500 Euro?!

Luxury!

When I lived in The Netherlands I would buy my bicycles second hand (well, more likely 3rd or 4th hand) from a bicycle shop at the train station for less than €100.

It would've been cheaper to buy from the fishy looking guy near the Red Light District but those source their bicycles in "special" ways (and I don't mean "drag it up from the canal").

Granted, this was maybe 2 decades ago, but still, €500 sounds like treating oneself with an extra nice brand new bicycle.

Curiously I kept doing the same thing - buying my bicycles second hand from the bicycle shop - in both London and Berlin.

But are they good bikes though? I've been to Amsterdam twice, once in the 80's and again a couple of years ago. I love the bicycle culture but the bikes themselves, not so much. I saw a few decent ones but they were few and far between the heavy looking cruisers most were riding. I was a transportational cyclist in California for a few decades and my last bike was $1100 new in 1987. Would be a few thousand today and I can't picture riding anything lesser. My standard commute was a little over 11 Miles, so 18 km...

Why do they shit on them? I love them.

I think this is the biggest thing. Everyone's complaining about weather like you cant just dress for it.

The biggest thing is that the biggest hills you'll get in the netherlands are when youre going over a bridge over the canals. Otherwise the whole place is below sea level.

Still though, we can definitely make it easier and better for bikes around the world.

200m climb per 10k is also very doable.

Yeah I’ll often walk a mile or two (and back) for an errand or appt because it’s more pleasant than the driving/parking. Drivers are always stressed (kinda reasonable when you’re operating a dangerous and expensive machine, but not pleasant).

And that means a lot of indirect reductions in carbon emissions from health-related industries

For context, aviation is also about 2% of emissions. So it really isn't nothing.

But the lower-hanging fruit for me is all of the kerosene used to cook. That's also about 2% of global emissions and it's a good candidate to be fixed with solar panels and wind turbines.

Well in the USA that wouldn't be a problem because people don't walk, either

Strong legs?

redesigning cities to be more bikeable (and less car centric) would have an infinitely better effect on your quality of life than stopping billionaires from using private jets tbh

not that we shouldn’t do both, obviously. we should prevent billionaires from existing in the first place even

Sidenote: a vegan who drives has almost as low of a footprint as an omni who is full time car-free. So why not both? Whatever you can do for where your life is at, the more plants you eat and the less animal products, the more worthwhile you'll find it to be.

Spreading out like that was a deliberate choice on the part of American city planners. It was an unnatural experiment that failed, and which can and should be undone.

https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburban-experiment

But how much "actual travel" do you do? Most of my travel is urban, where cycling tends to be the fastest and most efficient option when you factor in traffic, parking dilemmas, etc.

I'd say outside of 2-3 months in the winter, I make around 80% of trips by e-bike. The car is still there when I need it. I guess what I'm trying to say is it's not an either/or proposition.

I mean... It's not like Dutch people use their bikes to go between cities (maybe sometimes, but they got buses and trains, too). The bikes are for local trips, which make up the vast majority of trips you'll do. It sure helps that cities in Europe are laid out in a less spacious manner, but that's not an unfixable situation for the US.

I have regularly commuted by bicycle when living in The Netherlands, England and Germany and bicycles are really only for traveling inside the city not for going between cities.

Back when I lived in The Netherlands at one point I had a bicycle at home and another parked at the train station on the city where I worked, so I would commute to the train station nearest to were I lived using my home bicycle, leave it there, travel by train to a different city, pick up the bicycle I had there from the train station and use it to do the last leg to get to work. At the end of the day I would do the reverse.

Even having a bicycle to cover just 1 or 2 km is quite a time saver (easily turning a leg of a journey that takes 15m walking into one that takes 5m).

That said, I could do it like that because in The Netherlands there are proper parking places for bicycles at all train stations plus trains are pretty good.

When living in London (which at the time seriously lacked good conditions for cycling) I just used my bicycle to go from home directly to work, which was maybe 4km, took me around 23 minutes and was actually faster than using the Tube (the subway), whilst in Berlin it was sorta the same length of ride but from where I was living to were I was studying.

Obviously in all those places the bicycle was also useful for things like doing my weekly shopping (just get some bicycle bags).

Mind you, having a bicycle doesn't exclude also having a car, though I never really got a car in Germany (I was there for 3 months only, living and studying in Berlin) whilst in London I actually ended up selling my car because it was just a massive money drain (especially because in the last place I had to pay for a garage) which I barely used since even without a bicycle, public transportation is excellent when living inside in or near the core of the city (so, Zone 1 - 3).

The Netherlands is also one of the flattest countries in the world. We should still all cycle more, but it would require much more effort to cycle 5km in San Francisco or the Himalayas than in the Netherlands.

People are not going to give up their comfort. And that is the problem. It isn't just cars it is rampant consumerism that is a problem and nobody is giving that up.

first off, i would just like to say that i completely understand you and i agree with you. But ironically, if everybody would cycle, the roads would be safer, so there's that as well...

You sell bikes.

They did improve on the bicycle not too long ago. The evolution is called an e-bike.
Of course, then we're back to "but what if the electricity comes from filthy coal plants?" etc.

How about we do both?

Meh. The Netherlands is doing better than we were (all new houses have to have solar panels, for example) but we still get a ton of electricity from gas, and even some from coal still. Most cars are still ICE (internal combustion engine), and efforts to reduce flights to Schiphol (are main airport) keep getting scuttled.

Countries with elevation are greener, because they have hydroelectric power (Sweden, Switzerland). France gets a special mention for being mostly nuclear, which is really good for carbon emissions.

Looking at the year by year emissions at this site is informative:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/NL/all/yearly