I mean, if we are imagining government doing it’s actual job, isn’t it easier to pass regulations then to change how North American cities work?
Like I support walkable cities, I’m just convinced regular people don’t actually want it.
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phoenixz@lemmy.ca 6 months agoThe solution is -besides regulations for that - have governments push for much MUCH more bicycle roads and same for public transportation. With great public transportation and bicycle roads, most people won’t need cars to begin with.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Well a few things there:
1: yes they want it, most people don’t know what they’re missing. Everyone always asks me why the Netherlands is so friggin nice when they go there. Limit cars, bignoaet odnthe answer
2: even if they don’t like it, we’re at the point of “do or die”. Climate change keeps beating expectations in that it’s always so much impressively worse than expected. Just now I read that CO2 dumping into the atmosphere actually is increasing, we’re actually making it worse faster. Soon we’ll be at the point of “where do we get fresh water” and “all our crops are dying”. Then the wars start, not for “I want that oil of yours” but “I want that food of yours”. It doesn’t.need to be that bad, we still can fix it if only we wanted it.
3: bicycle infrastructure and public transportation infrastructure is so so much cheaper than all the car crap we’ve been building for the past 7 decades. Cheaper to build, cheaper to maintain, It’s quieter, it’s healthier, which lowers healthcare costs for nations, it’s prettier, cleaner and solves an enormous part of climate change. If only car and oil companies could stop
bribingpushing our politicianssugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
They don’t want it because they haven’t experienced it. The Dutch used to be super car-dependent, and now they’re known world-wide for good infrastructure, and it improves every year.
The problem is we keep getting half-measures, like a few lanes here and there, and maybe a cycle path for recreation that doesn’t go anywhere interesting. We need a big investment into infrastructure to show people what they’re missing. But when all you have is a hammer (car), everything looks like a nail (more lanes).
My area is super car-dependent, but people love our train infrastructure and want more. But we only want that because we were essentially forced to build it to host the Olympics (I’m near SLC). Before that, we paved over a lot of our tracks because cars were getting popular, and that was before we had any traffic issues. Now that everyone needs a car to get everywhere, traffic sucks.
exanime@lemmy.world 6 months ago
In the USA, that boat sailed long ago… most cities are too spread out to pedal anywhere
Soggy@lemmy.world 6 months ago
My city is just too hilly. Cycling around is one thing, and they just put in new bike lanes (they’re not good ones, but still), but doing that with a grocery run or 60lbs of cat food and litter? No thank you.
JudahBenHur@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Wife and I bought e-assist bikes, it makes it so you don’t really have to work much even when youre carrying groceries
Malfeasant@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Weight speeds you up downhill more than it slows you down uphill.
spidermanchild@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Wat? The law of conservation of energy tends to disagree. Commuters are generally starting and ending at the same elevation so there’s no trick. We’re not going to convince anyone to carry heavy loads on bikes by saying “pedal more downhill to smooth out the power requirements if you hate grinding it out on uphills”, the answer is just ebikes.