Not quite sure about that. Denmark famously had a bicycle regiment during WW2. We’ve never been anywhere near as car centric as places like the US, for various reasons including, but probably not limited to:
Our cities and towns are really close. I can cycle for 30 minutes and get through 3-4 towns around my rural parts.
We have had excellent public transportation for a very long time.
Old ass cities are really bad for big roads, so instead you get a bunch of crammed roads that are awful to navigate, resulting in more people prefering their bike, since it’s about as fast anyway.
We have a very high (compared to the USA) tax on cars, gas and everything relating to it. This started in the 70’s when oil got scarce. To try to make people conserve oil, we started to tax the shit out of it, and kept doing it. As a result, driving a large vehicles is super expensive, and if you CAN live without one, you’re much better off riding a bicycle.
This is not to say that the person you responded to isn’t completely wrong about everything, it’s just not going to help acting like we’ve ever been as crazy about our cars as they have always been. It could also be a decent roadmap for how to get rid of the huge deathtraps, and get people more excited about bicycles.
Sure. I’m from the Netherlands, we did use bikes more often. But if you look at infrastructure from the fifties and compare that to today there’s a world of change. Cars were everywhere and bike lanes just a line on the road.
They didn’t come out of nowhere in those countries. They were once as car centric as everywhere else.
‘if you build it, it will come’
Not quite sure about that. Denmark famously had a bicycle regiment during WW2. We’ve never been anywhere near as car centric as places like the US, for various reasons including, but probably not limited to:
This is not to say that the person you responded to isn’t completely wrong about everything, it’s just not going to help acting like we’ve ever been as crazy about our cars as they have always been. It could also be a decent roadmap for how to get rid of the huge deathtraps, and get people more excited about bicycles.
Sure. I’m from the Netherlands, we did use bikes more often. But if you look at infrastructure from the fifties and compare that to today there’s a world of change. Cars were everywhere and bike lanes just a line on the road.
All of those are policy choices though. None of that (except the old cities) happened by accident