
Europe’s cities are making less room for cars after coronavirus - pseudolus
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2020/04/coronavirus-reopen-cities-public-transit-car-free-bike-milan/610360/
======
jasonv
I'm perplexed by the comments here.

Some cities have seen greater business increases on pedestrian and bike
converted through-ways because people in cars weren't just passing by.

Bikers and pedestrians stopped and shopped in the areas they were traveling
through.

I, for one, look forward to making a choice to move to a place where I can
live car-free and hope more cities accelerate plans like this.

~~~
Barrin92
I never even got a drivers license and have lived just fine so I'm also always
shocked by the comments here in transport-related threads when people talk
about not having a car as if this is somehow a fantasy utopian vision.

And this also I might add includes families with children. While I don't have
any I know a lot of parents who don't rely on cars either.

~~~
ghaff
I have zero trouble understanding that owning a personal car may not make
economic sense in many cities. I have more trouble really grokking the no
driver license. So many trips associated with both work and vacation
experiences--or even weekend activities outside of a city--require renting a
car. I guess you can consciously avoid those situations but it seems very
limiting.

(Certainly I couldn't really have done jobs I've had without being able to
drive a car and would have missed out on many, many travel experiences
including just visiting family.)

~~~
clairity
growing up i remember sorta envying the kids who got hardship licenses at 14,
allowed for teens to drive to work and contribute income to their family,
completely ignoring the familial/financial situation borne of that. in that
small, mostly suburban city, everyone drove, and everyone got their license by
16 (unless you failed your test a bunch of times).

imagine my shock when i went to college with a bunch of kids from “the city”
(nyc) who never got a license in the first place and many didn’t even see the
point of it. truly mind-blowing.

now i live in LA and haven’t owned a car for years (but still have a license).
it’s great! the weather makes this the perfect city for mass
biking/scootering, if only we could convert even some of our abundance of
street parking into bike lanes.

~~~
ghaff
If I lived in Boston--as opposed to a fairly far out exurb--I could imagine
not owning a car given that I mostly work remotely. Though I probably still
would so I could get out to mountains, etc. for the weekend. In any case, I
would certainly want to be able to drive so I could do various vacations and
sometimes necessary work driving. Some of this is less common in Uber days but
certainly not non-existent.

My point again isn't about owning or not owning a car but being able to drive
a car when needed.

~~~
mjmahone17
When do you need to? If your family never drives, you wouldn’t see a need to.

It’s almost like asking “well wouldn’t you want to be able to go camping?”
Sure, if you grew up camping you might know you want that. But if you didn’t,
why would you even think about going camping?

Similarly, if you’ve only lived in a city where you can hire a driver (cabs,
moving vans, etc) as needed, why would you ever think you need to be able to
drive? What is the situation you’ll be in where you need a license?

~~~
vinay427
I've lived without a car for years but I still find a license invaluable for
the few times I'm moving or helping someone move. It's much (much!) cheaper
where I live to borrow a car from a friend or car share service than pay a
moving service. I aim to never use a car except when moving or visiting family
inaccessible to public transit.

------
acd
I hope we remove cars from city centers in Europe and replace them with more
bike lanes and public transport. Ie the small particle pollution from cars is
making pedestrians and cyclist sick. I hope we put car parking centers outside
the city center and offer good inbound public / private transport.

I would say clean air is an example of Tragedy of the commons, where the
pollution is an externalized cost.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Example...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Examples)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
_Ie the small particle pollution from cars is making pedestrians and cyclist
sick._

It's making car drivers sick as well, they have to breath the same air and
often air intakes are close to the exhaust of the car in front.

~~~
jfim
That's why most cars have a cabin air filter though.

~~~
benhurmarcel
Somewhat surprisingly, studies ([1] in French, sorry) show that on average
drivers breath worse air than cyclists actually. The main reason they bring up
is that the relatively airtight cabin accumulates particles, whereas people
traveling in open air can get short high peaks but lower pollution on average.

[1] [https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2014/03/13/auto-
metro...](https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2014/03/13/auto-metro-ou-
velo-ou-respire-t-on-le-moins-d-air-pollue_4382697_3244.html)

------
anigbrowl
San Francisco and Oakland have implemented a 'slow streets' initiative,
gradually closing off some streets to through traffic (residential/emergency
vehicles only) to allow more room for exercise. Predictably people have begun
to deploy street furniture of their own (flower planters and so on) to make it
more permanent. Nobody wants all the traffic and associated pollution back.
Hard to predict how this will pan out as the necessity for social distancing
recedes.

~~~
throwawaysea
That’s obnoxious. Cars and vehicles are necessary for many people and many
purposes and cities should not use this crisis as a Trojan horse to force
changes hastily. Deploying furniture to make it permanent sounds like the
doing of a renegade cycle club and not everyday people, however.

~~~
DoreenMichele
That street runs both ways. Car culture is already amazingly pushy and
obnoxious in the degree to which it makes life difficult for pedestrians,
cyclists, etc.

------
anigbrowl
This preprint from Italy claiming to have detected SARS-cov-2 on particulate
matter offers the intriguing hypothesis that the outbreak in Lombardy may have
been exacerbated by the region's higher levels of pollution.
[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20065995v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20065995v2)

Some additional interesting links in this summary article:
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/24/coronavi...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/24/coronavirus-
detected-particles-air-pollution)

------
adreamingsoul
My family (child, spouse) and I live car free in Oslo, Norway. It’s amazing.

We used to own two vehicles when we lived in the States. I did take public
transportation during the week, but still had to drive almost everywhere else.
When everything is designed around cars, it can be extremely difficult to try
and go without.

Oslo was mostly built before cars, so roads are smaller and highways go below
or around the city. Oslo is slowly making it harder for cars to be within the
city, and actually changing streets to be car-free. Having a car here is not a
need, but a want. I like that.

~~~
jononor
The highways today mostly go below the city. But that is a quite recent thing,
the last parts of the Opera tunnel for example was opened only 10 years ago.
Car traffic was a big problem in the 1970-2000. Making modern Oslo nocar-
friendly and Oslo center pedestrian/bicyclist friendly is the result of
massive investments in infrastructure over several decades.

~~~
adreamingsoul
Thanks for sharing. It is impressive to me that a city of Oslo's size was able
to achieve that. I know of one similar sized city in the States that has
similar high-level plans to re-route major roads and highways, but they never
make much progress beyond committee meetings.

------
daenz
Anecdotally, where I live in Seattle, the people who are still driving are
driving like maniacs...speeding, ignoring stop signs, lights, etc. There may
be more room for cyclists, but it doesn't really feel safer.

~~~
SECProto
> Anecdotally, where I live in Seattle, the people who are still driving are
> driving like maniacs...speeding, ignoring stop signs, lights, etc

This is likely similar everywhere. Traffic controls idiots speeding. For
another anecdote, check out these statistics from Toronto [1], approx 460%
year-over-year increase in stunting charges ("stunting" being the charge when
someone is going more than 50km/hr over the speed limit.) One person recently
was going 270km/hr in a 100km/hr zone (cops caught them because a tire blew).

[1] "Between March 16 and April 22, police have issued 6,978 speeding tickets
and 224 stunt driving charges. In the same period last year, police issued
5,504 speeding tickets and 40 stunt driving charges."
[https://www.toronto.com/news-story/9960534-toronto-police-
ch...](https://www.toronto.com/news-story/9960534-toronto-police-charging-
more-drivers-during-covid-19-crisis/)

~~~
ornornor
Toronto has a huge road violence problem, on top of an enforcement problem.
Traffic laws are almost never enforced, the police is complacent, and road
violence goes unpunished. It is absurd and hard to believe, you have I see it
to believe it. Drivers know that and have no problem intimidating pedestrians
and cyclists because they know absolutely nothing at all will happen. Either
the police won’t even bother to take the complaint seriously, they’ll turn a
blind eye (can’t count the number of times I’ve seen someone break the law in
their car right next to a patrol car and the cops just carried on), or they’ll
get caught but not see a judge because the system is overloaded and so the
charges automatically dropped. I’m not even mentioning drivers using bike
lanes as a stopping lane. Toronto is pure madness and is has terrible quality
of life as a result.

They do however have once a year, for about 8h, car free streets (only 4/5 but
still). It’s such a delight on these days. Everyone is out and about, cops are
at every intersections to turn cars away, and you can even hear the birds
sing!!! But yeah that for a grand total of maybe 10 km of main streets, 16h a
year.

------
gorgoiler
A bunch of climate change protesters shut down a major city interchange during
the last half term. Three main routes were closed for a whole week.

It was wonderful — who knows if there’s any unbiased truth to it but it
certainly felt like there was a huge reduction in stress cycling around. Even
where it’s perfectly safe to interact with cars — bike and pedestrian route in
the park quickly crossing a road into another park on the other side — it was
just such a relief not to have to eye roll at the traffic jumping the lights
as they turn red or be glared at by angry van drivers who had to stop for the
hippy on his push bike!

It feels a bit like that now. Even more so really with the grater number of
cyclists I see at all different times of the day (I’m out on the bike more
than most, doing PPE deliveries.)

------
vinay_ys
The framing of this city planning problem in my mind is like this:

The appeal of a big city is potential to connect with lots of people from
different backgrounds, skills and culture. This enables richer commerce and
social interactions.

This doesn't happen without huge amount of commute and lots of social
gathering places like offices, schools, restaurants, malls, bars, sports,
gaming, park etc.

A city fundamentally has to make it possible for a lot more number of N x k
connections – where N is city population and k is number of people any one
person can potentially meet – for much larger N and much larger k.

THis is the fundamental difference between a big city vs a cluster of small
towns/villages which are fairly disconnected from each other. Basically, towns
and villages scale down both N and k.

Okay, so the question is how do we make it possible for such a large number of
N x k commutes to happen? To support large N and large k the commute has to be
faster and over longer distance. It has to solve for flexibility of hours of
the day and also be accessible for young/old, men/women, kids, disabled etc.
There are cost affordability considerations too.

In some countries, like US, they have social culture where young and old don't
live together, those with kids have different lifestyle than those without
etc. Then in others like India, young and old do live together along with
kids.

Solving for high N x k for mixed demographics in a large urban sprawl is
fundamentally more challenging.

------
IAmEveryone
This (specifically car/bike traffic) may be the first real-life example of a
Giffen Good I've come across:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good)

You'd think that people avoiding public transport would result in increased
car traffic. But in a scenario where the roads were already at or near
capacity, that's impossible. Not only would a number equivalent to those
switching from public transport have to use bikes. Because bikes also need
(some, but less) space on the roads, car traffic actually needs to decrease.

~~~
SECProto
I'm having a lot of trouble trying to conceptualize how "car/bike traffic"
could be a giffen good. "A product that people consume more of as the price
rises". Raising/creating tolls for cars decreases usage. Raising bus prices
also discourages use. Could you help clarify what you meant?

As for road space usage, generally bike lanes are added by adjusting street
parking, narrowing lanes, etc. Eg I worked on a recent project where two 4m
lanes were turned into a 3m middle lane and 3.5m curb lane and a 0.5m buffer
and a 1.0m bike lane. I can't think of many situations where bike lanes were
added by removing capacity from roads that had usage approaching capacity.

~~~
tobylane
London’s Embankment from Westminster to Blackfriars (and the rest of CS3 on
other roads) added a bike lane by removing car capacity despite it being full
every rush hour. The road as a whole has higher throughput now.

[https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-cycle-lane-superhighway-
em...](https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-cycle-lane-superhighway-embankment-
new-thames-101637783.html)

~~~
naskwo
A safe bike route from SW to NE, e.g. Fulham to Shoreditch, would be lovely.

~~~
tobylane
Kensington and Chelsea don't like segregated bike lanes. One upcoming bike
lane of CS3 quality is from the borough border (Olympia) towards Heathrow.

------
Igelau
> If the system looks like it will exceed the passenger numbers that makes
> this level of distancing possible, station entrances will be temporarily
> closed until congestion eases.

Now you still have close crowding: it's just outside the gate and not getting
anywhere. I guess it's more about metro companies being able to say "didn't
happen on our trains".

------
stunt
"Cities are making less room for cars"

Is this really corona related? I'm hearing this for many years now.

~~~
ProZsolt
Cycling skyrocketed after social distancing started. People realized cycling
is not that bad if you don't have to be afraid to be hit by a car. Currently,
there is less car on the roads because people working from home.

------
DoreenMichele
The current city doesn't work anyway. A lot of our development patterns were
born of seeds planted in the 1950s during an era when the nuclear family --
with a male breadwinner, female homemaker and 2.5 kids -- was the assumed
standard basic "economic unit" and one male breadwinner provided adequate
money, healthcare benefits, etc for multiple other people.

Suburbs grew out of the idea of a separation of the public and private
spheres. Please note the assumption there is that it separates them for the
male breadwinner.

The female homemaker de facto worked at home. Most _women 's work_ \--
cooking, cleaning, raising kids -- is done at home and is generally not
assumed to be anything like paid work that needs to be regulated as a
profession. Yet it is essential work, critical to the health, welfare and
productivity of the world.

With people living longer, marrying later, having fewer children, living many
years after the kids grow up and move out, etc. this model breaks down. As the
world has generally moved more towards two-earner couples, a house in the
suburbs has gradually turned into a nightmare we don't know how to escape
because, at least in the US, it's our default assumption for a good home looks
like and most of our financing and tax benefits etc are aimed at that type of
home, so it is a large share of our good housing stock. Attempts to find
alternatives, such the Tiny House movement, have largely not worked all that
well.

We need to re-envision our social fabric. This baked-in, unstated assumption
that most people are part of a nuclear family with multiple children and one
partner doesn't need a full-time paid job is very much out of date. It's
mostly no longer true and, unsurprisingly, the built environment we created to
accommodate that lifestyle works rather poorly for all too many people today.

So that's where we need to start. And it is very much bound up with car
ownership and car use because the single family detached house in the suburbs
assumes you have a car and assumes a family of five only needs one car.

When mom and dad both work and the neighborhood has a dearth of children for
your only child to play with, the social fabric that lived when I was a child
in a neighborhood full of kids cease to exist and the road are congested and
people are both time stressed and financially stressed.

This is the crux of a lot of the problems with the world today. We built a
world for the parents of the Baby Boomers, in essence, and we haven't updated
it. Demographics have changed, yet we continue to try to force-fit this shoe
and wonder why it pinches so very badly, to the point of being crippling for
many people.

~~~
hnarn
> Suburbs grew out of the idea of a separation of the public and private
> spheres. Please note the assumption there is that it separates them for the
> male breadwinner.

This is US-centric though. The notion of downtown vs. suburbia is the complete
opposite in Europe for example, and in many other parts of the world as well.
I remember as a kid learning English and learning about the US that it was
amazing to me that "downtown" was considered low status and "suburbs" were
affluent. Visiting, I was almost amazed to see downtown Minneapolis almost
completely deserted on a Friday evening. It made me think of "28 Days Later".
In Europe you'll mostly see downtown being the historical, beautiful and
expensive part of town while some suburbs are post-war, concrete blocks of
public housing.

> So that's where we need to start. And it is very much bound up with car
> ownership and car use because the single family detached house in the
> suburbs assumes you have a car and assumes a family of five only needs one
> car.

It seems to me that the odd thing, or perhaps not so odd when you consider the
era they were built in mostly, is that these suburbs completely lack any city
planning in terms of public transporation. As you say, it's a requirement to
have a car to even get in and out of the place. The implications of this are
many, and often quite weird seen with my eyes -- for example, teenagers are
essentially "contained" until they get their own car, or know someone who
does. You can't go out drinking without a car because there's no commercial
area in the immediate vicinity. But anyway, since these suburbs are already
built, couldn't this be resolved relatively easily by building public
transport to the biggest suburbs? You wouldn't have to change the suburbs so
much as the transport network around them, and perhaps add some local
commercial areas to make them slightly more self sustaining.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_This is US-centric though._

As noted elsewhere, I'm pretty short of sleep, so I no doubt could have said
some things better.

Yes, some of what I'm describing is very US-centric. But not all of it.

When I was growing up, most of the world lived and worked on farms. Within my
lifetime -- in fact, within the lifetime of my children -- that changed and we
now have more people living in cities worldwide than on farms.

The world has changed, but we still cleave to certain mental models that no
longer serve us well. That's the super short version.

 _But anyway, since these suburbs are already built, couldn 't this be
resolved relatively easily by building public transport to the biggest
suburbs?_

Mostly, no. The suburbs actually built in the 1950s aren't so bad. A larger
problem is the policies that era fostered in the US and the direction things
have gone since then.

Average new homes in the 1950s were about 1200 square feet and held about 3.5
people. Today, the average new home is more than 2400 square feet and holds
about 2.5 people.

There have been a lot of other changes as well in what is typical for a new
home, but those details right there are enough to let you know that our homes
have grown larger on average while our families have grown smaller. Meanwhile,
we have a growing homeless problem (which people on the internet routinely
want to claim is unrelated to housing supply issues and the high cost of rent,
but the data doesn't support that conclusion).

Our family size has shrunk. Our homes need to also shrink and we need to
return to patterns of development compatible with fostering walkable
neighborhoods and transit-oriented design. Adding public transit to existing
suburbs won't really achieve that.

The general assumption in the US is that young people should rent a place
designed for a nuclear family and get a bunch of roommates to fill the extra
rooms and split the rent. Then we make horror movies, like Single White
Female, about basically what a nightmare this is. The internet is filled with
horror stories of the roommate from hell and questions about "How on earth can
I survive this or get out of this???"

We have eliminated about a million SROs. People object to SROs a "slum"
housing. They are literally more comfortable with having people out in the
street than with building housing that isn't upper middle class as our
baseline expectation without providing jobs and incomes to support that as our
baseline expectation.

While eliminating small homes that people could potentially live in as a
single adult or childless couple, our millionaires are actively planning to
eliminate jobs and create permanent unemployment. After eliminating jobs that
paid on average $20k to $50k annually, our rich people here would like to
institute UBI paying between $10k and $18k annually with an expectation that
we will have 80 percent permanent unemployment.

Given that we have eliminated most housing across the US that costs less than
$500/month to rent, there are a lot of places where $10k won't even pay your
rent for the year, much less feed you. Without resolving our housing issues,
there is no hope that some ridiculous scheme like UBI will do anything but
shaft most Americans.

I mostly can't get people to really listen to me. They are too busy listening
to multimillionaires and failing to see that those people are actively and
intentionally planning to create a permanent underclass that will have no hope
of accessing wealth ever again.

I was homeless for nearly six years while active on Hacker News. Simply being
allowed to run my damn mouth in the same space as all kinds of millionaire
businessmen absolutely didn't fix my life and lift me out of poverty and so
forth. So I'm quite convinced that the entire point of wanting to create UBI
is so that asshole rich people can wash their hands of poor people.

It's quite horrifying and I don't know how to stop it.

On the upside, the pandemic seems to have fostered some of the changes the
world has been talking about for years and not accomplishing, such as reducing
our carbon footprint and reducing pollution. So maybe we will find solutions
anyway, in spite of bulling our way intentionally and on purpose towards a
dystopian vision of intentionally shafting most Americans and telling them to
fuck the hell off and forget about ever having any kind of a life.

SROs are going the way of the dinosaur and a lot of people no longer know what
they are, so here is the obligatory link:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy)

This comment is a little more on the ranty side than I really like. I'm just
really short of sleep and tired of trying to be polite to people who literally
don't care if their callous BS results in my death. So it's probably time for
me just stop talking and attempt to go get some sleep.

~~~
3131s
I really wonder what fantasy world you live in where the elites are just
clamouring to institute a UBI.

So far only a single congressperson that I am aware of has advocated for it,
and that's Ilhan Omar, who is a hero of mine.

Why is it impossible to have a UBI alongside other nice things? What better
proposal do you have to reduce wealth inequality?

~~~
DoreenMichele
I spend a lot of time on Hacker News where, for a time at least, articles
regularly appeared here about the desire of Sam Altman and Elon Musk to
institute a UBI. A quick search would readily turn them up.

Sam Altman has grown quieter about it, but his desire to make it real
persists. He put $5 million of his own money into a UBI experiment when he was
president of YC and, more recently, he backed some presidential candidate who
was proposing UBI as part of his political platform. I think the candidate's
name was Andrew Yang.

My proposals:

We fix the housing supply issues we have and institute universal health
coverage in the US. Those two things would go a long ways towards improving
things for the lower classes.

I don't necessarily think it's impossible to have a UBI alongside "other nice
things." I just know that what I've read so far doesn't at all bode well for
UBI being a positive.

Should I start hearing different things, I would be amenable to changing my
mind. Given some of what happened during the pandemic, I'm cautiously hopeful
that someday things will be different.

But today does not seem to be that day.

------
collyw
I am just thinking of the metro here in Barcelona. Rush hour is fairly packed.
No chance for social distancing. (I cycle the majority of places, as its
faster provided you are willing to bend the rules).

------
naskwo
I'm still missing London in this discussion.

~~~
ProZsolt
Please, explain why

------
cwhiz
The only city in America that is even remotely capable of going car free is
NYC. And really it’s just Manhattan because in the other boroughs the train
service starts to get spotty.

Bus service in NYC would suffice if they killed off most of the other vehicle
traffic. It is sometimes faster to walk than take the bus.

Honestly, the amount of vehicle traffic in NYC right now is perfect. They
should just cap it at current levels.

------
goatinaboat
Cramming people in on buses and trains is sure to slow the next pandemic
spreading _facepalm_

------
papito
Europe's cities had room for cars?

------
mamon
So, in response to epidemic cities are limiting the only transportation mode
that is safe during the epidemic - yes, that makes perfect sense :)

------
lnsru
It’s completely wrong discussion. Remote work should be prioritized, so the
people don’t need to move to overcrowded cities. Less people in the cities,
less problems with their cars and crappy public transport.

~~~
hnarn
Urbanization has been going strong as a trend for more than 100 years and I
think it's reasonable to assume it won't stop anytime soon. If that's correct,
density in cities will only increase, and most remote workers will not be
outside of the city anyway. People enjoy having an entertainment-dense area to
be in during the weekends and evenings, and they enjoy being able to go there
without taking their car for an hour. So even with remote work, I don't think
it does much to alleviate the problems associated with urban density.

Remote work is a great idea for many reasons, if nothing else it lessens
unnecessary load on infrastructure systems, but having grown up in Europe with
the "public transport mindset" I can't help but feel that a society centered
around highways, car ownership and isolated suburbia feels almost a bit
dystopian.

I believe the future is in cities, and for cities to work people need to be
able to get around efficiently without having to each own a separate car that
mostly just stands around taking up space and costing money.

~~~
ProZsolt
I could have worked fully remotely in the past 3 years, but I choose to live
in a big city and only work from half the time. There are way more things to
do in the city than just work. Cinemas, restaurants, museums, stores.
Everything in cycling distance. It's easier to network, find people with
mutual interests. All these things won't work without the economy of scale.

What it can bring is lower average house prices cities and gentrification of
neighborhoods farther away from the city center. People could move farther
from the city center because they don't have to commute to work every day.
(This is EU specific)

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
This seems really short-sited given the reality of pandemics. Walking or
biking or high utilization of public transport implies high density. In a
pandemic, the more people you encounter, the higher the chance of contracting
the disease. Cars decrease density by increasing the effective area where
people can work/shop/live. The area accessible grows as the square of the
distance you can travel. In addition, in a car, increased travel time does not
increase exposure. With walking or public transport, your exposure increases
the longer you travel.

~~~
ollo
Walking or biking does not always imply high density! On the other hand,
public transportation can easily get crowded. That is one reason why European
cities are moving away from public transportation in favour of bikes, scooters
and so on. Finally, I agree that it would be better to encourage car usage
during a pandemic. One reasonable reason not to do so is that parking spots
are limited.

~~~
luckylion
Bikes and scooters cannot replace public transportation though.

I live at the very edge of a large city. Fortunately, I don't work in the
city, but if I were, it would be a 30 minute train ride. Sure, I could also do
that by bike, but it would take me ~90 minutes. That's not a realistic
alternative. Scooters are fine if they are to replace buses that you'd take
for two or three stops, e.g. a kilometer or two.

And we still occasionally get bad weather. I predict that scooter and bike
usage will drop extremely fast once it rains for a week or two, or, god
forbid, we get a real winter once again, with snow and sub-zero temperatures.
People want comfort, and riding a bike in bad weather, even if it's an ebike,
isn't comfortable.

~~~
ollo
> And we still occasionally get bad weather. I predict that scooter and bike
> usage will drop extremely fast once it rains for a week or two, or, god
> forbid, we get a real winter once again, with snow and sub-zero temperatures

Live in the Netherlands for a week and you'd be amazed at the resilience of
Dutch bikers in bad weather.

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luckylion
Maybe living with the knowledge that the sea lurks to drown you gives them
fortitude ;)

I live in northern Germany, we've got plenty of bad weather and always have,
and you can see lots of cycling when spring blesses us with a sunny and warm
day, but it drops when it rains.

Maybe it's intention ("I want to ride my bike to work because reasons") vs
opportunity ("I can take the bike, it's so nice outside") that helps create
all-season bikers.

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ProZsolt
It's also an infrastructure thing. Is it faster if I cycle? Do I have a place
with a roof where I can store my bike? Can I change and store my wet clothes
at work? Expect from a few, people will choose the most convenient way of
transportation.

