Dutch Cargo Bicycle

Hi missy, their website www.doubledutchbikes.com

Where did you get yours?, I have been looking for a Bakfiets for a wile but so far all i have been able to find are ones with a $3000 pricetag?

Hi, these bikes are great, i just got myself one imported from a company in the netherlands whom sell and deliver these for around $2000, I use it to go to central park and drop my little pride and joy at the playground!.

There are a few misconceptions here. The photo was taken in England, hence the helmets. You only very rarely see kids wearing helmets on bikes here. The same goes for adults unless they're racing.

The bikes in the picture look more like the ones made by http://www.bakfiets.nl than the fietfabriek model (there are quite a lot of manufacturers in competition for this market). They handle well and are very stable to ride.

Kids do cycle and walk to school. It looks like this: http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=2n_znwWroGM

As for temperate... It was -6 C ( 21 F ) for several days last winter and no-one stopped riding, and it hit 35 C ( 95 F ) in the summer this year, and that just meant that the bikes were ridden to the beach. And hills ? Having ridden in hilly places and here, I can assure you that the mighty headwinds that you get in a flat country are much worse than hills. You don't get to go back down the other side of a headwind. Note also that levels of cycling in Switzerland are significantly higher than the US or UK. Switzerland is anything but flat.

And how much are bikes ridden here ? Well, in this city the average person makes 1.2 cycle journeys per day.

A couple of factors that Fumbata forgot to mention in regard to the popularity of bikes in the Netherlands; the climate is relatively temperate, and the terrain in much of the country is very flat. If I lived in a place where the roads weren't covered in ice three months of the year, didn't have to deal with hilly terrain, and was able to get to work without smelling like a horse in the summer, I'd definitely ride a bike most of the time.

As it is, I can accomplish bike commutes about half the time total, but the weather & terrain in the upper midwest just don't work in your favor. I'm guessing that's also the case in much of the rest of the US, although having an infrastructure built around a biking mindset would certainly help.