I’m Dutch and live rural. Used to cycle to school daily, 22km per day.
Never again. I need a car for work as I visit clients alot. I think cities could use bike friendly environments, like we have. But rural, no way. Good luck cycling 2 hours to get somewhere decent if you can drive that in half an hour.
It simply costs too much time, and with the amount of wind and rainfall we had past year is absolutely no fun.
Yeah, rural areas will pretty much always need cars or something similar - not just for traversing the massive gaps between places, but also because most rural homes are their own logistics for most things.
It also doesn’t help that this conversation itself is a pretty America-centric one. In the US and Canada, dense urbanism does not exist outside of major cities. NotJustBikes on YouTube has many videos talking about just how car-centric and space-inefficient it is here.
We have some big parking areas and garages specifically for bikes, especially at train stations, schools, city centres, etc. But at home, you don’t need a lot of parking space
At least in Finland apartment buildings have “parking” for bikes in the sense that there’s bike racks in front of staircases and usually a storage room specifically for bikes. “No need for parking” seems incorrect, even though it takes much, much less space than cars
The indoors bike storage room is for winter (and other longer term) storage so you don’t have to leave them out in the elements and don’t have to bring them inside the apartment either. It can be handy.
It takes like half a square meter outside
It does add up in bigger apartment buildings. Nothing compared to cars but if you don’t factor it in during construction it can be annoying as shit.
(You definitely do need bike-specific parking when you get to those numbers though. And other good infrastructure, though it’s rather the other way around: you need the good infrastructure to get to those numbers.)
Yeah, just look how Nederlands or Belgium looks like xD
I’m Dutch and live rural. Used to cycle to school daily, 22km per day.
Never again. I need a car for work as I visit clients alot. I think cities could use bike friendly environments, like we have. But rural, no way. Good luck cycling 2 hours to get somewhere decent if you can drive that in half an hour.
It simply costs too much time, and with the amount of wind and rainfall we had past year is absolutely no fun.
Yeah, rural areas will pretty much always need cars or something similar - not just for traversing the massive gaps between places, but also because most rural homes are their own logistics for most things.
It also doesn’t help that this conversation itself is a pretty America-centric one. In the US and Canada, dense urbanism does not exist outside of major cities. NotJustBikes on YouTube has many videos talking about just how car-centric and space-inefficient it is here.
We have some big parking areas and garages specifically for bikes, especially at train stations, schools, city centres, etc. But at home, you don’t need a lot of parking space
At least in Finland apartment buildings have “parking” for bikes in the sense that there’s bike racks in front of staircases and usually a storage room specifically for bikes. “No need for parking” seems incorrect, even though it takes much, much less space than cars
Pretty much no one parks their bikes inside in the Nerherlands, I’m guessing that’s a climate thing. It takes like half a square meter outside.
The indoors bike storage room is for winter (and other longer term) storage so you don’t have to leave them out in the elements and don’t have to bring them inside the apartment either. It can be handy.
It does add up in bigger apartment buildings. Nothing compared to cars but if you don’t factor it in during construction it can be annoying as shit.
Now imagine if all those bikes were cars.
(You definitely do need bike-specific parking when you get to those numbers though. And other good infrastructure, though it’s rather the other way around: you need the good infrastructure to get to those numbers.)
Rookie numbers.
Have you ever seen a walmart parking lot in person? You can fit the Netherlands and part of Belgium in one.