> 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.
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.
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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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.If you drink a whole canister of gas, that’s enough to cover your nutritional needs for the rest of your life!
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???
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)
I’m trying to figure out, how do we get them to POKÉMON GO TO THE POLLS
Bro pokemon WENT
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.
Hm… Is there any law that says I can’t ride my bike in the store? 🤔
Sure would make shopping faster.
where I live is quite common to ride bikes for transportation, lots of places have stickers disallowing riding the bikes in the buidings
You can still take the bike in in some cases, but not ride it.
> 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
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
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.
Acktually a fair few counties in the US have gone bankrupt building car-centric infrastructure, because it’s ruinously expensive and doesn’t even come close to being covered by the taxation they put on cars. Mass transit and bike infrastructure costs are miniscule in comparison and sometimes even actively gain money.
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.
Yeah, but do you dress like a chode and hang out at vitamin shops?
Actual unironic gigachad moment
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’
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.
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.
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.
sees happy person
gets mad
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.
My job is 18 mountainy miles away, and when I show up drenched in bicycle sweat everyone in the office says I smell bad
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.
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.
I do think it’s funny that America has the worst traffic in the western world, yet in Europe we can get by just fine with roads built by people that even the Romans considered to be ancient.
It has to be said that people from one place underestimate the other…
In Europe, 100 miles is a long distance.
In America, 100 years is a long time.That’s because Europeans invest in all forms of transport, so you don’t get people who can’t fathom the concept of taking any trip from point A to B in anything other than a car.
Edit: not sure why I’m getting downvoted. I think Europe does it way better if that wasn’t obvious
Couldn’t finish reading that disaster of a paragraph. What a fucking loser, “bicyclefag?” Calling people “tards?”
Yeah… fuck that guy.
