[dmitriid]

> Bicycles aren’t very useful vehicles compared to cars, which is why a very small share of the US population uses them on the roads in the first place.

It's because the infrastructure for biking is almost non-existent. Thanks to people who keep saying "just ban bycicles because cars!".

Read and watch this: How the Dutch got their cycling infrastructure https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/how-the-dutch-...

[philwelch]

The infrastructure is almost non-existent because the vast majority of Americans don’t use bicycles to travel, not the other way around. There is not any sort of untapped well of demand in the American population to use bicycles to get around, outside of a very small and vocal activist minority who mostly already ride their bicycles in motor traffic already.

The Netherlands is an extremely dense, flat, temperate country, which is ideal for bicycles. The United States is none of those things. Bicycles predate automobiles by decades, but in the US they never even displaced horses or horse-drawn vehicles because even those are more practical than bicycles here.

[dmitriid]

> The infrastructure is almost non-existent because the vast majority of Americans don’t use bicycles to travel, not the other way around.

No. Please read about Netherlands again.

> The Netherlands is an extremely dense, flat, temperate country, which is ideal for bicycles. The United States is none of those things.

Ah yes. All of United States is mountainous land where each person leaves 100 miles from another person.

However, even in places where United States is more like the Netherlands there's almost non-existent bicycle infrastructure (or even pedestrian infrastructure for that matter).

> Bicycles predate automobiles by decades, but in the US

Ah yes. The uniqueness of the United States where bicycles were introduced decades before the car. Unlike any other country where... bicycles were introduced decades before the car.

If you actually made the effort to read the link (and watch the video), you'll see that it's not a unique thing only seen in the US. Let me quote:

"But the way Dutch streets and roads are built today is largely the result of deliberate political decisions in the 1970s to turn away from the car centric policies of the prosperous post war era." The Dutch had the same thing: everything was being converted to roads used exclusievly by motorists, and "the Dutch don't use bicycles for travel". And yet, here we are in 2022.

[philwelch]

> > Bicycles predate automobiles by decades, but in the US

> Ah yes. The uniqueness of the United States where bicycles were introduced decades before the car. Unlike any other country where... bicycles were introduced decades before the car.

You’re quoting me out of context and mocking me for your own misunderstanding of what I said. What I said was, “Bicycles predate automobiles by decades, but in the US they never even displaced horses or horse-drawn vehicles”.

In the English language, we use words known as “conjunctions” to combine two related thoughts into the same sentence. The first thought was, “bicycles predate automobiles by decades”, which is a general statement that was not specific to the US. The second thought was, “bicycles never even displaced horses in the US”. These two statements are joined by the conjunction “but”. Adding the qualifier phrase “in the US” after the conjunction “but” is done to indicate that the qualifier phrase does not apply to the first thought.

> The Dutch had the same thing: everything was being converted to roads used exclusievly by motorists

They didn’t quite have the same thing, which is the point I made earlier. From Wikipedia:

> Cycling became popular in the Netherlands a little later than it did in the United States and Britain, which experienced their bike booms in the 1880s, but by the 1890s the Dutch were already building dedicated paths for cyclists.[8] By 1911, the Dutch owned more bicycles per capita than any other country in Europe.

> The ownership and use of bicycles continued to increase and in 1940 there were around four million bicycles in a population of eight million. Half of these bicycles disappeared during the German occupation, but after the war the use of bicycles quickly returned to normal and continued at a high level until 1960 (annual distance covered by bicycle for each inhabitant: 1500 km). Then, much like it had in other developed nations, the privately owned motor car became more affordable and therefore more commonly in use and bicycles as a result less popular. That is: ownership still remained high, but use fell to around 800 km annually.[9] Even so, the number of Dutch people cycling was very high compared to other European nations.

This did not happen in the US, where private car ownership caught on much earlier, but also where bicycles were never as popular to begin with as they had been in the Netherlands.

[dmitriid]

So, cycling became popular in the Netherlands later. And the Netherlands also was busy building roads for cars only, especially post WWII.

And yet, "US is unique, everything about the US is unique, we are unique, and the wind blows because the trees move".

> Dutch people cycling was very high compared to other European nations.

And yet even other European nations have decent-to-great cycling infrastructure.

[philwelch]

You really need to work on your reading comprehension, or at least put in more of an effort. My central point here isn’t that the US is unique. If anything, it’s the Netherlands that’s unique. But at the very least, they are two very different countries.

One thing the US and Netherlands have in common is that they are both democracies. The Dutch pivoted back to bicycle infrastructure because there was public demand for it. This is not true in the US.