Suddenly, all the north Canadians who live with snow storms 24/7 appear to comment how all the world infrastructure has to adapt to their specific needs.

As someone who doesn’t have a license or a car, but does bike a lot - there will be solutions.

I order my groceries delivered. When I needed to get my old bed recycled, I asked the second hand store and they came and picked it up. They weren’t interested in the broken mattress for it (obviously), so I contacted a moving company and they had it recycled for $40.

Now I get that that cost might be hard to swallow for some, but keep in mind that I don’t pay for my car, its insurance, the fuel, or maintenance, and it took less than five minutes for me to be done with the entire thing. All I had to do was open my front door and two burly men came and picked it up for me. I didn’t even have to wait at the recycling station.

Those $40 paid for themselves.

It’s also worth noting that I do live in the frozen north (not Canada, further north), where we don’t see the sun for half the year. I see people biking year round.

Yeah, it depends on the context. Is the thread saying "we need to build out far more cycling infrastructure"? If so, no argument.

Or is the thread one of the naiive ones trying to argue about how we can completely eliminate cars? Then people start bringing up the edge cases that still require cars.

See, this is why I'm convinced that Americans secretly love traffic congestion. Why else would they do vehemently oppose anything that takes cars off of the streets and highways, and out of their way?

I'm not even sure that I'm joking, anymore. It's important for humans to have rituals that symbolically bind us to a larger community, like eating a big meal (usually turkey) on Thanksgiving Day, right? It feels like drivers want everybody stuck in traffic jams, so that they can feel that their own frustrating commute has some greater meaning, like this is how it is, and we're all in it together. (Like the weather.) Those of us who escape the matrix just enrage them by proving that their effort is meaningless and dumb.

Anyway, just a random musing.

Say this to anybody who will listen, please! I've been using it on my car guy friends, and they're receiving it loud and clear. They love the idea of having the roads all to themselves, many of the actual enthusiast types do anyways.

We had to spend about a month mapping the city to figure out WHERE THE FUCK SHE COULD GET ON AND OFF THE SIDEWALK.

Wow. It even worse than my shithole.

That's the logical result of decades of car-centric policies.

0 cars bad idea. Need less car, need more everything else.

I've heard it said that Houston's annual transportation cost for total car-dependency is close to 20% of their budget.

NYC, which has the entire MTA plus a huge number of highways and still shocking amount of car dependency, is 10%.

Amsterdam with all of its trams and bike paths is closest to 4%.

Yet any resident of NYC or Houston will tell you it is fucking TERRIBLE driving in either of those cities. Meanwhile, Amsterdam is ranked one of the best cities for people who love to drive because its roads are maintained, safe, and aren't congested.

It's actually not possible to be 100% transit or 100% bike, outside of some weird Swiss vacation communities or Canadian island neighborhoods. But the more you invest in transit and bikeped, the more you address the actual cause of congestion and the more drivable your city gets. Even if you truly love and prefer driving, multimodal cities are still better. Downs-Thompson is inviolable.

Cause they live somewhere where public transit is treated as a last thought thing for "the poors". When public transit is designed as a method of moving people, rather than a last thought, it gets much wider adoption. Because it's freaking great to not have to drive.

In my first job i used to work for a property management company. The owner had her office in the lavish flat of her parents in an upper class area of the city. When the mother of her asked, how i make it to work and i answered by subway. Her answer was something like "I couldn't do that. It is always so dirty."

Fuck rich people.