Dutch people cycle an average of 2.6 kilometres each per day. If this pattern was replicated worldwide, the study suggests, annual global carbon emissions would drop by 686 million tonnes.
This mammoth figure exceeds the entire carbon footprint of most countries, including the UK, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Australia.
I’m from the Netherlands and use a bicycle for most of my daily commute. What isn’t mentioned in the article: cycling is also dirt cheap. I bought a new bicycle 8 years ago for 500 euro, needed two times a repair of around 100 euro in total. That’s like 3 months of owning a cheap car
500 Euro?!
Luxury!
When I lived in The Netherlands I would buy my bicycles second hand (well, more likely 3rd or 4th hand) from a bicycle shop at the train station for less than €100.
It would’ve been cheaper to buy from the fishy looking guy near the Red Light District but those source their bicycles in “special” ways (and I don’t mean “drag it up from the canal”).
Granted, this was maybe 2 decades ago, but still, €500 sounds like treating oneself with an extra nice brand new bicycle.
Curiously I kept doing the same thing - buying my bicycles second hand from the bicycle shop - in both London and Berlin.
500 € is the cheaper side of decent new bikes… Inflation is a bitch. Still, you can’t even buy only the tires of many cars for that price. It’s dirt cheap to cycle.
You can buy an €8k bakfiets or long tail that’s a full car replacement and it’s still cheaper than just the price of owning a car for a single year. Even top end bikes are dirt cheap compared to cars.
Yeah, for a brand new bicycle it doesn’t sound too much nowadays, considering that an electric scooter will be more expensive.
As I said I’m used to buying them second hand which even now is quite a bit cheaper - last one I bought was a couple of years ago in Berlin (were I was going to stay 3 months) and if I remember it correctly it was 200 euro.
Aye. Course, we had it rough. We used to have to buy a bike for 75 euro from a scrap yard.
You had access to a scrapyard?!
When I was young we had to pay a farmer 25 euro so that he let us in into his part of the woods were we would make our own bicycles from pieces of twig and some leaves!
Luxury! When I was a lad we would go out to the prison yard and scavenge mismatched bicycle parts from the prison chop shop then build them into a frankenwheelie
But are they good bikes though? I’ve been to Amsterdam twice, once in the 80’s and again a couple of years ago. I love the bicycle culture but the bikes themselves, not so much. I saw a few decent ones but they were few and far between the heavy looking cruisers most were riding. I was a transportational cyclist in California for a few decades and my last bike was $1100 new in 1987. Would be a few thousand today and I can’t picture riding anything lesser. My standard commute was a little over 11 Miles, so 18 km…
my favourite bikes to ride are my shittiest ones (that I keep in good condition)
they’re not actually shitty bikes, they’re just 25 years old and I bought them for next to nothing. they’re nothing like my good bikes, and yet they get ridden the most
I think if you’re having trouble enjoying yourself on a well-maintained cheap bike, the problem is with you and not the bike tbh
Oh, it’s definitely with me. Good bikes are a pleasure to ride and get you there faster, handle well and are generally safer. Clunky cruisers and lesser bikes handle poorly, go slow and shift even worse should they have gears. I still ride the 1987 Bridgestone MB-1: Cro-mo steel, suntour, drop bars. It’s old but nothing shitty about it.
I just don’t get societies that embrace the bicycle but ignore the technology and quality that makes them good.
You don’t NEED a carbon frame multi-thousand dollar bike any more than drivers need Lamborghinis. If that’s what you WANT, that’s fine, and you should buy it. For most people, they want the equivalent of a Honda Civic.
Yeah, I’m riding a massive hundred pound steel behemoth. It’s fun and carries 200 pounds of kitty litter, but I am not moving that thing faster than 7mph uphill under my own power