just move all the tin out of the neighbourhood and to the edges on big solar covered parking lots, then it is easily done. It will create a lot of space and very little downsides. Of course we can't just rebuild all cities, but we can use this design for new ones. I'm really not talking about parking along the edges of the city, so that you have to take a bus or bicycle in order to get to your car. I want people to park just on the edges of a block or neighbourhood (like 500 to 5000 people, depending on density). You should be able to walk to such a parking lot within 5 min. You would still be able to get to your house for things like groceries and stuff, just not park there. And disabled people would get an exception. Just this relatively simple change will reduce traffic immensely. Third, it may feel now like you are entitled to be able to park in front of your house and drive to it by car. Everybody must naturally accommodate your wishes in this respect, because this is what the majority wants. However, if we change that and take that away from you, it will not take a lot of time before that changes. And then people will start to feel entitled to be able to have their children play on the streets again, and to enjoy such these carless spaces. In the same way, smokers used to feel entitled to be able to smoke in restaurants, in the train and even at the office. Things can and do change. For the people who meticulously maxed out the total amount of minutes they are willing to commute, so that they really can't bear to add 2 x 5 minutes of healthy walks a day: they will eventually move jobs closer to home or vice versa, so we eventually again hit the same average of daily travel time which has been stable since medieval times. Reduced emissions is just a bonus. Really, why are we not doing this? The Netherlands is often seen as a country which has their act together around transportation, but it could still be so much better. Cars are still way too dominant and there are way, way too many of them. We just don't have the space.