Oooh, a prior oil crisis is what turned the Netherlands from a driving country to a bicycling country.
The Guardian: Do we want to keep fixing the same issue? Unlearned lessons from the first big oil crisis
As energy prices tripled in the 1970s due to Middle Eastern wars, Scandinavia, France and the Netherlands sped up green transition
@dr2chase @ai6yr I don't think that's what tilted the US into re-embracing cars, though.
There were a number of factors. Even getting Reagan in there wasn't 100% about oil, but the wealthy right wing got very scared about the activism on campuses in the '60s, the Civil Rights Movement, Women's Movement, Gay Rights Movement, etc. and that was about the time they forged their unholy alliance with previously not-politically-engaged evangelical Protestant churches.
They learned from progressive
@dr2chase @ai6yr organizing and protest tactics, incorporated and improved upon those. We've been dealing with the fallout of that ever since. Reagan winning over Carter was *the* watershed moment for US democracy, IMO. US wealth distribution has gotten more lopsided and democracy has grown scarcer ever since.
But pushing back against energy-saving and oil-spurning movements was certainly part of that packet. FFS, Reagan even yanked out already-paid-for solar off the White House.
Children living in the Amsterdam neighbourhood De Pijp fight for a play street without cars in 1972. More info: http://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/...
@rusty__shackleford @ai6yr @anantagd 1983 in the UK accompanied by cabbies doing their Mr Angry act, screams about nanny state politics (despite it being a Tory government), FUD campaigns about "what if your car explodes in flames" (and that's pre Tesla) etc.
Oddly not that dissimilar to cracking down hard on drink driving, introducing stronger rules for elderly drivers, 20mph speed limits and some other things 8)
I don't know if you all remember how, when Bush tripled gas prices - $1.50 -> $4.50 - that it jump-started this whole bicycling thing in the States. It took a while for the suffering to sink in, but in 2009 LA had its first bicycle summit, and Ciclavia started shortly after.
Also because people were not accepting the high toll in children's lives that automobile traffic was taking, year after year. You've probably heard it named "kindermoord", or child murder.
@CelloMomOnCars @ai6yr
Yeah………
This is the US of A$$hats… ummmm I guess you haven’t met us?
There was this incident a while back called Sandy Hook (among other incidents) - that has led many of us to believe that very few actually care about children being murdered in this country.
Honestly when I look at a US city I see the Amsterdam of the 1960s. Congested, smelly (nobody had heard of catalytic converters), and dangerous.
Even today, the Dutch are arguably more car-addled than Americans. We have more cars per capita, and we feed them with much more expensive fuel.
But a culture change happened where walk and bike safety got prioritised. The US needs a similar culture change.
@me_valentijn @MsMerope @ai6yr
Good point!
Apparently my statement is true only for a few selected states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_vehicles_per_capita
@CelloMomOnCars @MsMerope @ai6yr It's funny. Just earlier I was recalling to myself an accusation someone leveled at us "liberals". I woke up to thinking about it.
His beef was that we keep trying to take peoples' rights away, like the right to drive around really big, gas guzzling, major polluting trucks. I simply said, "Well, who says that's a right?" He of course took this as proof of his point.
I guess it must be part of the 2nd Amendment?
He never did say.
I would turn it around and say, "HOW COME I can't buy a small car in the "freedom!" United States? What about my right to choose a gas sipper?"
Example: Audis start at series 3 in the US. Not because Germans don't count from 1. And even those are nearly impossible to buy: dealers just push you to the larger cars.
Theres periodically an open street festival that rotates around LA county
@ai6yr another large factor was a popular campaign against kids getting killed by cars
Since the 1970s, the Netherlands and the United States have taken different paths when it comes to engineering streets. While the Dutch tackled traffic deaths and injuries by designing local streets where walking and biking are safe, convenient ways to get around, the prevalent approach in America was to apply highway design principles to local…
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