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Comment by Maarten88 | Hacker News Reader

The surprise in this for people from the Netherlands is that this is a surprising statistic for people from other countries. Having lived here all my life, my first thought was: 2/3 seems a bit low to me. I had to read the article to see that it is a bit lower for primary school kids (who can often walk) and actually 90% for secondary school age.

The differences between our infrastructure compared to other countries somehow grew organically inside the Netherlands, not many people here were noticing that this was anything special. Even right wing politicians here don't really oppose bike infrastructure, except for a few lunatics. Now that everyone here "gets" it, it even seems to be accelerating lately. I think we must thank our politicians, civil servants, city planners and a few very effective activists in the previous century for their good work.

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I'm American and the photo of the bikes parked at the school shocked me. I've never seen so many bikes in one place. I'd estimate that bicycle usage in the schools near me at around 1%. When I was in high school (800 students) I was one of 4 people who regularly biked to school.

I'd love to see the US start to organically shift toward the infrastructure you have in the Netherlands.

It is not just the bike lanes, but also the gradual downsizing of roads to smaller roads. If you bike through the cities here, you will never have to drive along a highway for example. At least not within a few feet. (Secondary road). This gets the speed out of traffic, also prevents cars driving into stores at crossroads for example. This doesn't happen very much here, once every few years and it is big news.

you should see these pictures of bike storage at central train stations:

[0] utrecht centraal prior to their major renovation [1] airial picture of the a different bike storage at the same train station

[0] https://tondejager.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/bikes-in-utre... [1] https://www.aerophotostock.com/-/galleries/all/-/medias/8098...

It was not organic, there were fierce fights against the cars in the 70s[0] but unlike in the US where the car aided white people fleeing desegregation, they won. Not so in the US.

I don't think you'll see an organic shift except in some city areas unless there's an intentional change in policy.

[0] https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/how-the-dutch-...

Maybe next they can think about student housing.

Yes, there are still many problems in need of a solution in the Netherlands. I sometimes wonder if they'd get solved better when managed by boring bureaucrats who do thorough analysis and slowly implement consistent long-term policies, without too much politic influence, like our infrastructure.

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