Comments by "TheEvertw" (@TheEvertw) on "Why The Netherlands Is Insanely Well Designed" video.

This whole "that can never be done here" idea only demonstrates a lack of vision and/or commitment by the planners responsible. We Dutch changed our infrastructure gradually, fitting it into our regular maintenance schedule. Sewage & drainage systems need to be overhauled every 40 years, and road surfaces every 20-odd years, which make great opportunities to add bike lanes. This way, building this infrastructure is essentially for free: you were going to tear up the existing road surface and put in new anyway. So to get to the state where we are, the only thing you need is a long-term, decade-spanning vision of where you want to go, and make sure that every time a road is maintained, it is used as a step towards that vision. Except if you have built an unsustainable mess that is left to collapse due to neglect, as most US cities have done, using money that should have been spent on maintenance to finance cheap homes for the top 50% that do not generate enough taxes to maintain their infrastructure.... Greed is destroying the USA. Greed and shortsightedness.
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The biggest difference between those compact Dutch housing schemes and a sprawling US suburb is that the compact scheme generates enough tax income for the municipality to maintain its infrastructure. In the US, those hated inner cities with their squalid apartments generate the income that is used to build those suburbs. So here again, the poor are paying for the rich.
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@iColantai Bridges have a life span of about 40 years, depending on e.g. traffic. As most of your infrastructure was built between the 50ies and 80ies, I can believe you have serious problems there.
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