Originally Posted by
acidfast7
I also think there is an important distinction being missed by many posters in this thread.
That's being a tourist and cycling around and living there and actually commuting with such infrastructure. These are totally different.
You keep saying that. You are wrong. I suppose it makes you feel better...”superior”...which is okay but you are still wrong. I’ve been to many, many, many places that I’ve never been to before and I don’t have to live there for years and years before I know how traffic works.
There are a lot of commenters saying that it's not nirvana and it's too busy. When I first moved to Stockholm, then Copenhagen, I would have agreed. However, after a few weeks. It makes a huge amount of sense. A quick handdrop and I get on/off the cycleways and do all my shopping. It's actually super nice.
What you are really getting wrong is that the commentators aren’t the problem. The commentators are warning people who have never been that those cities aren’t the cycling nirvana that they
think it is.
Coming from commuting in Maine and Texas where it's a barren wasteland for commuting (with the exception of Austin), it's bliss and it makes a huge amount of sense.
What makes Maine and Texas a wasteland of commuting? There are roads there. There might not be protected bikepaths everywhere but I’m not a fan of those kinds of paths...either in the US or Europe. Commuting where there aren’t 30,000 people per day doing it really is the cycling nirvana that people are looking for. Think of it this way: would you rather drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic or drive an open road? European cities with high bicycle commuter counts are much more like the former while that “wasteland of commuting (all of the US in your mind) is the latter.
However, I can appreciate that Midwesterners here stating that it's too hectic in those videos. I think they'd get used to if they gave it a shot in earnest or actually needed it to commute on a day-in/day-out basis. Thus, I can't really hold it against the people in thread without the proper experience.
Nice dig there. Why didn’t you just call us “hayseeds”. Many of us have far more experience than you do. As for “getting used to it”, yes, we could but why? I can “get used” to bumper-to-bumper car traffic as well. It doesn’t mean I would actually
like it.