EVs already have escape velocity in Norway to replace ICE cars, and incentivizing more walking and cycling not only promotes more efficient modes of short distance travel, but makes the population healthier.
Over reliance on cars kills us slowly via lifestyle degradation.
Either this article is contentless compared to the press release or the press release itself is just based on platitudes.
Don't fucking “incentivize” alternatives to the five-seater. Architecture it. Make more of the urban area car-free.[1] Make other modes of transportation superior except for things like emergency care.
Am I holding my breath for cheap bus fares and actual bikelanes? Not exactly. The usual fare is to keep maintaining and upgrading the road network with only automobiles in mind and then act surprised when people keep choosing the mode of transporation that the infrastructure was built around.
Cheaper EVs was a nice way to pander to the middle class. There is less of a reason to pander to people who either don't own a car or can't afford the more expensive (at least back then) EVs. That's why there is less of a chance to see cheaper bus fares.
> EVs already have escape velocity in Norway to replace ICE cars, and incentivizing more walking and cycling not only promotes more efficient modes of short distance travel, but makes the population healthier.
> Over reliance on cars kills us slowly via lifestyle degradation.
Many people who work in Oslo can't afford to live in Oslo (I'm sure many can relate). Then they get stuck in traffic for hours a day because many others, you know, live outside of the bikeable/walkable core. Commuting home from perhaps a sedentary job. Then this gets labeled as a matter of lifestyle. What the hell?
Outside of Oslo the infrastructure is built with car reliance deincentivizing cars and incentivizing walking and bikes won’t make much difference. Instead they should be making public transport more attractive. Walking and biking is not exactly ideal in harsh weather.
it all depends on your lifestyle. A big piece of my reason to live is being able to get out in the woods or get to a dark sky site and sit out under the stars. People crowded places are not good for me from a mental and physical health perspective.
Living in or around city spaces raise my blood pressure to unsafe levels. It only takes living a couple weeks in a quiet place to bring my blood pressure come back down to healthy levels. It doesn't matter how much I walk or bike in a city. No amount of exercise or stress management techniques brings my blood pressure back down.
I will continue to live at edge of cities because I do need some of the medical services found in them but, living in them, well that's saying I'm ready to die.
> EV is seen as a savior for economies and urban structures that are not viable to start with
EVs are pushed because it's where the money and lobbies are. It's the "business as usual but clean™" option. Companies keep making bank, people keep their lifestyles, &c.
People (want to) believe in it because it's the 0 effort solution
* Watch politicians/millionaires flying their personal jets to event avenues wasting within hour the equivalent of CO2 you personally can save by choosing to make life difficult and dangerous for yourself and your family for years!
Fuck that.
As someone who loves to bike and hates to walk why would you prioritize one over the other? You're entire prescriptive approach is a big problem in making any improvement. How about "try to do anything other than drive by yourself in your car?"
I can’t even imagine that here where I live. My neighbourhood has sidewalks, which is nice because all the adjacent ones don’t. To go downtown in this little town in winter you have to risk a treacherous steep hill covered in ice and snow that never gets cleared and it’s actually dangerous
Yes, it's amazing how bike advocates view the world as a homogenous place.
Where I live it's 90 degrees or higher, and humid in the summer, and can be sub-zero in the winter. It's also quite hilly -- flat and level riding is the exception. I'm not riding a bike any substantial distance in those conditions, regardless of paths or lanes.
Which they absolutely are doing, but it's difficult to provide public transport anywhere else than the big cities when only about 2% of Norway is inhabited. The price of public transport is not what's keeping people from using it, but the fact that many people live outside the big cities and have to travel to them for work. Depending on where you live, commuting to the city may be very unwieldy. Oslo has been building out more train tracks recently which make travel time much quicker for a lot of people living outside the city.
I get the sneaking suspicion this is part of a ratcheting strategy for state prohibition of private ownership of any means of transportation for common people. Calling these policies sumptuary laws probably wouldn't fly nowadays I suppose.
This is hypocrisy Norwegian economy is heavily driven by oil industry. Instead of planning to phase out oil they just makes these ineffective policies. People are going to buy big electric cars even with VAT.
Hypocrisy? They're not allowed to improve in other areas just because they sell oil? What in the world are you on about? This is not what hypocrisy is.
There's actually a Norwegian show about Norway getting invaded and occupied by Russia, with support by the EU, because they decided to stop producing and exporting fossil fuels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupied
There was a great article a few years back relating oil from modern Norway to opium from the British in China, forcing them to sell a toxic product the British would never allow their own people to consume.
I feel like we're going to look back on the past ten years of EV hype the same way we look at the big tech/social media rise of the obama years -- why were we so completely in the throes of this silver bullet, seeing no downsides to a different set of trade offs...
Certainly, there can't possibly be downsides to replacing mechanical bits with electronics that are fragile in their own ways and harder if not impossible to repair, also the batteries will make cars much heavier, the momentum that much deadlier, that damage greater and more expensive, not to mention the extreme computerization that's already reached the front page here recently regarding how much data car manufacturers and dealers collect and their inevitable attempt to milk another cash cow by moving from car ownership to car rentership.
I live in Norway now (ex US)
(BTW: One of the world's biggest producers of oil and natural gas (fossile fuels))
It is a country with winters filled with slippery ice at least in the south,
and lots of steep hills up and down up and down.
The ER stats for broken hip bones and other injuries during the winter is high.
The ice is a much bigger factor than cold or snow when evaluating walking or biking
It is possible to bike all year round.
But very few people do it.
and I think for good reason.
I did it for 2 years and I am never doing it again.
Yes you can get studded bike tires and they help but no.
Politicians here keep talking about Norway as if we are Spain.
(With enough global warming from the fossile fuels produced perhaps?)
Let us be good for the environment and walk and bike everywhere.
Like they do in Amsterdam.
Meanwhile public transit in Oslo is good, and well used.
But the buses and trains are stuffed like sardins in a can.
during rush hours.
I wish they would stop spending major money on constructing bike paths
and allocating more and more of the road to bikes, and instead invest heavily
in improving and expanding public transit.
Since it is useful for nearly all of the population all year around.
Since Norway is investing heavily in EV busses, the trains are electric
as are the trams, increasing the number of busses, allowing people to breathe
in rush hour would not have any noticeable impact on emissions.
I would rather see many more lanes for public transit only than the same
space being built for bikes only.
With a population of 700.000, the capital Oslo,
seems at most 3.000 brave bikers during the winter.
(less than 0.5%)
This is easy to calculate since the city have signs
that measure the number of bikers that pass them
24h a day.
There is a Finish town that the newspapers like to
cover in how people ride their bikes there all year
around. Joensuu.
""Meet the bike-loving Finnish city that keeps pedaling even in the snow""
It is blessed by being flat, by having a youngish
population, and a consistently below freezing winter.
(Which means much less of an ice problem).
Even there only 7% ride their bikes in the winter.
Since Oslo will remain outstandingly non flat, and
be covered in ice during good parts of the winter,
I dont see the advantage of spending on bike
infrastructure over public transit.
> I wish they would stop spending major money on constructing bike paths and allocating more and more of the road to bikes, and instead invest heavily in improving and expanding public transit. Since it is useful for nearly all of the population all year around.
They are, though. That’s where most of the money goes.
All the trams are being replaced with higher capacity trams. Additional trams are being purchased as well. When this process is finished, Oslo will have doubled the tram capacity.
A new metro tunnel is in construction between Fornebu and Majorstua, which will greatly reduce the need for buses on that stretch (it’s one of the most active public transit routes).
The metro signal system is being replaced as well. When done, subway trains can travel closer to each other, increasing capacity on the same infrastructure.
When it comes to bikes. Bike infrastructure is cheap. Most of the bike lanes come at the expense of roads to regular cars, not other public transport. It’s also become more popular with electric assist on bikes to help with the uneven terrain and, sadly, winters are only getting shorter.
Bikes are becoming more popular. But most of the money, and people, are still going to public transportation.
I cycle like 1,000 miles a year, in UK, and last winter broke a few bones. Not sure I am doing that again.
I feel cycling advocates get some strange tunnel vision, we can have other mobility solutions. Perhaps one that is more stable on ice. Current EU law is stupid - if it has pedals, it’s a bicycle even with 4 wheels, but a small scooter is an illegal motorised vehicle.
I biked to work every day for 4 years in Whitehorse, Yukon. (~61 deg North). It was -40 for a couple of months a year, plenty of ice.
Whitehorse actually has the highest rate of bike commuters of anywhere in Canada, though that is likely just because everyone there is nuts about the outdoors.
Studded tires were great, and I loved riding. It was more fun in the winter than summer.
its great that they're incentivising public transport. Does anyone have any numbers comparing carbon emissions from a population using green public transport vs using electric cars vs using gasoline cars?
[+] [-] anonporridge|2 years ago|reply
EVs already have escape velocity in Norway to replace ICE cars, and incentivizing more walking and cycling not only promotes more efficient modes of short distance travel, but makes the population healthier.
Over reliance on cars kills us slowly via lifestyle degradation.
[+] [-] avgcorrection|2 years ago|reply
Don't fucking “incentivize” alternatives to the five-seater. Architecture it. Make more of the urban area car-free.[1] Make other modes of transportation superior except for things like emergency care.
Am I holding my breath for cheap bus fares and actual bikelanes? Not exactly. The usual fare is to keep maintaining and upgrading the road network with only automobiles in mind and then act surprised when people keep choosing the mode of transporation that the infrastructure was built around.
Cheaper EVs was a nice way to pander to the middle class. There is less of a reason to pander to people who either don't own a car or can't afford the more expensive (at least back then) EVs. That's why there is less of a chance to see cheaper bus fares.
> EVs already have escape velocity in Norway to replace ICE cars, and incentivizing more walking and cycling not only promotes more efficient modes of short distance travel, but makes the population healthier.
> Over reliance on cars kills us slowly via lifestyle degradation.
Many people who work in Oslo can't afford to live in Oslo (I'm sure many can relate). Then they get stuck in traffic for hours a day because many others, you know, live outside of the bikeable/walkable core. Commuting home from perhaps a sedentary job. Then this gets labeled as a matter of lifestyle. What the hell?
[1] https://www.oslo.kommune.no/byutvikling/bilfritt-byliv/
[+] [-] vinni2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|2 years ago|reply
They're simply reducing subsidies to EVs, which will only be slightly less heavily subsidized compared to ICE vehicles.
Anyone from Norway know what they're doing for walking and cycling that isn't in the article?
[+] [-] taude|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life...
I'm guessing it trends similarly for other countries.
EDIT: Not that I'm against walking and cycling (I don't own a car). But to say that this is causing less lifespan...
[+] [-] all2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] datameta|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rickydroll|2 years ago|reply
Living in or around city spaces raise my blood pressure to unsafe levels. It only takes living a couple weeks in a quiet place to bring my blood pressure come back down to healthy levels. It doesn't matter how much I walk or bike in a city. No amount of exercise or stress management techniques brings my blood pressure back down.
I will continue to live at edge of cities because I do need some of the medical services found in them but, living in them, well that's saying I'm ready to die.
[+] [-] nologic01|2 years ago|reply
* Walk Else
* Take Bicycle Else
* Take Electric Bike or Fixed Track Public Transport Else
* Use Electric Automobile or Bus Else
* Use Fossil Fuel Automobile or Airplane
Subsidies, incentives etc must align with this flowchart. EV is seen as a savior for economies and urban structures that are not viable to start with
[+] [-] lm28469|2 years ago|reply
EVs are pushed because it's where the money and lobbies are. It's the "business as usual but clean™" option. Companies keep making bank, people keep their lifestyles, &c.
People (want to) believe in it because it's the 0 effort solution
[+] [-] candiddevmike|2 years ago|reply
- Carpool
- Bus
- Train
[+] [-] pxtail|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajnathani|2 years ago|reply
Or [standing] electric scooters.
[+] [-] skeeter2020|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gentleman11|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SoftTalker|2 years ago|reply
Where I live it's 90 degrees or higher, and humid in the summer, and can be sub-zero in the winter. It's also quite hilly -- flat and level riding is the exception. I'm not riding a bike any substantial distance in those conditions, regardless of paths or lanes.
[+] [-] vinni2|2 years ago|reply
how exactly are they boosting that? They should really be making public transport better and cheaper throughout the country not just Olso.
[+] [-] TonyStr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onthecanposting|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinni2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paddim8|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonporridge|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|2 years ago|reply
The world needs 100 million barrels a day.
We are at peak coal too.
https://www.iea.org/news/global-coal-demand-set-to-remain-at...
[+] [-] philip1209|2 years ago|reply
Then, there's no need to continue offering an incentive - because behavior was successfully changed.
[+] [-] philip1209|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
Observation and exclusion of companies: https://www.nbim.no/en/responsible-investment/exclusion-of-c...
[+] [-] Sporktacular|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chha|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supertrope|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenthrow|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zzzbra|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CatWChainsaw|2 years ago|reply
Me and my smug "Told you" will be waiting.
[+] [-] ThinkBeat|2 years ago|reply
It is a country with winters filled with slippery ice at least in the south, and lots of steep hills up and down up and down. The ER stats for broken hip bones and other injuries during the winter is high.
The ice is a much bigger factor than cold or snow when evaluating walking or biking
It is possible to bike all year round. But very few people do it. and I think for good reason. I did it for 2 years and I am never doing it again. Yes you can get studded bike tires and they help but no.
Politicians here keep talking about Norway as if we are Spain. (With enough global warming from the fossile fuels produced perhaps?) Let us be good for the environment and walk and bike everywhere. Like they do in Amsterdam.
Meanwhile public transit in Oslo is good, and well used. But the buses and trains are stuffed like sardins in a can. during rush hours.
I wish they would stop spending major money on constructing bike paths and allocating more and more of the road to bikes, and instead invest heavily in improving and expanding public transit. Since it is useful for nearly all of the population all year around.
Since Norway is investing heavily in EV busses, the trains are electric as are the trams, increasing the number of busses, allowing people to breathe in rush hour would not have any noticeable impact on emissions.
I would rather see many more lanes for public transit only than the same space being built for bikes only.
With a population of 700.000, the capital Oslo, seems at most 3.000 brave bikers during the winter. (less than 0.5%) This is easy to calculate since the city have signs that measure the number of bikers that pass them 24h a day.
There is a Finish town that the newspapers like to cover in how people ride their bikes there all year around. Joensuu.
""Meet the bike-loving Finnish city that keeps pedaling even in the snow""
It is blessed by being flat, by having a youngish population, and a consistently below freezing winter. (Which means much less of an ice problem).
Even there only 7% ride their bikes in the winter.
Since Oslo will remain outstandingly non flat, and be covered in ice during good parts of the winter, I dont see the advantage of spending on bike infrastructure over public transit.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2021/01/22/meet-the-bike-... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2020/feb/0...
[+] [-] Skinney|2 years ago|reply
They are, though. That’s where most of the money goes.
All the trams are being replaced with higher capacity trams. Additional trams are being purchased as well. When this process is finished, Oslo will have doubled the tram capacity.
A new metro tunnel is in construction between Fornebu and Majorstua, which will greatly reduce the need for buses on that stretch (it’s one of the most active public transit routes).
The metro signal system is being replaced as well. When done, subway trains can travel closer to each other, increasing capacity on the same infrastructure.
When it comes to bikes. Bike infrastructure is cheap. Most of the bike lanes come at the expense of roads to regular cars, not other public transport. It’s also become more popular with electric assist on bikes to help with the uneven terrain and, sadly, winters are only getting shorter.
Bikes are becoming more popular. But most of the money, and people, are still going to public transportation.
[+] [-] ClumsyPilot|2 years ago|reply
I feel cycling advocates get some strange tunnel vision, we can have other mobility solutions. Perhaps one that is more stable on ice. Current EU law is stupid - if it has pedals, it’s a bicycle even with 4 wheels, but a small scooter is an illegal motorised vehicle.
[+] [-] grecy|2 years ago|reply
Whitehorse actually has the highest rate of bike commuters of anywhere in Canada, though that is likely just because everyone there is nuts about the outdoors.
Studded tires were great, and I loved riding. It was more fun in the winter than summer.
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