Not Italian, but am there frequently and have lots of friends there:
Naturally, it depends on where you are. Some places are frequented by tourists with mobile homes, and those have a higher amount of “casual riders”.
But generally speaking, Italy is… let’s say not really bike friendly…
For example: At Lake Como, the SS 36 runs along its Eastern Coast. SS stands for “Strada Statale” which is the Italian name for highway, a road where only cars are allowed.
But! At some points the SS36 is the only road since Lake Como is sitting next to mountains, and they only dug a tunnel for the highway. This in turn leads to these parts being demoted from an SS to a regular road, meaning other modes of transport are allowed.
Which of course means you’ll find people on road bikes, without any lights, riding in an old and badly illuminated tunnel with cars zooming past them at ~130 km/h 🤡
Had the opposite experience unfortunately. Tunnels on the ligurian coast are single direction, that switches with a timetable. Just 50 km/h or so, but bikes not allowed. Oh, sure, I’ll just pedal my bike over this 9km detour over a 350 meter high mountain pass instead 🤡
If really depends on the city you’re in. Some cities do have a bike culture, especially those where there are big Universities (in my experience). It also depends on the area you are in. In Turin for example there are a lot of young people cycling to the University Campus
Interesting. We went to rural Tuscany recently and it was only the first group.
I get the feeling that Italy is very heterogenous culturally, despite appearances. It did only become a single country relatively recently in the history of Western Europe.
We were unified in 1861, which is before other Countries in WE, but the problem is more related to the fact that our economic boom in the 50’s brought a car colture that still exists right now: for the first time ever people could afford to move easily, and the infrastructure was built upon that car-centric idea. Tracking back is hard and colture is hard to change.
I’d like to know where each of those places are. If I recall correctly (and if I’m wrong, I would like to be corrected with visual evidence), one thing the US has over pretty much all of Europe is the natural landscapes.
Europe also has stunning natural landscapes. Just look at the Swiss Alps as an example.
It do believe it is true, however, that in America you are more likely to encounter vast expanses of beautiful (nearly) untamed nature.
As for the pictures in America, I just googled some nice urbanism terms and US and picked the first pictures that seemed nice.
I think the first one is in Boston, but I don’t know where the other ones were taken.
100% agree that it’s horrible wording, but the linguistics nerd inside my brain just has to say: that’s not the passive voice.
Passive voice would be something like “a store was smashed into” or “a car was driven into the store”, where the grammatical subject is the semantic object. It can be used to avoid saying the subject of the sentence, who’s doing the action, but in this case they keep the active voice and just change the subject from a “driver” to a “car”.
On another note, it’s also telling that the article first comments on financial damage, then that the driver is unhurt and the car is damaged, and only after that does it say that the store-owner and the two customers were unharmed.
At least they didn’t use the victim-blaming language news outlets often use for pedestrians and cyclists: “Tanning shop struck in accident wasn’t wearing a helmet”. No mention of the driver, the car, who had the right of way, who was speeding, etc.
News outlets like the BBC try (in my experience most of the time, but not always) to avoid implying something without some evidence or source. The driver was probably at fault, but it could have been a mechanical failure, a panicky swerve to avoid a dog running into the road, etc. Without knowing more they report passively, which I feel is appropriate.
So the owner (who is probably the driver)'s fault.
a panicky swerve to avoid a dog running into the road, etc.
So the driver’s fault.
Without knowing more they report passively, which I feel is appropriate.
But yes, this remains correct even if the driver is at fault, someone must assign that fault, and that’s not BBC’s job. Could passive voice the driver in there too though.
On the note of mechanical faults, it is odd that cars are typically safetied when sold/transfered to a new owner and never really required to be inspected again. Regular safety inspections should be a mandatory part of car ownership.
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