It may be 50% in Amsterdam, but I seriously doubt it's anywhere close to that high in the rest of the country. I've ridden extensively around Eindhoven, a mid-s

It may be 50% in Amsterdam, but I seriously doubt it's anywhere close to that high in the rest of the country. I've ridden extensively around Eindhoven, a mid-size city in the middle of the Netherlands, and you spend extremely little time in the street with cars. The other thing that the author glosses over is that pedestrians and bikes don't share space either, and that pedestrians are equally deferential to cyclists. If you walk in the bike lane, you'll get a good shouting at. That's something that shows extremely poorly here in the USA by comparison, after you've grown accustomed to it. Anywhere in the US there's a separate "bike path", it's really a multi-use path for bikers, rollerbladers, walkers (usually two or three abreast), kids on Razor scooters, horseback riding, you name it. Dutch bike paths are for BIKING (Ok, and for 50cc motor scooters).