Yes but not everyone lives in a flatland like the dutch do, I believe I could fully transition to a bicycle if cars weren't the top priority on my city, but I know many friends that live in parts of the city that are basically mountains.
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Id say the car-centric city design is a huge factor as well. At least in the US, most large cities had electric trains, and we tore it down for parking lots. Fixing that problem would be incredibly daunting.
Id say a good step would be to have high speed rails that go between major cities, coupled with bringing some of those electric trolleys back. As a Michigander, I think a good line would be Detroit -> stops along I96 -> Grand Rapids -> Benton Harbor -> More stops along 131/I94 -> Chicago.
That's why bikes have gears. You should be able to go up any reasonable hill with a bike that has more than one gear.
E-bikes are another option, but not a necessity.
As someone who once HAD to commute for a 45 minute car ride to work... not all commutes work with this. Public transit can help with a lot of those, but unless we rezone and rebuild most cites for shorter commutes, it won't replace all cars.
I asked a couple with a 3 year old daughter how they get around without a car, and they said they cycle by default and use a car-share service occasionally for longer journeys. The amount they save on insurance alone pays for the car-shares and short term car rentals to get out of the city for a few days.
Suburbs and rural areas can benefit from electric bikes to an extent. And a more deliberate focus on building transit oriented communities should help quite a bit.
I like this idea in principle, but the annual CO2 emissions for 2018 was about 35 billion tons. This makes the drop barely even impact our total production, let alone be enough to stop global warming.
It's still a worthy goal, but we'd be better off focusing on bigger wins, where even a few percent of carbon reductions would dwarf this number (or pushing for both).
This may work in the Netherlands, but in my country (Canada) where it's a 2 hour drive to the next city, it simply isn't feasible. I do, however, wish that my city was much more bicycle friendly and we had easier and cheaper options for bikes that could be enclosed from the weather.
We need high speed trains between cities with a car for storing bicycles
I think we need electric trains across the whole country and into the arctic and territories. Encourage more eco tourism. We can barely access northern Ontario much less the territories. This would require nuclear power, and as a byproduct, tritium which is needed for next generation fusion reactors. We could become the next Saudi Arabia.
It probably would be helpful, but it wouldn't be that useful in the tropical regions, where you have monsoons with strong rain/wind and hot summers.
Physical exertion in the sun is not always fun.
Tho, It'd be fun when the destination is closer and the weather is decent.
There is a very impressive set of reasons why we could and should encourage less CO2 intensive forms of transport, indeed many actions. However, these arguments always seem to me to take the pattern of picking the extreme example of whatever good we are hoping to achieve and then implying that everyone else could easily make the switch. There is always a wide and natural variety in things and this is true for differences between nations too. Extreme examples used like this often just end up making a bigger divide between people because the discussion misses all of the important differences that constrain choices and shape outcomes. We just end up talking from our own perspectives and experiences rather than exploring the complicated and difficult questions of how we can produce localised and regional responses to CO2 emissions drawn from fossil fuels.
The problem with this is that while true, the solution for lower emissions will look different for every place.
You can ride a bike to work or the store around here, but you'll be walking home. Bikes are way too easy to quietly steal.