The person on the left is carrying bags, the one in orange is a delivery driver and a couple of people are wearing backpacks. Aside from car brained, Damaris is also blind.
Don’t remember where I heard it first, but I always love to hear it.
“Whenever someone brings up bikes, suddenly everyone needs to move their refrigerator 100 miles in the rain”
The solution? Rental vans…
It’s like people think they need mega trucks for the time once a year or less that they have to move a couch.
“But what about when I have to haul wood for my yearly porch renovation?”
“Rent a fucking truck!”
Have it delivered by the people selling you the wood.
“That’s so expensive!”, having big goods delivered costs a fraction of maintaining your own car…
In this vein, I saw a comment on Lemmy that speaks to this. I’m paraphrasing but it really woke me up. The person said that Americans choose on edge cases and not standard use case. I realized I felt that way about ICE cars vs EV and I am a cyclist. It is amazing how we can have blinders on.
It’s weird because all, and i mean ALL, furniture and electronic shop in my country will do delivery for you, most even do it for FREE.
Then there’s 3rd party delivery service via an app.
or hitch a trailer…
I’m gonna steal that.
You’re living up to your name, lol 😉
How often does one need to transport a sofa, table, or desk? That’s what delivery trucks are for, which is a legitimate use of that type of transportation.
The drugstore cowboys driving Dodge Rams clogging up the streets aren’t transporting anything more robust than a 12-pack of Mtn Dew and complaining about the price of gas
Oddly enough, the discussion is never on the other side.
“WHY DO YOU NEED BIKE LANES?! NO ONE IS EVER GOING TO RIDE A BIKE! JUST DRIVE!”
I’d gladly remove every car from the roads that is not carrying a sofa, table or desk.
I’m even willing to add “large amounts of water & a big ladder, or sick/injured people” to that list.
They already move an entire sofa, audiovisual center and HVAC.
Yea, car congestion isn’t about industrial transport, it’s about personal transport. All of the people commuting to/from work etc in single person occupied tanks.
TIL driving to and from work is “recreational” unless you have a TV or something in the back of your car.
He didn’t make it to the second semester of high school economics where he would have learned that labor is a service.
Anyways…
Holy leg day
That’s awesome
The bike in front literally has shopping bags hanging from the handles. Fucking clown take
And also someone sitting on the back of the bike.
Skill issue.
The Dutch absolutely use bikes to carry goods.
I’ve seen people with TVs on their bike. I’ve seen them with multiple crates of beer on the handlebars (kingsnight).
I saw three people on one (regular) bike.
Also these:
Yup and if we really NEED to transport big things, sure, we might need a van. But that’s probably a once every once every year thing max.
You can stack at least 3 crates on the back of the bike if you have a bag carrier, 2 otherwise. Then 1 or 2 on the bar between your legs, and 1 on the steering bar, or 2 if you also have a bag carrier there.
Ebike recommended if they’re full, but it’s way doable when bringing them back to the store.
I’m sure that works well where it’s flat. Try that in a city with tons of hills and you’re gonna have a much harder time.
Ebikes can take a lot of the pain out of that. They’re very powerful now.
And most cities are very flat.
I live in the very non flat south East of the Netherlands. We still do everything on bike. Groceries, mail, like 4 children while carrying groceries and being on the phone.
When I used to be on twitter and in response to idiotic comments like that, I would post the video of the guy cycling with a fridge on his back, one of someone moving a piano, several tradesmen that quit their vans to use cargo bikes, the pedal cab company in London (proper cargo bikes not the shitty tourist things) and the mother of 6 from Portland that had a cargo bike to take them all to school.
It used to shut them up
“Well I don’t want to bike with a fridge on my back!”
“Oh I was never suggesting you could.”
No, I was definitely suggesting you could but could you? Especially people like the person who made the half literate other reply
I was intending more like reverse psychology. “I’ll show you!” That kind of thing.
I get how I might not have said that well enough though.
It’s really hard to convey certain subtleties in text. It’s all good!
With a 3 wheeler it’s not really hard unless there is a hill or you have to dodge cars.
You are av ducking idiot if you are moving fridges on your bicycle
You’re a fucking idiot if you think roads were only built for the transportation of goods & services as they were superceded by canals then by railways.
It was a massive step backwards in inefficiency in an orchestrated move by vehicle manufacturers that freight was shifted back to roads.
And the guys (yes, more than one) carrying fridges on their shoulders while cycling, have more fucking balls than you’ll ever dream of having.
That person clearly hasn’t witnessed Dutch students carrying a whole bedroom on the back of their bike.
Moving out a whole apartment with bikes : https://youtu.be/qCraLSgVx6E?si=x_UZpk--c5Kkdgcu
These morons are insufferable because they don’t believe anything exists outside the frame of the photo. they have worse object permanence to babies
Yeah. That building is probably an office block.
And those guys usually have loading/unloading areas in the back (if not an actual car park).
The right building is a clothing store. There are indeed often back entrances for smaller vans for supplies
Having lived in Utrecht, yes all those stores in the picture, completely empty, also all the people on bikes are happy to finally have the chance to sit after spending their day in a house without furniture.
Also many pedestrianized streets allow for deliveries with larger vehicles! These just have to drive more carefully and slower for the last couple hundred meters. Usually just a city block or two.
People lived before cars, people will live without them.
Not if cars destroy the planet with us first.
Throughout history, most people have lived within an hour of work.
The biggest difficulty is retrofitting cities that have developed in the last century. Places that have been around for centuries were developed with walking in mind. Places that were developed around the automobile and climate contril are very difficult to convert.
The world has both quadrupled in population and urbanized over the past century as the car became the primary mode of transit in much of the world.
The only thing that makes transitioning even possible is that the landlord class would love to return to feudaliam.
It’s actually still doable, but requires some creative thinking to undo the damage done for half century. Train can carry people from suburb into the city, the last mile can be solved either by brt, tram, or by micromobility. Bus, tram, and bicycle need their own dedicated lane for this to work nicely. This won’t necessarily prevent people from driving but it will make driving not the only way to go to work.
Places that were developed around the automobile and climate contril are very difficult to convert.
Iirc Amsterdam is basically that, it used to be car-centric but the government take away that monopoly and give it back to bicycle and micro-mobile. Paris is another recent example on how bicycle usage is rising if given the proper safety infrastructure to ride around. It’s also a car-centric city before this.
It’s not that it’s hard, it’s just lack of political will and dinosaur way of thinking. It’s something that never crossed their mind.
Your examples are cities that are hundreds of years old and we’re absolutely initially designed around walking.
Cities design around walking is technically harder because the space limitation if they want to share it with car, but tend to have everything in close proximity, which in that case it’s far easier to just ban car from entering and cater the street to just pedestrian and bicycle/non-electric scooter. Cities design around car however, is easier to convert, as they tend to have wider road and more lane for car. They just need to take away one lane and give it to cyclist and that’s it. The only hard part is going through the legislation and carbrain.
Okay. Great. Downtown is now walkable.
How do people get downtown?
The thing about auto-centric design is that it covers transportation from end to end. Other methods require a much more complicated network of fist and last-mile solutions that aren’t easily adapted.
“Just use park and rides” doesn’t solve the problem. It just moves the traffic to the transit stations. And now it’s more expensive and slower than the existing system.
Houston put in a light rail system that costs 1% of every dollar spent in the city, costs a ton to ride, adds 45 minutes to a trip downtown, and drastically increases the odds of your car getting broken into at the park-and-ride. So yeah - there’s pushback against expanding it.
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There’s also inherrent difficulty when the city is so spread out (The Grand Parkway outer loop has a 60-mile diameter, compared to Paris’s 15), and walking outside is a health hazard 3-4 months out of the year.
It just moves the traffic to the transit stations
The first step and the mindset is already wrong, focusing on moving traffic instead of removing traffic. So yeah, of course it wouldn’t work. Houston failed at it doesn’t mean other city would fail too.
People can’t travel 30 miles from their home to the office entirely using public transit. Walkable cities and light rail are Last-mile. Heck - throw in high-speed for the majority of the transit and you still have a huge first-mile problem, which is by far the hardest to solve.
The reasons modern cities are designed around cars is because cars are flexible. Add a street for a new row of houses and every single one of those points is connected to every end point in a single step. No new scheduling, routing, or transit lines required. Problem solved with a little asphalt.
It’s an easy solution, and backing out of it is very, very difficult because it must be replaced with a complicated, expensive solution that’s less-convenient for most users.
I’m not anti-transit at all, but people around here seem to believe that a city can be fixed with the power of wishes and fairy dust just because another city that covers 1/10th the area and was developed hundreds of years before auto-centric decelopment ago managed to do it.
