Dutch people cycle an average of 2.6 kilometres each per day. If this pattern was replicated worldwide, the study suggests, annual global carbon emissions would drop by 686 million tonnes.
This mammoth figure exceeds the entire carbon footprint of most countries, including the UK, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Australia.
And of course it’s your responsibility as opposed to the people designing infrastructure, the politicians approving their plans, and the corporations lobbying the latter
/s
I got 54kms to get to work every day and no place to park that’s safe between.
I would be happy as a Clam to save my morning run and go to my car but it’s not feasible unfortunately.
Maybe stop putting the buck on people trying to make a living and give it to politicians who fly privately or massive shipping companies.
Nobody’s asking you to cycle for 110 km per day, and the Dutch don’t fo that either. It’s about building cities that are bicycle-friendly, and where people can live in reasonable proximity to their job and all services.
If you’re in the US or Canada the problem is likely zoning and suburbia.
The problem is look his densely populated European cities are. Here we have sprawl and more sprawl.
So given the cities are have now, what can we do? Can’t simply build a new one or tear the old one down.
Stop voting for politicians who want to get rid of existing bike lanes (Doug Ford - Ontario, Canada), stop voting for politicians who oppose high density residential zones (gestures at most of the developed world), and vote for politicians who have the best public transportation plans. Get involved with city politics a la the annoying people in parks and rec. It works. Donate to and get involved with your local progressive organizations (shout out to https://www.progresstoronto.ca/).
Just narrowing the space for cars and adding continuous walking paths plus protected bike lanes will get you pretty far. The goal isn’t that every single person should travel by foot or car every time, it’s to make it more common to use those travel modes in general.
And build passenger trains.
We can just change the design of existing cities.
Heck the Netherlands was designing for cars until massive protest (violent and non violent). It then started to change existing infrastructure for a more people focused design.
A oil crisis helped of course
But it wasn’t. Your telling me an old city was designed for cars?
No I’m telling you they were designing for the car after the second world war. Just like in north America(North America cities started a bit earlier). Most north America cities were also not build for cars, but bulldozed for the car.
Amsterdam for example also had plans to build a highway into the city (lucky the lack of money and opposition stoped it) and bulldozed some streets already for heavy car design. The rest of the city streets where full of cars and parking.
Here is what the Damrak looked like
But after the stop de kindermoorden (child murder) protest(and many more) it slowly started changing. Now everytime a street is renewed it is to today’s standards including people focused design.
Also keep in mind the old city of most European cities is pretty small. The argument “BuT tHe cIty Is olD” only works for maybe 20% of a city the rest is build after the 1900 or for sure not medieval.
And this is also not just a big city thing. Every city, Town or Village(and also outside it) has the same rules for street design. Amsterdam for example really sucks te ride a bike I think. There are many better cities in the Netherlands.
But you can also look like a city like Rotterdam, a city designed for the car in the Netherlands. It’s not great but it still has room for bikes and public transport. And some projects to make the city more people friendly.
You did that already once, when decided to move to car-centrism. No reason not to do it again
Get an ebike
Ebike are expensive. I know people how bought small used cars for the price of an ebike.
I once bought a used bike for 12 € another time for 5 €. Yes, it was a long time ago and we got inflation since bit ever since bikes become trendy, they got overly complicated and overly pricy. That doesn’t help people cure their carbrain syndrome.
you want the mad max future
The Dutch also have a very flat country
They make ebikes now that really help with hills
As someone who’s relatively recently started riding a motorcycle I feel like at that point skip the half measure and get an electric motorcycle. Really don’t get the focus on bycicles in these discussions since I feel like it’s liable to make people think it’s a lost cause in areas like mine where the city is quite literally on a 20 degree slope minimum.
Wish I had an electric motorcycle to a degree but the 40 year old 110 is far more workable with what I intend to do with it what with reserve fuel and whatnot. Is it insane to plan a trip from SoCal to Washington on a 40 year old motorcycle? Yes. Will that stop me? Fuck no. My first trip up there was with a slowly dying 95 four runner I’ve got to up the standard set by 19 year old me.
True, but 4 hills = 20 miles.
That doesn’t get a lot of snow.
Oulu (Finland) is pretty big on cycling and they get plenty of snow
I am strongly leaning toward beginning to take practical steps to someday move to the Netherlands because, even ignoring the ugly US political climate (which let’s be real, is probably not going anywhere good anytime soon), I came to realize as a bike commute lover that I will always be miserable in this country unless I relocate somewhere where I can bike more freely.
Sidenote: a vegan who drives has almost as low of a footprint as an omni who is full time car-free. So why not both? Whatever you can do for where your life is at, the more plants you eat and the less animal products, the more worthwhile you’ll find it to be.
If everybody cycled as much as the Dutch, global carbon emissions would drop by nearly 700 million tonnes per year.
For context, Wikipedia puts annual global carbon emissions in 2023 at 39,024 million tonnes. That’s a 2% slash. I suppose if you find a lot of these it could add up, but without a fix for the original problem of unregulated capital expansion it’s just going to fill the void.
For context, aviation is also about 2% of emissions. So it really isn’t nothing.
But the lower-hanging fruit for me is all of the kerosene used to cook. That’s also about 2% of global emissions and it’s a good candidate to be fixed with solar panels and wind turbines.
By the Allfather id kill for a good quality electric stove for camping. At least on the same durability and reliability as my propane/ butane one.
there is NO solution to climate change that doesn’t involve a > 80% reduction in car use (and banning flying) Even the IPCC has said e-cars aren’t an answer (they embed urban sprawl).
There’s is a persistent myth that we can’t inconvenience anyone, which is patently nonsense as the destruction of civilisation from climate change is more than inconvenient.
People are not going to give up their comfort. And that is the problem. It isn’t just cars it is rampant consumerism that is a problem and nobody is giving that up.
Rebuild the whole of society, place affordable houses around work centers and we could.
Cities need to be build around this concept
They were. America bulldozed them. Just do it again
*Car companies bulldozed them. Around the same time they bought up all the trolley systems, and then shut them down.
Well, they have longer legs than the rest of us.
I’m from the Netherlands and use a bicycle for most of my daily commute. What isn’t mentioned in the article: cycling is also dirt cheap. I bought a new bicycle 8 years ago for 500 euro, needed two times a repair of around 100 euro in total. That’s like 3 months of owning a cheap car
500 Euro?!
Luxury!
When I lived in The Netherlands I would buy my bicycles second hand (well, more likely 3rd or 4th hand) from a bicycle shop at the train station for less than €100.
It would’ve been cheaper to buy from the fishy looking guy near the Red Light District but those source their bicycles in “special” ways (and I don’t mean “drag it up from the canal”).
Granted, this was maybe 2 decades ago, but still, €500 sounds like treating oneself with an extra nice brand new bicycle.
Curiously I kept doing the same thing - buying my bicycles second hand from the bicycle shop - in both London and Berlin.
500 € is the cheaper side of decent new bikes… Inflation is a bitch. Still, you can’t even buy only the tires of many cars for that price. It’s dirt cheap to cycle.
Yeah, for a brand new bicycle it doesn’t sound too much nowadays, considering that an electric scooter will be more expensive.
As I said I’m used to buying them second hand which even now is quite a bit cheaper - last one I bought was a couple of years ago in Berlin (were I was going to stay 3 months) and if I remember it correctly it was 200 euro.
Aye. Course, we had it rough. We used to have to buy a bike for 75 euro from a scrap yard.
You had access to a scrapyard?!
When I was young we had to pay a farmer 25 euro so that he let us in into his part of the woods were we would make our own bicycles from pieces of twig and some leaves!
Luxury! When I was a lad we would go out to the prison yard and scavenge mismatched bicycle parts from the prison chop shop then build them into a frankenwheelie
But are they good bikes though? I’ve been to Amsterdam twice, once in the 80’s and again a couple of years ago. I love the bicycle culture but the bikes themselves, not so much. I saw a few decent ones but they were few and far between the heavy looking cruisers most were riding. I was a transportational cyclist in California for a few decades and my last bike was $1100 new in 1987. Would be a few thousand today and I can’t picture riding anything lesser. My standard commute was a little over 11 Miles, so 18 km…
You don’t NEED a carbon frame multi-thousand dollar bike any more than drivers need Lamborghinis. If that’s what you WANT, that’s fine, and you should buy it. For most people, they want the equivalent of a Honda Civic.
Yeah, I’m riding a massive hundred pound steel behemoth. It’s fun and carries 200 pounds of kitty litter, but I am not moving that thing faster than 7mph uphill under my own power
my favourite bikes to ride are my shittiest ones (that I keep in good condition)
they’re not actually shitty bikes, they’re just 25 years old and I bought them for next to nothing. they’re nothing like my good bikes, and yet they get ridden the most
I think if you’re having trouble enjoying yourself on a well-maintained cheap bike, the problem is with you and not the bike tbh
Oh, it’s definitely with me. Good bikes are a pleasure to ride and get you there faster, handle well and are generally safer. Clunky cruisers and lesser bikes handle poorly, go slow and shift even worse should they have gears. I still ride the 1987 Bridgestone MB-1: Cro-mo steel, suntour, drop bars. It’s old but nothing shitty about it.
I just don’t get societies that embrace the bicycle but ignore the technology and quality that makes them good.
People are not aware how wasteful cars with combustion engines are. If you go by a car to the next supermarket to buy a veggie pizza, the emissions from the car are likely higher than from your whole meal - 220 grams per person-kilometer.
Per kilometer, the carbon footprint of a car is about as high as seat in a passenger plane.
Trains are at a tenth of that.
Bikes practically at zero.
And bikes are the means of transport which statistically make your life longer , not shorter - cars mostly kill people by lack of movement.
As an American, the closest I’ve come up death, by far, is on bicycles. I’m also a motorcyclist, but my closest calls have been on bicycles.
I’ve also had bicycles stolen. Per mile traveled, it’s amazing how often they’re stolen.
Bicycling in America is a great way to put your life at risk and have to take a taxi home because someone stole your vehicle. If you try to improve it with things like “15 minute city” initiatives, right-wingers freak out about a conspiracy to control them. It sucks.
Fuck trains, too, at least in America. The other day, I had to wait almost half an hour while a cargo and lumber train blocked my path, switching cars on and off of a branch line. There were probably 50+ cars, idling in the heat for half an hour, all so that some train company can make a few bucks by abusing its employees, inconveniencing the public, and skip infrastructure maintenance on land that was granted to them generations ago.
Yeah, America is fucked.
I feel like we’re kinda derailing the discussion if our point of reference is North America. You guys have spent generations building a car-centric society. The same is not true for most countries. You can fix it but your solution will probably involve a lot more public transit rather than bicycles.
Hey, hey, hey… my fat mother isn’t going to ride a bike. Even though I rode a bike for years, I like air conditioning now that I’m older (fatter). You can’t save the world trying to convince me that I should sweat.
/this is sarcasm
They make these great recumbent trikes for us fat decrepit folk
I always say my “dream car” is good public transit and walkable cities with good bike infrastructure.
It might not work everywhere, but it’s a nice goal and it would have the secondary effect in America of making most of us a lot healthier.
Then build us cities like the dutch.
Having to only go as far as the Dutch for travel would be helpful for transitioning to bicycles. The moment American city distances ( hundreds of km) are applied, everyone scraps bikes. Buses and trains and cars and planes become the conversation - bikes aren’t realistic for actual travel but nice for local commutes like groceries.
Spreading out like that was a deliberate choice on the part of American city planners. It was an unnatural experiment that failed, and which can and should be undone.
https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburban-experiment
Are you suggesting time travel as a solution?
Bike lines to commuter hubs for mass transit is the answer I’d go with, personally.
No, I’m suggesting zoning law reform. Right now, it is very often literally illegal to build in a sustainable way, and that has to stop.
I agree with that, but sorry I don’t understand how thats related to biking more and mass transit, other than a complete rework of the layout of towns and cities across the country that would take decades or more to have an impact.
It is true that the US has a loooong way to go. It’s insane to me that even the most progressive among y’all don’t even see the point of starting this journey.
The rework is the suggestion, I think A gradual rework would already help and wouldn’t take that long. It’s just that somebody would have to start that, and I am not sure if the will for that exists.
I would have to disagree on it taking that long (as in so short) - not the change to zoning law, but the actual existing building infrastructure.
Cities are one thing, and often have better infrastructure in place (though absolutely not a guarantee), but general suburbia you wouldn’t find much shift in a short time. For one, availability of sites for new construction, and two, its the most likely place for quick capitalist change (new expensive clothing store rather than say, a small grocer).
Its going to get harder the further rural you get, there is more space but won’t be as much appetite. Small businesses had already been squeezed out by the likes of Walmart and their ilk, and wouldn’t sensibly be able to return without other changes (like being low cost enough and affordable to the local folks to go there instead of a Walmart Super Center or whatever those giant warehouse mini mall ones are called), which means financial incentives and lower and middle class folks having more money to spend.
Which you’d need to start having people stay more local for work to grow the local community.
Its a part of a solution, but it isn’t a solution by itself IMO. And its going to take time to have an impact. Time that will be on a decades-long scale, considering many towns have been around for a hundred years or more that isn’t a staggering timeframe, its sensible.
It definitely can’t be done in the same kind of timeline as bike lines and bus infrastructure.
(Edit: stupid mobile keyboard)
You might be surprised at how much pent-up demand for density there is in the inner suburbs (the ones old enough to still have been built on a reasonable grid system instead of cul-de-sacs).
People really gotta start saying what they mean by “density”, because I’ve had 4 people in 700sqft, and cannot imagine people actually want to live like that.
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When people complain about lack of density they’re complaining about 2 people living in a 4500+ sq ft suburban house with an even larger yard.
I’m not, I just don’t think there is that much by comparison to the huge swaths of the rest of the country.
For the record, I’ve lived in city, suburb, and more rural, and have spent long periods of time in really rural (like a town of 200 people that my mom has family in, and a not-even-a-town where its just 50+ acres of woods between everyone’s home and its only 20 minutes by car, on roads with no speed limit, to reach the highway).
The time scale for those sorts of changes is long, and need other changes to make it work.
I suggest fixing what you can to stave off an even worse climate catastrophe. It’s that or go extinct. I am sure the USAians will make the sensible choice.
Cars have only existed for ~150 years, American cities are mostly older than that. Spreading out was a choice but it wasn’t because of cars.
At one point in time 100 years ago you could take commuter rail systems all the way from NYC to Cincinnati. Those systems were removed 1950s and then the bus companies that removed them ‘mysteriously’ stopped having so many routes (many were owned by GM…).
150 years ago, most cities were a bunch of unconnected small towns surrounding a central smaller city. They slowly grew together into the sprawl we have today.
The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 and again that’s not even talking about the commuter rail systems that I was mentioning before. You could take a train from New York to Philadelphia in the 1830s. Car companies want you to forget just how connected we used to be.
Uh…you can take a train from New York to Philadelphia today and it leaves like every 20 minutes. Two a day from New York to Cincinnati, but 19 hours. Car would be half that, airplane a fraction. I think it’s less conspiracy and more convenience…
They didn’t have cars or airplanes 150 years ago… but they did have trains.
What complete nonsense. The suburban sprawl of the US is a relatively recent phenomenon.
So I live in one of America’s oldest streetcar suburbs, from the 1890’s. They had horse-driven streetcars since the 1860’s or so, steam from the 1870’s, and electric ones from the 1880’s. LA’s urban sprawl is entirely due to their historic streetcar system. The person you’re responding to is basically correct…
I mean… It’s not like Dutch people use their bikes to go between cities (maybe sometimes, but they got buses and trains, too). The bikes are for local trips, which make up the vast majority of trips you’ll do. It sure helps that cities in Europe are laid out in a less spacious manner, but that’s not an unfixable situation for the US.
The car desert that is suburbia can be split into micro cities (perhaps with bike friendly trains) with a few local food supplies and necessary services. Far from impossible with a cultural mind shift.
10-20 km is an easy bike commute distance if the infrastructure allows it. Especially with electric bicycles. I’d guess that most people in the US don’t travel more than that for their daily routes.
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I wouldn’t say easy. 20 km takes me an hour or more, although I am slow and don’t have an electric bike (yet).
But how much “actual travel” do you do? Most of my travel is urban, where cycling tends to be the fastest and most efficient option when you factor in traffic, parking dilemmas, etc.
I’d say outside of 2-3 months in the winter, I make around 80% of trips by e-bike. The car is still there when I need it. I guess what I’m trying to say is it’s not an either/or proposition.
For me, actual travel is 35 miles every day. Uphill elevation change over that distance is 800ft-1500ft depending on the direction.
Most places in the US never considered biking as a valid travel method when being designed.
Is that 35 miles round trip or one way? If it’s round trip, that’s actually not so bad. You’d clearly need an ebike to handle those climbs though.
Also, I don’t know your situation in terms of whether you could take trails or cut through parks to reduce the distance? I sat down with google maps and figured out a shorter route for my commute. It actually involves more climbing because there’s a ravine trail I follow now, but that’s not an issue for the ebike.
That’s round trip mileage.
An e-bike would be nice, but would definitely add commute time. I commute via motorcycle most days.
Let’s be real, we have long since given up on USAians coming to their senses. But the rest of humanity might like to save themselves still.
I have regularly commuted by bicycle when living in The Netherlands, England and Germany and bicycles are really only for traveling inside the city not for going between cities.
Back when I lived in The Netherlands at one point I had a bicycle at home and another parked at the train station on the city where I worked, so I would commute to the train station nearest to were I lived using my home bicycle, leave it there, travel by train to a different city, pick up the bicycle I had there from the train station and use it to do the last leg to get to work. At the end of the day I would do the reverse.
Even having a bicycle to cover just 1 or 2 km is quite a time saver (easily turning a leg of a journey that takes 15m walking into one that takes 5m).
That said, I could do it like that because in The Netherlands there are proper parking places for bicycles at all train stations plus trains are pretty good.
When living in London (which at the time seriously lacked good conditions for cycling) I just used my bicycle to go from home directly to work, which was maybe 4km, took me around 23 minutes and was actually faster than using the Tube (the subway), whilst in Berlin it was sorta the same length of ride but from where I was living to were I was studying.
Obviously in all those places the bicycle was also useful for things like doing my weekly shopping (just get some bicycle bags).
Mind you, having a bicycle doesn’t exclude also having a car, though I never really got a car in Germany (I was there for 3 months only, living and studying in Berlin) whilst in London I actually ended up selling my car because it was just a massive money drain (especially because in the last place I had to pay for a garage) which I barely used since even without a bicycle, public transportation is excellent when living inside in or near the core of the city (so, Zone 1 - 3).
The Netherlands is also one of the flattest countries in the world. We should still all cycle more, but it would require much more effort to cycle 5km in San Francisco or the Himalayas than in the Netherlands.
It’s also very rainy and windy.
And come on, not every city is like SanFran – it’s disengenious to imply so.
Oh, I’m not trying to imply that. I ride a traditional bike myself in an incredibly hilly area, and it can absolutely be done (though it really sucks sometimes). I’m just noting the reality that there’s less effort involved in flat cycling than in hilly cycling and the Netherlands is famously flat.
People in really hilly areas can also get e-bikes, which would still be a huge improvement over driving, but wouldn’t bring us down to the transportation emissions of the Netherlands.
“bikes are icky and slow. They just get in the way of my lifted f250, blacked out, with a really loud exhaust that I only use to drive to Walmart for groceries” MAGAcucks
“I also modified the engine to run richer and added smoke stacks so I can gun the engine and blast smoke and vaporized diesel into the faces of cyclists.”
