After a visit to Houten my wife and I are working out how to move to the Netherlands next year. Meanwhile, for this year we're just trying to figure out how to get our kids to school without buying a second car.
We should not have to be taxis to our kids. The entire world has gone utterly mad, making it impossible to get around without using gargantuan child-crushers that can only be operated by people in the middle years of their life, and there are only a few pockets of sanity now.
You should see what's been going on in the US. Due to a combination of anti-tax crusaders, aging of the workforce, service industry jobs asking for higher wages, and Covid chaos, school bus service is drying up all over.
I have friends in multiple states who spend hours every single day, sitting in a line to drop off/pick up their kids from school. It's utterly, mind-bendingly insane. I still cannot fathom it, and it makes me angry.
They'll say things like "you have to get there an hour ahead of time so that you only wait 45 minutes more" because if you show up at the "correct" time you'll be waiting for 2 hours.
In a lot of cases, these schools have been built where you really can't walk to school, and children are not allowed to leave on their own.
Not the entire world, our child can get to school 3 km away on a bike without sharing the road with cars. There are bridges and tunnels, the bike road is physically sepparated from car roads with trees and grass at all times. Except for the last bit in to school that is in a small single family house area with almost no traffic. (North Sweden)
Would you be able to comment more? The northern Nordics in general look very interesting, particularly for having cool temperatures in future decades, but I worry it might not be easy to integrate as a non-nordic myself. Apparently Oulu, Finland has a good tech scene (not to suggest Sweden and Finland are the same, of course!! http://satwcomic.com/ makes sure people know better :-) )
From a California / Ireland perspective, I suspect Sweden and Finland are, SATW notwithstanding, pretty much the same, culturally and economically. And from what I've seen (53 years living in Sweden and Finland) they're also internally pretty uniform on the North-South axis (e.g, our kid had an almost car-free bike route to school here in Helsinki), so you don't have to limit your search to just the northern parts.
Since most of the northern nordics consists of relocated southerners it should be no problem for you. I was working in a small village a few years, in the middle of nowhere. Talking to some old people long out of working age turns out most of them were from Stockholm or Finland moving up for work and got stuck. The unemployment numbers are lowest in the country at the moment. What is missing is a proper food culture, the new people are wrinkling their noses when the neighbours starts opening the herring boxes. And yes, it really smells as bad as they make it look like on youtube. If not worse.
The bigger cities tries to keep the roads bikeable during winter but it can be a day or two in a row that you will have to take the bus to work because they just can't clear 40 cm snow before 7 am during a snowstorm from 200 km of bike roads.
I had a north-Swedish friend introduce me to surströmming, along with about 15 other people in Denmark, and most people agreed it was worth trying, but probably not something to eat more than once a year.
(Prepare it properly, unlike pretty much all of the Youtube videos.)
Just the video I was hoping for. That's the plan! After moving somewhere less hostile to people. Rode 30km with my kids in a Gazelle Cabby last week and they loved it!
My dad used to take me and my sister to the local market (to buy food, not to sell us, you understand) on one of these in the 70s in London. He called it the Long John. The basket was a much wider, lower version than this though, and quite uncomfortable, but exciting! I have very early memories of people pointing and laughing at us as we went past.
> Meanwhile, for this year we're just trying to figure out how to get our kids to school without buying a second car.
Make them take public transport? If they’re older than 10 or 11, let’s say. Or make them walk to school? Assuming you live at about 2 km max from said school (a good half-hour walk to and back from school has never hurt anybody, to the contrary).
Now, I understand that there may be laws around where you live that ban leaving kids unaccompanied, but you can and try fighting those laws (I guess there would be other people who might join you). Also, maybe your local public transport is crap, but it’s easier and better for the whole society to try and fix that than to try and impose cycling paths that would be used by only a small percentage of the people living there).
> "maybe your local public transport is crap, but it’s easier and better for the whole society to try and fix that than to try and impose cycling paths that would be used by only a small percentage of the people living there"
Nonsense. Cycle paths aren't "imposed" on anyone - they're far cheaper to build and maintain than public transport and are an asset to society.
It's easy to say "why build cycle lanes when nobody cycles", but the reason nobody cycles in your town is because there isn't safe infrastructure for cycling. If you build enough cycle-friendly infrastructure, people will use it because suddenly a lot of trips become practical, convenient, and safe by bike that weren't before.
Plus, you save a lot in long-term healthcare costs by promoting a healthier, more active population! But even die-hard car drivers benefit from increased cycling thanks to reduced traffic and congestion.
We live 1 km from the preschool but it's a narrow country road with tall hedgerows and drivers doing 90-100kph. We live 13km from the primary school (it's the nearest non-religious one) and there is no public transportation.
Of course, this was a predictable consequence of moving to the countryside, but it meant we could get a super cheap house to dig ourselves out of a hole. We knew this was a predictable outcome and leaving is a logical step. We're done digging (the plan worked!)
"cycling paths that would be used by only a small percentage of the people living there"
Odd since many people already bike here, just at great risk to themselves, and a bike path can allow convenient, immediate transport as opposed to public transportation which doesn't work well at our low population densities. I have a bunch of footage of people riding bikes around here I need to put together in to a video, actually - mostly older folks.
I'm annoyed the car paths were imposed on us, but here we are.
We should not have to be taxis to our kids. The entire world has gone utterly mad, making it impossible to get around without using gargantuan child-crushers that can only be operated by people in the middle years of their life, and there are only a few pockets of sanity now.