Is it just me or is that a depressing fact? The Danes have a rather sweet setup with a good cycling infrastructure, mostly flat terrain and a rather mild temperate climate. It's difficult to reproduce that everywhere.
Still, you can do a lot to make cities more bike friendly. In Silicon Valley it’s my impression that Palo Alto is vastly more bike friendly than all of the neighbor cities.
Reading Hacker News can bring value but corner cases of $solution are not very useful.
I love biking - taking the car would be horrible, especially parking wise, and the public transportation, while good and regular is just not for me.
If it's -15C and sunny it's good, but if it's +15C and raining it's a pain.
In the Netherlands and I think even in Copenhagen, 15C and raining is much more common. In my own experience, raining isn't the biggest pain. I hated the wind the most.
Denmark may be warm compared to say Minnesota but it's further north than a very large chunk of the world's population.
Denmark, The Netherlands, Germany and basically all of Europe didn't always have the cycling infrastructure they have now, it's a relatively recent thing. If there's support, it can be built.
For hills, there are e-bikes. Yes they're more expensive than a regular bicycle but they're still a pretty recent invention. They'll surely get cheaper as they mature.
So in effect people are spending more on ebikes even though they technically become cheaper.
SRC: Recent discussion on golem.de regarding the Aldi ebike & personal experience from friends &family buying much more expensive bikes than necessary for their use.
> When talking about bicycle infrastructure in Canada, the number one excuse I hear is "winter." Many Canadians see the cold and snow as a fundamental barrier to year round cycling. But one city, Oulu in Finland, with winter weather worse than most Canadian cities, shows that winter cycling has nothing to do with the weather, and everything to do with safe cycling infrastructure.