Er... I got an electric car does that count? Based on $ keeping the old car is cheaper. Also divestment, purchase choices, charity donations, solar install.
Buying electric cars, installing solar, and switching to heat pumps are one of the few things you can materially do to screw the powers that be. The the other one is limiting your family size.
In a world where the brightest minds are paid to intentionally develop tools to make people betray their values (advertising, propaganda, rolling news, etc), I'm not sure anyone should feel safe about what they teach their kids. Many industries, but especially tech, will do everything possible to make them do whatever makes a few dozen people richer.
The best thing an individual can do against, say, the advertising industry, is to become an important person in an advertising marketplace and then destroy it. You spend 30 years to become CTO at Google and then you set the billing system to charge every customer $1,000,000, right before you drop an EMP in the biggest DC.
Limiting your family size has concrete outcomes, having a big family and hoping you can impart the right values so they go onto have an positive impact is no guaranteed. You can hope your child goes onto develop a fusion reactor that fits in a storage container but the likelyhood is they won't be.
In my opinion it's a way to justify your own (perfectly fine) selfish desire to have a child.
There are many places in the world this is not true. I would say about half the people I know who live in London don’t own a car. They travel plenty - probably more than the people I know who don’t live in London. If they really need a car once they get to their destination they will rent one, or use taxis.
For The Netherlands you are really constricted to the city you live in if you don’t own a car. You can forget about going to a concert, a birthday party or catching an early flight without one. Or if you want to do anything fun on a Sunday in the east. Most people I know have a social life or do sports that require a car. If your children play football you really need a car. Last time I used a taxi in The Netherlands it was €210 for a 40 minute ride, that is reserved for the very wealthy.
London is a well connected metropole with 15 million people, not really comparable to most cities.
Edit, reply to Alex as I am rate limited with my comments:
Please tell me how I can cycle the 60 kilometers from the airport to my home at 23:00 with a rolling carry-on suitcase.
Renting a car is around €50 for a night out. And you need to reserve way in advance which is not great for spontaneous trips. Car ownership becomes cheaper and more convenient very quickly. I did car renting and after a couple of €1000/month bills I went back to car ownership.
Renting a bus for the sports team is a lot more expensive than using the parents cars which are at no cost to the club.
Reply to consp: You need the cars for football matches as public transport doesn’t get you there. The fields are outside of cities and matches are in the weekend when public transport is very limited.
> in The Netherlands it was €210 for a 40 minute ride
That's much more than taxis cost in the UK, and pretty expensive even for the Netherlands. You have great cycling infrastructure, and public transport though.
Renting a car is an affordable alternative to ownership, if you need to go to occasional concerts or birthday parties, and public transport happens to be inconvenient for your specific destination. I did that for years - the rental company would deliver and collect from my workplace, so it's super-easy.
> If your children play football you really need a car.
A friend of mine used to ferry his son 1000s of km per year to ice-hockey matches around the country, so I know what you mean. I don't understand it though - if the whole team is travelling, why don't they just rent a bus? Personally, I don't think it's healthy for a child's hobby to consume so much of the parents' time - of course, your choice.
You can forget about going to a concert [..] or catching an early flight without one
Those are really bad examples. Quite a lot of venues are easier to reach by public transport than by car, e.g. Carré, Luxor, Tivoli, Diligentia, Vera; even Pinkpop provides a dedicated shuttle service. And Schiphol has 24h train service, nobody cycles to the airport unless they work there.
Schiphol has 24 hours train service that reaches maybe 10-15 percent of the Dutch population. If your flight lands past 23:00 chances are slim you are going home by train.
Same goes for concerts that end after 22:00. You need private transport to get you home if you are in the 80% of the population that doesn’t have public transit late in the evening and night (or Sundays)
No. Only short trips to the supermarket and such. Most of the trips are done by car.
Most cities in The Netherlands aren’t high density and the Dutch are king of urban sprawl hence the high amount of bicycles. In other European cities with better planning people walk instead.
You don't need a car for football matches. You need a car for convenience because [fill lazy reason]. And if one person rents a van you can take half the team...
Depends on the public transport network where you live. I used to work with someone who commuted from London to Cambridge (yes, that way around). And in Berlin, someone else who commuted from half way to Poland.
Won't work everywhere, e.g. from what I saw when visiting I don't foresee US cities rapidly integrating enough good public transport to properly replace cars within themselves, and from what I've heard about how municipal organisation works in the US even less so for a convenient and well integrated intercity network, but it can be done.
It's also 100 km to the border. The point is, we actually have trains (and busses) that can do this here. It's actually possible.
I visited Davis CA few times around a decade ago for comparison; Go to google maps, choose public transit, and use Davis as an origin or destination while dragging the other end around and see how many routes it can even find.
The rate of successes I get in the Sacramento conurbation are about the same as the rate of success I get for rural Brandenburg, but for most of the rest central Valley (with a handful of exceptions), Google mostly couldn't find a route at all.
By this measure, California's central valley is worse-connected for long-distance public transport even than rural Wales (measured by "can I route-find to Aberystwyth?").
You can use public transportation, bikes, car pooling, taxis and rentals for your rare-use needs, and its usually cheaper than owning and operating a vehicle.
Unfortunately not. Average distance to work is 19,9 kilometers. That is well outside the city they live in. Most people can’t afford to live in the city they work in. In Amsterdam my entire team lived outside the city.
Unless they lived in another big city, this is completely off-topic. Suburbs tend to have hit-or-miss public transit access, and the vast majority of people who live in a big city work in that big city (20 kilometers away would usually be just another district within the same city).
Legally, you can do a lot more than ignoring. If you have any talent for it, becoming an activist (say a youtuber) rallying people against whatever you believe is bad, can be pretty powerful. A single person (again, with some talent for public speaking etc.) has a real chance of making meaningful change this way.
Rallying people to do what? Boycotts? They have some effect, but never enough. The most influential YouTuber I can think of is Louis Rossmann, and you know, he's not a YouTuber, he's a MacBook repair guy who took up YouTube.
The influencial youtubers I think of actually can shape political debate and thus policy - what they say, if it gains enough popularity, sometimes seeps into the political agenda of the ruling party (which is always looking to "score points" with the voters and has its ears to the ground listening which issues and points people are currently responding to). It's basically like being a columnist of an influential newspaper, except you don't need to have the right connections to become one.
The political establishment is savvy enough to score points on things they don't care about and ignore voters on things they do care about. That's why one party supports LGBTQ pride and the other opposes it, but they both support the genocide. LGBTQ pride doesn't really affect politicians' power, genocide does.
I think producing and consuming like crazy could also work, considering how quickly Twitter turned Elon Musk from most important to least interesting figure on Earth. Wealth and sensory capacity don't appear to be positively correlated at all.
The real eco hippies were fueling a 40 year old mercedes on fry oil. Powers that be want you to replace all sources of oil dependent product with another oil dependent product (after all, EVs depend on oil making plastic and grease a cheap commodity). They don’t want you to buy something they already sold to the unwashed masses decades ago. They want you to buy new thing. Never mind old thing still works.
Bicycles and public transportation are better yes. If I were healthy enough I would consider a cargo bike and bring 20kg of shopping home on that (for real). It would be cool. Then buses for unladen journeys.
If the cargo bike is electric, the threshold for healthy enough lowers significantly.
My weekly shopping for a family of four is done on one like that, which I can park like 50cm away from the shop door and 50cm away from my home front door. That’s even more convenient than any car.
It's the nice thing about government in my opinion: we create it to serve us as a community. Our taxes are the price to creating the community we want to live in. From taking trash away to keep the neighborhoods clean, to good schools to educate our (and other's) children.
If we want public transportation, a bike-able city—we just need to demand our tax money go to that.
Are you claiming owning a cargo bike is a bigger privilege than owning a car? Problem with cargo bikes are, if you are living in a flat where you cannot "park" them, you mean this?
The lifestyle I refer to is living in a bike friendly city, being able to afford a multi-thousand euro cargo bike and having secure storage for it. OP also appears to live in a house with a yard on top of that. That lifestyle is reserved for very high earners.
Edit, reply to Lukan as I am rate limited with my comments: I’m sure that those people you saw in Leipzig and Berlin are global 5% earners, maybe even 1%-ers. That is a very luxurious lifestyle that not many can achieve.
Edit 2, again to Lukan. My point still stands that the Germany lifestyle is very luxurious compared to the rest of the world. And even in Germany, you need a decent income if you want to live in a high density city.
"Edit, reply to Lukan as I am rate limited with my comments: I’m sure that those people you saw in Leipzig and Berlin are global 5% earners, maybe even 1%-ers. That is a very luxurious lifestyle that not many can achieve."
I am pretty sure they are not, I don't just see them, but also speak with them. But normal approach is not compare "global 5% earners", as probably all of germany would fall into that bucket, but compare locally.
So can a normal german household afford them?
And the answer is yes. But if the household also needs a SUV and a garage for that, then maybe not.
But I was talking about people who cannot afford their own house. And they could afford a cheap car - or a cargo bike.
Hm. Maybe visit a city like Leipzig or Berlin? Lot's of cargo bikes - some do belong to high earners, but most do not. Finding a suitable place to rent with secure storage is hard, but most old houses for example do have a big enough entrance house floor, where the bike can stand and this is what people do. Otherwise bike sheds in front of the house are becoming standard as well.
I live in Zürich, I don’t even need a bike, I just take a tram to do my groceries. Many of my friends have bikes though, I’ve considered getting a cheap one but my apartment’s bike storage room is kind of crowded…
yeah, the real carbon footprint of especially non-wimpy EVs remains to be seen. EV recycling seem to be as real as gasoline from algae, the slides look beautiful but all mysteriously fail to take off.
