Also, for anyone wondering, Cambridge is a lovely city to by cycle around, with lots of cyclists, some of whom are not asshats.
There is also a rather pleasant river, with nice hand powered boats punting around, and a well developed bus network
A lovely university and cathedral to visit too, if you have time.
the university is like, almost 800 years young!
You clearly have not been there. It’s far from a hell hole. In fact if I had to pick between hanging with Dutch in his bike infested hellscape, or with you in the North Shore I’d pick mussels and frites on the canals any day of the year (and I’m betting I’m not alone there).
We kind of had congestion before motor cars around the world in big cities, and suspect, we still will have congestion after them.
Some people just like sitting in traffic. I see no reason to antagonise them, just let them be, and carry on your own journey
University towns are always great. Because a sizable portion of the population are students who don’t have the money to drive a car. Which basically forces the city to account for non-car traffic and making it better for everyone there. University have a great impact on city planning and should be a leading example on how to design things, even if your town doesn’t have one.
I planned a bike tour to France (just cruising down the coast), but UK wasn’t that attractive to me ever since the B-word happened. I still want to visit Ireland and Scotland though. Never say never. But I’ll check out Cambridge for sure. Are there ferries from e.g. Den Haag to Boston or somewhere close? I certainly DO NOT want to bike through Greater London Area, there are millions of cars, all driving on the wrong side of the road after all.
That says nothing about how people feel about having to drive everywhere. Most younger people I know who drive also want to prioritize biking so we can bike to work.
My city has been doing a lot of surveys about what people want, and when asked about one of our main streets what should be done the plurality was behind removing cars from it.
Then we had surveys about our downtown and what people wanted there.
How people currently get around reflects nothing in terms of what they want from places. Every survey my town does people want more biking and walking facilities
Business owners also want it
Most surveys in my town capture 20% or more of the population, I think the downtown survey was about 25%
Before anyone gets too confused, this is about the Little Apple, not the Big Apple.
These are niche situations and if it’s more often than rare then that’s going to be life. I could name multiple reasons why I would rather drive even just out of pure laziness, but I would be delusional to not understand there will be a trade off which will be time and some headache.
Honestly, I have only driven there, parked up and walked around.
It was not work, so commuting was not an issue.
I would have suggested Eurostar to StP’s, then train our to Cambridge, but it seems less easy to travel with bikes in trains.
When I spent a decade in the London area, I did not keep a car at all, and just used busses, trains and tubes. Or walked
So far, I lasted about 12 years, without perishing once.
I used a car before I moved there, and have a car now I moved to another city.
So I sit in some traffic… 
My previous living space was across the street from the last Bart station stop. The convenience and relief of being able to travel to SF without dealing with traffic or not risking a DUI (honestly the main reason 
) was tremendous. Good public transport is really the way to go albeit expensive and arduous to implement, any thing then related to urban travel should be walking, biking, etc. The option for traveling by car would still be available but that will be a “do at your own expense” kind of situation.
People are basically the same globally, same needs, same complaints. Everyone loves parks, no one loves traffic.
Here in rural northern Germany, most people have a car but 40%+ would prefer to commute by bike or public transit. I know several people commuting 20km by bike here, but these are mostly die-hard cyclists who still do it despite car rush hour traffic conditions. But you can’t expect “sane” people to do this, because it’s dangerous. And also prevents tourists and family bike trips going from these rural areas into the town. With even grandpa having an E-Bike now to keep his cardiologist at bay, wealthy/middle class sees the need for more inclusive infrastructure here.
So there obviously demand and support to change things and make stuff fit more to what a lot of citizens prefer, but the nature of public infrastructure is that it is very expensive and changing it requires 30 years of continuous effort and support. You just can’t afford to replace and redesign every 5 years. And you need a consensus across several/most parties, so this won’t blocked/cancelled/postponed after each election cycle. And we humans are bad at long-term strategy and planning. This is very hard and returning to easy mode and dealing and satisfying immediate problems is always tempting.
NY would be a great city for bikes, subway and walkable areas. Just imagine everyone in NY having a car to drive around buying groceries. 24/7/365 traffic jam. Congestion pricing is a great thing, it’s relying on economical principles of offer and demand. NY always has been a catalyst for so many things happening elsewhere. And NY/Manhattan was New Amsterdam at some point. Made it a city that never sleeps.
I would totally love to see stock brokers riding their bike to wall street. Financial district in (“Old”) Amsterdam certainly has a lot of bikes.
People can just as easily be hit by a tram or a bus. Safety is an illusion. Regardless of how we as humans decide to get around, that transportation will always include risk. There are some marginal differences between different methods of ground transport, but none of them are perfect, and none of them would eliminate or even drastically reduce fatal accidents.
Personally I am in favor of there being as many different options as people want to have.
If people want the option of riding a bicycle, let them have it. Who am I to say that they can’t?
I might even part take on a nice day if I don’t have to carry anything large or heavy and am going somewhere where it doesn’t matter if I arrive in a sweaty mess.
Do I like sitting in traffic? Of course not. But most days around here are either obscenely hot and humid, or cold, rainy and slushy/snowy. And most of the time I need to transport things that would be inconvenient or impossible to transport by public transit or bicycle.
This is why I am insistent that the option to use a car remain, and isn’t hobbled by having driving lanes removed.
I’m all for people using public transit or riding their bicycles, and I am all for the infrastructure being funded for for those things. It just has to be done intelligently in ways that don’t take from one group to give to another.
By all means, find ways to allow for bicycle lanes and paths, but find ways to do it without taking away driving lanes, and making drivers lives even worse.
A lot of these surveys - at least around here - are only asking what people who live in the immediate downtown areas of cities want and completely disregard the needs of the many who surround the city and rely on it for their daily lives.
And often these surveys are completely useless.
We had one of those in our town. They called it “Vision 2030” or some useless nonsense like that. When I heard of it, I figured I’d take it to make sure my views were factored in.
It was the most propagandist thing I have ever experienced in my life.
Not only did they seemingly only inform people they knew would already agree with them about the survey, leaving everyone else to stumble across it by chance, but it was also structured in such a way that it could only ever result in the results they wanted.
It was multiple choice, and every last question was asked in such a way that the only response would give them the answer they wanted to pursue their agenda.
Every single question included multiple choice answers where A was “I prefer this change that removes and narrows driving lanes” and B was “I prefer this other change that removes and narrows driving lanes”, etc. etc.
The towns groups were overwhelmed by angry citizens who just wanted there to be a “keep things the way they are and just fix the damn potholes” option.
The silent majority has been ignored for so long, and is now tired of being silent.
This was asked of everyone in town we don’t have suburbs really and to what extent we have some luxury housing that sits outside city limits to dodge taxes I don’t really care about their opinions. Even then i am pretty sure this survey had an option to say if you live outside of city limits.
Sure we had some grumpy people at the city meeting, but that is way way less representative of how the population feels it is mostly people with a lot of time to show up to a city meeting to complain it is why my city has quit using that as the primary feedback mechanism and moved to surveying the population, it is a lot more democratic.
Very unprofessional approach. Unless you want to use these nonsense surveys to present “facts” and numbers to underline your agenda. Waste of public money and time to achieve nothing. Often these surveys are either made by incompetence (hire some good sociologist, it’s literally their job to do this kind of stuff) or just made so “we have done it because policy XY said we have to, but I don’t change my mind on it”.
If people think you are taking something away from them, they of course will be angry. And so would anyone else. Wouldn’t be the first time (no matter where you are from) that some politician with crazy ideas that just makes things worse or end up doing nothing, taking 5x the budget and just destroying trust and confidence.
And everyone having better access to a subway station, riding a bike or whatever technology/people come up with is one person or a family not driving the car in front of you, slowing things down.
NY is special, because you just can’t replace all streets there with 10-lane roads in Manhattan, so they HAD to adapt to be more efficient and become experts in moving all the people. Basically out of necessity.
We Europeans had other factors contributing to cities going away from cars.
And in southern Germany, the conservatives (safer streets, mobility for old people), greens (less pollution, less CO2 emissions, more trees) and the social democrats (affordable and good public transport for working class and poor people) just made this politically feasible. And these are the cities with usually very high economic outputs and the most wealthy in comparison.
When I went to Karlsruhe to study at the University, I was surprised to see people in suits and others in full out ghetto outfit sharing the same tram or bench. It’s also a place to get into contact with other parts of society, people you usually don’t meet or talk to in your everyday life. I’m impressed to this day how well this worked and how accepted and normal it was for everyone.
Focus on the people contributing to solutions and brainstorming new approaches. Criticism is very valuable unless all you do is criticizing X. The grumpy ones will always be there and in my experience (local city council, had a seat with the libertarian/liberals 10 years ago), there is little you can do to appease them in the long-term. But a lot of them will be very quiet, friendly and supporting once they see projects resulting in positive things. But they also quickly get replaced by the next grumpy group of people 
The population is the main driving factor. And the same group of people, sitting at every meeting, are just politicians that don’t hold office. It’s a selected, “loud”, dedicated and often important faction, but they’re just one small group in the grand scale of things. And that’s why Oligarchy isn’t bad, but lacks the median breadth of perspectives and experiences and why Democracy often results in a better and more acceptable compromise, even if it is often less intellectual, reasonable or scientific. You just don’t exclude as many people. And excluded people without (perceived) representation eventually will set things on fire until their needs are respected 
Too much rambling. But we’re having a conversation, and that’s a win.
this is patently and obviously untrue, as there are far fewer busses and trams needed per-capita so there are simply fewer of them to get hit by and they generally travel at lower speeds, and are operated by people who are trained to do it, not anyone who can pass a driving test. can people get injured by trams and busses? of course. is it as easy or likely as getting injured by a car? no it is not and saying that it is is just obviously disingenuous. try a better argument.
can you tell me how many people have been killed on the japanese shinkansen system?
There is no way this is not a troll.
I don’t understand what part you find incomprehensible.
I am being 100% serious.
It is inhumane to ask people to subject themselves to the elements just to be able to get around.
Other than quickly darting from door to vehicle, no one should ever need to be out in the elements.
That is some poverty/third world/developing nation bullshit that we did away with in the developed world 70+ years ago, and it should NEVER come back.
Wall-E in waiting.
How Dare anyone suggest one has to rise from ones conveyance. With added bathroom and grooming facilities built in.
Would also fix congestion, if one can work from home, in ones pod.
And, as one gets older, it can support the skeleton in the way a musculature would have done if excercised
/s
I joke
Obviously Some amount of walking / exertion is required, even if only to get to the garage/car.
In developed nations, infrastructure has been built out to reduce single car journeys, and allow for efficient transit, but that was due to necessity of having smaller roads, closer buildings, and humans around that we don’t want killed by cars.
And, we still have cars causing congestion All The Time
But, transit allows people to still get places, while drivers wait.
It is far from perfect, but works
And, makes enough profit, to be sustainable.
I dont think Sensible solutions would work in the US, because so many vast swathes of places are tarmacked already, that you have desserts of pavement to cross between transit stops, and sprawling suburbs so large, each would need this own minibus, the way school busses work.
Cities seem still fine for city dwellers; a lot of apartment block residents, are physically agile enough to walk to a bus stop, and there are enough stops to get to useful places in reasonable times, in a lot of places.
But the sub-urban sprawl? That would require park-and-ride systems.
Which would require shuffling a few yards exposed to nature
