> be me
> live in a relatively new part of town in the Netherlands
> bike 20 minutes to the city center
> no hills or mountains because netherlands
> See almost no cars because most bike routes are completely seperated and shorter than car routes
> Park my bike in a surveilled parking area funded by the city
> Do all my shopping for the day and return
> MFW my friends and family don’t even realize how good we have it
So how easy is it for an American to move to the Netherlands? Asking for myself
If you are skilled labor, yes: https://www.expatica.com/nl/finance/taxes/the-dutch-30-ruling-explained-101641/
But what @abbadon420 said is equally true. Housing market’s fucked beyond belief. Now, if you want to WFH and live out in the sticks, you’d be set.
Or you’ll need to bring like 500k. No, that’s not a joke.
For a small flat in an older building, surely not for a single house or even semi…
The average price of all sold houses, including the shitty apartments in the middle of nowhere, is 440k
You can drive though the Netherlands in 3h, for Americant’s that means there are no sticks.
Drive though the Netherlands in 3h
It takes 1 hour to get from Germany in the east to Belgium in the west.
On a plane maybe
If I can get from Dortmund in Germany to Calais in France in 4,5 - 5 hours (including stopping to fill up), I sure as hell don’t need 3 hours to go across the Netherlands.
I used to drive regularly to Antwerp from Dortmund in a truck and it took between 3,5 and 4 hours.
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The Netherlands is less than half the size of my state. There is nowhere in the Netherlands that is more rural than where I live right now, lol.
Eh, there are a few spots that it certainly feels like it, especially the Frisian islands.
I guess it’s easy enough, but good luck finding a house.
Scooby-Doo and the Case of the Missing Houses
No hills or mountains is great for biking, but bad for beautiful nature experiences (BNE)
1 gal of gas: ~29k calories - $4.609
~29k calories of rice: ~$600 <-- sus math btw 🤔It’s simple: drink the gas.
okay, update:
my math was wrong. new cost of rice: ~$11.5 (ordering in bulk)CONCLUSION
Drink the gas.100 grams of raw white rice is 365 calories, meaning that it’s about 3650 calories per kg. 29k calories of rice is 8 kilograms.
Where are you buying rice that it costs $75/kg???
I did my math wrong lol
Found some at 66c/lb. Need 17.5 lbs. $11.5 👌
If you drink a whole canister of gas, that’s enough to cover your nutritional needs for the rest of your life!
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Also, gas is less toxic than vitamin C. So you should be fine! :D
Yeah but I don’t have to carry an actual ton of weight on my bike.
Except when I’m taking yo mama home after date night
stfu nerd
My mom has lost a ton of weight and im v proud of her 😡Okay I’m sorry that was mean
I meeeeaaan, she lost that actual ton before you started biking her around and she’s still somehow fat. Someone had to say it. You shouldn’t apologize.
you better watch out
my dad is microsoft and he will delete your accountPlz dont im so srry. I bag ur 4givness. I hav sweet ethral fools cristal sord in d2. I wil giv it 2 u. My mom wil kil me if I get a nother virus. She mite blame my dad and devors him. Plz. I bag of u!
Your mom is so fat when she sits around the house she’s morbidly obese.
I don’t get it?
You’re so dumb your IQ is below average.
See, if you keep fumbling the 2nd part of your jokes, I’ll have to keep asking around to have them explained.
You’re so unable to understand the concept of the anti-joke that, uh, you’re unable to understand the concept of the anti-joke.
An Anti-Joke still has to be funny.
It’s a stab at fat… I can’t help but feel targeted but I’ll have to wait until the stabbing pain in my chest subsides. The shooting pain down my left arm is lessening already! I’m fine, everything’s fine… just let me catch my breath for a moment.
Still don’t get the joke
Old “your momma” joke… Your momma so fat when she sits around the house, she sits “around” the house! Meaning that she’s as big as the whole house or even bigger than the house.
Which someone that fat is morbidly obese.
So the joke is a twist on the joke, with a jab at the fat person, in the form of faux concern over their health.
Sort of in the same vein as “bless your heart” or “he/she has a great personality”.
Thanks now I get it and can rest assured it wasn’t funny.
Aww snap!!
Taking this further, that $4.60 of gas will power the most efficient car for about an hour.
That $12 of rice is enough energy for you to power your bike for like 50 hours.
Conclusion: Just drive your car. Do you really want to waste 49 hours on your bike? /s
But that’s because that fuel is used to do much, much more work. if you scale down the unit to, say, a scooter (50cc) it will last much longer. Most scoots have 1gal tanks and they can get over 100mi per tank.
That being said everyone will think you lost your license due to drunk driving so to prevent this you should replace alcohol in your life and simply drink gas.
Real ones will switch to drinking biofuels because they’re better for the environment.
Ethanol is a good option.
Pro-tip: make sure it’s not denatured and is purified—it’s less dangerous for consumption that way.Wait a second…
simply drink gas
No, drink diesel - more calories per gallon, even though it costs more per gallon, too. The calorie difference is more than enough to offset the cost difference.
drink diesel ? I thought the obvious conclusion was to fill up my tank with rice
If you bike regularly, you actually don’t spend more calories. You only see calorie burn uptick when first taking on new exercise, which falls off over time back to your usual normal calorie cost. Because of this, that calorie cost for a biker is calorie intake they’d already consume even if they didn’t bike. It’s essentially free, in contrast to the gas of the car which is always a cost.
Checkmate liberal. /s
You can’t convince me of free energy
NICE TRY SCIENTOLOGY
There was a Kurzgesat video about this a couple weeks ago. Apparently if you don’t spend calories exercising/biking, your body will find other ways to burn it like increasing your immune system activity (which can have poor long-term effects). There’s an adjustment period when you do start exercising where energy is still spent on sedentary things and the actual exercise before the former is reduced to mostly match the latter.
I have also read that regular exercise can lead to an increase of base metabolic rate by ~5% though, which is like an extra 100 calories per day.
You should always doublecheck Kurzgesagt videos, btw.
They’re not a good sole source due to being heavily simplified (they know this and often provide further reading (you probably also know this (just commenting anyway for general visibility (this should be considered good practice tbh (to be honest)))))Yeah, I started taking Kurzgesagt videos with a grain of salt a while ago, hence the “apparently.” Their explanation just fit NoName’s assertion pretty well. Never bad to make the possibility of being wrong explicit though!
Seems like a potential circular reference though, judging from how popular Kurzgesagt videos are.
Gross metabolic efficiency is gonna be around ~25% so you’re best off measuring kilojoules of work as an approximation of calorie burn, and then compare that to how many gallons of gas would be consumed when in a car, but you’d still probably wanna drink the gas
One thing to account for is that humans are very inefficient at converting food into energy output. Only about 25% efficient to be precise. So you need to eat about 4 times more calories than you end up outputting into the bicycle.
The same thing applies to ICE cars, their engines are also very inefficient. EVs however reach an efficiency of 80-90%, they only end up using more energy than a bicycle because of how much faster you usually drive them. But if you drove an EV at the same speed you would ride a bicycle they would be vastly more efficient. And that’s not even accounting for the amount of energy used to produce food in the first place, which is a lot higher than the energy content of said food.
The superior choice is obviously an electric bicycle though when you want to have the most sustainable transportation, you get all of the efficiency gains from a battery operated motor, whilst still having the low weight and drag of a bicycle
“low drag of a bicycle” citation needed
EVs however reach an efficiency of 80-90%,
That’s not accounting for the inefficiency of turning heat into electricity in the first place (turbine generation is about 90% at utility scale) or turning photons into usable electricity (photovoltaics are at about 20%). And with turbines, you have to account for the inefficiencies in processing the fuel to get it to that point.
The whole universe is just an entropy generator and we’re gonna lose a lot of useful energy as we try to manipulate it.
Yes, I was purely referring to the efficiency of the battery and motor. Producing food also requires a significantly more energy than the food ends up containing
Actual unironic gigachad moment
Be American
Living paycheck to paycheck
Need job
Good worker
Work overtime when needed
Trying to pay off car
Smug biker does a driveby near open car window
Rethink my life
Realize U.S. infrastructure often requires vehicles
In middle of daily 40min commute, one way
Realize the same distance on bike would be two hours
Depresso
This is why we need good public transit on top of good biking infrastructure. The two working together let’s you get anywhere a car can go while not taking a lot longer.
I miss Japan’s public transport. Never felt like I needed a car while in the city.
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Chill bud. It’s possible to compliment an aspect of a society without going balls deep on the rest of it.
Not hating on the country, just on its white knight fans in the Western world
Yea I get that, plenty of weebs out there that don’t want to acknowledge/don’t care to learn the downsides of Japanese society.
Just working 12 hour days is enough for me to be glad I wasn’t born over there. Great place to vacation though, especially since the yen is dropping so much.
It used to be just weebs, but in the last few years I’ve seen plenty of “normies” (for the lack of a better term) getting into weeb culture, I.e. travelling to Japan for a week, encountering a vending machine that has hot drinks, and from then on basically becoming Japanese ultranationalists in the way they think Japanese culture should be opposed on all others. While knowing basically nothing about it. It’s strange. Especially for an European person.
They missed their chance, now it’s the Chinese 😁
You’re not wrong, but that’s not going to work over the entire country. There’s just too much space to cover; the country would go bankrupt trying to provide mass transit everywhere that it’s needed. So while this could be, if you could convince people to actually do it, a solution in urban areas, it’s never going to work out in the thousands of miles of country and they have the exact same problems. They just have less traffic and more empty space to cross.
We didn’t go bankrupt making a car-centric infrastructure, we won’t go bankrupt building adequate mass transit and micromobility infrastructure. In fact, we will probably profit greatly in myriad ways.
I just spent a week in Texas in places that had plenty of people living and presumably working close together. The infrastructure is a hellscape of concrete and asphalt and monstrous pickup trucks. It has nothing to do with being a big country and everything to do with culture and policies.
You realize the US used to have a comprehensive rail network, right?
I was specifically addressing people commuting to their job and traveling within their immediate area. That kind of stuff could definitely be covered by biking and better bus/light rail investment without having to go everywhere. The only people who wouldn’t be covered by that are people living in the country and they are a minority compared to those living in suburbs or near big cities and could still be served by public transit using park and ride stations if they have to travel to a bigger city. They would just drive to the closest park and ride station and then use the public transit to travel within the metro area. Of course if they’re traveling entirely within less populated country areas then public transit won’t serve them that well but at that point you can just use cars as a backup. But public transit investments could easily serve the majority of people for their daily travel needs and even if they do have a high cost the economic benefit of making it easier for people to commute to work and to cities for fun day trips will create more economic value over time being a net benefit in the long run.
Get a closer job or move closer to your job if it’s a good reliable job. I did and it’s fucking wonderful! Riding gets easier and easier as you get stronger and better cardio too.
Took me a long time, a lot of work, and some luck but I can’t recommend it enough. Most days I ride my bike or skateboard, but even walking doesn’t take long. I only resort to a car if I’m too injured to ride/skate/walk far or the weather makes it too dangerous (which is rare, I’ve ridden through more storms than I can count lol, icy conditions suck though).
Damnit, now I want to go for a ride.
>just get a job closer to your home
>just moveIdk man, not sure either of those are the easy solutions you’re implying them to be.
Go reread what I posted then because you clearly missed the part where I said it wasn’t easy but worth it.
Everyone employed is living paycheck to paycheck; you just spend it all
Some lucky few still get to build up an emergency fund, possibly retire, or even become independently wealthy, but yeah, most of us are working class stiffs.
> be me
> be downtown on bicycle
> actual protected bike lanes
> zipping past hundreds of people that decided to drive for some reason
> bumper to bumper traffic
> road capacity literally maxed out
> honking and yelling at almost every intersection
pic related
Road capacity in traffic: basically zero Single bike lane capacity: absolutely massive.
And park directly in the immediate front of the building I’m visiting. No circling around and around without finding a space to park my overly expensive rust box. Just arrive, lock the bike to a post and be there.
Totally different experience in that aspect alone.
Be me
Download Pokemon Go
Start running to work
Gotta catch them all
4 months later run a 50K
“What was your training like?”
“I dunno, run more?”
(true story back in 2022)
Bro pokemon WENT
You might want to check out walkscape to run even more
I couldn’t get into Walkscape, but it’s definitely better for running as you don’t need it open until you’re done.
Big update is coming next month if you want to check it out ;)
I’m trying to figure out, how do we get them to POKÉMON GO TO THE POLLS
Ngl, I have a nice ass and legs. Nice compliments, too! It’s worth it to bike everywhere if your city allows it
I forgot to mention that the cost of repairs is also dirt cheap here.
pics or it didn’t happen
I’ll let these babes do the talkin’
🥵
I can’t bicycle anywhere. Well, at least my commute would be certain death, There is a nice bike trail a few miles away but I’d have buy a bike and a rack for my car to haul it over there. Can barely afford the car.
Depending on your personal circumstances you might not need a rack. I always just take the front wheel off (quick release) and shove my bike in the back seat
Well, at least my commute would be certain death,
RIDE TO VALHALLA! WITNESS! WITNESSSS!!
Given that’s a greentext, legitimately expected anon to somehow get injured or killed by some not paying attention driver on unsafe road or something. Glad he didn’t.
Me unironically wanting to do this
100F outside most of the year because Florida (that’s 38C for you europoors)
Have to wake up at 4am before sunset to be able to ride at all
work at 9
Can’t into roadbike :(
It would take me 3 hours to get to work on a bike, and 3 hours home. I’d love to be able to do it, but Vancouver is expensive and I don’t want to waste my free time biking in 30° weather
Where do you live, Chilliwack? Lol. I get it though heat sucks. I’m in Kelowna and bike whenever I can, but I’m not showing up to dinner or a meeting drenched. Errands or casual hangs though sure why not. It is a little less soupy humid here so even 40° isn’t awful as long as you’re moving and have a breeze.
I’d prefer not to specify where exactly I live but you’re close
4am before sunset
4am is technically “before sunset”, but I assume you meant “before sunrise”.
I used to live in central Florida (so not even the benefit of the ocean climate) and I rode my bike everywhere and I lived in a house with no AC. I was young and high all the time, which I guess made being soaked in sweat and stinky all the time bearable. Somehow I still got play from women - apparently I was cute back then and I was hyper-fit, at least. Absolutely no fucking way I could stand that shit now.
My job is 15 mountainy miles away, and when I show up drenched in bicycle sweat everyone in the office says I smell bad
People shouldn’t live that far away from their workplaces. They didn’t used to, before we invented shitboxes.
I would love to live 5 minutes away from my workplace
But I saved about $300,000 on my mortgage when I bought a more rural house that isn’t near the city/my office building
If it’s cheaper to live in the middle of nowhere, with water and electricity and internet needing to be piped all that way out there, and the gas bills, and the road wear, then the government has failed. High and medium density housing costs the government less in maintenance, stimulates the economy, and is cheaper to build. Any functioning economy would price those homes cheaper. If you’re saving 300,000 by costing the government all that extra money and polluting the environment, someone fucked up on a colossal scale.
Welcome to every modern country, but especially North America.
Spoilet alert: someone fucked up on a colossal scale.
I saved about $300,000
Sold your own future lol.
How so, I have a place to live now
You could get a decent e-bike?
“But they’re so expensive, I’m not paying that much for a bike! I’d rather pay 10 times as much for cheap car that’ll sell all my text messages to data scraping companies while polluting the environment and destroying my future.”
Bro my car cost $4k, has no radio and manual windows, if this 20 year old civic can sell my data, it’s earned it
Even more reason to get an e-bike lol. Too late I guess since you already decided to pay 4000 dollars for a shitty car. :p
4k for a top of the line e-bike.
Or 5k for the best e-bike in the world.
None of these have radios either. And you don’t have to work up a sweat by rolling down the windows because there’s no windows!
Sure, but that doesn’t allow me to bring home a family worth of groceries, or let me drive 4-5 hours away to see family for the holidays, or give me a way to drop my partner off at the airport with three suitcases for work conferences, or a way to get my 110lb dog to the vet.
The bike is not a replacement for a car, not even if it’s an expensive e-bike.
If those are your use cases, then you would probably want to get a Dutch bike (>5k); specifically for a big doggo, groceries and suitcases. Unfortunately there are no North American companies currently making cargo bikes as good at replacing cars as the Dutch ones. Though most people do perfectly fine with North American versions, even with children (but not big doggos lol).
The only good reason to drive a car in the situations you listed is driving it to another city, which would very likely not be feasible with an e-bike. Unless that trip is taken up every weekend, the best (and cheapest) way to accomplish that would be to rent a car.
A good e-bike is certainly a good replacement, unless you focus on certain situations like driving 4-5 hours out of town. Everything else it can do just as well and even make it easier and less stressful.
You can get an E-Bike or other personal electric vehicle if you want. Eco-friendly, inexpensive, fun, and won’t leave you drenched in sweat.
That’s the downside bike enthusiasts like to gloss over about - and in summer it doesn’t even have to be mountainous.
I always wanted to learn how to ride a bike. Always looked like fun.
Do it. I took up cycling last year (although I learned as a kid) and now it’s literally my favourite thing to do ever. I’m also the fittest I’ve ever been.
I wouldn’t even know how to start. And, even though I know it’s silly, I’d be super nervous to try in front of people. I’m fat. They’d laugh at me 🤣
There are videos on youtube that can help. Tom Scott did one where he learns to ride a bike as an adult. He seemed to get the hang of it pretty quickly.
You’re going to do great. Keep the seat low and push with your feet to get the feel of coasting, just like kids learn. Small steps and you’ll be riding in no time. Depending on where you live, see if there are community bike groups you can volunteer at - these are great for learning about bike maintenance, and some places will let you build a bike for yourself from donated stuff for your time. Bike shops are pretty much universally supportive too.
For what it’s worth, I think you already did the hard part by coming here and expressing interest :)
Absolutely go do it! Riding a bike is one of the simplest joys in life once you get the hang of it. I live ripping around doing all my errands on it. I have a reasonably nice vehicle but really I only drive in the worst of the winter, or to get out of town to do some activity. In the summer that activity is usually mountain biking, go figure!
So do it?
Have fun commuting 30 miles to work on that thing. Especially when there’s 8 or 10 inches of snow, -10 wind-chill, or there’s a thunderstorm rolling in. I’ve seen people do it; they look absolutely fucking miserable and it’s a miracle it doesn’t kill them.
Enter the saviour of the commuter - trains.
I like trains
sees happy person
gets mad
Yeah good luck driving your car through a tornado. I’ve seen it, these people didn’t look happy.
Respect to those folks. A miserable ride is often rewarding because it’s one of those lows that is eminently temporary and gives you an appreciation for the highs, especially if you are dressed appropriately so as not to catch a cold or some such. Kind of like shoveling snow for that sweet sweet mug of hot chocolate on the sofa afterwards. But yeah, also a good city will provide alternative options for its citizens, trains, buses, rideshare even. If a 30 mile bike ride is the only alternative to driving from place A to place B, your government doesn’t want you to have any kind of freedom to choose how you get from place A to place B, if there are no affordable housing options or good job opportunities that change that equation, your government is working on behalf of the big car manufacturers and dealers to keep you enslaved in debt to them, which is pretty fucked up
You may have misread the history. The man is having fun with his current commute and he does not seems to be looking for some sort of a change in his routine.
Some corrections:
You may have misread the history. The man is having fun with his current commute and he
isdoes not seemsto be looking for some sort of a change in his routine.Thank you. I’ll change that.
You’re welcome! I hope I didn’t come off as rude.
Nah… don’t worry. I know I never check twice the messages I wrote on social media. They are bound to be full of mistakes. Plus my french autocorrector modifies my english. Still, if I write to be read I should try to be readable (^_^)
This person just wanted to feel clever. Your English is fine and required no corrections to understand because this is a forum not a university essay.
We don’t know that. Maybe he was genuinely trying to help me improve my English, maybe he was genuinely having a hard time reading me bc of my mistakes. Even if it was about being clever there is no point for me or any of us to react with negativity and ruin our mood.
Lets be forgiving. It will make our life better. 🫰
Get a life.
The commenter I replied to is from a French instance. If I were writing in a different language, I would want to know where I’ve made mistakes.
I didn’t ask for your life story.
Actually, in a way, you did! You said “get a life”, which indicates you think I don’t have one. Me giving you information about me shows that I do have one. So now you’re more informed than you were before!
Bruh I will literally just stay home if there is that much snow I’m not fucking stupid
Don’t live in the USA, simple as.
Children in Norway ride their bikes to school every day, even in the snow. Are you saying you’re weaker than these literal children and need your climate controlled box to keep you comfortable? You can also choose to live closer to work if you want. Surprisingly most adults get to choose where they live.
Yeah, but do you dress like a chode and hang out at vitamin shops?
Too bad for the lung cancer
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969701007586
The car owners are getting their cancer air, not bicyclists.
Pretty cool study. Shame its so small of a sample size, but it shows some very positive signs.
Idk, I used to cycle to work a lot before changing jobs, and I’ve got to tell you, the fumes I felt in my throat were more noticeable than anything I’ve ever experienced in my car. Plus when exercising you simply breathe more.
That just prove how much we are accustomed to the polluted air in our cars, and not to the less but still polluted air outside.
You’re using your personal experiences to validate a broad generalization regarding the effects of air pollution on rates of lung cancer for the population of an entire country; this is wrong. Your sample size is one and your argument is “I felt the fumes in my throat more when cycling then compared to when I was in a car; therefore it must be cancer”. I appreciate that you actually had somewhat of a baseline, but your self experiment essentially tells you that exhaust fumes hurt your throat [full stop].
IDK where you were riding… 10 year cycle courier veteran from Boston here with my own anecdotal experience. This could very well be a personal health thing with you. Never had any issues related to the fumes in my throat, or heard of any related issues within the messenger community. If you told me over time that the fumes have a negative impact on healh I’d believe it, but I probably wouldn’t listen to a commuter who rode a tiny fraction of the urban cycling I’ve done personally. I’d be very interested to see a study on long term bike messengers.
People who regularly cycle live longer than people who don’t.
