At the same time NYC and Toronto, we are removing protected bike lanes. In North America the acceptable amount of lives per year to sacrifice for a little convenience for drivers is above zero, and apparently rising.
In the 70s there were massive protests in the Netherlands called "Stop the Child Murder". Note that these protests were based on conservatism. People were used to safe streets where children could cycle independently to school, go to sports clubs and hang out with their friends around the city. Then cars came and started killing their children.
At the height of the killings, 420 Children were killed per year: that is more than 1 per day. 3200 people were killed per year if you include adults. You can imagine that even more were wounded and maimed.
Of course people did not accept that the automobile would destroy their traditional lifestyle and massive protests took place around the country.
I can certainly attest that cycling around the Netherlands was a joy during the late 70s and 80s. I lived in West Germany on and off, mostly in the north and close to the border. A lot of German roads had very decent cycle lanes too.
It was a bit of a shock cycling in the UK but to be fair all roads were a lot less busy back then. I also don't recall the hostility to cyclists back then that exists now.
A bunch of Dutch hydo-engineers probably (there were rather a lot of skilled folk over there) assisted Somerset back around C17+ to drain and reclaim some pretty large tracts of land in the "Levels". Perhaps we need some cycle lane building assistance.
I think the bigger scandal in NYC isn't the removal (it was a single lane removed as part of a 15+ year back-and-forth beef), but the fact that the city isn't even close to meeting its legal obligations around constructing new lanes[1].
(That's not to say that the removal isn't shameful and nakedly for hizzoner's political gain; I just think it's not the "big" thing.)
This is a great reason to have snap elections instead of scheduled elections. Mayor Adams will scorch the earth to get the votes of a handful of extremists in his quixotic reelection attempt, and will harm lots of people in doing so.
How does snap elections solve this problem? You'd have less information if it happened in the next week, especially about less well known candidates. You are suggesting that elections coming in a few months leads to tricking people?
It creates conditions for more direct accountability. There's a pretty standard pattern of getting elected, doing the more extreme things, and then giving the voters time to cool off before the election happens.
The pattern in the US seems to be to leave time bombs running that only detonate if you don't get re-elected, something that snap elections wouldn't help with.
When I see someone violating cycling traffic code, nine times out of ten it's an electric skateboard, rental city bike or a food delivery guy on an electric moped (legally bicycles when limited to 25 km/h).
And those spandex-wearing road cyclists and commuters that motorists like to bitch about so much? The best law-abiding folks I've seen.
With no numbers offered. Lots of cities "expanded" cycling infrastructure but can't boast that level of safety. By far the strongest distinguising factor is the speed limit. That is a mere policy that doesnt cost taxpayers billions, it works, and therefore is politically viable.
"Special measures" is not just code for bike lanes either.
> At the same time NYC and Toronto, we are removing protected bike lanes. In North America the acceptable amount of lives per year to sacrifice for a little convenience for drivers is above zero, and apparently rising.
BTW, what do you think about the 5-10 extra lifetimes that people in NYC collectively waste _every_ _day_ in commute compared to smaller cities?
A well-designed car-oriented city will have commutes of around 20 minutes, compared to 35-minute average commutes in NYC. So that's 30 minutes that NYC residents waste every day on average. That's one lifetime for about 1.2 million people commuting every day.
You've sort of given it away with the "smaller cities" thing. People who live in NYC don't want to live in a smaller American-style city with suburban sprawl.
(You've also glossed over the more painful statistic: for every lifetime-equivalent lost on mass transit inefficiencies, there are hundreds lost to gridlock in NYC. That number, already terrible, would be far worse without the city's mass transit -- you simply cannot support the kind of density NYC endeavors for with car-oriented development.)
I mean, I don't hide my despair at large cities. They're destroying the fabric of the Western civilization by acting as black holes for population.
> You've also glossed over the more painful statistic: for every lifetime-equivalent lost on mass transit inefficiencies, there are hundreds lost to gridlock in NYC.
Here's the thing. A well-designed human-oriented city like Houston has FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.
The fix for cities like NYC is to stop building them and start de-densifying them.
> FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.
Houston ranks 7th worst traffic in the US. The internet tells me you’re boasting of 30mn for an “average 6 miles commute”. That’s bicycle distance and speed that you need to drive due to a broken city.
Wrong. Houston is a great example for planners who care about housing availability and the quality of life for the people. And not bike lanes and road diets.
> Houston ranks 7th worst traffic in the US.
Yes. And the 7th worst traffic in the US is STILL BETTER than any large European city's oh-so-great transit.
This framing that commute time matters more than anything else about a city seems facially incorrect. And once again, it glosses over the actual reality here: people living in dense cities want the benefits of dense living, and there’s no tractable way to maintain that while designing a city primarily for car traffic.
No, you didn't. You googled the first numbers you could find and threw them over the wall.
The official commute time (one direction) for Houston is in the Census. It was 27.6 minutes in the 2023 ACS: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2023.S0801?q=commuting&... (data series: "Workers 16 years and over who did not work from home", "Mean travel time to work (minutes)", restriction by "Census place" = "Houston city, TX"). Make sure you're not looking at "Houston county", which is a small rural area with a population of 20000 people.
And I was talking about the commute time in _large_ cities in Europe, comparable with Houston's population of 7 million. The best is Berlin, with 31 minutes.
So I suppose you're going to apologize for providing the incorrect data?
Pretty much the only thing is the availability of bars and night clubs. And people past the age of 20-25 are typically not that interested in them.
Anything else: museums, operas, theaters, etc. Take up an insignificant amount of time in the real life. For example, most NYC citizens go to museums exactly 0 times a year.
Might be true, but at this point it's an utopian level of fantasy. We spent more than a century with cars in old cities, new cities, smaller ones bigger ones.
The only proven results we've had is reducing cars solveany problems at once.
At the height of the killings, 420 Children were killed per year: that is more than 1 per day. 3200 people were killed per year if you include adults. You can imagine that even more were wounded and maimed.
Of course people did not accept that the automobile would destroy their traditional lifestyle and massive protests took place around the country.