A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
Just to compare, this is the utopian dream for Toronto:
There are approx. 18 cars and trucks in that image.
They are taking up SIGNIFICANTLY more space, and are causing traffic.
Still, we keep saying, "give us more of this, please!".
Insanity or stupidity?
Now I want to eat Falafel. These Maoz guys made awesome falafel back in the ‘90s when I lived there.
These big American trucks are infesting our roads now too. They are technally not street legal because they are not measured to the same enviromental and safety standards compared to a European car for some reason beyond me.
The EU has not done anything yet, but there are many enviromental groups pressing the EU on getting these trucks banned.
Importing these trucks (and any truck) without paying any vehicle tax registration is getting cancelled in 2025 here in the Netherlands so let’s hope these trucks will get the fuck off our roads. This law was kind of a loop hole to import these trucks for cheap.
Quite a few of those ghastly RAM trucks where I am up in the mountains
If they find out it's me that's sticking the "Fuck your environment, I'm compensating for my micropenis" stickers on them, I'm fucking dead
Cheap as fuck on AliExpress
Maoz falafel is still awesome!
Would love to own a moped, but it stands out too much in a sea of cars to not get stolen
The other thing we do here is have many more cars than people. I live in a neighborhood where basically everyone has two spots per unit in their attached garage...many, many people spend a lot of their time trying to avoid parking tickets because they have to park their 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th cars somewhere else.
So, so, sooo much wasted money. I've got neighbours like that... one car for each family member. And none are driving outside the city on a regular basis.
the Netherlands is so great! the train station near me has a giant bike parking garage, and only like 10 car spots, which are made just for bringing and picking up people. And from then its less than an hour to get from anywhere in the 'randstad', the part of the Netherlands with most cities, to another.
also, most Dutch neighbourhoods (/suburbs) have a single lane road which is also used by the bikers, meaning the cars are forced to go only as fast as the bikers.
In a random US city a lot of these bikes would probably be abandoned / with parts missing. Does Amsterdam have that problem? I've heard a lot of bikes go into the canal but I can't imagine this is a big problem. How does Amsterdam deal with theft / vandalism / bike abandonment?
Theft happens, for the cheap ones it’s considered part of the natural lifecycle (no pun intended) of the bikes. They’re usually stolen by the local junks and sold for €10 in the next square over. But nicer bikes are usually locked to something fixed like a pole and insured. Still they’re stolen because people will cut the lock at night, yeet them in the back of a van and drive back to Eastern Europe.
Vandalism rarely happens afaik, why would someone go around and destroy random bikes? Not really a reason unless they’re like really drunk and an asshole I guess. Some indeed end up in the canal this way.
Bike abandonment is handled by the municipality. They’ll label bikes that look abandoned with a sticker that says “please remove this sticker or we’ll remove your bike in a week”. Works well.
why would someone go around and destroy random bikes? Not really a reason unless they’re like really drunk and an asshole I guess
Haha, sounds like England.
I always try to avoid leaving my bike anywhere too central for too long in my shithole town on Thursday, Friday , Saturday nights. The roaming gangs of twats love pringling wheels just for fun - I guess.
We used to have a decent bike place in the train station, but that's now ran by car park wardens who think a pair of painnears are a major terrorist threat.
Haha, sounds like England.
Well, you might not be wrong about that in Amsterdam either :’)
the stations usually have underground guarded bike parking lots, but if you put a nice looking bike in a bad part of a city and dont put a chain on it, it'll probably get stolen. And, of course, the drunk students throwing them in the canals.
This might sound bad, but its not actually that bad. if you just put a chain around it, nothing happens.
I live in another very bike centric city, Copenhagen, and bike theft is ~0.5% of bikes every year. Many people lock the bike wheels here, some lock them to a rack/something else as well. It's a lot less locky than the US (where I used to live), but theft still exists.
Since everyone has more support and means here, there is a lot less incentive to steal a bike. It's of course punished harshly but rarely caught.
No clue how Amsterdam handles it or how prevalent it is
Way more prevalent but it's also kind of accepted as a part of life. People will have multiple bikes, the race one, the fancy one and a cheap one they bought 20€ from a local junkie and will get stolen again and resold the same way at some point. If you go somewhere with a safe spot for the bike you take the fancy one, if you're going out drinking you take the rust bucket.
That sounds like a non-issue.
Where I live, in Canada, I basically have to use two locks and an alarm on my bike.
Hell, thieves around here will break into garages or backyard sheds to steal a bike. Or right out of your apartment's bike storage.
I guess the point is, more bikes won't equal more problems 😂
...in my north american experience, those bikes would either be stolen or stripped within a day...
When i was there, a lot of them weren't fancy bikes, just get around bikes. Even if there was theft they weren't much to lose.