#Amsterdam also needs concrete barriers to prevent cars from taking shortcuts. Maybe it always has or maybe this is a new thing.
Looking at the kind of people that drive certain cars, I think for most of them there may have been some harsh lessons involved to learn that they’re aren’t the king of the road here.
These bollards have a built in light which is probably because there wasn’t exactly a shortage of incidents where people would cycle or ride into them at night.
After not managed to develop god-mode for Cuppings I just baked a version for my local iPhone in 5 minutes that filters for: venues.filter(state == "TO_VISIT" || state == "PICK") instead of states != "CLOSED".
That's a good enough hit list for this visit and about the justified amount of effort.
Going to sleep now and amazed that there's still a very heavy drone of #ADE bass hanging over the city.
Given that I can't figure out where it's coming from, I guess everybody can hear this? I know #Amsterdam loves the revenue but this can hardly be justified.
Most Dutch (and other) bike lights are StVO illegal in Germany which is why we stock up at HEMA whenever we have the chance.
The German car lobby blocks lots of measures from the small here to the very large (like default liability) which would make cyclists and pedestrians safer.
Being on a street with a bike in Amsterdam, it’s so relaxing not to have to worry about getting honked at or narrowly overtaken.
The Netherlands had all the same debates as Germany on the topic of Sunday shopping but they were resolved, stores here are now open and pretty much everybody is happier.
In Germany this is still a highly contentious topic with the Berlin government even cracking down on the Späti system which is pretty much the only thing open in many areas.
One more item for the massive backlog of the German Reformstau.
@dlx Not that much except some local evaluations, a report from the CPB toeing the government line and an endless barrage of (predictable) objections from Christian politicians.
One of the Christian dailies that has a piece on it, shuts their website down today so I can’t read it.
Another telling one are these two tablets which can only be bought at pharmacies (mebendazol on prescription and ibuprofen over the counter) in Germany but are freely available at very low cost in the Netherlands.
The German lobby of pharmacists insists these cannot be made freely available because then scores of people will die. This is clearly false and a blatant excuse to safeguard what is a source of monopoly revenue for them.
Jarring to see the entire square of Amsterdam Amstel including the station redone. I was there at the consultations for this when I was living here 14 years ago.
The entire station area has been upgraded and lots of stairs and passageways which used to be dank and dark are now pleasant to walk through.
But this is a point about the much praised fully automatic bike sheds of Dutch train stations. They are good but they are also so systematized that you have to know how to use them.
For the bike storage you have to have a transit card to check your bike in. Parking your bike street level is forbidden and could risk having it towed. The first 24 hours of storage are free.
Ideal you’d say but not for everybody. There’s lots of reasons why people won’t use a system like this. My mother for instance says she’ll always tie her bike outside.
It’s well designed, that’s not the problem. Germany could never get a system like this together at a similar level of (service) design.
Similar issues abound with train travel with the transit card and many other digital automated service interactions which abound in the Netherlands.
(The transit card is not legible or inspectable without a terminal which is a huge issue that nobody cares about.)
The big city yuppie loves this stuff because it makes their life more efficient but anybody in the Netherlands who’s foreign (tourists!) or poor or not so literate is excluded softy but relatively definitively by the technocracy.
Honestly I love these smart city elements that are thrown around like this public space issue tracker QR code and the expectations of uptime and quality that accompany it.
On the other hand you have to remind yourself of the reams of meetings and SLAs and back offices and management steering committees that back this and ask yourself whether the cost of all of that is worth it.
Or the live dot for the bus on Google Maps which is a level of integration I’ve never seen before and a view that I’ve always dreamt of 10-15 years ago when I was living in Amsterdam.
(Going to Berlin you quickly learn to give up any dreams of anything like that ever working.)
@alper Apple Maps has that as well in New York at least. You know the official (bullshit) reason BVG can’t give out this data (which they do have)? Terrorist might use it 🤡
Back in Berlin from Amsterdam the question is why things here can’t work and the answer is: There’s no pressure (cultural or environmental) to do so and without that people prefer whatever is easiest for them right now.
The dedication people have to sucking is quite something to behold. All of the problems here have clear solutions but that doesn’t matter if nobody wants them to be fixed.
@alper Are you talking about Berlin in particular or Germany as a whole?
In any case, it's probably due to our car industry. It sucks the country dry by lobbying for more road infrastructure and car subsidies of all flavours.
Everytime I see headlines about how the German car industry is in decline, l smile.
@alper Let's talk about the political resistance against assisted dying for very old or terminal sick people in Germany.
They use every kind of excuses to let you suffer until they can press the last cent out of your body.
My grandfather was fighting for a right to suicide since the 1990s, in the end with 96 he hat to refuse food and throws himself out of the bed in a nursery home until he died of starvation after days.
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