Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

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Nah, cycling is virtually nonexistent outside of the Netherlands and Denmark. E.g. Finland sees it as a hobby more than a transportation method, Germany doesn't see it at all. A train station just across the border in a town where most people work in the next city over (namely where that train goes) has three loops as their main bike parking and on a regular working day there is an average 0.5 bikes making use of it.

From what I see and hear about being your kids' taxi until they get a driver's license (at 16yo already), I'd assume the difference is pedestrians. I'm nearly 30 and never owned a car, coming from a village and living in a town. Shops are walking distance, I take the bus to work (non-covid times) for environmental reasons, and I think a small majority of people I know do the same (most of my friends/acquaintances are in NL).

Germany is already quite car-centric by my standards, yet they have the most contributors. There's still a lot of pedestrian traffic for the short distances inside of towns and cities, just no medium-distance cycling traffic. So why do they have the most contributors?

Living in Germany, the mentality is different. I have been trying unsuccessfully for three years to find a good definition or concise explanation. There's something that drives use of Threema (paid), PGP and Linux (relatively hard to use), and OpenStreetMap (when sugar daddy Google gives you free maps already). Certainly Google's map here is worse than in their home market, but it's not bad either.

Everyone in Germany will tell you that by the end of secondary education, they're just so done with the whole hitler thing. It's a huge topic throughout the educational system. So I guess morals and things like why privacy matters gets ingrained as well? But that doesn't hold for other European countries, in NL the Linux/Threema/OSM/PGP usage is similar to what I hear on HN.

So a combination of factors, with as biggest common denominator probably pedestrians, plus the mindset in Germany, and maybe a tiny fraction the cyclists (which is literally everyone in NL, by the way, it's not a subgroup but a state of being, or at least I learned that "cyclists" is a laden term in North America from someone who is from there and moved here, but anyway OSM contributorship in NL isn't that huge).

As a german that enjoys all of it (Threema, OSM editing, linux, etc) my points for contributing are:

Pedantry (maybe the wrong term but): Things must be in order. It's really nice to see white areas vanish on the map (I started ten years ago) or just to complete and correct stuff, translate osmand etc. Lots of tourist locations have german editors btw., myself included. "This intersection is wrong!" Lets edit this feature or at least leave a note on the map :-)

Control. Having something that cannot be taken away from me feels great (applies to linux, osm, osmand, f-droid). Take it and use it at my discretion. The ability to contribute.

Privacy: you can have a complete offline experience via osmand if you want to. BigCorps or the state can leave me alone and let me do my stuff, plz

Share: i really enjoy it when my work is useful to others

To contradict your suggestion that Germany does not see any bike usage at all: In a somewhat recent survey (2019) 44% of people claimed that they were using their bicycle as a transportation method more than once a week (up from 38% in 2015). 61% were using their car as a transportation method more than once a week (70% in 2015). There were more sales of bicycles last year than diesel cars.

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.

There is no need to paint such a bleak picture. You might have made life choices that makes bicycling harder, that's pretty common but if you look at the population as a whole it's an extreme view. Commuting 35km one way everyday by bicycle is very possible, when I dropped off the kids at school about 20% of the parent commute with bicycle 15km to the city center all year through winter etc. Which reflects official stats with a 12%-20% modal share in Sweden.

What?

This is far from my experience! People in Bayern are crazy for bikes, they do long rides on the weekend to lakes and pre-Alps: there are a lot of bike shops, and possibilities for any kind of budget.

People go by bike also in these days, while the temperature is way below 0.

Also in Italy there is quite a culture, especially outside the big cities. All the Alps area has amazing tracks, also cross countries

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.

OSM mapping in Britain has been absolutely driven by enthusiast cyclists and walkers. That’s not to say cycling is a mainstream mode of transport on Britain - if only - but there is a very high correlation between OSM mapping and cycling.

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.

You might wanna tell the people of Oulu that Finns don't see cycling as a means of transportation: https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU

You don't maintain extensive bike infrastructure during harsh winters just for a few leisure cyclists. Although I agree that no one comes close to the Dutch, the situation in Germany is not as grim as you describe it. The quality of cycling infrastructure varies from city to city and I guess it's safe to say that infrastructure is the main driving force in getting people on the bike. Münster isn't famous for nothing, right?

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).

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