Yeah, see, cycling on tracks in the Alps or going cycling for a weekend is kind of my point: then it's a hobby, like I saw it was in Finland, and not a common mode of transportation. There will be a minority of people that enjoy it in the first place, and of that minority, not everyone does it every day. You'll find very few people actually owning usable bikes for daily city trips (fenders, generator-powered lights, chain and skirt guards, sitting upright... the stuff that makes cycling practical and not a special thing you dress for).

Where I'm from, a third of people say that cycling is their most common mode of transport (according to Wikipedia). That's different from taking your bike out, even if you'd do it every evening, to go ride in the (indeed very beautiful) Alps.

It might seem "huge" to you, but check a nearby bus or train station. If there's not even a few percent of people arriving there by bicycle, which for a typical bus or train station is at least a hundred bikes¹, then practically nobody cycles. Now take a slightly busier-seeming station near where I live today (don't have stats handy), in Germany, and there's zero to one bikes there. Or the main bus station, hundreds or thousands of people travel on my line alone (most buses are filled and they go every 15 minutes), but the number of bikes parked there can be counted on one hand. And this is just across the border, there is Dutch vla, stroopwafels, kroketten, all available in a regular supermarket, sporting Dutch flags (but tasting slightly different, clearly made for this market :p). The influence is clear, but cycling is near zero. We won't have the highest cycling stats I'm sure, but I do think it's representative of Germany.

¹ On the quietest train station I know of in the Netherlands, Diemen (typically I'd see a handful of people on the platform), stats say that in 2019, 3300 people enter or exit there daily, so even if only one in twenty people would get there by bike, that's 165 bikes that should be parked there.

Would you say showering is common if 44% of people claimed they do it more than once a week? It's clearly not a regular thing, even for this 44%.

The bike sales stat includes MTBs that aren't commonly used for actually getting somewhere. From my colleagues, I know that two cycle and one basically takes the car to go cycling somewhere and doesn't use their bike any other time.

Heck, I'm Dutch and I don't cycle here. The roads inside this town are very dangerous and I'd feel obnoxious sticking to the rules and bothering the much faster car traffic. Then, cycling between towns usually means driving on what is a highway in the Netherlands (100km/h). The drivers there have murder in their eyes when they have to crawl behind you waiting for a safe moment to pass, or squeeze past at high speeds. And I don't blame them, it'd be the same in NL if you cycle in the car lane on one of our 80 roads.

I'm happy that the stat is going up, it's healthier and more sustainable, but it's just not yet commonplace to cycle to any type of regular destination (work, supermarket, family, friends, city center, pick anything people go to on a regular basis) for any population subgroup except students without driver's licenses, let alone common for the population and set of destinations as a whole.

But correlation is not causation :)

It's plausible, perhaps you might say probable, but I don't think it unlikely that it's just that kind of person (open data contributor about the outside world) that also chooses to get a zero emissions vehicle and go outside, rather than that the cycling causes them to contribute to OSM.

If it were causal, I'd expect many more contributions in the Netherlands compared to other European countries. Looking up the populations of Germany, France, UK, and Poland and taking yesterday's OSM contributor count stats from neis-one, all outrank NL's contributors per population (todo: someone with more time could do a proper analysis also with more than one day's worth of data - I didn't see a button to get an overview of contributors per week/month/year). It's not only cycling that causes mappers, or at least that's not the driving force.

I watched that video already :). It's really cool, I didn't know it could work that well. My two months in Finland were during the late summer and more southern (relative to Oulu, still far away from the south of Finland). There is a very acceptable infrastructure for cyclists, and in the city there's simply a ton of space (so much green, big buildings, big roads, so much space still available! Amazing place) so you aren't bothering car traffic there either most of the time, but I was told by locals at the hacker space that come winter, most of that bike usage would disappear.

As for my exaggerating about the situation in Germany: perhaps, that's of course a matter of how it comes across and what your reference frame is. I wrote it how it seems to me; to you, it might seem different, and as you say, it's additionally regional. I do think that where I live is probably representative for Germany though (reasons given in a sibling comment, ctrl+f my threads page for stroopwafel).