Yes, but that's still not a good comparison. Amsterdam has always been a dense city with or without cars. It's also extremely small. You can walk from one end of Amsterdam to the other in just over an hour. It is much easier to transform the infrastructure of a city when the city itself is tiny and not even 1 million people live in it. They had the benefit of being dense, very small and having a government willing to figure out how to fully maximize its land use because, well, the country itself doesn't have a lot of useful land. Bike usage is high there because the country/cities are tiny, they have fairly mild weather year round and they really could not afford to waste space on roads.
It's a much different story to transform a North American city in this way. We are doing it, thankfully, but it'll be a slow process...especially since we had a century of oil company propaganda that created a generation of room temperature IQ carbrained fools, which in turn created more and more demand for roads and parking and perpetuated it for an entire generation and beyond.
Anyway this is less about cars or bikes and more about terrible local transit in an extremely car centric urban area. Regardless of what you believe, more people would benefit in the immediate term from improved bus services than they are going to benefit from a bunch of novelty bike lanes because we are currently and will remain for many decades, a car centric place. It will take time for denser development to catch up. There are not going to be any true 15 minute neighbourhoods in Waterloo Region for a long time. As such, we are still going to need investments in transit improvements but unfortunately GRT doesn't really do that.
That's my point, not that bikes suck and we shouldn't care about them. It's that local transit sucks. We are not the Netherlands or Finland, we are Waterloo Region and so we should be trying to develop our services in a way that maximize benefit for the greatest number of people right now...and for us, that means improved buses and light rail prioritized rather than bike lanes. I mean yeah build those too, but build them intelligently. Since this forum loves to use Amsterdam as an example of an apparent utopia, I must ask, how well do you guys actually know about the urban history of that city, beyond what Not Just Bikes and other YouTubers waffle on about? Before there were bike lanes all over the place, Amsterdam invested very heavily into both rapid transit and bus improvements to get people around. It got people from A to B very fast and reliably. They began to build a metro system in the 1970s. Trams were expanded and improved. Buses also saw investment. The city has always been dense, so walking the last mile to work/school/shops/back home and so on was easy enough. Over time, bike use grew because it was handy, so people advocated for more improvements to that infrastructure. They didn't just start turning roads into bike lanes, they improved higher order transit first and then evolved the rest. Doing that is especially important in Waterloo Region since we're already car centric and it can take a long time to go anywhere and it'll take a long time before you get your average car user to be able to make biking anything more than an exercise hobby.
It's a much different story to transform a North American city in this way. We are doing it, thankfully, but it'll be a slow process...especially since we had a century of oil company propaganda that created a generation of room temperature IQ carbrained fools, which in turn created more and more demand for roads and parking and perpetuated it for an entire generation and beyond.
Anyway this is less about cars or bikes and more about terrible local transit in an extremely car centric urban area. Regardless of what you believe, more people would benefit in the immediate term from improved bus services than they are going to benefit from a bunch of novelty bike lanes because we are currently and will remain for many decades, a car centric place. It will take time for denser development to catch up. There are not going to be any true 15 minute neighbourhoods in Waterloo Region for a long time. As such, we are still going to need investments in transit improvements but unfortunately GRT doesn't really do that.
That's my point, not that bikes suck and we shouldn't care about them. It's that local transit sucks. We are not the Netherlands or Finland, we are Waterloo Region and so we should be trying to develop our services in a way that maximize benefit for the greatest number of people right now...and for us, that means improved buses and light rail prioritized rather than bike lanes. I mean yeah build those too, but build them intelligently. Since this forum loves to use Amsterdam as an example of an apparent utopia, I must ask, how well do you guys actually know about the urban history of that city, beyond what Not Just Bikes and other YouTubers waffle on about? Before there were bike lanes all over the place, Amsterdam invested very heavily into both rapid transit and bus improvements to get people around. It got people from A to B very fast and reliably. They began to build a metro system in the 1970s. Trams were expanded and improved. Buses also saw investment. The city has always been dense, so walking the last mile to work/school/shops/back home and so on was easy enough. Over time, bike use grew because it was handy, so people advocated for more improvements to that infrastructure. They didn't just start turning roads into bike lanes, they improved higher order transit first and then evolved the rest. Doing that is especially important in Waterloo Region since we're already car centric and it can take a long time to go anywhere and it'll take a long time before you get your average car user to be able to make biking anything more than an exercise hobby.