@hembrow @WhyNotZoidberg I feel like blaming ebikes for that seems like a bit of a stretch, then? Especially as the prices for all bikes are high. One reason I bought my ebike was precisely that - if I was going to buy a cargo bike anyways, I might as well get electric assist.

If car ownership is increasing, that's the issue, and the ebike stuff is likely to be a symptom and not a cause. I do also wonder about public transport cuts, which are themselves something RW governments like to do.

@prestontumber You can feel that way if you want, but e-bikes are at least a large part of what is destroying cycling in my country and I'm not happy about it.

Public transport has little, to nothing at all, to do with any of this. Dutch people don't use public transport very much at all.
About 2% of all journeys in this country are by train, and about another 2% are by bus/tram and subway combined. That's not changed in years.
http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2015/05/how-much-do-dutch-really-cycle-how-is.html
@WhyNotZoidberg

@hembrow @WhyNotZoidberg

...literally nothing you have posted supports that, especially if regular bikes are getting more expensive as well. You can do "old man yells at cloud" all you like, but it's not actually objective.

Disregard public transport all you like - inadequacies in transit are a reason people may choose autonomous modes of transport, and cars are one such mode. You can say "that hasn't changed in years" - has the population? Has the housing market? Has the median age?

@prestontumber Not only have you completely missed the point, but you've also begun an ad-hominum argument. Is that objective in your world ?

You clearly have no idea about how the Dutch bicycle market works.

To maintain our fleet of 23 million bicycles in 2000 with sales of 1.5 m bikes per year in 2000 required that each bicycle would last around 14 years. A bicycle would typically be on its third or fourth owner by the time it was beyond economic serviceable age and end up scrapped.

With sales of proper bicycles plummeting in large part because of people who buy new bikes buying e-bikes instead, and because e-bikes go to landfill after five years because they can't be repaired, we now need each new real bicycle to last 60 years in order to maintain the fleet size. That's impossible.

This effect will take a few years to make itself obvious, but without enough bicycles we won't be able to cycle as much as now.

If you can magically come up with a method whereby a fleet of 23 million bikes can be sustained from annual sales of 350000 new bikes without requiring them to last >60 years on average please let me know.

Please read the blog post. I already explained all of this, *and* also answered many of the typical responses that people come up with:
http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2022/03/the-challenge-of-declining-bicycle.html
@WhyNotZoidberg

@hembrow @WhyNotZoidberg You're the one who started the incivility, not I. You don't get to go on arrogantly about "feelings" when my statements were clearly just a courtesy to avoid pointing out that you were making the fairly elementary logical fallacy of confusing correlation with causation.

I have heard your argument, I just find it perplexing you want to pretend that bicycle sales exist in a vacuum, even in a country as bike-friendly as NL.