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A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

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How is it that Germany and Japan can maintain good urban planning despite being home to some of the largest car companies? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Ever since ditching car culture and joining the urbanist cause (on the internet at least but that has to change), I've noticed that some countries always top the list when it comes to good urbanism. The first and most oblivious one tends to be The Netherlands but Germany and Japan also come pretty close. But that's strange considering that both countries have huge car industries. Germany is (arguably) the birthplace of the car (Benz Patent-Motorwagen) and is home to Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Japan is home to Toyota, Honda, Nissan and among others. How is it that these countries have been able to keep the auto lobby at bay and continue investing in their infrastructure?

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

Lol, have you been to Germany? It’s not a concrete hellscape like some of the US, but it’s very car centric if you compare it to e.g. Denmark or Netherlands.

Edit: also, German car lobby is powerful, that’s why their highways are free to use and constantly maintained and kept at a high quality. Trains on the other hand are constantly being delayed and have to slow down due to bad rail quality

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (3 children)

German asphalt sucks though, compared to Dutch asphalt

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Just use Belgium as the baseline, then everyone in Europe has great asphalt

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

I am very certain that here in Belgium they simply don't put on the top layer of the finer wearing layer.

I watched the workers work on a road as I biked to and from work. They were done in 2 days and they put down 1 single layer on top of the base layer that they tore down too. It was extremely course, not nearly liquid enough (probably not enough binders), and after a week or so now of medium traffic, it acts only a little better than a loose gravel road.

It will probably be a wreck in a year because that is a high traffic road by the container park with a lot of trucks moving.

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