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Comment by neals | Hacker News Reader

It isn't all fun and games. I had to ride the bike to school for 5 years. Over in the neighbouring city. A 45 minute ride. Alone. Through wind, rain, wind and wind. And rain. That's also part of the culture, because it's safe and ok to send kids, 12 years old, on their own, in the dark over unlit forest roads. Through the wind. Also wind. Saves on bus fare. Which is also typically Dutch.

I don't own a bike any more.

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I would have killed to swap my 60-90min bus journey for your bike ride... and yes I regularly cycled for leisure in the conditions you mentioned. That said I know not everyone is a glutton for that kind of suffering which is why I am hopeful electric bikes will take off in a big way. The electric assist will make the wind (and hills) a non-issue and then you can just cruise anywhere if you dress right. If electric bikes replace cars for most daily journeys the world would be a much more enjoyable place to exist in.

How many transfers does that bus route have? I'd prefer being able to use a smartphone/etc than having to bike all that way.

Zero transfers. It was a school bus. Cycling for 45 minutes is much more enjoyable and rewarding than using a smartphone (which didn't exist at the time)

Subjective I suppose. In high school I had a school bus ride about 40 minutes long every day to a trade school-type place you could elect to go to instead of taking some classes at the high school. I liked using the time for either web browsing, games, sleeping, or homework. I would've surely found cycling less enjoyable.

When I lived in the Netherlands it always seemed like anyone over 30 had a war story of how they used to cycle in such harsh conditions.

I used to cycle 18km to get to work and if I would tell a Dutch person it was always "Oh that's nothing, I used to cycle twice that distance in the snow uphill when I was younger!"

Generally the rain was fine, it was the wind that can make you feel like someone is pushing against your bike that really got to me.

A lot of kids do this in The Netherlands. And as far as I can tell, not a lot have a problem with it. It's part of the culture. And as said by another commenter, most kids ride in groups. I think it's healthy to let kids ride on their own and take responsibility, both physically and mentally.

6 years, 35 minutes ride for me, admittedly mostly over a well-lit separate bike path, and most kids rode in groups of friends there. Only exception was when there was black ice on the road, then I took the bus. Strong side wind could be worse than rain, actually. Every country has its own way of building character. As we say in Dutch: we aren't made of sugar.

Good memories. I always took some extra tools with me when it was freezing, to put my bike 'back together' after falling because of those invisible ice patches. Or maybe some else's bike.

My kids ride their bikes to school. During the winter we install studded tires. And yes, it saves on bus fare. Plus, they can get up a few minutes later in the morning and still be on time at school -- what an incentive.

That all seems perfectly fine to me, to be completely honest.

I would have loved that kind of independence at age 12, but with the fear of traffic, paedophiles, kidnappers and whatever, I wasn't even allowed to walk to the end of the road unsupervised.

That's too bad. When I was 12 (late 1970s, Midwest US) I rode my bike all over the place. No mobile phone either. I'm sure there were as many pedophiles and kidnappers then as now, but I never encountered any. I think the risk of a totally random stranger doing anything is very overblown. And traffic was certainly less aware of bikes. You learned to pay attention to cars.

When I was 12 (late 70s, Australia) I rode my bike all over the place. Rode to and from school, about 25 minutes each way. And through the forest at the edge of town -- we'd disappear for hours there, riding as far as the next town (1 hour downhill :-)

We knew where the dodgy guy hung out near the public toilets in the park, and avoided him (the teacher at school was a different matter).

I think ... people were less alienated from society then. It seems different now.

There's been a few high profile cases of e.g. the van luring kids with puppies or the abduction and rape from the street, but those are edge cases - most cases of pedophiles are from e.g. teachers and family. People you trust and drop your guard around. Not "stranger danger".

When and where was this? Just curious. In the early 90's in the US at age 8-9 I was allowed to ride all around the neighborhood and to school, as long as I was with a friend and not alone. We moved to Europe in 1995 and by then most people had stopped trick-or-treating in the neighborhood due to the TV news scares of razor blades in apples and whatnot, it seemed like the public trust had hit rock bottom.

UK, 1998.

My parents were very unusual, to the point that my friends' parents would lie to them to cover for me, but the practicalities meant I still couldn't do much of what they did. I didn't own a useful bike, didn't have money for the bus etc.

Today, in the US, it's flatly illegal for kids under the age of 12 to be unsupervised in public in many states, including Virginia.

It wasn't like this here when I was growing up.

This reminds me of latvian potato jokes. Perhaps we need dutch wind jokes. Probably the dutch already have this.

Also wind.

Don’t forget about the rain suit which basically gave you the option to arrive at school wet from your own sweat accumulating inside of it instead of the rain.

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