Environmental campaigners have called on the government to learn from its own successes after official figures showed the use of single-use supermarket plastic bags had fallen 98% since retailers in England began charging for them in 2015.
Annual distribution of plastic carrier bags by seven leading grocery chains plummeted from 7.6bn in 2014 to 133m last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said on Monday.
I see your from feddit.nl, which makes your comment make sense, but you really need to realize that in many places in the world, the way the town’s and cities were built, it’s just impossible to implement public transit, and biking isn’t really an alternative.
Or places where public transit is a thing, it is really inconvenient.
My girlfriend can drive to work in 30 minutes. Taking the bus takes her over an hour. So instead of a 1 hour drive each day, she’s on the bus for 2.5 hours + waiting + the inconvenience of the buses not being on schedule + the buses shutting down at midnight
It’s great if you can commit an extra 1.5 hours every day just to sit on a bus, but she can’t. Not to mention that’s just going to work. If she needed to stop by for groceries, pet food, doctors appointments, etc, she’s adding an insane amount of time in between by having to switch buses.
I know cars are bad, but going to work + running errands legit wastes a good 3+ hours vs taking a car. That’s a massive chunk of wasted time. She has shit she needs to do at home, she can’t spend a quarter of her day sitting on public transit.
Imagine if the public transport system wasn’t rubbish and your girlfriend could travel in the same 30 minutes?
Public transport isn’t the problem, it’s the solution
Really depends where you are how feasible it is. Where I live we have a great public transport system. Most stations can be reached within 10 minutes when walking and there’s a tram leaving the station every 10 minutes. So getting anywhere in the city is fairly quick and wait times are mininal in most cases.
Travel outside the city and it’s a whole different story and unfortunately there isn’t really a good way to fix it. Just increasing the frequency of busses/trains isn’t feasible because 90% of the rides will be empty at this point which makes no sense.
Okay. I’ll tell my city to just tear down half of it so they can build a better system.
Like I said, not all towns and cities were designed for it. It’s not something you can just plop in centuries down the road. The world doesn’t work that way.
Any new development should have public transit in mind. Old development can’t really be retrofitted. It’s like you missed my entire comment.
In many places the cities were retrofitted for car centric infrastructure already, why couldnt it happen again?
Great. And again, not ALL cities can do that.
Car-centric cities waste tonnes of space on parking which sits empty most or all of the time. Improving them requires less knocking stuff down and more filling in the gaps.
Luckily your city doesn’t have to pay for this - since property developers will do it for you to make money for themselves. You just need to fix the regulatory barriers: remove parking minimums and legalise mixed-use zoning.
If you want to accelerate the process, your local government can adopt the Japanese model: build rail or light rail and then develop dense areas around or above it. This is generally profitable but requires taking on a decent amount of initial risk.
So it can be done. But sitting around grumbling about how a better future is impossible because everything has to stay how it is right now won’t get us there.
Conveniently ignoring the part where I said new developments should absolutely have public transit in mind.
If you’re willing to spend enough money, anything can be retrofitted.
You just described how bad the public transport where you live is, not why it can’t be better. We 100% can and should be building better public transport & active transport, as well as building places with better land use for these.
Then your (presumably Canada) country needs to start re-doing the cities so they aren’t dependent on private cars. NL was also going that way in the 1970s until they changed direction. The best time to do it would have been back then, but the second best time to do it is start now.
It can be done.
It will not be cheap.
Who is going to pay? The Canadians who live in the most expensive country in the world and cannot afford to live anymore?
You guys are ignorant as hell lol