Recent comments in /f/UpliftingNews

azimir t1_j64i222 wrote

> Amsterdam (and the bulk of the Netherlands) is almost perfectly flat, so biking is easy

Definitely a win for biking there.

> cities and towns are older, so densely built which makes biking convenient

So why don't we build our cities more densely? Often because we've put laws in the US to block it, but those should be changed:
https://youtu.be/bnKIVX968PQ

> and the weather is milder, without extended periods of heavy snowfall.

True, but Finland still manages to ride bikes all year in many places:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

> Does rain and does get cold, but people in Copenhagen are crazy like that and will bike through it

More often because the bike infrastructure is cleared and is built for bikes (not cars where there's a snowplow'd pile of snow in a bike gutter).

>For this to happen elsewhere like in NA you need an urban redesign to cram a lot of people into much smaller spaces.

Yes. Our cities have a much too large footprint to be sustainable. They're essentially all insolvent and they shall all eventually have to shrink their square miles by abandoning the sprawl. The economics of our post WWII city designs just don't work once you start having to do maintenance on the car infrastructure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa

The Strong Towns book lays it out reasonably clearly. We're going to have to shrink our car infrastructure, build denser cities, and construct serious public transportation to serve the core, not stroad-based big box stores and low density suburbs.

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AccordingLifeguard49 t1_j64cqh8 wrote

Hard to ride a bike in 4 feet of snow at -31. In addition some cities & towns are just too darn big for this to work. There are a few chuckle heads with lifted trucks and stickers of course. However, bike travel only works like 3 months out of the year in MT. And I've seen I snow in July. I dont know of many towns where bike travel is so feasible they could restructure for it.

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RedditOR74 t1_j64bpq3 wrote

>This is such a cool thing. I can only hope the US can create infrastructure like this in my lifetime

There is not much of a chance. DFW is 75 miles across east to west and that is just the heavily developed portion. US cities incorporate much more private housing and as such have a much larger footprint. As much as efficiency is a goal, not many of us want to give up a home and private residence in lieu of an apartment. There are some, but definitely not the majority.

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