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You're comparing the average Dutch person vs a hypothetical average American to say it's a huge difference, but obviously the "average American" is going to be
by SamBam 7y ago
You're comparing the average Dutch person vs a hypothetical average American to say it's a huge difference, but obviously the "average American" is going to be orders of magnitude lower as the vast majority of Americans don't bicycle regularly.
The article already points out that a much higher proportion of people in the Netherlands bike.
"The Dutch hardly bike at all" refers to an individual cyclist compared with an individual cyclist in the states. To someone who does bicycle regularly, 1.5 miles is, indeed, hardly anything at all. I bike 1.5 miles in each direction to my train each day (so twice that average) and don't consider myself to bike far at all.
I guess at worst you can say it's a click-baity title, as it's appearing to go counter to your expectations of a heavy biking culture (which it is) to say that any one cycling individual doesn't actually bike far, but that shift in perspective is the point of the article.
- wodenokoto 7y agoThat still doesn't give you a 3 mile daily average. You have to discount weekends, holidays and bad weather days. You also cannot compare average biking distance for a whole population with the average biking distance of the biking subset of another population. That is like comparing life expectancy of musical conductors with the life expectancy of the general population. > I guess at worst you can say it's a click-baity title That is being extremely generous.
- jiofih 7y ago> You have to discount weekends, holidays and bad weather days That’s part of it, in the Netherlands you might cycle even more on weekends and holidays to go somewhere, and there is no ‘bad weather’ (it’s already bad most of the time).
- SamBam 7y agoIf the Netherlands were known for being "a country of musicians," because almost every Dutch person played the piano, would that be a fair stereotype of the country? If, on average, they only played the piano once a week, just to play a single scale, would it be fair to have an article whose title was "The Dutch barely play at all"? All three things would be true: 1. The Dutch were famous because most of them played the piano 2. The average Dutch person plays significantly more scales than the average American (who probably play <0.005 scales) 3. The Dutch "barely play at all." Honestly, I don't see why this title is bothering you so much. Most people's image is of the Dutch biking everywhere.