I completely agree with this and I would never blame anyone who doesn’t bike without good infrastructure. What I meant was that instead of hoping that self-driving cars will solve all issues, we should be pushing for better alternatives, beginning with improving infrastructure. Maybe I wasn’t clear in my previous comment, because as a Dutchman I am used to safe bike infrastructure (public transit is not so great). To summarize my opinion: we need policies that support safe infrastructure to create alternatives to driving, because cars are never the solution to climate change. Biking should be made safe and convenient, so people will actually use it.

This may be true, but reduced car ownership will not solve many issues with cars, like the vehicle miles travelled. If we don’t change our lifestyles, we will still emit a lot of CO2. Here is a Dutch graph (maybe you can translate it, otherwise let me know!) showing that only that the production of the car causes less than half the CO2 emissions for EV’s (the second to last one in the graph). If we want to reduce emissions more than that, which we really need to do, we need to find something else, like biking, which is way cleaner.

Most of the people in both Finland and Japan live in cities, while most North Americans live in cities. Moving away from cars in rural areas may not be easy, but there is no reason why it would not be possible in the cities. The things that are needed are: denser cities (less tight zoning laws) and more alternatives to driving, like bike lanes or trams. These things are achievable by policy change. Also, the USA has around five times as much population density across the country as Finland, so while it may be big, it is not too big for decent alternatives to driving