Not on distances I’ll have to travel after we finally move to an office further away in a car-centric hellhole. 18 km (~10 miles). ½ hr on a motorcycle or a moped, twice as long on an (e-)bike. Nah, I’m not doing the latter in the morning when I can barely get out of my bed. And I’m not the only one complaining about the office moving.
You know they’re illegal? E-bikes are supposed to go 25 kph (~15 mph) max and only assist when you pedal. Not the best solution when I want to get to work quite far away in the morning without being pulled over for obvious speeding on a cycleway.
Motorcycles aren’t actually uniformly more fuel efficient than cars despite the size. Many full sized ones will actually use as much fuel as a car on commuter trips. The engines are massively more wasteful. Mopeds or scooters will fare better. Maintenance can also be costly. But really, the whole efficiency difference is probably obsoleted by using electricity instead of gasoline.
Two wheeled vehicles aren’t that useful in actual winter snow and ice. They are completely unsafe if you have to ride in traffic with cars and lorries etc. On light traffic routes, bicycles do work, at slightly above walking speed. Quad bikes, trikes or light vehicles, barely doable, but the cost and parking is as bad as with cars and weather resistance is much worse. Safety is worse, though not as bad as two wheels.
Somewhere, for someone, maybe they are an economical option, but these observations killed the idea for me. If I can’t walk or cycle, because of distance and time mostly, or use public transport, a car is the only viable option for year round commute where I live. Electric preferrably.
To be fair, that’s a stupid, pointless hard mode, regardless of having a car or not. If your city is designed correctly, it more like taking a day worth of groceries 200m.
Economies of scale and specialization of shops mean that even if you get your noodles and tomatoes from the corner store each afternoon, you’re still going to want to go someplace else to stock up on 40lb sacks of basmati and chickpeas. And maybe you want to visit the farmer’s market on the weekend, which cannot be on everyone’s streetcorner.
I use paniers, and every 2-3 years I get my bike trailer out of the closet. I can carry 90 litres in my panniers and not even notice they’re there.
I walk past it on my afternoon walk, get my groceries for the day and that is it. Why would I bother storing that much crap? This way I get fresh food basically every day.
Most trips I don’t use the cart, I also just do short walks on a semi daily basis for most things. I was just pointing out it’s still possible to do big trips without a car. I mainly cart for the bulky/heavy items. Bags of rice, paper towels, cat litter, etc. Or if I’m doing a bigger trip to a specialty market across town like an Asian grocer.
Waymo has started to use my neighborhood to park their cars and it’s causing traffic in a freakin residential street. I’ve been thinking of using tape and white paper to cover their cameras
I agree, joggers aren’t really a problem at all. They move faster than walkers and overtaking them is a non issue.
I do have a problem with large families using our new wide dedicated bike lanes as their own personal sidewalk though. They really tempt me to fit a car horn onto my bike again… That’s even considering I’m someone who prefers to slow down and wait behind pedestrians, instead of ding-dinging my bell to ask for passing space on shared paths
It’s more acceptable if the lane is wide enough to overtake and/or they’re running at a decent clip, i.e. 10-15 mph. But jogging is usually more like 5-10 mph.
That jogger is a fucking idiot, never ever run on a road with your back to traffic, run on other side and face cars coming at you so you can get the fuck out of the way in event of an accident, if it happens behind your dumb ass, you are fucking dead.
Edit: Also, why the fuck are you linking to reddit???
This is a great counter to the video that NJB put out, and his comments on bluesky. You don’t have to move to an urbanist paradise to be happy. Even if you feel like you do, you don’t have to leave North America to get that.
In Georgia, a very car centric place with a shit ton of suburbs, there’s a town called Peachtree City. Nearly every place is connected by paths that you can drive golf carts and ride bikes on. That’s just one example of many, but if all you listen to is NJB and some people on here, you’ll get the impression the US is a black hole and cannot be fixed.
For those of you who mention “yeah but those places are really expensive to live”, okay, and? Most countries are going through a housing crisis right now, so if you wanted to move to a country like Amsterdam you’re not exactly going to have much of an easier time. Moving to a different city in the US or Canada is way easier than uprooting your life, learning a new language and begging whatever country to let you stay there as a resident.
But in general, the argument of “just move” is dumb. A lot of people can’t. There are people who deal with more than just bad city design and even if they wanted to move, they can’t. In the case of NJB, he has explicitly dedicated his channel to this. In essence he has told us that he doesn’t care about our advocacy in our cities and thinks we are a lost cause, and we should give up and move. His channel is, by his own admissions, for people rich enough to escape the plight of the common man and get the fuck out of where they live. How is this productive?
You don’t give a fuck about advocacy and wanna move? Fine. Do that. But don’t seed fear and despair into those who can’t and fight to make their communities better. Change only comes when it is fought for.
“yeah but those places are really expensive to live”
They’re expensive because they’re rare. Supply and demand. If more places became better at walkability, then everywhere already walkable would get cheaper.
Because they would be privatized and maintained by the cheapest ass companies and they would do a shit job of maintaining the cars and there’s no way in hell I’m sleeping in a public bed that is poorly maintained.
Interestingly, the video goes into exactly why there are so many quality sleeper train offerings in Europe compared to North America. In North America, most of the tracks are privately-owned freight rail, and the rest is a patchwork of local monopolies of passenger rail (e.g., Amtrak, Via Rail, regional/commuter rail, etc.), and none of them are being made to cooperate or allow interoperability.
Whereas in Europe, having so many countries in such close proximity, they were forced to make their systems interoperable and standardized and allowing open access (much like roads are open access to drivers or buses), so what you get is many state-run operators and private operators in a competitive market without local monopolies. The result is high competitiveness, high standardization, high interoperability, and thus high quality and availability of service for competitive prices.
Not really. The tracks can only take so many trains, so one more operator just pushes other trains off the track. Which might be fine if it meant that the trains that did run were hyper-competitive. But they’re not, because the train companies tend to get a near monopoly on a particular kind of service (fast trains vs stopping trains, for example). And if there are two companies running the same service, you’ll only have half as many trains to choose from for the return journey. It’s a ridiculous thing.
They are 100% owned by the British government. There’s nothing privatised in the UK and never was. And that’s why they suck so hard.
As for German involvement - the British government just outsourced day to day operations to Germans and others. Just like they outsource No. 10 floor wiping. That doesn’t mean that No. 10 is privatised. It’s the choice of the government and that’s how they decided to spend their budget.
I mean… it’s literally not - we obviously have some fundamental misunderstanding between us and neither of is going to get our point across to the other, so I’ll simply agree “The railways are currently shittier than they should be” :)
Not sure how there can be any misunderstanding. It’s just a fact that British railways are nationalised. It is also quite obvious that privatisation and deregulation works really well as we have a good example from the EU and Japan. Oh, speaking of EU, this privatisation and deregulation was one of the key points for many Labour voters to support Brexit.
I’m not sure either! British Rail was literally, factually privatised and sold off to a lot of different private companies, over a few years running up until 1997. It has not been re-nationalised since. I can’t understand how you wouldn’t be aware of that, unless your view on what nationalised and privatised means is different than the news/dictionary/encyclopaedia/anyone else.
The railways were nationalised between 1948 and 1997, but it’s currently 2023 - and unless you’re from a parallel universe where Neil Kinnock won, they haven’t been nationalised for two and a half decades now.
Worth taking statistics with a pinch of salt, but apparently after a couple of decades of underperforming privatised service, the UK population is overwhelmingly (across both sides of the political spectrum) in support of re-nationalising the railways.
Who owns the infrastructure? The government (through Network Rail).
Who decides which routes to run and how? The government (through Rail Delivery Group).
Who is managing the ticketing? The government (through Rail Delivery Group).
Who decides which companies to hire to run day to day operations and how much to pay them? The government (through DfT).
What is privatised exactly? Once again, British railways are 100% nationalised. This is just a fact. And this is the only reason why they are so poor. The so called “privatisation” never really happened, what happened is that the government created a scapegoat to blame all their failures on. And they stole a lot of tax payer money along the way. Just like it ALWAYS happens with nationalised industries.
Network Rail profits are at least to some extent nationalised, so have to be used for railway reinvestment instead of shareholders, yes - and therefore additionally that means indirectly, the government kind of have some representation in the Rail Delivery Group, amongst the privately owned operators that make up the rest of it.
Some of the fares (not all), or at least their rises each year, are regulated by the government, the rest are set by the individual companies.
The privatisation is the ownership of the trains, the stations, the staff, the companies that run them, and the investment of profits - now I know some of the companies have had to be individually renationalised as a “company of last resort” after they’ve failed, but that’s only in the last couple of years - there’s been over 20 years of profits going to shareholders and not being used to improve the railway - which is why at commuter hours, you still, in 2023, have 400 people trying to get onto a 35 year old, 2 carriage Sprinter - despite the billions each year paid from public money. Like with the energy companies, we’re playing “private profits and public losses”.
I sort of get how you could see regulations/guidance/controls as being a bit like “they own it all”, but I’d assume you don’t see all British pubs as nationalised, despite the fact that (local or national) government controls whether a pub is allowed to exist in that location, who is allowed to run it, what the opening hours are allowed to be, what the minimum price of an alcohol unit can be, the sizes of single servings of different types of alcoholic drink etc etc.
Anyway, if you perceive regulation as nationalisation, we’ll never agree or even reach a middle ground of understanding on that term specifically, though would both agree “What they have currently is not as good as it could be” - and I imagine we both agree that the railways are important, are an essential alternative to individual car travel and desperately need some support and investment to improve.
I don’t think I can spend any longer talking about this, but thanks - it’s been interesting to see a different point of view :)
Just like it ALWAYS happens with nationalised industries.
It was an interesting, err, “conversation” I guess, but I am starting to see that the disagreement is based in the fact that you are viewing things through a particular lens.
I’m going to make the argument against trains for everything, despite being a huge fanatic for trains.
Trains are the most efficient transport method per tonne-km over land, yes. However from certain operational standpoints trains can make less sense than existing solutions.
When distance between stops for heavy rail becomes too short, you lose quite a bit of efficiency. Trains themselves aren’t a one-size fits all solution as there are various types that each need their own form of investment (which is a lot $), when roads are compatible with both personal transport and large trucks with little investment by the transporter (govt pays for road maintenance).
Rail companies right now are chasing profits and neglecting operational improvements. In the US, hauling a long, LONG, old and slow train loaded with bulk aggregate, oil, grain, chemicals is more profitable than aiming for JIT capability that is more feasible with trucks. A complete change in societal incentives is necessary to bring back the usefulness of railway in all types of transport. Second, the North American way of railroad companies owning the tracks dissuades a lot of innovation and new firms from entering the market, unlike the “open road” where there are many competing OTR freight companies. None of the Big Six would like my idea of a nationally controlled rail/track system.
Just to pick on one point, as a tangent, the government paying for roads with little cost to the freight carriers is a major, major problem. If the cost of transport is not factored into the cost of goods, it breaks the feedback mechanism of prices in the market affecting the supply of road transport, both per se, and in relation to other, possibly more efficient, means of transport. I came up with a reductio ad absurdum scenario to illustrate better: Imagine the government provided free air freight across oceans, without limit.
It’s pretty obvious what would happen: The logistics companies would abandon cargo ships, which cost them money, for the free air service. It would be horribly inefficient and wasteful, but that would not be their concern. We’d end up in the same situation that we are today with roads; our governments are going broke trying to pay for it. (In that world, I also imagine that people consider the service the normal baseline that they’ve structured their lives and businesses around, and can’t fathom ending it, just like roads in our world.
Anyway, passenger rail service has never been profitable. Railroads just operated passenger trains as a condition of being allowed to operate freight routes, which the government had subsidized with land giveaways. The question is whether passenger is more sustainable fiscally than roads for personal vehicles, and the survival of rail freight against massively subsidized road freight suggests that it would be. At least for longer, intercity routes.
Yes you’ve got a point. Part of this was an exercise to argue against something I really love and passionate about for the sake of “Change my Mind”.
But that’s part of the thing. If an organization paid for unlimited free air passenger and freight transport system, converting to better alternatives (on monetary cost, the environment and other bases) would be difficult to convince from people and logistics companies alike. If left alone, this sort of system would be unlikely to change until some devastating consequence made it unfeasible to switch at that point anyway. And in such a universe maybe we’d see more blimps in the sky.
So either road has to be regulated fairly and costs that were externalized get properly accounted for and renumerated, or railroad track has to be managed nationally, and provide fair access to communities large and small, in order for rail and wheeled vehicles to be on equal footing. Neither of these things I would expect to happen naturally, it must come from an organized effort somewhere.
Electric motors are now capable of >90% regen, so the braking energy argument against short stops doesn’t work anymore (and the energy during motion strictly less than a rubber tired vehicle with a worse aspect ratio so long as the trip is no longer).
The amount of rail needed for short distance distribution networks could still be prohibitive in regions designed for road though. Even then one could still argue that the total infrastructure costs are lower by moving the destinations slightly given how much roads cost to maintain.
Corporate has corrupted the train system in the US. People have become secondary to company profits. I watched this a while back and couldn’t believe the US has allowed this.
It’s a thermal engine for only one or two people, it’s incredibly loud, it needs big roads to go fast, it has poor cargo space… I like bikes for the aesthetics but I don’t think they are a step in the right direction.
We all have the right to be annoyed at anything. Even ridiculously small things that don’t affect us at all. Isn’t that swell. So what? What’s the BFD? If a grown adult would rather run on the shoulder than on the sidewalk, they probably have reasons for doing that.
You don’t see the slant in the sidewalk? The fucking pavers are uneven af as well. Have you ever ran on an uneven surface? Shit is prone to rolling your ankle. If you are older, probably fucks up your knees
I agree he is running on the wrong side and for safety should definitely run against traffic. Whether it’s illegal to do this really depends on the local and state laws, I think.
In some states, pedestrian sidewalks do not exist so the rules/laws are a bit unclear. Not sure where you live but in my area the sidewalks just abruptly end and leave you to enter the roadway or cross the road to get to another sidewalk which may or may not be protected by signal or paint (ie, unsafe af)
Lol you got guts for commenting that here and I respect that. Better to risk an ankle roll then to be hit by a crazy person on their phone while driving.
It’s not just the softness of the material… Sidewalks have lots of undulations and uneven angles every time you cross a driveway or a junction. Also gaps and cracks
Jogging 2km on a sidwalk is fine
Running at a serious speed over 10k on an uneven, hard surface like sidewalk is a high chance of injury
But I would imagine it is much easier to live a happy life if we simply move to Amsterdam? instead of dealing with unreasonable, old, and stubborn populations in the city hall?
At least I can learn dutch in 5 years, but I dont imagine I can convince our semi-suburbian city hall to remove even the minimal parking requirement during that time.
You can just move to a good US city. It would be way easier than somehow getting the chance to immigrate to Amsterdam and deal with the serious lack of housing and also high cost of living.
I am not quite aware of the living cost in amsterdam, but given a studio (single room apartment, bedroom, livingroom, study, and kitchen all in one) in a somewhat walkable major city in the U.S. cost around 400k, and a 2 bedroom apartment can easily cost 700k. And none of above includes luxury apartment, which can add another 50% to the cost.
I would be really keen to see how netherlands can top that.
Just from a quick google search the first things I find are more expensive than my nearest major city. Anything in the “affordable” range was co-living with strangers.
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