| > > 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. |
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.