[rpadovani]

What?

This is far from my experience! People in Bayern are crazy for bikes, they do long rides on the weekend to lakes and pre-Alps: there are a lot of bike shops, and possibilities for any kind of budget.

People go by bike also in these days, while the temperature is way below 0.

Also in Italy there is quite a culture, especially outside the big cities. All the Alps area has amazing tracks, also cross countries

[Aachen]

Yeah, see, cycling on tracks in the Alps or going cycling for a weekend is kind of my point: then it's a hobby, like I saw it was in Finland, and not a common mode of transportation. There will be a minority of people that enjoy it in the first place, and of that minority, not everyone does it every day. You'll find very few people actually owning usable bikes for daily city trips (fenders, generator-powered lights, chain and skirt guards, sitting upright... the stuff that makes cycling practical and not a special thing you dress for).

Where I'm from, a third of people say that cycling is their most common mode of transport (according to Wikipedia). That's different from taking your bike out, even if you'd do it every evening, to go ride in the (indeed very beautiful) Alps.

It might seem "huge" to you, but check a nearby bus or train station. If there's not even a few percent of people arriving there by bicycle, which for a typical bus or train station is at least a hundred bikes¹, then practically nobody cycles. Now take a slightly busier-seeming station near where I live today (don't have stats handy), in Germany, and there's zero to one bikes there. Or the main bus station, hundreds or thousands of people travel on my line alone (most buses are filled and they go every 15 minutes), but the number of bikes parked there can be counted on one hand. And this is just across the border, there is Dutch vla, stroopwafels, kroketten, all available in a regular supermarket, sporting Dutch flags (but tasting slightly different, clearly made for this market :p). The influence is clear, but cycling is near zero. We won't have the highest cycling stats I'm sure, but I do think it's representative of Germany.

¹ On the quietest train station I know of in the Netherlands, Diemen (typically I'd see a handful of people on the platform), stats say that in 2019, 3300 people enter or exit there daily, so even if only one in twenty people would get there by bike, that's 165 bikes that should be parked there.