Re:We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes
by WalterBright on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @05:18AM
(#21332756)
The Netherlands bike culture is very different than in Seattle. In the Netherlands people ride cheap beater bikes in street clothes with no helmets. In Seattle people ride expensive racing bikes with Tour de France outfits on and helmets.
Electric bikes come at a large cost premium over that.
If only young/fit people use the infrastructure then the infrastructure is really poor! Note than I'm from the Netherlands and comparing countries is a bit weird. Why not aim for a better infrastructure than the Netherlands?
Anyway, for hilly areas I expect a large share of people to use electric bikes. And way more care for safety. In Netherlands they think about possible safety issues. Meaning, someone on a bicycle going down a huge bridge is probably going fast and doesn't want to stop. You could argue that a bicyclist shouldn't do that, but that's pretty pointless. What's better to engineer the infrastructure in a way that deals with that. Hillier areas would require a lot of thought.