[piva00]

Berlin might be considered bike friendly but it's very far from being a good city to bike in, I regularly travel there with my bike and can compare with other European cities: - You can get around but bike paths on sidewalks are very badly maintained - Bike paths across major streets (such as the lanes on Skalitzer Straße, Karl-Marx Straße, etc.) suck balls. - Cars are often stopped on the bike lane as it's not separated from the road like in the Netherlands, and Germany being so car-centric it's allowed to stop over bike lanes. - There are many cobblestones streets to rattle you around, no separate bike lanes on sidewalks for those. - Often, bike lanes on sidewalks are very bumpy due to tree roots' undergrowth. - Bike lanes in general are very poorly separated from other traffic even though the city has quite a lot of space to properly separate pedestrians, bikes and cars.

I do enjoy Berlin to bike as it's extremely flat but the infrastructure is not even close to good. In Stockholm I have some issues with maintenance and some bike lanes in the center but its infrastructure is much more inviting to biking than Berlin. Sharing a 50-60km/h road with cars just separated by a painted line is not great.

[peoplefromibiza]

> In Stockholm I have some issues with maintenance and some bike lanes in the center but its infrastructure is much more inviting to biking than Berlin.

And yet according to ECF (European Cyclists Federation) Stockholm is stuck at 9% usage.

My point is: there are many other factors that drive bike adoption, bike lanes, infrastructures and "they are good for your health" are not enough to convince a majority of the people, apparently.

Or maybe, except Holland, 15%-20% is kinda of a hard limit, very difficult to surpass, and we should start considering that in general no more than that will use a bike and plan infrastructure accordingly.

Sometimes I have the feeling that wishful thinking takes precedence over harsh reality.

The only other country where bike usage is more than 30% that I know of is China, for the opposite reason though, people are too poor to afford to buy a car.

That also explains the boom of dirty cheap micro electric cars in China.

[tremon]

It's not really a hard limit if there are exceptions, though?

The issue is that The Netherlands has been moving in this direction for 50 years. It takes decades of consistent policy to convert a city from car-only to multi-modal, and adoption will only increase once a critical mass has been attained.

For cycling specifically, it's about the value of the network: what I've seen happen in many places is that they construct a bike path, evaluate it a few years, and then conclude that there's not much bike traffic, so it must be that the people simply aren't interested in cycling. That conclusion conveniently ignores the fact that the bike path terminates on a dangerous multi-lane road at both ends.

You simply won't see cycling adoption rise with half-hearted implementations like that. Only when people can safely make a full trip to their destination does the alternative begin to appeal, and only then might you see a generational shift to cycling. So for a city that's completely car-dependent now, you're looking (roughly) at a 25-year policy window to see the full effects.

[kafkaesk]

Why except Holland? Or parts of Denmark and Germany for that matter? It seems that 30-40% of bike share is definitely already happening in the harsh reality [1]. Add in another 30% walking and public transpor and a majority car-free city is definitely possible. And highly desirable for a myriad of reasons (public health, quality of life, sustainability, energy independence) [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share

[piva00]

Stockholm's weather and geography is very different than Berlin, Amsterdam or Copenhagen. Bike infrastructure is also a second-class citizen for now and the public transportation network doesn't allow bikes (except local trains out of rush hour) which doesn't help usage as it's a sprawling city focused in multiple "centers" located around stations.

The ECF data you mention is from 2012, it's 10 years old...

Not sure what you are basing your hard limits on, care to share if it isn't just guesswork?