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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

Copenhagen doesn’t have 40 degrees Celsius heatwaves in the summer nor winter blizzards that make you feel like you’re in Siberia, while places like the US East Coast (and I guess even the Chicago area in the Midwest) have them both.

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Melbourne, Australia has heatwaves exceeding that, and shivers through thoroughly miserable wet winters, and yet we have a large, thriving, and ever-growing corps of recreational, competitive, and commuting cyclists, and that's despite the increasing hostility and declining levels of competence exhibited by local drivers.

The suggestion that cycling is a fair-weather activity is hogwash.

Those aiming to debunk me - and all I said is that public transport should take priority over some dramatic increase in spending as envisioned in this article - seem to read rather too much into the fact that some demographic cycles a lot.

There are huge demographic clusters (particularly late-middle-age to old, middle-aged-to-older women) who, statistically speaking, don't. I'm sure that we're off to the Proof By Anecdote races again about all the spry old folks who cycle everywhere. But in practice weekly cycling rates in places like NSW and VIC for the middle-aged are about 10%, tops, and this declines faster as people get older.

I would hazard a guess that on bad weather days, this skew gets even more extreme i.e. fewer people cycle total, and even fewer proportionally out of the demographics that don't ride much.

I don't know about Melbourne, but the idea that we should splash out Serious Cash on cycling infrastructure in Sydney (vs filling out our shithouse transit network) is just laughable. I'm pro bike lanes and better infrastructure (particularly at the expense of cars), but this 'think big' stuff is really on the nose in terms of equity of access.

Here in Seattle, with a powerful bike lobby, the cyclists come out when it's warm, dry, and daylight. Which is about 30% of the year.

The demographic that bikes are young, fit adults. Can't bike much of anywhere without struggling with hills.

> The demographic that bikes are young, fit adults. Can't bike much of anywhere without struggling with hills.

If only young/fit people use the infrastructure then the infrastructure is really poor! Note than I'm from the Netherlands and comparing countries is a bit weird. Why not aim for a better infrastructure than the Netherlands?

Anyway, for hilly areas I expect a large share of people to use electric bikes. And way more care for safety. In Netherlands they think about possible safety issues. Meaning, someone on a bicycle going down a huge bridge is probably going fast and doesn't want to stop. You could argue that a bicyclist shouldn't do that, but that's pretty pointless. What's better to engineer the infrastructure in a way that deals with that. Hillier areas would require a lot of thought.

The Netherlands bike culture is very different than in Seattle. In the Netherlands people ride cheap beater bikes in street clothes with no helmets. In Seattle people ride expensive racing bikes with Tour de France outfits on and helmets.

Electric bikes come at a large cost premium over that.

The demographics regarding participation are well known to be self-fulfilling negative prophecies. That is, if you don't build the infrastructure, then participation declines (or stays low), and particularly amongst the groups you mentioned.

Low participation from a particular group != low latent demand.

I've ridden in every Australian state capital bar Darwin, and rate Sydney drivers as the most aggressively incompetent of the lot - which, combined with the spectacular hostility of the state government to cycling, is a clear recipe for low participation.

Notwithstanding which, I agree that mass transit infrastructure should be built up to the level where it is an easy choice for every commuter, and not the unhappy choice for those within reach of a station.

If the argument is that it's unbearable to commute by bike in scorching heat, I would argue you could still bike and ask your employer to install showers at your workplace. That's how it's done in the Netherlands, where most (modern-ish) offices have showers next to enclosed bike parking facilities.

San Francisco has the best weather you can think of for biking: never too cold, never too hot, not that much rain.

Yet the bike infrastructure is mostly bike lanes painted on the road and used as additional parking.

When companies are leasing space and skimping on office walls, major plumbing expansions are unlikely. We can't even get more toilets.

But that does not mean that parts os US that have favorable conditions should not improve bike infrastructure. You are comparing one city (88.25 km²) to a country (9.834 million km²)

Copenhagen might not quite have 40C heatwaves, but it certainly has winter blizzards that make you feel like you’re in Siberia.

Not very often and not for very long. Source: lived here 38 years.

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