I don't think that would be worth the effort. One sees enough cyclists in the winter, and the city has its own methods for judging use, that society generally considers biking a reasonable method of transportation even in winter and appreciate that the major bike routes are kept clear of ice and snow all winter long. Those who don't enjoy cycling, or prefer not to cycle in winter, can take public transportation.
... deaths in traffic
Helsinki bike lanes are separated from car traffic.
As I have pointed out elsewhere here, in the Helsinki metropolitan area people tend to own cars to get themselves and their children out to their second homes in the country (owning a summer home is a popular Finnish tradition), but they wouldn't actually drive the cars into the city: the cost of parking in Helsinki is horrendous, and petrol isn't cheap either.
Why would anyone use a taxi to get around Helsinki?
Never been around Rautatientori late at night? When you have been drinking heavily with friends and want to get back home, but you are too drunk to walk, 1) it might be a shorter distance to the taxi stand than to the night buses, 2) the taxi drops you right at your door, you don't have to stumble home from the bus stop.
But yeah, only after some crazy nightlife have I ever used a taxi, and the same goes for every other young person I know. I have no idea why they would be used during daytime.
Helsingin Sanomat did report a couple of years ago that some people were operating illegal taxis. Maybe they were cheap enough that a group of people would find it preferable to split the cost of one of those than use public transportation to some obscure spot.
If you are having winter bike infrastructure problems whoever you are, I feel bad for you, son, but WTF does that have to do with the Slashdot submission here that talks about declining interest in driving one's own car within the Helsinki metropolitan area?
That's not exclusively a city thing. Rural poverty in the US is extremely high. Much of my extended family back in the middle of nowhere Alabama has been on food stamps. Your welcome to go up to one of said relatives and tell them that thanks to being country-dwellers, they can eat the best steak around, I'm sure they'd love to hear about their supposed wealth of options when they can hardly buy enough food (crap food, the same as any metropolitan area in the US) to feed their families.
If someone starts doing that in a small town... very quickly everyone will simply know who you are and what you do. It doesn't work. The sort of criminal you get in small towns tends to be drifters... traveling criminals.
Besides the aforementioned backwater that marks the southernmost extent of Appalachia, I have extensively travelled in rural areas across Europe, Africa and Asia. Crime is a concern in many places -- you might not get mugged, but you can get burgled, or your telephone might stop working because someone cut down the copper lines so they could sell the copper inside. And it often can't be blamed on a drifter, but instead it's a member of the community that everyone knows. Many travellers can tell you of having e.g. a camera or notebook stolen in a village, and when the theft is reported, a group of the villagers simply walks you by the houses of the usual suspects to get your stuff back, because they know these people regularly steal.
You would be surprised how far meth addiction has spread in rural areas globally, from the Caucasus to Madagascar, and alcoholism has often been prevalent in some countries, and all that leads to much of the same crime anywhere.
Those same people would probably be a lot happier in small towns where they could at least feel like they are a part of a community rather then just a number in a machine.
As I've mentioned elsewhere here, it's important to look at the motivations of the population in question and not be so presumptuous as to speak for them. In the Finnish context, young people overwhelmingly want to move to the cities. You can talk all you want about citydwellers being just "a number in a machine", but they won't have any of it. I daresay the same applies for many places in the US. Everyone is not you.
As to congressman... you have a parliament... in the context of this discussion is there a relevant distinction?
Entirely. Political horsetrading works quite differently in Finland than in your depiction of the US. People living in the country do not just want lower taxes and nothing else. There is wide support for state funding of physical and cultural infrastructure even among rural people; they want a lot of the same things you can find in cities, and building these things with state subsidies has proven to a help against depopulation of rural areas (though it may not be enough to stop all the young people from leaving). There simply isn't the same "red state"/libertarian versus "blue state"/redistributionist divide here that you suggest is true of American society.
As to runways, finland might be similar to Alaska in the US. They deal with that situation with sea planes and ski planes.
The north of Finland gets enough visitors seasonly that there has been a push to build better airports, not least from the local people whose income is heavily boosted by these tourists.
I can commute farther in the state of California than the entire nation of Finland.
The maximum distance in Finland from north to south is 1,157 km. While it might be possible to commute on a regular basis in California, I doubt that a meaningful proportion of Americans would consider that particularly desirable. While perhaps not embracing public transportation, they'd probably want to be based in a suburb nearer to the commuting destination in questions where they would drive.
You mean the fact that the American standard of living that is so high that most normal people own a car so they aren't limited by where some train tracks run or where the bus goes?
Car ownership is high in Finland (the exact figures have been quoted here in another comment), and people like to own their own cars to get out to their summer homes. That's right, the standard of living in Finland is so high that it's entirely normal for Finns to have a second home outside the city. Nonetheless, the majority of people would prefer not to use their own cars within the city, and are fond of getting where they need to go with public transportation or bicycles.
Could you have learned the bare minimum about the country under discussion before depicting it as a dystopia?
Your unusual feelings are rather irrelevant in the context under discussion here, Helsinki, where most of society thinks favourably about public transportation.
I understand that for people who live in places that are warm year round, bicycles are a viable method of transportation. Where I live, there is ice and snow on the road for at least 8 months a year.
Helsinki has excellent bike infrastructure where the major thoroughfares are kept free of ice and snow during the winter. Lots and lots of people cycle to where they need to go in the winter, and -28 is a pretty common winter temperature. Further north, where winters are even more severe, I imagine that situation remains the same: Oulu has bike routes just as extensive as Helsinki, and I'm sure they wouldn't have done that if people weren't using them year-round.
Right now society (jobs, business interactions, legal obligations, etc) are generally structured around the common denominator of automobile transit. Your boss expects you to get to work around the basic parameters of what you can do in a car.
American society, maybe. In the Helsinki metropolitan area, the topic of discussion, the usual way to getting to work is the train or metro. Even citydwellers who own a car don't typically use it, it stays in wait for rare outings to one's second house in the country.
I've worked in a fair few sites scattered across Uusimaa (the province in question), and never was there any expectation of using a car. Had I driven to work, my coworkers might have thought be odd; petrol and parking are simply too expensive for doing that on a regular basis.
The Finnish state has already ensured excellent internet connectivity and cultural infrastructure (regional orchestras, good libraries) in rural areas, but it hasn't stopped the migration to the cities. The north of Finland is being depopulated so rapidly that the Finnish state has had to introduce subsidies to encourage people to stay put, but young people are drawn towards Helsinki and other cities in the south of the country. Drinking is a prominent part of Finnish culture, and when you've had a fair few drinks -- you might be so pissed that you can barely stand -- it's a lot easier to get to your home a few kilometres away than to go all the way back into the countryside because you made a temporary visit to the city for an outing. Furthermore, live music is very popular with young people -- a digital reproduction won't cut it when you want to go out with your friends to an arena concert -- and it's hard enough to convince musicians to come to Helsinki, let alone the countryside.
Finns are familiar with "country living" since most Finnish families own a second home in the country. However, while it might be pleasant to stay there for a month in the summer, few would want to stay there all the time. You might like the countryside, but you should respect other people's choices, and to insist that the countryside is universally better when the Finnish trend is so overwhelmingly directed towards moving to the city is rather creepy.
They just get it because their congressman felt he had to get his district something.
Finland doesn't have "congressmen".
Airports are not expensive to set up and maintain... especially small airfields. A dirt runway is perfectly servicable if the airport doesn't see much traffic. And a simple asphalt runway is no big deal either.
Finland has severe winters and de-icing of runways is a major task. A "dirt runway" here would be useless for half of the year.
As to roads, the interstate system was set up mostly for military reasons after WW2.
What does the US interstate system being set up after World War II have to do with Finland?
Have you been holding this rant on your demographics in the US bottled up inside for so long that you have to bring it into this discussion of a whole other country?
What the hell do you need libraries in rural areas for. From what i understand Finland has one of the best fiber infrastructures of all the first world countries.
Because plenty of people like paper books, CDs and DVDs, because rural areas have a predominantly elderly population that are not always comfortable with newfangled technology, and because these libraries tend to double as cultural centres where you've already got to pay staff and keep the lights on even if you transitioned the library holdings to ebooks.
More to the point, you're making it hard for me to just have a car which limits my independence.
As I've pointed out elsewhere here, no one is stopping you from having a car. Lots of Finns will continue to own cars so that they can get out to their second homes in the country on holidays. What is being discouraged here is driving from one's home in the direction of the city center, not in the opposite direction.
. We already have to heavily subsidize and incentivize city dwelling to keep the density this high.
Who is "we"? Your statement is not true for Finland. The Finnish state has to redirect an enormous amount of money from the cities to the less-populated areas, because the countryside does not have a tax base large enough for infrastructure that Finns consider essential, whether physical (rail services and paved roads that keep the country connected even in winter) or cultural (a local chamber orchestra, decent libraries). The depopulation of northern Finland as virtually all the young people head south to the cities has also led to the establishment of state subsidies to encourage people to stay out in Junttila ("Redneckland").
Mostly because they don't smell like other people, or what they ate/drank last night.
You should avoid projecting your own, presumably American public transportation situation on to the rest of the world. Public transportation in Finland is not particularly smelly. Leaving Chicago, where the trains inevitably smell like urine, for Helsinki, I was amazed at how clean the buses, trams and metro are. Finns are big public drinkers, and on a Friday or Saturday night the public transportation is full of drunks, but everything remains remarkably orderly and tidy. That's pretty much true for the whole continent. In Romania, where I now live, things might be a bit run-down because we use second-hand vehicles bought from Western Europe, but they don't smell.
If in the US public vehicles tend to quickly succumb to vandalism, bodily fluids and the smell of people who don't bathe, that's less a reason to disparage the concept of public transportation than to wonder WTF is wrong with US society.
Your view of Helsinki car ownership is rather distorted, you ought to visit the city when you get a chance. Journeys in one's own car within the Helsinki metropolitan area are not some kind of cherished activity; the popularity of driving one's own car has already waned drastically due to the expense of petrol and parking. I imagine that the minibus plan now being developed is for places on the outskirts of Helsinki where population density is low enough that only minibuses run, and waits for them can be long enough that parents who just want to get their kids somewhere might just start the car. Elsewhere, most people, even the well-off, just take the train or metro to get to work or do their shopping.
As for car ownership in general, as long as owning a summer home remains so popular in Finland (most families have a second home, it's not only for the wealthy), people will still feel the need for a car to get themselves and their families out to Nowheremäki. However, as long as those cars are not being used very often, and not adding to congesting of metropolitan areas, where's the problem?
I expect will lock the inhabitants (or at least the non-wealthy ones) into those cities by denying transport outside them and preventing them from traveling to less spoiled areas.
Quality of life in Helsink is very high. It's often rated one of the most livable cities globally. Few would call it "spoiled".
Sometimes Finns want to get out into the peace of the country, but they have summer homes for that which they visit on a temporary basis. Society-wide, it's clear that most people don't want to move their main residence from the country to the city, they want to abandon the countryside for the city. The north of Finland is being depopulated at an alarming rate, with only the elderly remaining in many places, with all the young people heading towards Helsinki (or other cities) because that's where the jobs/nightlife/culture are.
And note that because summer-home ownership is high, there are plenty of public transportation options into the countryside, and many people still own cars to get out there (it is driving within the city that is less popular and more of a hassle). So no one is being stuck anywhere.
In order to transition an economy or government to true socialism, the first step is to remove the concept of private ownership over anything especially the things that allow you to carry out your daily activities and sustain yourself.
Finland isn't aiming to make private vehicle ownership illegal. Lots of people will continue to own private cars, because most Finnish families have a summer home in the country and those are best reached with one's own car.
However, in order to alleviate traffic within the city, the transportation authorities are simply offering an incentive to not use one's car for city-internal trips. With a larger number of people on board, the expense in time and money (parking in much of Helsinki is expensive, as is petrol) goes down. If it were a private corporation organizing this same ridesharing by exploiting economies of scale (and there are lots of app-based service to do so), would you be so quick to call that socialism too?
Some of it. And most of that had it roots in Greece, since they had access to those writings after Rome fell;
No, Arabic/Indian numerals did not have "roots" in Greece. The classical Greek system of representing numbers was to use letters of the Greek alphabet (sometimes with what looks like a prime symbol following it) that were assigned numerical values. The system was rather clunky, and the adoption of modern numerals from the Near East during the Medieval era was a huge step forward.
Not if you include crime in the walkability score. Consider Marseille or southern Italy. Perhaps you don't know that Kosovo is in Europe. Although the OP left it off, crime is a must consider factor in walkability.
Have you ever actually been to Kosovo? You can safely walk around Prishtina, Pejë or Prizren at night. Albanians have a café culture, so even at fairly late hours there will be plenty of people in the street around you, you aren't all alone and easy pickings for some thug.
What I'd like to hear is an orchestra recording which mics each instrument and gives each of them a channel.
Even when recording for SACD with 5.0 sound, labels try to keep the number of microphones down: more does not necessarily equal better.
In any event, preexisting surround systems were not really designed with classical music in mind. The rear channels are low-resolution, which is a problem for classical works (e.g. Stockhausen's Carré, Langgaard's Music of the Spheres, even some Bach organ recordings), as some performers are placed behind the audience and they really need to be heard in the same high resolution as the ensemble coming from the front channels.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that would be worth the effort. One sees enough cyclists in the winter, and the city has its own methods for judging use, that society generally considers biking a reasonable method of transportation even in winter and appreciate that the major bike routes are kept clear of ice and snow all winter long. Those who don't enjoy cycling, or prefer not to cycle in winter, can take public transportation.
Helsinki bike lanes are separated from car traffic.
As I have pointed out elsewhere here, in the Helsinki metropolitan area people tend to own cars to get themselves and their children out to their second homes in the country (owning a summer home is a popular Finnish tradition), but they wouldn't actually drive the cars into the city: the cost of parking in Helsinki is horrendous, and petrol isn't cheap either.
Never been around Rautatientori late at night? When you have been drinking heavily with friends and want to get back home, but you are too drunk to walk, 1) it might be a shorter distance to the taxi stand than to the night buses, 2) the taxi drops you right at your door, you don't have to stumble home from the bus stop.
But yeah, only after some crazy nightlife have I ever used a taxi, and the same goes for every other young person I know. I have no idea why they would be used during daytime.
Helsingin Sanomat did report a couple of years ago that some people were operating illegal taxis. Maybe they were cheap enough that a group of people would find it preferable to split the cost of one of those than use public transportation to some obscure spot.
If you are having winter bike infrastructure problems whoever you are, I feel bad for you, son, but WTF does that have to do with the Slashdot submission here that talks about declining interest in driving one's own car within the Helsinki metropolitan area?
That's not exclusively a city thing. Rural poverty in the US is extremely high. Much of my extended family back in the middle of nowhere Alabama has been on food stamps. Your welcome to go up to one of said relatives and tell them that thanks to being country-dwellers, they can eat the best steak around, I'm sure they'd love to hear about their supposed wealth of options when they can hardly buy enough food (crap food, the same as any metropolitan area in the US) to feed their families.
Besides the aforementioned backwater that marks the southernmost extent of Appalachia, I have extensively travelled in rural areas across Europe, Africa and Asia. Crime is a concern in many places -- you might not get mugged, but you can get burgled, or your telephone might stop working because someone cut down the copper lines so they could sell the copper inside. And it often can't be blamed on a drifter, but instead it's a member of the community that everyone knows. Many travellers can tell you of having e.g. a camera or notebook stolen in a village, and when the theft is reported, a group of the villagers simply walks you by the houses of the usual suspects to get your stuff back, because they know these people regularly steal.
You would be surprised how far meth addiction has spread in rural areas globally, from the Caucasus to Madagascar, and alcoholism has often been prevalent in some countries, and all that leads to much of the same crime anywhere.
As I've mentioned elsewhere here, it's important to look at the motivations of the population in question and not be so presumptuous as to speak for them. In the Finnish context, young people overwhelmingly want to move to the cities. You can talk all you want about citydwellers being just "a number in a machine", but they won't have any of it. I daresay the same applies for many places in the US. Everyone is not you.
Entirely. Political horsetrading works quite differently in Finland than in your depiction of the US. People living in the country do not just want lower taxes and nothing else. There is wide support for state funding of physical and cultural infrastructure even among rural people; they want a lot of the same things you can find in cities, and building these things with state subsidies has proven to a help against depopulation of rural areas (though it may not be enough to stop all the young people from leaving). There simply isn't the same "red state"/libertarian versus "blue state"/redistributionist divide here that you suggest is true of American society.
The north of Finland gets enough visitors seasonly that there has been a push to build better airports, not least from the local people whose income is heavily boosted by these tourists.
The maximum distance in Finland from north to south is 1,157 km. While it might be possible to commute on a regular basis in California, I doubt that a meaningful proportion of Americans would consider that particularly desirable. While perhaps not embracing public transportation, they'd probably want to be based in a suburb nearer to the commuting destination in questions where they would drive.
Car ownership is high in Finland (the exact figures have been quoted here in another comment), and people like to own their own cars to get out to their summer homes. That's right, the standard of living in Finland is so high that it's entirely normal for Finns to have a second home outside the city. Nonetheless, the majority of people would prefer not to use their own cars within the city, and are fond of getting where they need to go with public transportation or bicycles.
Could you have learned the bare minimum about the country under discussion before depicting it as a dystopia?
Your unusual feelings are rather irrelevant in the context under discussion here, Helsinki, where most of society thinks favourably about public transportation.
Helsinki has excellent bike infrastructure where the major thoroughfares are kept free of ice and snow during the winter. Lots and lots of people cycle to where they need to go in the winter, and -28 is a pretty common winter temperature. Further north, where winters are even more severe, I imagine that situation remains the same: Oulu has bike routes just as extensive as Helsinki, and I'm sure they wouldn't have done that if people weren't using them year-round.
American society, maybe. In the Helsinki metropolitan area, the topic of discussion, the usual way to getting to work is the train or metro. Even citydwellers who own a car don't typically use it, it stays in wait for rare outings to one's second house in the country.
I've worked in a fair few sites scattered across Uusimaa (the province in question), and never was there any expectation of using a car. Had I driven to work, my coworkers might have thought be odd; petrol and parking are simply too expensive for doing that on a regular basis.
The Finnish state has already ensured excellent internet connectivity and cultural infrastructure (regional orchestras, good libraries) in rural areas, but it hasn't stopped the migration to the cities. The north of Finland is being depopulated so rapidly that the Finnish state has had to introduce subsidies to encourage people to stay put, but young people are drawn towards Helsinki and other cities in the south of the country. Drinking is a prominent part of Finnish culture, and when you've had a fair few drinks -- you might be so pissed that you can barely stand -- it's a lot easier to get to your home a few kilometres away than to go all the way back into the countryside because you made a temporary visit to the city for an outing. Furthermore, live music is very popular with young people -- a digital reproduction won't cut it when you want to go out with your friends to an arena concert -- and it's hard enough to convince musicians to come to Helsinki, let alone the countryside.
Finns are familiar with "country living" since most Finnish families own a second home in the country. However, while it might be pleasant to stay there for a month in the summer, few would want to stay there all the time. You might like the countryside, but you should respect other people's choices, and to insist that the countryside is universally better when the Finnish trend is so overwhelmingly directed towards moving to the city is rather creepy.
Finland doesn't have "congressmen".
Finland has severe winters and de-icing of runways is a major task. A "dirt runway" here would be useless for half of the year.
What does the US interstate system being set up after World War II have to do with Finland?
Have you been holding this rant on your demographics in the US bottled up inside for so long that you have to bring it into this discussion of a whole other country?
Because plenty of people like paper books, CDs and DVDs, because rural areas have a predominantly elderly population that are not always comfortable with newfangled technology, and because these libraries tend to double as cultural centres where you've already got to pay staff and keep the lights on even if you transitioned the library holdings to ebooks.
As I've pointed out elsewhere here, no one is stopping you from having a car. Lots of Finns will continue to own cars so that they can get out to their second homes in the country on holidays. What is being discouraged here is driving from one's home in the direction of the city center, not in the opposite direction.
Who is "we"? Your statement is not true for Finland. The Finnish state has to redirect an enormous amount of money from the cities to the less-populated areas, because the countryside does not have a tax base large enough for infrastructure that Finns consider essential, whether physical (rail services and paved roads that keep the country connected even in winter) or cultural (a local chamber orchestra, decent libraries). The depopulation of northern Finland as virtually all the young people head south to the cities has also led to the establishment of state subsidies to encourage people to stay out in Junttila ("Redneckland").
You should avoid projecting your own, presumably American public transportation situation on to the rest of the world. Public transportation in Finland is not particularly smelly. Leaving Chicago, where the trains inevitably smell like urine, for Helsinki, I was amazed at how clean the buses, trams and metro are. Finns are big public drinkers, and on a Friday or Saturday night the public transportation is full of drunks, but everything remains remarkably orderly and tidy. That's pretty much true for the whole continent. In Romania, where I now live, things might be a bit run-down because we use second-hand vehicles bought from Western Europe, but they don't smell.
If in the US public vehicles tend to quickly succumb to vandalism, bodily fluids and the smell of people who don't bathe, that's less a reason to disparage the concept of public transportation than to wonder WTF is wrong with US society.
Your view of Helsinki car ownership is rather distorted, you ought to visit the city when you get a chance. Journeys in one's own car within the Helsinki metropolitan area are not some kind of cherished activity; the popularity of driving one's own car has already waned drastically due to the expense of petrol and parking. I imagine that the minibus plan now being developed is for places on the outskirts of Helsinki where population density is low enough that only minibuses run, and waits for them can be long enough that parents who just want to get their kids somewhere might just start the car. Elsewhere, most people, even the well-off, just take the train or metro to get to work or do their shopping.
As for car ownership in general, as long as owning a summer home remains so popular in Finland (most families have a second home, it's not only for the wealthy), people will still feel the need for a car to get themselves and their families out to Nowheremäki. However, as long as those cars are not being used very often, and not adding to congesting of metropolitan areas, where's the problem?
Sorry, that should have read "most people don't want to move their main residence from the city to the country..."
Quality of life in Helsink is very high. It's often rated one of the most livable cities globally. Few would call it "spoiled".
Sometimes Finns want to get out into the peace of the country, but they have summer homes for that which they visit on a temporary basis. Society-wide, it's clear that most people don't want to move their main residence from the country to the city, they want to abandon the countryside for the city. The north of Finland is being depopulated at an alarming rate, with only the elderly remaining in many places, with all the young people heading towards Helsinki (or other cities) because that's where the jobs/nightlife/culture are.
And note that because summer-home ownership is high, there are plenty of public transportation options into the countryside, and many people still own cars to get out there (it is driving within the city that is less popular and more of a hassle). So no one is being stuck anywhere.
Finland isn't aiming to make private vehicle ownership illegal. Lots of people will continue to own private cars, because most Finnish families have a summer home in the country and those are best reached with one's own car.
However, in order to alleviate traffic within the city, the transportation authorities are simply offering an incentive to not use one's car for city-internal trips. With a larger number of people on board, the expense in time and money (parking in much of Helsinki is expensive, as is petrol) goes down. If it were a private corporation organizing this same ridesharing by exploiting economies of scale (and there are lots of app-based service to do so), would you be so quick to call that socialism too?
This was covered zdnet.com. Apparently the submitter forgot his link.
No, Arabic/Indian numerals did not have "roots" in Greece. The classical Greek system of representing numbers was to use letters of the Greek alphabet (sometimes with what looks like a prime symbol following it) that were assigned numerical values. The system was rather clunky, and the adoption of modern numerals from the Near East during the Medieval era was a huge step forward.
Have you ever actually been to Kosovo? You can safely walk around Prishtina, Pejë or Prizren at night. Albanians have a café culture, so even at fairly late hours there will be plenty of people in the street around you, you aren't all alone and easy pickings for some thug.
Even when recording for SACD with 5.0 sound, labels try to keep the number of microphones down: more does not necessarily equal better.
In any event, preexisting surround systems were not really designed with classical music in mind. The rear channels are low-resolution, which is a problem for classical works (e.g. Stockhausen's Carré, Langgaard's Music of the Spheres, even some Bach organ recordings), as some performers are placed behind the audience and they really need to be heard in the same high resolution as the ensemble coming from the front channels.