[scottious]

I don't really buy this argument. I live a happily (nearly) car-free life with 3 kids. It's not hard, it really isn't. I bike them everywhere, we take transit. I even do our weekly grocery shopping by bike. I bike them to school year round (yes, even today when it was 10F this morning). I wouldn't consider myself "hardcore" at all. I'm just your average middle-aged dad.

I use our car approximately once per week. In 2024 I used my car a total of 32 times (I actually tallied it out for the whole year)

It's really just a matter of city design. Do you think there aren't families in Copenhagen who need to get to their job and shops? They manage with much lower car mileage than the average American. American suburbs are car-centric and those cars end up clogging up urban cores where people are trying to live their lives.

Many Americans/Canadians probably cannot even imagine what my life is like. They can't even picture what it means to pick up a week's worth of groceries for a family of 5 on a bike (with a kid!). It just doesn't even register that this is a possibility.

[bombcar]

> American suburbs are car-centric and those cars end up clogging up urban cores where people are trying to live their lives.

I wonder how much of that is the case - anymore. I am suburb or even exurb, but I don't go "to the urban core" unless basically forced to; these days that's specialized medical only.

And surprisingly numbers of what people call "suburbs" are decently walkable, if you're willing to compromise on where you walk to - e.g., you might not have 20 restaurants in short walking distance, perhaps only 5.

(I've literally walked young kids - including a baby! - to school when it's -40°. A big big part of the change is to slowly move people to fewer car trips - not try to get them to reduce the number of cars. That comes later once they realize they only used it 32 times!)

[rfwhyte]

You have to keep in mind that at this point, a substantial majority of Americans are overweight, and something like a full third of the US population can be considered "Obese," and so the notion of them doing any form of physical exercise whatsoever is utterly anathema to their world view. They live their lives in actively avoiding physical exercise at every turn, and so they cannot even fathom that someone would prefer active transportation like cycling that is also a form of excercise to being stuck in traffic in an automobile.

Basically to a lot of Americans, Jesus invented the pickup truck so they could "Exercise" their god-given right to never have to walk anywhere ever, as that's the way they like it. Walking is hard work when you're obese, and its uncomfortable to have your rolls of cascading fat rubbing against one another on a hot, humid day, where as sitting in a rolling leather recliner in their air-conditioned Ferd FteenFiddy is comfortable and requires no physical effort whatsoever.

The thing of it though is they know their choices are unhealthy for both their bodies and their communities on some level, but they'd rather drag everyone else down to their level than have to make and hard personal changes. They see us on our bikes getting where we need to go just as fast or faster than them (Since we're not stuck waiting in traffic), and getting exercise in the process, and they don't just resent us, they flat out hate us for it. We hold a mirror up to their unhealthy lifestyles, and unattractive bodies, and rather than following our lead by trying to be more active themselves, they'll fight tooth and nail to make the rest of us as miserable as they are trapped in their rolling metal prisons.