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Comment by lnxg33k1 | Hacker News Reader

Well, already the fact that you drove a bike in London for 2 years and survived is outstanding :D

But maybe the frequency of use is also important for the context, like here you use the bike 2-3 hours a day, every day, weekend included, want to commute? Bike. want to go to the gym? Bike. want to go out with friends? Bike. want to go to visit Utrecht? Bike. When I lived in London (for few years) bike was not used with this frequency and the infrastructure (up to 2018) didn't seem to allow for that kind of use, so maybe if you take your bike once a week, it can survive that long without issues, is that your case? Or your use is compatible with the one in Ams?

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> 2-3 hours a day, every day, weekend included

I mean, I use a regular bike for 30 years in Amsterdam, I really don't think 2-3 hours of daily biking is the norm... There's 5 supermarkets and 5 gyms within a 5minute bike ride, including the ones I go to. My parents are 20min away, friends are typically 5-15min. It's really rare to spend more than an hour on my bike each day, even though I use it daily for just about everything in the city, I think it's an average of 20min a day the past years and about 50m if I wasn't working from home and biked to work (I work from home due to covid, but otherwise take the metro, not a fan of biking in a suit in rain half the year).

You can cut that by at about 30-40% if I had an electric bike, due to the speeds.

Going to Utrecht by bike is not really done, it'd be about two hours at the legally max speed (25km/h), and another 2h back. You'd typically take a train.

So 2-3 hours is really extreme. The Dutch average is just 16 minutes a day, by the way, Amsterdam won't be far off from that.

I've been commuting daily by bike in London for almost a decade. I use my bike to get around on the weekends too. Never had an issue.

Maybe this is because I've never had a job where I've had to leave it locked up on the street for hours on end. However, my bike is kind of crappy looking and I've left it locked up outside pubs and restaurants many times. I've never had an issue finding somewhere to lock it up anywhere in the city - there's always a bike rack, tall lamppost or solid railing near where I'm going.

You have to be confident riding in traffic. But once you accept that you need to be assertive - take the centre of the lane if there's no space to pass, use your positioning to control the traffic behind you, don't go into peoples blind spots etc, it's pretty safe. I think traffic in London is pretty accustomed to cyclists - we're everywhere. It's when you get further out the city into the suburbs that things start getting unpleasant.

I ride my bike like a Dutch person, which is to say I ride it everywhere. The infrastructure is getting better BUT I live in the borough of Waltham Forest which is miles ahead of anywhere else I have seen in the UK. Every main street has a separate bike lane and car driving is made to be deliberately painful. We affectionately call it Walthamsterdam in my house.

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