I think these articles are doing alternatives to car use - be it CE or electric - a disservice. Why? Because they seem to confound cause and effect.
This isn't about "geography" or "wealth". It's about infrastructure, urban planning and lifestyle. In the western world, the architecture of cities and regions has been redesigned during the 20th century to accommodate car use as the primary mode of transport. And it happen as a complex interplay between business interests, market demand and public governance, creating intricate feedback loops.
At the start of the 20th century, when the automobile was still in it's infancy, car use was looked down upon and there was even an anti-car sentiment.
Dane here: essential bit of info is missing in the discussion. Cars are MUCH more expensive to buy and own (sales tax used to be 180%, but I’m expat). I knew very few < 24 yo who could afford a car. Personally I got my first at 32 … when I moved to USA. But cars here are dirt cheap to buy and own.
> Cars are MUCH more expensive to buy and own (sales tax used to be 180%, but I’m expat).
The 180% tax rate is the highest bracket. So you don’t pay that rate on the first $x of the car’s price.
So really expensive cars are almost three times as expensive, but cheap cars are about as expensive as in all other countries. Which is why you see a lot of cheap/small cars in Denmark.
If living in Denmark and driving a car there, you need a Danish license plate for your car. If not, everyone and their mother would be driving around using Romania or Bulgaria registered cars...
OK, plates are a bit different, though. From the previous comment I thought the extra tax was a sales tax (which is in general not the same as registration fees). But I imagine governments always find ways to prevent competition that is not to their advantage (I.e. it seems that free flow of cars is actually restricted as per other reply to my previous comment)
Their cars per capita is about 2/3 of the US [1]. I bet if you correct for the effect of GDP per capita, they will rank near the bottom among European countries too.
> I bet if you correct for the effect of GDP per capita, they will rank near the bottom among European countries too.
If you start correcting for other variables, you'll have to look at demographics, size and flatness of the country, prices, public transport availability, population distribution between rural and urban areas etc. etc.
Relatively poor Romania has a lower number of cars per capita and if you live in Bucharest like me, you'd believe everyone owns a car (half being Dacias), nobody rides a bicycle.
Is it just me or is that a depressing fact? The Danes have a rather sweet setup with a good cycling infrastructure, mostly flat terrain and a rather mild temperate climate. It's difficult to reproduce that everywhere.
That is true, but even in Denmark, bike usage among adults is greatest in the biggest cities. Rural and sub-urban life requires cars (but the politicians live in Copenhagen so they don’t appreciate this reality).
Still, you can do a lot to make cities more bike friendly. In Silicon Valley it’s my impression that Palo Alto is vastly more bike friendly than all of the neighbor cities.
Infrastructure is definitely required - safe bikelanes are almost a "must have". I live on the highest point in copenhagen and bike to the lowest. Granted it's not a mountain. Weatherwise, and I bike to work every day - 6-7 km btw, the summer is great, fall is lots of rainy days (but having quality rain clothes helps). In the winter, which granted is mild - but goes down to maybe -10c, you can still bike, even in heavy snow and when the bikelanes haven't been cleared.
I love biking - taking the car would be horrible, especially parking wise, and the public transportation, while good and regular is just not for me.
And I'd like to clarify: Safe bike lanes mean you are comfortable riding a bike while transporting your 3-year-old in a trailer behind it. This is the sort of safety that is required.
> If it's -15C and sunny it's good, but if it's +15C and raining it's a pain.
In the Netherlands and I think even in Copenhagen, 15C and raining is much more common. In my own experience, raining isn't the biggest pain. I hated the wind the most.
I think that's an overly pessimistic way of looking at things.
Denmark may be warm compared to say Minnesota but it's further north than a very large chunk of the world's population.
Denmark, The Netherlands, Germany and basically all of Europe didn't always have the cycling infrastructure they have now, it's a relatively recent thing. If there's support, it can be built.
For hills, there are e-bikes. Yes they're more expensive than a regular bicycle but they're still a pretty recent invention. They'll surely get cheaper as they mature.
I'm not quite sure about the fact that ebikes become cheaper. Theoretically yes and practically "somewhat": But a lot of people are convinced that e.g. the 1k€ ebike sold by Aldi must be crap and you need to get one of the more expensive brands. Probably the same kind of people who would buy an Alienware Laptop just for email correspondence or a Ferrari for their commute, but with ebikes I'm under the impression that the average person is more gullible for this kind of thinking.
So in effect people are spending more on ebikes even though they technically become cheaper.
SRC: Recent discussion on golem.de regarding the Aldi ebike & personal experience from friends &family buying much more expensive bikes than necessary for their use.
I find it depressing that reducing all global commuting related carbon emissions would reduce global emissions by just 1%.
And then the EV is supposed to be poster child for "doing something about the climate" and in that best case it would be much worse than this.
What do you mean “mild temperatures climate”? I was planing a visit there last winter and thought it’s not advisable. How low does the temperature get on par with the rest of Europe and is there wind gust something I found make it really hard in Europe to bike in the winter?
> When talking about bicycle infrastructure in Canada, the number one excuse I hear is "winter." Many Canadians see the cold and snow as a fundamental barrier to year round cycling. But one city, Oulu in Finland, with winter weather worse than most Canadian cities, shows that winter cycling has nothing to do with the weather, and everything to do with safe cycling infrastructure.
Climate and infrastructure is what keeping me from using a bike for non recreational purposes. Continuous bike lanes, driver culture where bicycles are treated as equal on the road and temperatures that don't hit 40c.
It might, but ebikes are expensive where I live. Most of them cost as much more than my current car (which is 20 years old and bought used, but still). I can ride the bus for months off of that money.
Right and how does this work for people who are in the country? I'm a country lad and quite frankly a car will always be necessary. I'm not cycling half an hour there and half an hour back to the nearest shop and 2 hours there and 2 hours back to school every day
Well, you may still end up needing a faster vehicle, and perhaps a BEV is indeed better for you. The fun thing is: most people live or are projected to live in cities, so this is still applicable to them. Different people may use different modes of transportation.
I have always felt analysis like these are missing some details useful for the context? For example, how does it scale to a population size of UK and is it comparing the entire UK pollution (including industrial)?
As someone who's cycled around Copenhagen I have to say biking there is not just easy due to flatness but also very enjoyable. Wide biking lanes, long straight stretches without signposts in the way, cars paying due respect to bikers, place to put the bike after use, showers at work etc. etc. The experience is much much better than every other city I've been to.
Sadly I don't see this transferring to other countries any time soon. Infra was built for the car and a cyclist is often a 2nd grade participant. All the steep inclinations in cities also don't help. CPH is really flat. My hometown has so many hills a lot of people (especially elderly) are not fit to even climb them. It's also really hard to drive at decent speed on narrow lanes built as an afterthought next to the main road. Things are changing though so at least biking is doable despite many downsides.
I'd be curious to see how this compares to cutting or reducing emissions from other sources, like private jets or burning coal. At a glance, without knowing much about greenhouse emissions, this seems like an extremely high effort low impact measure. Surely there must be lower hanging fruits?
When that comes up, people make comments like "The problem with banning private jets for reasons of climate change: it is nothing but symbolism." and "Good intention but in my opinion this is a non-starter." and "This seems like the worst kind of envy politics.", to quote three of many HN comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32342021 from 16 days ago.
* UK's worth of emissions in 2015. More concretely, 400-700mn tons of CO2 would reduce global emissions (currently about 35bn tons: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions ) by 1-2%.
sure, but it's also pretty easy to implement / low hanging fruit.
In the beginning, bike paths can be just painted on the ground / plastic barriers in riskier places. It can be improved upon later as the roads are going through more thorough maintenance / renovations.
Once some reasonably safe infrastructure is in place, the bike traffic often picks up pretty quickly on its own.
Also:
> The Vehicles per 1000 people of Denmark is similar to that of United Kingdom, Qatar, Czech Republic, Estonia, Ireland, Dominica, Barbados, Bermuda, Bulgaria, Slovak Republic with a respective Vehicles per 1000 people of 516, 514, 495, 494, 491, 470, 439, 422, 417, 382 (per 1,000 people) and a global rank of 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43.
The underlying paper comments the Czech Republic has high car ownership but relatively low use because of good public transport:
> The few exceptions where car modal share remains low and car ownership is relatively high, such as Switzerland, Japan, and the Czech Republic, have well-developed and efficient public transportation systems (e.g., public buses and subways) to satisfy their main mobility demand.
Thus, a ranking of "Vehicles per 1000 people" isn't necessarily indicative of vehicle use, and it's the latter which generates CO2 (for IC engines) and other pollutants, not mere ownership.
The paper calculates the effect of changing the modal share of bike use world-wide to match that of Denmark, and presents the first ever (to the authors' knowledge) substance for that calculation.
Bicycles compete with other modes of transport in varying degrees.
Critically, bicycles have very close to the same random route ability as cars. They’re excluded from most limited-access highways but otherwise can go directly to a place 2 miles away by traveling approximately 2 miles and without significant waiting times for the user. Contrast that with public transit that might need to go 5+ miles and involve a transfer, multiple waits, and walking on both ends to cover that same 2 mile journey.
It was practically possible for me to cycle to my old office. It was comically impractical (though technically possible) to use a combination of multiple buses and multiple subway lines to get there. For that commute (and I think many other journeys), bikes are competing with cars not public transit.
I think "it depends". For someone living in the same city as you, but having both their apartment and place of work connected by a more feasible public transport route, a bike competes with public transport.
For me it augments it: Taking public transport is not pleasant (10 miles at 40m travel time), but I could go to the train station by bike, take the train and then cycle to work (<20m). Only reason I'm not doing that that I have to carry the bike up the stairs (10m height difference) and instead do wfh. By car it's 15 to 20m depending on traffic.
> That said, the vulnerability of cyclists to cars poses its own lethal risks. But these aren't anywhere close enough to outweigh the benefits from lower obesity. (They'd add about 90,000 and 160,000 additional deaths per year for the two levels of use.) And, if fewer drivers are using cars, there's a chance that these numbers would come in even lower.
Are they using the existing car->cyclist kill risk for this? The only way you would actually get people to bike more is by making it safer via dedicated infrastructure, so this figure would necessarily be lower.
> The parties have agreed that an extra tier will be introduced, whereby a lower 25% tax rate will be applied to the car’s value up to DKK 65,000 in 2021. The 85% tax rate will then be applied up to the slightly higher value of DKK 202,200 in 2021, with the 150% rate above that level.
So you can buy a 80k DKK car and pay only 25% tax.
(Which is the sales tax rate in Denmark for all consumer goods)
As of today, 65,000 DKK amounts to about 8,800 USD. I don't know of any (new) regular cars you could buy at that price.
Also, I'm not sure where did that 80k number came from. If you're using it just as an example, then I think the effective tax rate on that would be 36.25%. [1].
> many Danes drive cars that cost a bit over DKK 100k
Interesting, I'm curious to know what kinds of car are popular there. I searched a bit, and it seems like after Tesla Model 3 (which is expensive), the most popular car models are Peugeot 208 and Nissan Qashqai [1]. I wasn't able to figure out how much they cost in Denmark through a quick search though.
Coworker next to me rides 15km to work every day. Works fine, he just bathes at work rather than at home. He always shows up with a big smile, sqeeky clean.
Also, he gets to eat more cake without getting fat. Bastard.
And would your company provide showers for everyone, if at least half the people would decide to bike? When I was around 10Km from work, I mostly used public transport, as even a mild summer day in central Europe was quite intense, and I'm not one to race through the city.
Chances are that less than half would come by bike, but even if they would, ik could still make a lot of sense:
- Cycling employees are healthier. Belgian stats say they average more than one sick day less per year.
- Cycling employees are less stressed. You can squeeze more productivity out of them before they burn out.
- Cycling employees take up less parking space with their vehicles.
- Compensating cycling employees for their mobility needs- a fiscally friendly form of compensation in many countries - is often more tax advantageous than doing the same with their car driving colleagues.
Take the bath at home before the ride, so you will start smelling next day only. Use CoolMax-like underclothes, for better cooling when ridding, so you will sweat less and stay dry for a whole day. Use deodorants with anti-respiratory effect. And so on.
Bikes are frequently stolen here in Copenhagen. But bikes are just so convenient that we just go buy a new one right away. Also, bike insurance/bike subscription is pretty common.
This isn't about "geography" or "wealth". It's about infrastructure, urban planning and lifestyle. In the western world, the architecture of cities and regions has been redesigned during the 20th century to accommodate car use as the primary mode of transport. And it happen as a complex interplay between business interests, market demand and public governance, creating intricate feedback loops.
At the start of the 20th century, when the automobile was still in it's infancy, car use was looked down upon and there was even an anti-car sentiment.
e.g. https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
It's worth paying attention to history and wonder how cars became so dominant a transportation mode in the first place.
In that regard, this statement:
> So, the biggest barrier is likely to remain the social will to rethink transportation.
Should have been the premise of the article. Not its conclusion.