Easy to say in a country famously flat, small, and with a relatively narrow weather window. I welcome any Dutch person to attempt a 15+km commute during a rocky mountain winter. I know of driveways in US/Canada with more vertical than any Dutch commute.
Having cycled on some of those windy days, it was more challenging than most of the hilly cities I've lived in.
Also in the US the max ebike power is 850W! More than enough to carry you up the steepest hills.
You do tend to warm up when riding a bike (pedal assist bikes might take longer). For me the issue is fingers, but with good gloves and a less than 45 minutes ride for me it was be ok. Ice and wind are issues too. But taking it slow and my glasses help a bit. The snow when plowed makes the roads narrower which can be an issue.
I always wondered why there were so many outdoor stores in the City.
There are places with wintry weather that are good for biking! Oulu comes to mind
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-64354089
And as explored in this video, if the weather is too bad to bike safely in, it's probably too bad to drive safely in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFkI3eglT1M
I am sceptical of this assertion. For starters, if you have poor traction in a car you can always slow down, and the risk you face is sliding. In a bike, you need to have a minimum speed to actually bike, otherwise you can't stay upright. And your failure case is no longer sliding, but it's toppling over.
To say nothing of what happens if you throw wind into the mix.
A road bike tire is inflated to 80-120psi which give an aquaplaning speed of about 92mph.
A hybrid tire is inflated to 40-70psi, which gives an aquaplaning speed of about 65mph.
Bikes aren't know for traveling above 60mph, so wet roads don't pose much of a problem for bikes. Their tire pressure is so high compared to their normal speeds, that an unassisted human would really struggle to make a bike aquaplane. Additionally bikes can easily be ridden stably at walking speed. Unless you're riding on ice, going slower simply doesn't pose a problem.
As a result slipping on bike, because you can't cycle slow enough, just isn't a concern. In the only situations where it might be a problem, simply walking would be challenging, and driving would be idiotic.
Wet ice is especially dangerous because it can be pretty much invisible and you can transition directly from normal road surface to essentialy ZERO steering ability (and immediate crash if you initiate a turn or anything). There is pretty much no avoiding occasional crashes from this, the only way is to leave the bike at home when conditions are wet and close to freezing.
My point is that these issues have a bigger impact on the safety of the bike rider than on the car driver.
Your car on the other hand, you lose control of that, and bystanders are in real trouble. Not to mention there’s plenty of incidents everyday of people loosing control of their car because they’re not driving to the condition (presumably because the big metal box makes them feel much safer than they should) and killing themselves and others.
Much less likely that a bike rider is going to ignore the prevailing conditions and injure themselves or others, and if they do, the impact is substantially lower. Adding more mass and speed to an out of control situation never improves the outcomes.
Yes, including sliding over my child who is riding her bike to school, and killing her.
"your failure case is no longer sliding, but it's toppling over."
In which case the primary injury will be to your dignity.
I just came flying off my bike two months ago after hitting some nasty patch of ice.
Broken hand, a good dent in my helmet, many bruises. If it wasn't for the helmet, I might have been taken away in an ambulance.
I've been cycling regularly for 12 years, so this isn't some noob error.
While the fall on the bike hurt me more, I can easily see how much more dangerous the situation in my car was. Blind luck saved me (and the car in front) that day.
I have managed to skid out once and that was with studded tires.
Ya, well one still has to get to work. "Safe driving" is slow but unless the roads are actually closed then most of us still have to get to work.
And it rains, a lot. Which is fine if it’s vertical and you have a rain coat, but Dutch people made windmills, the Netherlands and horizontal rain. No coat can protect you from that.
The weather band is indeed narrow, but half of that band is terrible.
The quick takeaways are that there are cities in Finland that are colder than any Canadian city where 50% of the kids rides bikes to school. Also, a test project in Montreal gave a bike path a dedicated snow removal budget and ridership was up 30% in one year.
The electric cargo bike works well there - the hills make electric an absolute necessity, but once you've done that it works very well.
How do Europeans keep ice off bike lanes? Salt?
Interestingly Oulu bike roads clearing contract states the company doing the snowplowing can do inspections only on bicycles, not cars :)
Seattle infamously tried the hard packed snow strategy about a decade ago, and it turned it into a dangerous (hilly) ice rink
Salt only works until ten below zero. After that it only makes things worse.
When it works the result can be magical if combined with sweeping. Trashes the drivetrain real bad though.
There's a nice big picture how Oulu does it, halfway down the article.
Convenience is relative. Sure, cycling in winter requires a good pair of mittens, and a warm hat, but all in all, it seems that a lot of people prefer it in Oulu over driving.
And the thing here is that it’s not the weather that’s stopping people from cycling. It’s shitty maintenance of the cycling network. Slush and ice, being forced into the same space as cars.
And that’s the newsworthy part - how does Oulu manage to maintain a cycling network in winter where most other cities fail. The answers include things such as priorities, dedication, investment. Oulu dedicates resources to the problem. Most towns don’t because “no one cycles in winter” - which then becomes a self-reinforcing prophecy.
It’s not Oulu, though: any city with students in the North has a lot of bikes, Umeå in Sweden has 40k students almost all on bikes; Vaasa (opposite Umeå, in Finland) also has a lot of bikes. Uppsala, Stockholm, Malmö, Göteborg, Eppo, all have a lot of bikes—and just as many in winter and summer.
The Dutch also like to drive, with 588 cars per 1000 people, higher than Denmark, Ireland, Sweden etc, and more miles per person than France, Spain, Italy, Poland, and 14% higher than the EU average
What kind of cycling clothes will mitigate a 40 C / 70% humidity afternoon in Memphis?
Wet snow being blown into the face? Compared to 20°C inside a car, commuting between two underground garages? That's going to be a hard to sell.
In the summer bike is fun, but from November, where I live it's just masochism.
As the Dutch like to say: there is no such thing as bad cycling weather, only bad cycling clothes.
I would strongly recommond a pair of water/wind proof trousers to go over your regular trousers, if you don't already have some. This has lead to a much more pleasant riding experience, especially in winter. They aren't very practical on a regular bike as they make you uncomfortably hot, but on an e-bike, it's much less of a worry.