Comments by "Andy Dee" (@AndyViant) on "American Reacts to Why America Is Terribly Designed" video.
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Australia (and America) will never get remotely close to the Amsterdam model for a bunch of reasons.
1) Population density. Old cities like Amsterdam were designed around short distances and high density and foot (or even horse) traffic. Substituting bicycle (or e-bike) for horse was basically a like for like swap, just without the manure.
You could probably do this with say a Manhattan Island, but you couldn't do so with even New Jersey. Add geographically huge cities like Sydney, Melbourne or Los Angeles and the travel times are going to be too high for the great majority.
2) Comfort. Riding a bicycle can be hot sweaty work. Once again, a moderate temperatured seaside, high latitude, relatively cool, dense and geographically flat city like New York might be viable for this kind of transit (although maybe not in summer).
But how about Orlando? Fort Worth? San Francisco? Brisbane? Perth?
You take away one or two of the comfort factors and substitute in a high humidity, hilly environment and cycling quickly becomes a hot, sweaty chore. Put you deep inland and these issues get far worse.
3) Medical costs. A big discouragement for cycling comes from our health system. Australia sees a cyclist without a helmet as some huge economic threat to our health system costs and demands they wear a helmet from childhood, but at least if there is an accident the healthcare won't bankrupt you, unlike America.
Of course we completely ignore the benefits of active mobility in weight loss, reduced obesity and diabetes, better respiratory health, less car crashes, out of pure blind ideology.
4) Restrictive, risk averse laws. Not just the mandatory helmet use. E-scooters are effectively illegal in NSW and VIC, basically barring the residents of Australia's two largest (and densest) cities from transitioning to modern (or should I say future) mobility options that suit the higher population density economists keep telling us we need. E bikes faster than 25 kph (15 mph) are also banned. We also have no Neighbourhood Electric Vehicle schemes and little support for any form of Zero Emission Vehicles at all.
5) Ideological opposition to public transport. Both from lawmakers not wanting to subsidise public transport, but also users of public transport being seen as a poor underclass. This of course ignores the huge subsidies on fossil fuels and the costs of building and maintaining roads.
All in all, such pollution free transport options that don't chew up enormous space in roads and garages are exactly what we need. Especially if we want to encourage high density development and reduce the barriers to not just mobility but also housing for young, old and the poor. Let alone the whole climate change thing.
Don't get me wrong, I love my cars and motorbikes, but if it wasn't just dead money not to use them and have them sitting there it would be great to have more options. We need some sensible laws and a regulation point as to where an e-bike needs to be registered and insured. We need changes to our registration, fuel taxation and road use cost base.
Our current rules are madness.
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