this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
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We don’t just need electric cars, we need fewer cars - Greenpeace International (www.greenpeace.org)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to c/europe@feddit.org
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Though progress is often slow, city planners and politicians are gradually waking up to the fact that when cities offer safe and affordable alternatives to cars, we start to travel differently.

More and more young people are choosing bicycles, buses and trains over owning a car out of the sheer cost. In Berlin, it’s public transport, not cars, which is the coolest way of getting around.

In Copenhagen, a city that has a long held reputation for being bike-friendly, a whopping 62% of people choose to cycle their commute.

In the French city of Lyon, the number of cars entering the city has fallen by 20% compared to just a decade ago. As the city’s network of bike hire stations continues to grow, town planners are hoping for a further 20% decline.

In London, where cycle super-highways are becoming popular, the share of journeys made by car has fallen by a quarter since 1990.

Car free days are rising in popularity in many of the world’s largest cities, giving people a taste of what it’s like to live with less noise, traffic and pollution. Bogota was one of the first cities to introduce a car free day, and it’s now become so popular that it’s been extended to a full week.

Bogotá's Ciclovía is fantastic! I was there in the mid-nineties and they closed a major artery, the Carretera Séptima, on Sundays. Here some pictures.

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[–] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Everything starts somewhere. The Netherlands were a car country through and through. That was until more and more people rejected it and they slowly built the infrastructure for bicycles, trains and walkable city centers over several decades they are famous for today.

Our biggest problem in the fight for cleaner, safer and overall better infrastructure are the car and oil lobbies for sure. They learned their lessons from the Netherlands too and fight every cycling lane with tooth and nail. But they can‘t fight progress when the cost of everything is becoming too high. People demand more efficiency than cars, be they electric or not, can offer.

[–] doleo@lemmy.one 4 points 1 week ago

Exactly right, but things were very different in the age that the Netherlands fought against car supremacy. The direct action that citizens took part in would end up in draconian punishment, nowadays. That’s if you could even get people to universally agree on the form of protest, the target of the protest, the demands of the protest, the shape of the planet, etc etc.

Sadder still, if the price of everything gets hiked, then an artificial concession is made (like marginally cheaper running costs), people seem to leap on that solution as a less bad option, and forget about the root cause all too quickly.

[–] TheReanuKeeves@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My problem with this at the core is that they are blatantly lying to everyone. There is no way none of them realized the solution to less cars was to provide people with alternative transport. There is a zero percent chance of that. And the fact that they would lie and say they are just realizing it is what pisses me off. Everyone knows oil lords control the world, everyone knows renewable energy, electric vehicles, public infrastructure etc. has been hindered because of them. They are treating the public like toddlers who can't differentiate between truth and absolute bollocks.

[–] gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

renewable energy took a long time to take off because the cost of it had to fall low enough first, which can only happen through substantial subsidies, which only germany and china were willing to do. germany cancelled the project sometime around 2012 while china pulled all the way through.

[–] TheReanuKeeves@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

You should look into how oil industry lobbying has affected green energy since the 60s