It's not a strength if you need that old book that has no electronic version and can only be scanned. AFAIK EPUB 3 allows for SVG layouts that can be, I imagine, very sophisticated; still, it doesn't address the old book case.
It's not rocket science. Establish tax-switching policies.
Make it less attractive to take the car by building automated car tolls and let the drivers pay. Subsidize public transportation to make it cheaper for the citizens.
That's basically what has been done in Stockholm (even though I wish it had been done to a greater degree, public transportation needs to be even cheaper). Cars destroys our shared environment and expanding it's infrastructure costs plenty (space, money, pollution). Of course it should be heavily taxed so that cycling, bus and subway infrastructure can be financed.
It's a bit of a chicken-egg problem, at least from my perspective in the US, as well as a bit of a vicious cycle. I'm not optimistic. Here's why. (and also why I think the fix wouldn't work for many cities in the US at the current time.)
In Seattle, if I want to get from a suburb on the east side into the city, during ANY trafficked time, it's going to be at least 2 busses (usually crowded, late, or full, so add another ~1), a decent amount of walking, and a 1.5-2 hour total trip. This compounds with the fact that many of the fringe buses only come once every half/hour, and not at all on weekends.
Compare this to a city that had proper infrastructure to start, Philadelphia. I lived a comparative distance, and the population is MUCH higher and denser. But a 5 minute walk and a single 20-30 minute train ride put me anywhere I wanted in center city. While Seattle "has light rail" it's an honest joke next to the coverage in the north-east.
As such, there's _no option_ to tax balance, it would end up being highly regressive punishing those forced to live further out and with no option but to use a car. The vicious cycle comes into play as the increased car traffic makes public transit less emphasized, convenient, and more of a perceived negative, leading to increased car traffic, etc etc. (compounded by less people wanting to take the tax burden they don't see a personal benefit to; there are a few different "tragedy of the commons" type effects in this mess.)
If we had trains that could get me to work like the sister post says about Stockholm's, no need for additional motivation, I wouldn't own a car for an instant, and didn't until my mid/late 20s when I left the east coast, but that's not the reality of the cities we've built, and now we're in a bit of a hole that I'm not sure how to incentivise people out of.
You could build more bike lanes and add transit only lanes. Build out from the city core, and expand it to outlying areas. Prove its value by showing people that alternatives to cars can actually be better.
For example if there was an express buss between Bellevue and the U District that didn't have to sit behind cars crossing Lake Washington, I think it would be pretty popular.
The chicken and egg problem is hard to crack. Not enough transit riders -> high car usage -> not enough transit riders -> ...
If we all throw up our hands and say "too hard" it's only going to get worse. Growing up in Seattle and Tacoma, it was pretty frustrating to hear about the supposed light rail connection between the two that's been promised and delayed countless times over the last 20+ years.
A lot of me wonders if the root is less a lack of specifically transit, and more of the broader oft-discussed problem of decaying ability to efficiently build public infrastructure/motivate capital improvements.
Novelty hill rd in the NE was supposed to be 4 lanes, even through the switchback, but because of bad contractor (likely back-scratching internally) and a lack of contractual protections, 4 lanes were paid for but 2 were obtained. If we can't even do simple things right (that road typically bottlenecks for ~20-30 miles straight during rush hour, and is single lane, so no bus advantage) and your aformentioned rail link, it's really a moot point, so the focus might need to be on governance than on the transit itself.
(To address your suggestions, I agree that dedicated bus lanes might be helpful, but worry that given the respective usage volumes 1. would it be effective and 2. can you convince everyone else potential further limitation to their lanes is worth it?. Not to say "throw hands up" but it might need to come coupled with a proposal to offer more car bandwidth.
I've always been skeptical of bike lanes on the longer-haul lines outside of city centers, because at least for the area I live in with huge gaps between "stuff", (and with our weather/geography) it's not a feasible form of long-term travel for most people, even for things like picking up groceries. If it can be built without impacting road bandwidth/significantly increasing cost, I obviously see that as a plus, but I'd need to be convinced that the tradeoff actually provided the right outcome.
My focus is typically on rail build-out, improving bus usage, and aforementioned governance/efficiency, as these seem to align incentives pretty well among various groups of transit users.)
Yeah, LA has a lot of commuter express buses from the suburbs that only have 3-4 stops. The problem is you're stuck in the same freeway traffic that everyone else is. Despite this, I know several people taking these buses, which are ~2.5 hour one way trips during rush hour.
LA also seems to be building a ton of rail. The Expo Line to Santa Monica was completed recently, and they're currently building the Crenshaw Line to LAX, the Purple Line extension into Beverly Hills, and a new set of stations downtown with more in the pipeline.
Seattle is a really bad example if you want to talk about poor public transportation. Seattle is one of the few places where bus ridership is increasing. Living anywhere with 5 miles of downtown (beside some areas divided by water) makes having a car somewhere between optional and inconvenient. It's one of the few places where bus ridership is increasing, and Sound Transit 3's implementation will make the Link Light Rail much more accessible. The number of bike trails and separated bike paths is arguably at the point where we might have too many for bike ridership levels. The city is very anticar, increasing the area where minimum parking requirements are not required, making bus only lanes in high traffic downtown areas, and talking about a downtown toll.
Saying it takes 1.5-2 hours to ride a bus from the east side to the city ignores the fact that it takes more than an hour to do so in a car. Not to mention how important the I 90 floating bridge light rail project is to further connect the east side to the city.
Transportation sucks in Seattle because of the population growth and the lack of investment in the 60s and 70s. Most of the things Seattle and King County has done in the last 20 years in regards to public transportation is correct with a few notable but not critical exceptions.
> Saying it takes 1.5-2 hours to ride a bus from the east side to the city ignores the fact that it takes more than an hour to do so in a car.
But, that's a key part of the problem. It's easy to compromise and take public transit instead of a car when the public transit saves you time. For many trips between popular commuting destinations, Seattle doesn't have that yet.
Seattle doesn't have good public transit because it's getting better, it is getting better because it has so much catching up to do. Right now we're pretty good at filling busses with riders, then jamming those busses up in traffic.
There wasn't just a critical lack of investment in the 60s and 70s - the 80s and 90s didn't make great progress with infrastructure either. What did Seattle have to show by 2000? Less than a mile of monorail, a downtown transit tunnel, and a few retired streetcar lines?
Seattle's first light-rail line opened in 2009. By comparison, Portland's MAX opened in 1986 and had over 50 miles of light rail by that point.
I'm optimistic that things are getting better and heading in the right direction, but am sympathetic to the argument that Seattle's system is poor - because in many ways it is.
I will candidly admit I've only had 5 years of context, but in those 5 years, while bus ridership may be increasing, my perception has not been that it's proportional to population growth, and a brief look at the data seems to back this up. (comparing % growth of ridership to % growth in population over the last 10~ years) [0][1] I don't want to come across as to criticize growth and progress, I don't have enough knowledge on what was done to address that. I just don't find the results to be sufficient; as you said, population growth is a huge factor, and that's what renders this a pressing issue.
I agree that we're probably paying for a lack of investment; to the point of my comparison with Philadelphia where the infrastructure was in place. I'd reference my other comment questioning governance, since while you say a few notable but not critical exceptions, I find massive build-out times (Overlake Transit Center, for instance, will be closed until 2023, assuming I'm not confusing dates), lack of funding (discussed this issue at a local city council meeting, apparently it's partly a state/federal problem), and mismanagement (see other comment) to be quite prevelent. I may well be seeing a small slice of this, but my slice's commute is looking anywhere but up, even considering future development.
I'd also add that I didn't ignore that it takes an hour in the car. I'd agree, it takes an hour in a car. But you're in your own car, which many people see as a positive despite the mental overhead of driving, and that's still less time, variance, and inconvenience than the bus. I can only speak to the # of cars I see in the lots at work, these are clearly sufficient dis-incentives to the bus as it currently exists, and we can't ignore that if we want to improve the situation. (I'd also note that your mention of "less than 5 miles of downtown" makes me think we may be looking at very different strata of things; perhaps I should have said initially "Seattle Area", the trains I was referring to in Philly go 20+ miles out in many directions)
> it would end up being highly regressive punishing those forced to live further out and with no option but to use a car
I feel like zoning regulations that altogether prohibit housing density in US cities play an extremely large part in this, and that shitty US transit and strict land-use regulations in US are not two independent phenomena. Allowing landowners to build apartments (or single-family homes on very small lots with high lot coverage and no setbacks, or duplexes/triplexes/quadplexes, etc) with density commensurate with the market need allows transit to suck far less (as does letting transit operators to build their rights-of-way along sensical alignments and allowing commercial density around train stations).
Zoning is the problem, especially parking minimums. Not only are areas zoned to only allow single-family homes (thus reducing density), but many zoning codes mandate a certain number of parking spots for every new business, leading to a car-centric lifestyle.
If you want to get rid of minimums per building look at the upgrade path.
Parking /silos/ owned by the city, right at transit transition hubs, at the edge.
The use case is driving in from the 'savage lands', having ample (free (paid for the same way roads are)) parking, and transferring to the local rail/bus/people-mover-belt system of the dense urban core.
Put another way, letting people live in comfortable homes, free of noise, light, and smell pollution from neighbors, has transit costs. Having a miserable home in order to get fast commutes isn't a trade everyone wants.
While this may be true, I'd like to see some unrented apartments in major cities that can't be filled before we decry this solution. Rents have been skyrocketing - so it appears there's a lot of people who WOULD like this trade, but can't do it.
The opposite is true. If people wanted these homes on large lots isolated from neighbors, you wouldn’t have to make it illegal to build other kinds of homes.
In my area, the government will use its monopoly on violence to keep you from building in a lot smaller than one third of an acre. Yet, in my pre-code subdivision (exempt from the minimum), houses are being built on 1/12 acre lots and selling just fine. In the rest of the county, the low density you see doesn’t reflect what people want. It reflects what a minority of people who control the local government have imposed on everyone else.
Right now there's very little around the US that's in the middle. On the one hand there's urban areas with no parking-minimums, mixed-use zoning, and cramped development. On the other is suburban and rural areas where there are strict parking minimums and single-family homes everywhere.
A more reasonable way to develop a city would be to have a cramped, urban core where everything is well connected, has low parking minimums, and minimal zoning restrictions, surrounded by areas of gradually decreasing density, and holding parking in "rings" around these areas. In my mind, I'd like to organize the city in these rings: walkable, bikable, short-drive/suburban, long-drive/rural.
The big issue is the US has made up-zoning impossible. There are no mandatory zoning changes as people move to an area, or anything of that nature. Add to this that many American homeowners derive a significant portion of their equity from their house value and you have a situation where it is very difficult for any area of the US to expand to accommodate to an influx of population.
Can't you tax all the people which have a car and are close to public transportation that makes center accessible, with those taxes finance public transit expansion and slowly tax people close to the new expansion?
This is an absolutely terrible idea, and really hurts the lower class, especially in sprawled out places like the US. Often times, housing that low-income people can afford are not near their jobs or places of business. Sometimes, owning a personal use automobile is the only reasonable way to get across town to their jobs, or back to their home in time for an evening with their kids. Raising the cost of driving artificially directly impacts the lower income groups at a far more impactful rate than the higher income groups.
Long story short, a flat toll is an incredibly regressive tax and directly damages lower income communities.
But the opposite is also true - cities have sprawled out to the degree that they have in part because driving is subsidized. You are quite right that addressing this too quickly can hurt a lot of people with limited means, but maintaining artificially low cost of driving isn't doing anyone any favors either.
This seems like such a weird commend given that the top of this thread is advocating making drivers subsidize public transportation to encourage people to use it.
When ~90% of adults in the US drive it's hard to argue that driving is being subsidized by anyone other than people who drive. And that's before we account for the forms of tax revenue used for these subsidies that are paid for exclusively by drivers -- like gas and registration.
There probably aren't a lot of people getting cheated, paying a lot in and getting nothing out, because so many people drive, yes. This is a valid point (although the distribution of infrastructure spending may not match the driving). However, the other trouble with automobile subsidies is they are invisible. An individual can't see the true marginal cost of their use, either direct (road wear) or indirect (sprawl, parking lot oceans).
Behavior would change dramatically if, e.g., you had a GPS tracker logging miles and you paid a monthly road use bill, and parking spots were all metered at their true cost.
> When ~90% of adults in the US drive it's hard to argue that driving is being subsidized by anyone other than people who drive. And that's before we account for the forms of tax revenue used for these subsidies that are paid for exclusively by drivers -- like gas and registration.
You need to look at the problem a little bit more. Designing a car-centered city and suburbs is expensive. You not only have to build highways to handle traffic, but your building options are limited because you need to build enough parking ; which results in sprawl, leading to less efficient use of the land. The higher costs due to this sprawl are undeniably borne by consumers. There are many other such hidden "subsidies" that have allowed such an overwhelming car-centric culture in the US.
Actually that's about "the market" externalizing costs in to the commons.
A better question is why haven't cities required sufficient housing near jobs to keep the cost of rent (let alone actual ownership of even a condo) competitive with the suburbs via supply control?
> A better question is why haven't cities required sufficient housing near jobs
Because to require a particular level of housing near jobs would require a prohibition on offering jobs without developing additional housing, in effect limiting jobs. Even if local governments are given the power to do that, politically, citizens demand that politicians do what they can to encourage job creation, not limit it by some other constraint.
You're taking this the wrong way; I'm not saying that jobs or housing should be directly limited. I'm saying that it's the job of the governance of a region to fulfill the needs of it's people.
Need for housing ~= {jobs} + {adult students} + {unemployed} + {retired} + {liquidity room} - {All housing in the market}
If the need for housing is positive than actions should be taken to accelerate and promote the development or re-development of new planned accommodations.
If the need is /dire/ (as it is for the large west coast cities) then that the government should take on the buy out and re-development of entire neighborhoods in to areas that are suitable for the continued health and prosperity of the whole (as private interests have clearly failed to do so or regulations have not allowed them to do so).
This planning and redevelopment should also include mass transit and other resources as well as more than meeting 'minimum code' for all construction. (My own views about the inadequacy of such codes are out of the scope of this topic.)
That would help prevent the decline of public transit.
Imagine the flip side: a city with functional public transit, where most poor people take subways and buses to get to work. Now someone proposes cutting down on public transit because you can always buy a car and that gives you more freedom.
Imagine how much burden it would be for a poor family to suddenly have to buy a car.
That's the cost America is passing on to poor families. It just doesn't look like much because it's been thoroughly normalized.
* That said, of course with change of policy some people will be hit and some poor people will be hit the hardest, so there should be mitigating measure.
> That said, of course with change of policy some people will be hit and some poor people will be hit the hardest, so there should be mitigating measure.
No it won't hit poor people at all if you fund it with progressive taxes and ticket sales. Car ownership on the other hand is not only expensive and unreliable (if you can't afford to buy decent cars), its ridiculously dangerous, increases stress and decreases well being. A well designed public transport assists the poor by making it much safer, cheaper and faster to come into the denser areas (typically with better/higher paying jobs) for work while living in lower COL suburbs.
I sincerely believe that impediments to more public transportation in the US is not chiefly financial; I believe its mostly due to what was before racism, and now is just NIMBYism. People don't want a bus stop or train station in their neighborhood, which will attract the homeless/poor/lower classes etc.
My life living in London would be hugely more expensive if I had to buy a car to get around - not to mention a lot worse since cycling is so much better for me and everyone else.
In Stockholm it's done by cameras that read the license plate (automated payment once a month can be set up). So no, progressive taxing would not at all be impossible (but perhaps unpopular in the US).
I travel 40 mins daily across town in stockholm. Change subway once for each journey. I travel at 08.30 and home at 17.15. I always get a set both ways. I turn on my laptop, work on the 4g connection all the way home. Rarely is there any problem.
I assume you live near Tunnelbanan and/or take the car regularly? Currently I spend about an hour each way on my commute (e-bike Täby -> Danderyd, then subway to T-Centralen), for a trip that GMaps says takes 20mins by car. And the piece of crap doesn't work during the winter. Alternately I could take two buses to Danderyd, for a total of 66 minutes in the absolute best case (never actually happens).
A car is absolutely #1 on my saving-target list, due to that. Oh, and being able to lock stuff inside it. The primary problem is the absolutely awful quality of service (in some areas, at least), not that it is somehow too expensive.
This approach would place a disproportionate tax burden on the poorest sectors of the population, at least in the US. It's mandatory to have a car in order to get to work in most parts of the country. The structure already exists, punishing the least fortunate because of existing systems and structures seems punitive.
> Of course it should be heavily taxed so that cycling, bus and subway infrastructure can be financed.
I like sentences that start with "Of course...". But I tend to think that Stockholm might not be a very representative city of the worst transportation problems.
Stockholm has a population of ~950,000 (or 2.3 million metro) and a city area of 188 km². Contrast that with London with 8.1 million (13.6 million metro) people and 1,572 km². Plus, there are unique geographical characteristics, different population distributions and infrastructures. All these affect commute times and congestion.
I don't think the solution in Stockholm is nearly universal. It might solve the specific problems of that specific city but would fail in many ways if applied blindly in many other places.
> I don't think the solution in Stockholm is nearly universal. It might solve the specific problems of that specific city but would fail in many ways if applied blindly in many other places.
Or it may work even better in other cities. What differences between London and Stockholm makes you think that it is going to work worse?
Why would you want to stop and switch to public transportation? It's a pretty significant QoL downgrade. If you can afford a car you pretty much always want to.
There is no horizon in sight where shared transportation will actually be an improvement on cars so it's always going to be kind of a futile battle.
I can afford a car but choose not buy one because riding a bike and taking public transport is a more convenient and often faster than taking the car. I don't have to look for parking spots, I don't have to refuel the car, I save a lot of money, I don't have to do maintenance on the car... owning a car just doesn't make much sense here in Berlin if you don't have to transport children around.
It's a balancing act I suppose. People still find that it's worth paying to take the car, but not to the same extent as without the tolls (it only costs between $1 and $4 depending on the time of the day). I'd guess there's still some headroom for increasing the tolls without decreasing the car traffic too much.
If it were too expensive there'd be less money to finance public transportation which, I guess, creates a strange dependency. It somehow works, but there's still of course far too much car traffic.
yeah that ain't gunna do shit to fix bart. (seriously though, the problems w/ mass transit, at least here in the bay area, are not simply "not enough money".)
> the symbol (⌘) has apparently been used at Swedish campgrounds and parks for decades
That's not how I know the sign. The Swedish Transport Agency has a page for this road sign[1].
It says, roughly translated: “The symbol indicates an historic site [or attraction] of national interest. The nature of the historic site is indicated in connection with the symbol.”
So, it's probably more commonly used to mark viking age burial grounds than campgrounds.
> There is no doubt that scooters could be safer if helmet laws were better enforced and basic safety training was provided before riding.
Helmet laws arguably does not work very well for bicycles.[1][2] Don't make the mistake of thinking it will work better for scooters (if you can't back it up).
Still not sure why I'd chose this over a bicycle. A bicycle gives me daily exercise and doesn't need a battery to operate. Also, it runs well on ice and in 20 cm of snow when winter commuting. I guess that's more than you can say about scooters.
I do that all the time with my scooter. (I don't have an electric one, just a normal push scooter).
Portability is a huge advantage that scooters have over bikes. I take my scooter literally everywhere I go, anywhere in San Francisco. It is actually 100% of the time.
And If I don't want to scooter home, I just call an Uber and put it in the back.
That's a good thing. But leaving it locked outside and walking ten meters into the bar works fine.
> I don't have an electric one, just a normal push scooter
How far do you commute on that thing? Yesterday I rode 15 km to a lake to meet some friends. When leaving I felt like riding more so I took a 30 km detour to a natures reserve before I began pedaling home. The freedom bicycles give me is why I truly love them so much. No electronic black box with limited range stopping me, just simple mechanics and my legs.
Another great thing is that it can carry the things I need to take with me (usually a lot). Racks and panniers are awesome and takes carrying the load off my body.
> Helmet laws arguably does not work very well for bicycles.
Yeah, the evidence is actually pretty compelling that requiring bike helmets is a net negative to society. It's unfortunate how little it gets questioned.
> Having been in a high speed accident, a helmet saved my life.
I'm glad you're alive. If you're in a serious accident a helmet is a very good thing to have. No one argues that. The point is that serious accidents are very rare. People seem a lot less likely to ride a bike if they need to wear a helmet—I wear a helmet 95% of the time and I do not understand why—and the health benefits from cycling far outweigh the risks. The article even says: "Helmet proponents are right about one thing: If you're in a serious accident, then wearing a helmet makes the odds of a head injury significantly lower — by somewhere between 15 and 40 percent."
> The article also states that walking is no more dangerous than riding a bike, though physics disagrees.
I believe that is because stats are by "per kilometre travelled" (at least the 2012 British study). People usually bike longer distances than they walk.
Another alternative is a https://hovding.se/. A lot of people in Stockholm wear one, but they are quite expensive.
My problem with biking during the (work)day is the sweating. I'm all for getting the exercise but 1) I don't have a shower at the office and 2) my co-workers wouldn't really like me smelling like a football team. I think it really depends on weather conditions, location and distance.
So much this. All of the people on reddit that are like "I commute 25 miles to work on my bicycle" and all I can think is "so you're the asshole stinking up the office eh?"
You must be doing something wrong. IF you have problems: Ride at a steady pace, not high intensity. Wash before riding and wear merino (not synthetic garments). If there are still problems, change your shirt on the bathroom when you arrive. If you're still stinking up the office, I'm afraid I can't help. :)
And oh, 41% of Copenhagers ride their bikes to work, yet I don't find that the city stinks.
The common joke about buying a motorcycle is that "buy honey I will save money on gas" but it suffers the same issues for most that bicycles and scooters have which you mentioned.
This isn't about cities not favoring alternate modes of transportation but the realities of our daily lives. From distance to job, some time cause by having to change employers, to have so many things to do and little time to get them done. So once you start adding on the weather, the needs to carry stuff, or changes to your schedule, alternate modes quickly fall by the way side.
my issue with escooters is not the tech but the items highlighted in the article but I am not nearly as forgiving. I am not sure I want them in the bike lane and you know someone will ride on sidewalks. throw in no helmets or enforcement of requirements for one and its a recipe to hurt both riders and pedestrians. plus when people don't own it they don't respect it. not for all people but there are more than enough who just act out wrongly. there are stories of people dumping them in rivers, dumpsters, and even just breaking them. In a perfect society...
Body odour is caused by the bacteria that colonize your sweat. By taking a shower just before you leave, you knock those bacteria back far enough to give you quite a few stink-free hours so that you should be able to make it through the work day.
Secondly, make sure you wear natural fabrics. Lycra and polyster and all of the artificial fabrics stink a lot worse than cotton or wool.
> Lycra and polyster and all of the artificial fabrics stink a lot worse than cotton or wool.
^ This is the line to remember. Synthetic garments indeed make me smell like a football team. Cotton or merino = no nothing (verified by GF and coworkers).
That depends on you commute I guess, I spend about 50 minutes on a bicycle, and it's enough to just have a change of clothes, but I do shower before riding a bicycle and wear clean clothes after the bike ride.
> Also, it runs well on ice and in 20 cm of snow when winter commuting.
That's the one time when I won't use my bike. Rain worries me as the rim brakes on my city get really weak, so I slow down a fair bit, but I am scared on snow and ice. Fortunately we don't get much where I live.
In a few years we might look back at this period and think: oh, it was at the time when we thought gut bacteria was the solution to every health problem known to mankind.
Maybe one day we'll realize that there is no single factor for good health. Maybe it's Vitamin D AND gut bacteria AND lot of other factors that are even individually different?
It turns out antibiotics are actually pretty awful - they wreak havoc on your microbiome, they modulate your immune system in weird ways, they cause some weird allergies.
But they are still way better than the diseases they cure, and definitely better than death!
Yep, antibiotics are the lesser evil. The only thing I really don't agree with is how easily and how much it is used in our food production.
Toxins move up the food chain, and with humans being pretty much the top of that chain we shouldn't be dumping medicine into livestock just to keep them from getting sick.
Worse, in China they are sold OTC and are as popular as you suggest (aside from being the thing that is prescribed on nearly every doctors visit to a health center). Even though anti-viral medicines (for what little good those do...) are also available OTC...
I think this is very different in that it's something we previously completely disregarded in health outcomes. We consume various things that we know wreak havoc on our gut biome including antibiotics and various residual herbicides, but it was felt that this was mostly harmless as the gut biome did not play a critical role in our physiological condition. Now it's seeming that it may indeed be quite a critical system in the human physiological condition and so it's more of an entirely new field of study than a miracle cure.
I feel as though there is some degree of ostrich-syndrome when it comes to the deterioration of American physical and mental health. Something is causing this change, and most convenient explanations (lethargic lifestyles, internet, etc) do not really work since that would imply a comparable decline in other areas that have also seen such changes, yet the correlations there are spotty at best.
As far as I know, the US is the only prosperous country where life expectancies are going down. Makes one sit back and think, no?
A lot of factors are probably involved as you say, but if I had to guess at the elephant-in-the-room dominant factor I'd say it's the US's model of what's euphemistically called "health care" and "health insurance." It's a complete no-brainer that people who can't afford medical treatment are dying earlier.
Look at the reasons that people are dying. It's been blamed on things like the opioid crisis but the numbers in no way support such 'hypothesis', which don't even really qualify as such.
Cardiovascular disease, heart failure, stroke, diabetic complications, etc are where the big increases are coming from. And nearly all the major causes of death that are increasing are strongly linked with obesity, which is skyrocketing out of control. This is what I was alluding to early when suggesting that this change is, in turn, blamed on lethargic lifestyles, the internet, etc yet such changes are also happening in other nations yet they are not experiencing such radical shifts in lack of healthfulness.
We should already know better that there most likely is no "secret". That is, it's probably more than one special variable we have to look at. Somehow many scientists are having a hard time to let go of one dimensional thinking.
Scooters require less skill to ride/are easier to maneuver, they're smaller and so can be used on a sidewalk less awkwardly and are easier to park inconspicuously. Also, if you have to suddenly "abandon ship" you're already more or less standing upright, which is probably safer.
These are really only intended for trips of a few miles where battery life isn't really a concern. If you want a longer trip then yes a bike is probably a better idea.
