- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32663335
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They pedestrianised a lot of the center. It used to have a four lane road traversing the center.
No people drive around Brussels rather than through it.
They have also made it harder to drive around in general with more one way streets. making more people opt for large electric bikes.
A lot of the damage was done in the 60s to make the city car friendly. some of these measures have been undone. it’s a massive change in the last 15 years.
Great work out of Brussels! Their ridership per capita is 60x my city’s in the US. Out city continually scores very high for mid sized US city public transit and it’s barely a blip on how well Brussels is doing.
It’s a long long battle. I’m guessing you never visited Brussels? It’s hard to compare a capital of a small country, and de facto of the EU, with a mid sized city in a huge country.
The survey you’re reading about was done with the residents of Brussels. Way more than many other cities: Brussels is a real commuter city. Hundreds of thousands of people commute into the city. We’re talking 350.000 or more. Few people living in Brussels commute out of it.
From those commuting people, 17 % cycle, 15 % use public transport (rush hour trains are full AF), about 65 % uses the car.
Reason? Cars are used in Belgium as a replacement (addition) for paying employees (it is called “salariswagen”) and they often get a “free tanking” card on top and it is completely legal (even expected/encouraged) that these cars are used by the employee both for coming to work and for wherever they wanna go privately on holidays or weekends. It is very gently taxed, while paying employees actual money in Belgium is taxed among the heaviest in the world. There are estimates of there being 700.000 cars like this (it’s estimate because it intertwines with actual “company cars”: people who need the company car for their actual job and not just to drive to work). A lot of those commute to Brussels everyday, from Antwerp, Ghent, Liège, … and from the hundreds of small cities towns in between and around.
The roads around Brussels (and Antwerp, and Ghent, and …) are really really jammed. On an average day, there are 160 km of traffic jam in rush hour. When there is shitty weather (cyclists turn to cars and public transport), it can go up to 400 - 500km all jammed up. For reference: if you measure very broadly, the country is east-west only 280km and north-south only 220km (while in reality one should ignore the south for this, it is very sparsely populated).
Whatever you do, do not take the way public transport is run in Belgium/Brussels as a prime example. It might be better than your average mid sized US city, but for European standards: public transport in Belgium is very insufficient, unreliable, too expensive and by far not the most popular mode of transport (and for good reasons). Truth be told: among this situation, the Brussels company (MIVB-STIB) is the best public transport company in Belgium, but compared to public transport in big cities in the Netherlands, Germany, … it still sucks pretty bad.