In Amsterdam, the bikers are more sensible. They wear street clothes, and ride heavy bikes suitable for street clothes and casual use. In Seattle, it has to be a $$$$ racing bike and one has to wear a tour de france spandex outfit. It's the law.
Every ride you remove from a car is a good thing. If people are riding half the year that's better than driving the full year.
I've biked to work for years, always just wore bike knickers and a tshirt. Bike jacket for the rain.
It's as I said. Yes, I'll pass someone once in a while on a bike in Seattle in street clothes, maybe one in twenty. The rest are in logo spandex. The ratio is reversed in Amsterdam.
Nobody wears a helmet in Amsterdam, either. Yes, I know you do :-) Make that one in a hundred. They're riding a sturdy bike often with a basket in front for the groceries. I've never seen a basket on a Seattle bike. After all, you never see a basket on the TdF.
In Amsterdam, and in all of Holland, riding a bike is simply the first mode of transportation we think of. Wanna go to the supermarket? We just go outside and grab our bikes and we're off, no second thoughts about it. This is exactly like how Americans would just grab their keys and get in their car, no second thoughts about it.
I'm guessing the reason you only see people in road bikes and spandex in the US are 1) confirmation bias because you just don't notice the people who ride the city share bikes or the you dismiss people entirely for being hipsters riding fixies and so on, and 2) because riding a bike isn't a mode of transportation in the US.
#2 is the big thing though. Most Americans I have ever met think that bicycles are primarily for exercising or for leisure, but few will say it's a mode of transportation. In Holland bicycling is the primary mode of transportation.
Also we don’t have helmuts because we’ve grown up in a society where people don’t get angry at you for riding your bike. Where people don’t run you off the road for laughs. Where people won’t speed off and disappear if they crash into you. Where people have been trained to pay attention to bicyclists from the moment they can walk outdoors.
A friend recently came to visit me here in Holland. She’s German, so you might assume that she’s used to bicyclists because she’s European or whatever. That assumption would be wrong because I had to grab her by her arms so many times to get her to stop walking because she just was not raised in a culture where you pay attention to bicyclists. Had I not grabbed her arms to stop her all those times she would have stepped out onto a bicycle path and gotten run over. This is the difference between bicycling in Holland and the world, and it makes no sense to compare Seattle and Amsterdam like you are.
Yes, I wear a helmet, I have WAY too much invested in this noggin to not wear one. Also I played football for 9 years, so I'm used to wearing helmets.
No basket but I can get a week of groceries into my full size chrome backpack. I can't couldn't really have a heavy steel bike with a basket, my commute has too much vertical. Old was 6.5 miles, 500ft climb (kirkland to bellevue). New one is 12 miles, 1100ft climb (renton highlands to seattle).
$5k bike for me, I'm big so I retrofitted a craigslist cyclocross aluminum bike for $400 with discs.
I had the good fortune to essentially never get in a car in Seattle — I always took the subway, or the trolley, or walked. Granted I only ever spent a lot of time at Amazon and the Hutch, most everywhere beyond walking distance of south lake union or the subway is a blank spot on the map to me. But it seemed like a pretty casual place to bike commute.
I rode to work most every day when I lived in SF, and in DC, and for a while in LA. Perversely, it was always safest where the traffic was worst (gridlocked) as drivers couldn’t get going fast enough to severely injure me then. Northern Virginia by contrast was terrifying — soccer moms barreling around at 70mph in SUVs while on cell phones. I think it’s a cultural issue — that wouldn’t fly in the Netherlands.
I rode my ancient 10-speed I'd had since a teen, and wore street clothes.
It was before the silly bike madness rolled over the city. I first noticed it when I invited my gf out for a ride, and she had to go buy a special bike outfit first.