I am curious do you guys typically have showers at work ?
One of the reason I don't bike to work is that we don't have showers at work. Most of days in this part of US are hot and humid and I don't feel like sitting at work drenched in sweat.
Microfiber towel and a change of clothes?
I typically wait the 30-45 minutes needed for me to physically cool down in my air conditioned office. Then I towel off and change and I'm good to go.
Probably wouldn't work for everyone, but it works for me.
So what's a great way to remove that bacteria? Showering (with plenty of soap).
So showering before you exercise, toweling off quickly after exercise, and following with deodorant, is a very effective way of eliminating body odor as a result of exercise, as that combination a) removes bacteria on the skin, b) removes the food they feed off of before odor compounds can form, and c) staves off further odor production as a result of additional sweating and bacterial growth.
Try it. You might be surprised.
Additional tips: adjustments to diet can make a huge change in body odor. Thinning or removing body hair is also helpful, as bacteria tend to thrive in those areas.
You could also try using disinfecting wet wipes as part of a post-exercise clean-up routine, in addition to simply toweling off.
It would be unfair to pretend the Netherlands don't have a huge geographic advantage when it comes to bike-friendliness; it's a flat, small country with bad weather (read: neither hot nor humid).
Thats not the case most parts of the world. Summers get really hot even in cold parts of the country here in the US.
There are many factors at play here. Simply installing bike lanes is not enough. Blaming it all on 'auto industry propaganda' is not fair.
And yet places with boiling hot summers can have a high bike mode share. Davis is not exactly pleasant in August.
It's not ALL auto industry propaganda, but a lot of it is. Much of what started out as auto industry propaganda is now deeply engrained cultural bias. People talk about jaywalking, but how many people talk about jaydriving???
For all of human civilization streets were for people, horses, carts, etc. They were used for recreation by children and this was accepted as a normal use. They were gathering places. But the car showed up, started killing everyone in its way, and we decided "well that's that, it's a cars-only zone now and anyone else who wants to use the street is a special case!"
Even here in Boston, I'd expect the same norm to work, though right now the prevailing norm in the bike lanes is set by speed demons like myself.
That's a really good point. Most Midwestern states can get down to -30F (-35C) in winter and above 90F (32C) in the summer. Whenever I hear people say "winter doesn't stop the Dutch from biking", I always think of the climate in Amsterdam. The record low for the city is still above 0F. The average low is still above freezing, even in the dead of winter. The average low for my Midwestern city is close to -10F in January. The average high in summer is 10F warmer.
We have some really extreme temperatures here, you can't discount the effect it has on modes of transportation without built-in climate control.
It doesn't quite get to -35c, but -20 isn't uncommon and it's below freezing for two to three months.
I'm not quite as tough, I ride to work the 9 months when there's no ice on the roads. I might try winter cycling but O don't have the equipment yet (mostly clothes but tyres etc too).
But on a typical not-quite-main street around Boston, winter biking is easy. There's enough traffic to make sure you will be seen, and it's slow enough you won't be killed.
I'm not "blaming it all" on anyone (I'm not sure what "it all" is even supposed to refer to in this context). If anything I'm defending cyclists from being accused of "asking for it".
The only thing I said was that auto industry propaganda is responsible for the blatantly wrong idea that roads exist purely for cars. That's not the same thing as discussing why bikes are or are not popular (although there is overlap).
I'll agree on the 'bit' part, but lets not overdo it.