[Aachen]

Would you say showering is common if 44% of people claimed they do it more than once a week? It's clearly not a regular thing, even for this 44%.

The bike sales stat includes MTBs that aren't commonly used for actually getting somewhere. From my colleagues, I know that two cycle and one basically takes the car to go cycling somewhere and doesn't use their bike any other time.

Heck, I'm Dutch and I don't cycle here. The roads inside this town are very dangerous and I'd feel obnoxious sticking to the rules and bothering the much faster car traffic. Then, cycling between towns usually means driving on what is a highway in the Netherlands (100km/h). The drivers there have murder in their eyes when they have to crawl behind you waiting for a safe moment to pass, or squeeze past at high speeds. And I don't blame them, it'd be the same in NL if you cycle in the car lane on one of our 80 roads.

I'm happy that the stat is going up, it's healthier and more sustainable, but it's just not yet commonplace to cycle to any type of regular destination (work, supermarket, family, friends, city center, pick anything people go to on a regular basis) for any population subgroup except students without driver's licenses, let alone common for the population and set of destinations as a whole.

[pastage]

There is no need to paint such a bleak picture. You might have made life choices that makes bicycling harder, that's pretty common but if you look at the population as a whole it's an extreme view. Commuting 35km one way everyday by bicycle is very possible, when I dropped off the kids at school about 20% of the parent commute with bicycle 15km to the city center all year through winter etc. Which reflects official stats with a 12%-20% modal share in Sweden.