Society's got priorities wrong.
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most car travels are 1 person or sometimes 2 person
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the majority of car travels are quite short, less than 40km.
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many car travels are just to get some groceries or drop of a little package or just say "hi" to someone, carrying nothing but themselves.
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cars are fucking expensive, to buy and to maintain
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accidents become way worse with heavier vehicles
Microcar is a valid answer to all of these, while still being sheltered from weather.
How are urban places (i'm in Belgium) with almost permanent super heavy road traffic congestion, bad climate statistics, high polution values, very limited available space left, no self-sustaining energy production and high traffic accident statistics still pooring in billions and billions in subsidies year after year into "regular" big heavy SUV-like vehicles instead of these? It's beyond my comprehension. The only real valid reason i somewhat get is the collective scare of being in a crash and not wanting to be in the smaller vehicle. We could save the climate, we choose not to.
- MICROLINO: 17.990 €
- OPEL ROCKS: 8.699 €
- CITROEN AMI: 7.790 €
- RENAULT TWIZY: 13.000 €
- FIAT TOPOLINO: 9.890 €
A lot of people here casually spend more on a sunday racing bike every few years for fucks sake.
Yeah I visited France and Belgium a couple weeks ago and saw tons of these little dudes. It helps a lot if your cities are designed properly. In NA these would probably get totaled by monster pickups not seeing them.
Totally agree, our cars are too huge IMO, no need for it TBH. Its always great to travel the world (if you can). Nice to see the different ways people live.
where in Belgium if i may ask? Because they are not very common at all here imo.
Ieper. It was a really cute city with fantastic urban planning (although we only spent time in the downtown near the cloth hall). It was neat seeing the kids all riding their bikes to get everywhere. That being said, the tiny cars we saw were more common in France.
Okay, yeah Ieper is quite neatly planned for flemish standards. Poperinge too. I'm living more in the sprawl called Vlaamse Ruit: ghent, antwerp, Brussels, leuven... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flemish_Diamond?wprov=sfla1