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by CalRobert 762 days ago
I moved to the Netherlands for most of the reasons NJB did and it's hard not to get emotional when you're saying "I moved here so a driver wouldn't kill my daughters while they bike to school."

Because at the core of it, giving my kids freedom and independence and not having a driver kill them shouldn't require moving to a tiny country below sea level.
2 comments
RestlessMind 762 days ago
It's not like Netherlands doesn't have any cars. It ranks fairly high (40 out of 196) in terms of number of motor vehicles per capita

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...

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seabass-labrax 762 days ago
According to data from 2020, the Netherlands has 30 road fatalities per million inhabitants, slightly below the EU average of 42. For comparison, the USA (when all states are considered as a whole) has 117 fatalities per million inhabitants. I'm not sure where to look for per-state statistics.

Anecdotally, even though the Netherlands and my home country of the UK are just next to each other on the ranking of motor vehicle per capita (40th and 37th), during a stay in Limburg I felt that the difference was much more stark. I saw far fewer people driving than I would have done in an equivalent area of Britain. I wonder if that means that the average Dutchman is likely to have a car, but also uses it less frequently than car users in other countries. That might partly account for the low fatality rate.

https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023...

https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2020-fatality-data-show...

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RestlessMind 760 days ago
> Anecdotally, even though the Netherlands and my home country of the UK...

Statistics paint a different picture.

"Mobility on Dutch roads has grown continuously since the 1950s and now exceeds 200 billion km travelled per year. With a population of 16.8 million people, this comes down to an average of 32 kilometres (20 mi) per person per day" [1]

Avg UK car mileage per day in 2022 was 18[2]. Given cars are fewer than people, per capita mileage driven will be even lower.

That is also reflect in safety stats. Netherlands has death rates of 3.8/100K people, 4.7/1B vehicle-km. For UK, those numbers are 2.9 and 3.8 respectively [3]. So Netherlands just seems to have a reputation divergent from the actual reality? (I mean, no one talks about how awesome UK is for biking or public transport).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_transport_in_the_Netherla...

[2] https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/cheap-car-insurance/average-car...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

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CalRobert 762 days ago
Indeed, there's tons of cars here. Too many, and too much free parking. But it's still better than most other places.

I actually don't think the Netherlands is "good" really, just that almost everywhere else is hellishly bad.

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seoulmetro 762 days ago
You moved somewhere for benefits of that area and lost benefits of the area you left.

That's life.

It doesn't help to mix your life choices with planning choices as one emotional mass. That's why the videos need to be viewed with that in mind.

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