Oh so the bridges on euro banknotes are not representative of real life, someone built them all on their own just to prove this. Wow what a weird headline that was.
Are footbridges easy to build in Europe? I've done some preliminary research into how a rural town in the USA would install similar small pedestrian bridges. The costs are astronomical and the environmental review seems nigh impossible to satisfy. (The only alternative, of course, is to drive a car as the existing roads/bridges are too unsafe for pedestrians + bikes.)
Footbridges like these, only for cycling and pedestrians, over several meters of non-moving water: Yes. Think less than a week of installation (mainly concrete for the foundation) often the rest is wood, some screws and € 100k max all-in. Replacement is a two day activity for two.
Cost can go up quickly though with requirements. Moving bridges are way more expensive, bridges across active waterways obviously so, cars are another dimension. There is a scandal in my town where a nice retro artsy car-bridge is closed more often than openend and the steel is breaking after 5-10 years. Think millions per year.
I fear that pedestrian bridges are pretty far out of the normal where your from? In my (small) Dutch city I think there are about 500? So they’ll replace at least a few per week (going from 20 year lifespan and the age of most of the bridges). They look like exactly those in the pictures (except the ornaments of course ;).
His city council was working on approving a new housing development that required bridges so they incorporated the designs into their plans prior to construction.
My home town had bridge failing(no full collapse) and replacement was delivered fast(~1.5 years to remove old one and install new one). A real bridge with 4 lanes(one way) over a river. And then pedestrian bridge over some railway tracks cost like four times and was designed badly from I heard and ended up costing more...
This looks like a pretty new neighborhood. Those get build as mass projects. The entire neighborhood is tendered to a single contractor (usually a consortium of multiple companies).
It gets a common design, with everything made to fit together. They can look pretty monotonous. Some people call them living-factories ("woonfabrieken"). The advantage is that they are high-quality homes and all kinds of services are designed in: there's a space for super markets and a few other shops, a handful of restaurants, doctors and dentists, primary schools and daycares. Everything you need for living with a young family.
Infrastructure, like bridges, are also designed in. The overall plan has had an environmental review. Probably multiple, and also other kinds of reviews. It can take years before such a plan gets approval, but in the end the municipal council usually agrees.
There were probably already some basic bridges designed at those spots. If the municipal council liked the idea, it wouldn't have taken much to get the design changed to this.
Two things struck me. Firstly it still amazes me I can (virtually) stroll around a town I have never visited and get a real feel for it's space and living (oh that's what Dutch recycling bind look like!)
Secondly and more depressing I think we have to rebuild our urban environments to de-prioritise the car. To hit carbon targets we need less cars, less car journeys etc (it's madness to build EVs 1:1replacemrnt with really high carbon initial inbuilt cost). And yet nice new developments in the nice advanced dutch world are still the same slaves to cars, roads and parking.
I don't know how we fix this - urban planning is going to make or break millions or billions of lives.
Sure, but not every country has the same amount of cars per capita, and especially not the same amount of miles traveled by car vs other means.
If anything, the Netherlands could be an example for most of Europe and the USA on how to lower the amount of car trips. While most people have a car, it’s seeing less use than in most countries I’m familiar with: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
> Two things struck me. Firstly it still amazes me I can (virtually) stroll around a town I have never visited and get a real feel for it's space and living (oh that's what Dutch recycling bind look like!)
You should try Apple’s street view competitor (in Plans). They developed an amazing effect when you move around, with parallax, 3D and all. Very impressive.
Before reading the details I thought: “it must be some kinds of façade they applied” because no ways they will try to (re-)construct the bridges using original techniques.
It’ll be awesome if someone actually build those bridges using original techniques of the times. By small bridges like that, I think it’s actually possible.
The euro bank note design is neat. I like the idea of putting bridges on them and it was clever to use made-up bridges instead of real ones, which would have ties to specific countries.
I appreciate why the bridges are (or were, as the case might be) fictional, but it also saddens me because of the implication that appreciating and respecting the people who came before you and exist around you is somehow offensive and wrong.
I'm American, so it's definitely not my place to discuss this anymore than in passing commentary, but comparing this to things like our US 50 State commemorative quarters makes me wish the world in general was in a better place.
You've gotten it a bit twisted. The implication isn't that appreciating the past is offensive
The idea was to not exclude any one country, nor to make any one country above the others. There were only 7 banknotes when the euro started but 11 countries. If you put actual landmarks on them you'd have inevitably linked the notes to the country of the landmark, you would've made some countries inevitably feel excluded and politically you'd have created the sense that some countries are literally worth more than others
These architectural styles can be found all over the eurozone members (especially the original ones) and making them bridges makes a nice symbol of bridging and bringing countries closer together
> 50 State commemorative quarters
There's no need for that because each country independently mints the 8 coins (0.01, 0.02, 0.05, 0.10, 0.20, 0.50, 1, 2) and have their own designs on the "tail"
Also I'm not sure if all, but many countries make commemorative 2€ coins each year too. But that is not really something to be done with bills, which you don't want to confuse users or machines.
Coins have fixed value side and same metal so it is simpler.
They have different coins. Why couldn't they have different notes? England and Scotland have different notes. I'm sure Germany and France could manage...
I can answer this one. Weird money is bad. The coins don't really matter (England for a long time had pre-decimal coins still in circulation, everybody knew what they "meant" so it didn't matter that they were labelled wrong) but large denominations such as bank notes are likely to attract notice and should not be "weird".
Almost everywhere, almost always (if you're about to write an objection about "Legal tender", go read what that phrase actually means and reconsider) what matters is whether the person accepting the money agrees this is money. So you want as much as possible for everybody to agree that this 50 Euro note is money, while this toy money from a Monopoly set is not money. Weird money interferes with that.
You mention that there are visually distinct Scottish notes. There are. And their face value is exactly identical to English notes, also true. And yet, it is entirely possible that Scottish notes will not be accepted in my city here on England's South coast. Not because of some specific anti-Scottish bigotry but because Scotland is far away and people here have not seen your weird money.
Story time. A few years ago I was at my favourite local Chinese restaurant, buying Duck Ho Fun (somewhere the other side of the city does even bigger noodles but it's too far to walk and I'm lazy) and a guy with a strong Scottish accent comes in. He wants something boring, I don't remember what, and he tries to pay with a Scottish note. The restaurant owner does not recognise this as money. Scotsman argues he "has" to take it [this is wrong] but the restaurant owner won't, it is clear that while they're arguing nobody will be actually working on my order, so, I take the Scotsman's weird money and swap it for my English money, which the restaurant owner accepts as good. Weird money is bad.
> And yet, it is entirely possible that Scottish notes will not be accepted in my city here on England's South coast. Not because of some specific anti-Scottish bigotry…
There’s another reason. Scottish pounds aren’t issued by the central bank, but by commercial banks and aren’t legal tender on England’s south coast (technically not anywhere in the UK, including Scotland)
That's not a coherent reason? The guy operating a corner store isn't taking your money to Threadneedle Street, so why would he care where the notes are issued? His bank knows these notes are the same as the English ones, for them it makes no difference. Legal tender is irrelevant, you note that Scottish notes aren't legal tender in Scotland, but that's because no notes are legal tender in Scotland, it doesn't matter at all.
History lesson. The Bank of England was a commercial bank, centuries ago the English government needed money for a navy to fight the French, and their scheme to raise money to pay for it was to agree that a Bank, the Bank of England, shall be created, a Limited Liability Corporation, owned by shareholders, able exclusively to issue notes against government borrowing. For the next few hundred years these shareholders and their successors did very well off this arrangement, and the Royal Navy was powerful enough even into the 20th century that it made Unternehmen Seelöwe [Sealion, a proposed invasion of England by Axis forces after the fall of France] completely impractical even though Hitler really wanted to.
However, in the intervening centuries England became just one constituent part of Britain, and in 1946 the by now very much British government decided to Nationalise the bank, so today it's no longer a private commercial business.
We also have a similar phenomenon here in the US with our $2 dollar bills.
They're legal tender and most people know about them, but they're very rare to see in circulation and use so there's the occasional shopkeeper or business that refuses them out of either ignorance or abundance of caution.
And yet they still exist, and the system still works fine. The coins are already "weird money". This isnt a problem as they have a common face. Notes could have a common face too.
I think the thinking was that falsifying banknotes would be too easy if there were many different ones. Yes, people could turn over bank notes to check the common side, but that’s annoying.
For coins, that’s less of a problem because they’re worth less and because it’s harder to make lots of money with fake coins (you’d have to make lots of them and, more importantly, find a way to spend them rapidly. Paying an expensive car/watch/smartphone/etc with coins is highly suspicious)
It's about symbols and we've learned that over the long haul real things make poor symbols. This is why I believe we should avoid building statues of people and build only statues of ideas. Big statue of some guy in your town? Owned everywhere you can see when he was alive, he built the mill where everybody worked, he founded the school ... and he was a slaver and notorious racist. Not so great. Big statue of Liberty in your city? No problem, the idea of Liberty is all she brings to the conversation (OK in New York's case also a poem "The New Colossus", but the poem was added, the statue doesn't inherently come with a poem).
The modern, progressive fetish of anything but The Perfect Man(tm) being unacceptable is a case of No True Scotsman, and I feel that it greatly harms properly understanding and appreciating history.
All people are imperfect, whether they are famous or not. If someone achieved something truly remarkable in their life I don't see why we shouldn't appreciate and respect the fact they existed, imperfections included, with symbols such as statues and other imagery.
Not to mention that any imperfections an individual has should be seen and considered with the context of their time. It certainly won't excuse their imperfections (nor is that the intent anyway), but doing so furthers understanding history properly so we can strive to be better today.
This is all tangential, though, since we're talking about imagery of landmarks and cultures. I find it sad that the EU has to rely on not including anyone/anything to avoid stepping on toes. I understand and appreciate why those toes must not be stepped on at any cost, but that doesn't change my opinion that it's all very sad.
Statues aren't history, statues are symbols of aspiration. Liberty and Justice are the most common two ideas we build statues of, but I used to spend a few hours per month at one of London's terminus railway stations, from which coincidentally trains leave for Paris. It has a large metal statue of two humans embracing. "The Lovers" is about why we'd build all this anyway - to bring people together.
And there's a big difference between history and aspiration. Poland's holocaust museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau is about history. Find out about what exactly did happen here, the circumstances in which it happened, and the consequences. Its existence isn't - and hasn't been claimed in some "modern, progressive fetish" to be - unacceptable just because nobody should ever do that again, it's kind of the whole point of the site.
On the other hand a statue of a Confederate General erected in your town square in 1964, the year MLK Jr won the Nobel Peace Prize, isn't there because of "history" it's there to remind black people that your town is actively proud of enslaving their ancestors and given a chance would do it all again.
Offensive and wrong? No, but choosing so few people from so many participating nations (and make no mistake, the EU is a lot looser conglomeration, even today, than the US) would be impossible without at least some hurt feelings. So fictional bridges is what you get, for peace and symbolism.
The Euro coins, on the other hand, have a country specific side. So with eight denominations and (about) 24 issuing countries there are 192 valid different coins. And then each country can issue two commemorative €2 coins per year.
If someone tried to fake euro coins they'd likely end up losing money and they're used much less (particularly across borders) than notes.
Notes need to be designed much more carefully to avoid counterfeits and if the designs differed people would be more easily tricked by a fake one or would assume that notes from another country are fake by default
Coins also don't have transparent elements like notes and aren't supposed to be inspected by using light so it's easier to have a common side and a "do whatever" side
Notes and coins are completely different things from a legal standpoint. Only bank notes are unlimited legal tender issued by the central bank. Coins are more of a practical aid for low value cash transaction and are issued by the governments' mints.
You can pay a ten billion debt in 5€ notes, but the recipient can refuse your payment if you show up with five billion 2€ coins, which is like two thirds of the total circulation and would require several of the largest freight ships commonly used on European rivers to deliver.
You're mixing a few things up. Euro coins are also legal tender, but minting and designing them is a national competence. The ECB decides on the volume though, and there are limits to the designs of the coins. Interestingly, member states have to inform the European Commission of the design, but not the ECB.
Legal tender as a concept is also usually not that useful. It's perfectly legal for a shop to refuse certain coins and bills. Dutch shops commonly refuse 1 and 2 cents coins (rounding the amount to 5 cents for cash payments), as well as large denominations out of safety concerns. 100€, 200€ and 500€ are very rare as a consequence.
Stam got a letter of approval for his project from the European Central Bank and he even cinched the support of the Spijkenisse city council. They financed his project with 1.3 million dollars which was around a quarter more expensive than what a more simple set of bridges would have cost.
It's implied in this article (in Dutch) that the municipality of Spijkenisse funded it. At no more cost than building 'normal' bridges, as they had planned originally
Huh. On the 5 Euro bill, it takes three pillars of the middle layer to go from peak to peak along the bottom layer. Then, it takes four pillars of the top layer to go from peak to peak along the middle layer.
That bridge is really the worst implemented one. The middle layer on the imitation bridge also is filled in between the arches which IMO ruins the entire aqueduct look
I would be interested to know whether the cable-stayed bridge is putting any load on the cables, or if they're just an art object supported by the bridge.
One day I'm going to try making a Firefox extension that uses LLMs to rewrite any of these annoying punchy two sentence headlines that the browser sees to normal
Everyone These Days Thinks Splitting Your Headline In Two Makes You Cool. This One Guy On The Internet Disagrees
somewhat relatedly, those buildings in Vienna are coloured like the euro bank notes (in increasing value from right to left): https://goo.gl/maps/9vAb8XfKeTZVv3wE6
Really? I was just looking a Michelin starred restaurant and their tasting menu was 300 euros. I suppose you could pay with three different bills, but it's nice to be able to just carry one as well as smaller bills. An a flagship phone is a lot more, so if you want to buy it in cash, that's another very normal transaction that would a require a large stack that's not able to fit in a wallet.
It's soon to be illegal in most of Europe anyway. Cash payments are capped nearly everywhere nowadays with varying limits (sometimes you can do it but have to fill in a declaration above a certain amount) and there is a draft regulation in the EU which would cap them to 7000€ everywhere if the sender can't be identified.
Seems insurance of the 500 euro note has already ended as it’s mostly used for crime. Kinda hard to imagine people using it anyway; in the U.S. you’re treated like a criminal if you pull out a $100 in shops.
You have a typo, you probably meant issuance, and yes, it was a bit awkward to use because from a point on they needed to photocopy your ID to accept the bill.
I was told a few years back that it was commonly used to pay rent in cash. I certainly had a friend who assumed that second option from the bottom would give him the right amount of money on a cash machine and was very surprised by just how much he took out.
