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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

> They’re not useful for taking kids to school,

Where I live a few hundred thousand kids are taken to school by bike every day. All the way up to age 10 or so it's pretty common to see parents with kids on the back (and sometimes on the front or both) of their bikes.

https://www.24baby.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/mamafiets.j...

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No sane person would do so in any country that doesn't have the bicycle infrastructure we have in the Netherlands. I live in Australia and/or New Zealand a few months out of the year, and I've taken my kids to school there - it's insane to do so on a bike. And this was in places that actually have bike infrastructure and bike activism! Dutch people need to try cycling somewhere else before claiming that bikes are a car replacement somewhere else (they could be everywhere, given the right infrastructure and culture, but they're currently not, that's my point)

My parents must not have been sane! London doesn't have the best bicycle infrastructure (it certainly didn't when I was a kid) but you still see parents riding with their kids. Although nowadays you tend to see parents on kick scooters hurtling down the pavement.

Bike infrastructure in the Netherlands is actually a very modern invention. It used to be a car-centric place like everywhere else.

> No sane person would do so in any country that doesn't have the bicycle infrastructure we have in the Netherlands.

Totally agreed, but bike infrastructure is something that you can actually decide to implement.

I do so with 3 kids on the bike on the road following vehicular cycling principles.

Even in Brussels, with its heavy traffic and unseparated bike lanes, there are quite a few parents taking kids around on bike.

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