Cycling in the US from a Dutch perspective

[nuliajuk]

I have a sister in law who is from Rotterdam. You can't get her on a bike for love nor money - she felt she had her fill of it, growing up there. On the other hand, I had a Dutch co-worker, also from Rotterdam, who was an avid cyclist - but he never rode to work and wouldn't even think of riding to the store. For him, cycling was long fast highway rides on the weekend with club-mates. In lycra.
So, they might ride like that in the Netherlands, but few continue to ride like that when they move here. And if they do bring their Gazelles and Omas here, they soon discover how unsuited they are to North American distances, roads, and hills. Especially hills.

[Eden]

Yeah.. I think you'd abandon your Oma or Bakfiets pretty quickly if you moved here.... (Seattle). I tow a trailer around here occasionally and I can tell you that there are hills that it is seriously difficult for even me (rather fit, seasoned rider, bike racer and hill climber) to pull that thing up. You'd have to plan your trips very, very well or confine yourself to a rather small area to avoid coming across places that would likely stymie the type of rider she wants to encourage.

There's a guy down the street from me who takes cool old Schwinns and converts them to geared with internal rear hubs. It takes that to really make them usable around here...

Probably wouldn't be too workable where I grew up (Pittsburgh) either... but where I went to college (Rochester, NY) was dead flat. Probably would be OK in a place like that. Still a bit spread out though..

[BikeDutchess]

I didn't mean to "dump & run" when I started this thread

It is very true that terrain/topography has a huge impact on how "bikable" a community is, as marni articulated very well. The Netherlands is a very densely populated country, and almost all the essentials are "nearby." I still remember when I first moved to the U.S. and brought my Dutch bike - it was pretty fancy (I thought) because it had three speeds! I was shocked at how hard it was to power that thing up the hills around here. And the nearest store was far away! Didn't use that bike much, and didn't bring it with me the second time I moved here (permanently that time).

But on the other hand, you have to start somewhere and there are places in the U.S. where it not only makes sense, but is already in development and in some communities many improvements have already taken place. In my own hilly city, where 12 years ago I had things thrown at me the first day I commuted by bike, it is much more common now to see cycling commuters and noticeable efforts have been made to improve the cycling infrastructure. Room for improvement will always remain. But even where it might make sense due to terrain and population density, there remains a huge obstacle in convincing the majority of taxpayers in our car-oriented society, who still think of cycling as merely recreation, to cough up the kind of money needed for really substantial and wide-spread infrastructure changes. I expect that it will always be an uphill battle.

Here is an interesting (and encouraging) video of the flip side: Americans looking at cycling in the Netherlands. nuliajuk, Rotterdam is mentioned in this video as well. I got the video off this blog page, which has a couple of other fun videos to watch: http://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/20...-by-the-dutch/