Why Dutch Bikes are Better (and why you should want one)
So, after a decade and a half of transportation riding in a metropolitan US city, I can definitively say: <i>no.</i> Big brain dump, incoming.<p>There a lot of elements of Dutch style bikes that are great. He&#x27;s completely right: enclosed chains, skirt guards, racks, generator lights, swept handlebars, internal-geared hubs.) If you&#x27;re interested in regular transportation by bicycle, you absolutely should try to find as many of those things as possible (or, more likely, try to find a bike with a frame that will accommodate as many of those as possible.) <i>But do not buy a Dutch-style bike if you live in the US.</i><p>Most of the things you want can be found in the (thankfully) ever-growing &quot;transportation bike&quot; category though you&#x27;ll have to look a bit harder. There are several brands that make nice transpo bikes, but I think some of the most consistently good transportation bikes are made by Breezer. The big boys like Specialized and Trek do generally try to force you into a &quot;hybrid&quot; bike if you want something for &quot;transportation.&quot; About the biggest change they make is (hopefully) making sure there are enough mounting holes on the frame for mounting both a rack and fenders, and doing so with a fair amount of flexibility (ie multiple options for doing so.) Many bikes sold as &quot;touring&quot; bikes can make for good transportation bikes.<p>The reason you don&#x27;t see good all-inclusive transportation bikes in US bike shops is because most shoppers in the US look at bicycles as toys, not transportation or utility items. And they are extremely &quot;price conscious&quot;, which is a polite way of saying &quot;people in the US are cheap as fuck when it comes to bicycles&quot;, so the pricetag on the bike has to be as low as humanly possible. This leads to a lot of other problems, like for example most bike shops in my city struggling to pay workers fair wages and benefits. People don&#x27;t blink at paying $100+&#x2F;hour for service at their car dealership, but they expect to pay more like $5&#x2F;hour at the local bike shop and are incensed if charged more. The exception are shops that do a lot of business with fitness&#x2F;sport&#x2F;competitive riders, but a lot of &quot;regular&quot; folks walk into such a shop and almost immediately turn around and leave, unless they happen to spy the display rack of hybrid bicycles.<p>My roommate thought I was insane spending $1,200 on a transportation bicycle. Ditto for when I then spent another $300 or so installing generator-hub powered lights (I went for fairly high end stuff; you can do it cheaper); I asked him how many bike lights he&#x27;d lost, broken, or destroyed or had stolen and he thought for a moment, how much he&#x27;d spent on batteries, and how many times he&#x27;d found himself biking in the dark because the batteries went dead due to not being charged or replaced recently...and said &quot;okay, fair enough.&quot; He rode home with me one night on the bike path and was so stunned by how bright and well-lit the path in front of us was, he actually swore. Those bike lights have functioned flawlessly for a decade and a half. Similarly, he was incensed that I spent $60 <i>per tire</i> on better tires for said bike. Those tires lasted me a <i>decade</i> of daily urban use in the Northeast US. They also had reflective sidewalls, which significantly increased the bike&#x27;s visibility at night.<p>The author of the video repeats a lot of common myths about bicycles. Upright seating position is &quot;more comfortable&quot;...but only for a fairly limited amount of time (there&#x27;s a reason bikes designed to be ridden for HOURS at a time are not upright; namely, you have less weight on your ass), has nothing to do with power efficiency (in fact many erg bikes used in performance studies and performance tests are...drumroll...upright), and &quot;aero&quot; does not matter at typical urban cycling speeds (ie about 10-15mph.) Don&#x27;t buy a dutch bike if you ever want to ride it more than about half an hour. Your ass will be <i>very</i> unhappy with you.<p>My daily &#x27;transpo&#x27; bike is a road bike style frame with road bike handlebars; they&#x27;re much narrower, and narrow handlebars can be a significant advantage in urban environments, though it&#x27;s kind of a tradeoff, because swept-back bars won&#x27;t get hooked on something...but if your handlebars get hit, you&#x27;re eating shit regardless. I&#x27;m baffled by the author&#x27;s snobbish comments about &quot;costume changes&quot; - I rode &quot;plain clothes&quot; on my road bike every goddamn day, just fine, thank you. Because I bought a bike that was sized appropriately for my body, I don&#x27;t get &quot;hit in the nuts&quot; by the top-tube despite having somewhat short legs, and I&#x27;m able to easily mount and dismount.<p>The reason drop-tube bikes are often called &quot;women&#x27;s bikes&quot; is because women are on average shorter, but yes, the US population also looks at them and thinks they&#x27;re &quot;girly.&quot; It is difficult to go below a certain horizontal top-tube height relative to the wheel size. Terry Bicycles famously made a lot of 650c road bikes for women (700c is the standard road bike wheel size)<p>&quot;Steel&quot; is not stronger than &quot;aluminum&quot;; there are numerous alloys and tubing thicknesses for both metals and both steel and aluminum bikes can range from &quot;don&#x27;t look at it wrong&quot; to &quot;will outlive you.&quot; Aluminum is generally more durable, especially anywhere it regularly rains. Steel frames can be protected with anti-rust treatments like Framesaver (which is likely just cosmolene or other standard automotive anti-rust spray) but that adds to the cost.<p>Anyway. Back to the point at hand.<p>The major problem with &#x27;Dutch bikes&#x27; is that they are <i>massively</i> heavy (Also, coaster brakes. The author loves coaster bikes. Those are fine in country where the legal system, infrastructure, and other road users are all much more accommodating of you. All of which is a significant problem in the US.)<p>First off, if you live anywhere that isn&#x27;t as flat as the Netherlands, that weight is going to mean going up hills is murderous, especially since most Dutch bikes are lacking in gearing. Seriously, the Netherlands is so flat, they used to transport a significant amount of goods on huge trikes <i>with a single gear</i>. Like, look at the size of these things: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notechmagazine.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;06&#x2F;tandem-cargo-tricycle-1940.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notechmagazine.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;06&#x2F;tandem-cargo-tricycle...</a> (granted, some of them were bread bikes, and I know from a cargo-bike-delivery-rider friend that the bread run was always her absolute favorite. &quot;It&#x27;s so LIGHT!&quot;)<p>The next problem with being so heavy is that you can&#x27;t easily bring the bike in at night unless you have a garage (unlikely in most metropolitan areas) or ground-floor apartment. Why do you need to bring bikes in? Because of systemic problems that lead to massive rates of theft.<p>US Police do not take bike theft seriously, despite the fact that just like with theft of a car, theft of one&#x27;s bike could lead to one being unable to afford getting to work or school, just as in theft of a car. Many homeowners and renters insurance policies exclude bicycles, too. Laws around bike theft are generally a joke in most of the US, treated as basic property theft unlike motor vehicles where theft of a motor vehicle, or even the slightest vandalism, is a felony level offense.<p>Few US urban communities have sufficient public bike parking, especially of the secure sort; a lot of it is badly designed (there is an obsession with making it &quot;pretty&quot;, for example), badly located, and badly installed. Many residential buildings have bike parking in them now, but reports of theft from them are extremely commonplace.<p>With the advent of municipal rental systems (aka bike &quot;shares&quot;) many cities have altogether stopped deploying infrastructure for private bike ownership and even removed it in some places. In my neighborhood in Boston, the city silently removed a number of bike posts in the main &#x27;square&#x27; where bike parking was in very high demand, right as they put in a new Hubway bike &quot;share&quot; station. I later found out that business owners complained that the bike share docking station was going to take up SO MUCH parking (about one and a half car spaces.) As a &quot;peace offering&quot;, the city removed several <i>on sidewalk</i> parking posts <i>on the side of a one-way street where vehicles were not even allowed to park.</i><p>We do not have the social safety nets that a country like the Netherlands does; bike theft is rampant in most metropolitan areas because it&#x27;s a fast, low-risk way to make money, especially if you&#x27;re homeless. There are a multitude of ways to steal almost any bike, but one particular way that is quite popular costs about $10-15, is almost completely silent, and will destroy even some fairly seriously built U-Locks.<p>Basically, you cannot leave a bike outside, even on your property, because eventually it will be stolen. And no, having a &quot;crappy&quot; bike &quot;nobody would want to steal&quot; works, because...guess what people want to buy when they move to a new city and are looking for a used bike online?<p>If you made it to the end, thanks for sticking around. Please support legislative protection for PEOPLE on bicycles, and <i>actively</i> support bicycling infrastructure, because there is a VERY loud minority that hyper-aggressively fights this stuff. It&#x27;s incredibly cheap for its benefits and we will not save the planet putting everyone in an electric car, especially in urbanized areas.<p>PS: before you comment in reply, see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyclingfallacies.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyclingfallacies.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a>, especially if you are preparing to regale me with what you saw a person on a bicycle do the other day, something about &quot;paying their fair share of the road tax&quot;, something about &quot;earning the right to the road by following the rules&quot;, or any of the usual tripe.