Comment by hmottestad
Comment by hmottestad 17 hours ago
Regular voting is usually what affects things such as the transportation infrastructure in your country or city. It’s a slow proceed though.
Here in Oslo there has been a lot of investment in bike lanes, but just because one part of the local government builds more bike lanes doesn’t mean that other parts of the government will follow suit. Police still doesn’t care about cars illegally blocking the bike lanes. The people ploughing snow see bike lanes as the last thing that should need ploughing, preferably no earlier than 2 weeks after it snowed. A dedicated bike path I use to work is supposed to be ploughed within 2 hours of snow, but it took a week before anything was done and now three weeks later it’s still not to the standard that the government has set.
Speaking of Oslo and bicycles, I just want to add an amazing statistic that surfaced a couple of years ago here on Hacker News:
Oslo has a zero pedestrian and bicycle mortality rate!
https://thecityfix.com/blog/how-oslo-achieved-zero-pedestria...
> In 2015, the political climate and public will in the City of Oslo changed the tone on accepting continued surface transportation fatalities. The mayor, city council and transport division staff all supported a shift in roadway decision-making from car-centric to people-centric. [...]
Neighboring capitals with similar progressive bicycle cultures (Denmark, Sweden) have somewhat low but non-zero mortality rate as Oslo had 6 years ago. So the policies definitely make a change, but it's the consequence of a culture. You won't see American politicians suggesting a ban on cars in big cities.