That famed flatness brings along with it less famed strong winds.

Having cycled on some of those windy days, it was more challenging than most of the hilly cities I've lived in.

Completely agree for a push bike, but with an e-bike it's a different ball game.

Also in the US the max ebike power is 850W! More than enough to carry you up the steepest hills.

Minneapolis is one of the top US cities for cycling mode share. You can bike in snow+ice with proper studded tires. With a fat bike, you'll do better than any car or truck in deep snow.

It's implied, but to be clear: ebikes make it comfortable to ride with 4+ inch tires for absurd distances. An ebike with studded fat tires will make you feel like Legolas in LoTR.

I'm not from Netherlands. What I have learned biking in snow blizzard is that it is good to have gloves and glasses. Everything else is just getting used to things.

It would be easy to say but that's not a common Dutch saying at all. It's a bastardised version of a Swedish/Norwegian saying.

Je bent niet van suiker...

Different meaning. More like "this sucks but you'll live".

I did a fair amount of winter biking in Boston. Good clothes really help. For me wool socks really help.

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.

The trick is to build your towns and cities such that 15km is longer than most people would need to commute by bike, except perhaps as part of a bike->transit mixed-mode commute.

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

> if the weather is too bad to bike safely in, it's probably too bad to drive safely in.

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.

You can calculate the approximate speed a vehicle will start aquaplaning at based the vehicles tire pressure (V = 10.35*sqrt(psi) ) [1]. A car tire is usually inflated to around 30-35 psi, which give an aquaplaning speed of about 61mph.

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.

[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19640000612

While interesting, this is almost completely irrelevant to bikes: The problem is not primarily water but wet ice or fresh snow.

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.

Ok, fine. But the argument above it that somehow these issues affect bikes, but not cars. Last I checked black-ice is just as much of a problem for cars.

That is not my argument at all.

My point is that these issues have a bigger impact on the safety of the bike rider than on the car driver.

And what about everyone else? Going sliding on a bike isn’t great, but it’s unlikely your bikes gonna put it self through the front of a shop and kill someone.

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.

"the risk you face is sliding"

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.

> 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.

I'm sorry to hear that. I hope you heal well. I was referencing the point about going so slow you can't stay upright.

I’ve fallen off my bike in ice. I’ve also skidded in a car on ice.

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 cycle in areas with ice and snow have done so all my life, all I do is lower my speed and my saddle. That means when there is ice I can always use my feets. This is more stable than walking, in wintertime I will stop and help pedestrians over vast swaths of ice.

I have managed to skid out once and that was with studded tires.

>> it's probably too bad to drive safely in.

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.

I don't understand how that relates to what I said?

Right. On a bike.

The worst weather when riding a bike is the wind (trust me: I live in the Arctic circle, we have snow or black ice on the road half the year and it’s routinely -25ºC; bikes handle both fine). The Netherlands has more wind than anywhere on land. It can be literally impossible to bike against the wind without the local training when it’s strong enough. If they can do that, I doubt a mountain pass would scare them.

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.

Luckily there is already a video about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

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.

How many people live in the Rockies though? And how many live in relatively flat cities. You're not wrong I just think that this is akin to saying EVs aren't practical in the US because of Alaskan winters.

How many? Me. Much of my family. The place i used to work. The rockies, and coastal mountains, cover a huge swath of north america.

On a grand scale, sure, but even those places aren't necessarily super hilly. There's a reason towns and cities exist mostly on relatively flat terrain.

I have a close friend who lives in Edinburgh (Scotland) who has an electric cargo bike. Edinburgh is full of very steep roads, lots of them cobbles rather than tarmac. It's also cold and wet in the winter (although nowhere near as snowy as the rockies).

The electric cargo bike works well there - the hills make electric an absolute necessity, but once you've done that it works very well.