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Another factor to remember is snowfall. Where I live, we push snow to the side on roads, but it tends to stick around and accumulate for months at a time. Adding a secondary* infrastructure around bicycles would be costly.

But the big one is that the Netherlands has about half the population of Canada in an area the size of New Brunswick. Obviously they can afford better transport infrastructure than we can.

* Where I live, bike lanes become snow banks circa mid-January.




Where they expect annual snow and have segregated bike lanes you simply plough those, too. I've seen this in Sweden in Uppsala. You bike across a hard pack of snow, just like the cars on the roads. The cars need studded snow tires but the bikes are okay without. In the melt when you can have ice patches then studded tires on your bike are possible.




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