[throwaway894345]

How is that a distortion? It seems like you’re violently agreeing with the parent that many people bike to work but far, far fewer than the majority (which is essentially what the American anti-car rhetoric suggests).

> Imagine if even half of these people took to cars instead, it would be gridlock.

There are 10 million employed Dutch (Statista) of whom 65% drive (Statista), so an additional half a million would be a 10% traffic increase, which is probably not “gridlock”, but in any case I don’t see how this refutes the original claim that Netherlands is a car country.

[nirimda]

I think the problem is that American anti-car rhetoric doesn't speak with one voice. There are people who know what they're talking about, who are mostly saying "If we follow some of the Dutch practices, we can get a city where people can get to a local destination by bike safely. But we should also take note that even in the Netherlands, the need to engineer roads for bike safety is something they continually forget". But there's others who say "The US is a hell-hole, Americans are evil and dumb, cars are evil, they will destroy the earth, we must all copy the enlightened Europeans who are good and wise people".

It is like that for so many reform proposals. Heterodox economists (MMT or gold standard or anything really) will say "we ought to consider this evidence in making our economic decisions", and their acolytes on forums like this will say "If we adopt this reform, we will be able to solve all our problems, but it's just corruption and self-interested politicians who stop us". Voting system reform people say "The US is screwed by FPTP, if we adopted proportional representation we will depolarise and have a nice consensual politics", but people who study the politics of countries that use proportional representation don't really indicate that (I think in this case there are some political scientists who get close, but only by circularly defining perfection in politics as exhibiting the consequences of proportional representation).

[throwaway894345]

I agree that it’s hard to represent groups accurately, but I don’t think your “person who knows what they’re talking about” falls reasonably within bounds of anyone’s “anti-car” definition. For one, it’s not actually an anti-car argument, it’s a pro-cycling argument and lots of Americans favor safer cycling without getting anywhere near anti-car. Moreover, every identifiably anti-car community I’m aware of (e.g., r/fuckcars) has a tone that is more akin to your “Americans are evil” example—are there identifiably anti-car communities that embody your former example?

[resfirestar]

I don't know of any such communities online, but in real world local politics the first example is more common. People who support things like bike lanes, bus lanes, and light rail don't describe themselves as "anti-car", but their opponents call them that among less polite names, so I'd argue it's the more mainstream definition of anti-car.

[throwaway894345]

Yeah, I think we're talking about different groups. I'm talking about people who self-identify as "anti-car". I've never heard of anyone who uses "anti-car" as a derogatory term for others, but I wouldn't be surprised if they exist somewhere. Personally, it seems unreasonable to me to define "anti-car" as "supports other modes of transit"; "anti-car" by my definition (which I think is the main definition) requires emphatic opposition to cars.

[tablespoon]

> ...but only by circularly defining perfection in politics as exhibiting the consequences of proportional representation

Oh, I love "logic" like that. Another common example is: "the free market is the best economic system because the perfect allocation of goods in society is how the market does it."

[rexpress]

The original poster claimed that car usage is the norm in the Netherlands, which implies that anything else is outside the norm, or unusual. This is obviously incorrectly.

There are various other posts in this thread that also give statistics, and the number of car vs bike journeys is not so far apart.

In a country that famously has more bikes then people, the idea that if half the bike journeys converted to cars there would only be a ten percent increase in traffic is quite clearly ridiculous. Especially within cities bikes carry volumes of people that would overwhelm roads if those people used space-inefficient cars.

[throwaway894345]

> The original poster claimed that car usage is the norm in the Netherlands, which implies that anything else is outside the norm, or unusual

This isn't a reasonable interpretation. "the norm" only implies that it's the majority mode of transportation (in contrast with the anti-car rhetoric). This implies that other modes are not the majority, but it does not imply that those other modes are particularly rare.

> In a country that famously has more bikes then people, the idea that if half the bike journeys converted to cars there would only be a ten percent increase in traffic is quite clearly ridiculous.

I mean, I showed my math--feel free to point out where I erred, but just stating "it's quite clearly ridiculous" is like putting your fingers in your ears and shouting, "I can't hear you".

[CydeWeys]

You need fine-grained statistics. It certainly isn't true that 65% of the people living or working in big dense Dutch cities like Amsterdam drive to work. That statistic more reflects how much the population of the Netherlands is spread out as a whole, not concentrated in its biggest cities as is more common in many other European countries.

[tromp]

> There are 10 million employed Dutch (Statistica) of whom 65% drive

People don't just commute to work. Millions of Dutch students commute to school and I expect a large majority of those will bike.

[ikesau]

Do you mean Statistica or Statista?

[throwaway894345]

Statista. I’m on mobile and autocorrect is getting me. I edited my post, thanks for the correction.