alt Hacker News> Bikes don't stand a chance. They're inequitable. Old people, pregnant people, sick people, and children are all left out. They suck in the rain and the snow. You can't move anything of size or scale.
I would invite you to come and have a look in the Netherlands. It’s very common for octogenarians to cycle. My wife cycled up to the day of the birth of our daughter. Children have more independence because they can cycle to football practice on their own. Bike lanes are great for mobility scooters. It rains here, a lot! And it snows. I picked up our Christmas tree with our cargo bike. When I need to transport anything larger I will book a carshare, which are dotted around our neighbourhood.
And the result? People are happy and healthy.
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European weather is still mild relative to the US. It will be so long as the Gulf Stream doesn't shut down.
Americans are fatter and less healthy.
Americans are busy and work longer and harder. ("Work hard, play hard.")
Americans buy more stuff. Big stuff. Lots of stuff. Frequently. (This is actually a superpower of our consumer economy.)
We have invested hundreds of trillions of dollars in our infrastructure. We might be able to put in a bike land here or there in a majorly dense city or two, but we're not changing all of this.
And more than anything else, America is fucking huge.
I know you Europeans love your model, but it doesn't apply to us. The proponents in the US trying to make it happen misunderstand the fundamental differences.
Just five years ago I would have said you were selling a monorail fantasy or sight to the blind to us. And an unfortunate few in the US were lapping it up as something we could actually do.
Now that self driving is finally arriving, what I'm saying is that our future is even brighter than most countries. We have the road infra to really make this magic.
I can wake up one day, make my coffee, hop into my car with my wife, and through no effort of my own, wind up at a mountain resort. No security checkpoints. No hassle packing. No screaming babies. We can listen to music, read, cuddle. It's our own space taking us wherever we want at complete and total leisure, affordably, comfortably, privately. We can even detour for food or whatever.
It's going to be pure magic. As big a revolution as the internet was.
There are two main reasons for what you describe: very flat terrain in Netherlands and people living in multi-family buildings mostly. Thus people don't ride any substantial distance according to Netherland's own statistics [1] and don't physically exert while doing so.
In the US average commute is 42 miles daily, that's over 67 km, or more than two weeks of riding a Dutch 12-18 y.o. does, or a month of riding of a Dutch 35-50 y.o. I'd like to invite any Dutch, who believes it's the same in the US, to ride 67km daily for 5 days straight, even in their own flat neighborhood. It might enlighten them why cyclists elsewhere wear special clothes too! And this is without hills...
1. https://longreads.cbs.nl/the-netherlands-in-numbers-2022/how...