That is absolutely great. A third of all short trips in the Netherlands are biked. To this North American, this is mental. What a great stat, that I trust the country to make even more impressive.
Take a trip to Utrecht and you'll feel like you've died and gone to heaven. Or Houten (right next to Utrecht) which is one of the best designed suburbs in the world
25% walking
48% biking
5% public transport
18% car
And the thing is - Utrecht is amazing. I don't think people there are bemoaning their sad existence lacking in freedom or mobility. But part of the success of Utrecht and Houten is taking space away from cars and giving it to bikes (and walking and public transport). I'm struggling to find a source but recently Utrecht determined that a street had too much traffic and was clogged with cars so the solution was that obviously it needed more throughput - so it should be made in to a bike route.
I just wish I hadn't needed to move 8,000 km to have this level of freedom.
That 757 traffic deaths in 2022, while tragic, makes it 4 deaths per 100K people in the Netherlands. For comparison, the NHTSA is estimating the US had 42,795 traffic deaths in 2022, which is 13 deaths per 100k people per year. Even a horrifically bad year in the Netherlands is dwarfed by the rate cars kill people in the US.
That's true, but it's also more than in relatively car-oriented Germany, not to mention definitely car-oriented (in European terms) Ireland.
My point being: it's not the mode of personal transport, but approach to safety that ultimately makes the numbers. The Dutch are unwilling to mandate bike helmets, saying that it would reduce cycling.
This begs the question: what's more important really?
I'm ambivalent. I personally think a helmet saved my life when I was riding in Sacramento but I ride much more slowly here in NL (about 8-11 mph). I wouldn't mind if helmets were normalized but (as noted at wikipedia) that makes using OV-fiets, etc. more of a hassle.
Certainly a helmet is a good idea when riding a faster e-bike.
I never liked helmets and refused to wear them even as a young adult, but now that I have a small child I got myself the dorkiest, safest high-vis bike helmet I could find.
The stories I hear how helmets save lives typically don't involve other vehicles - my personal is actually from skiing, as I borrowed a helmet from a friend who had to end his vacation early and I think that saved me from a severe concussion, because a few hours later I fell face-first on compacted snow and couldn't get myself together for a few minutes afterwards.
> that makes using OV-fiets, etc. more of a hassle.
Perhaps, but are we about road safety or are we about popularizing cycling, traffic deaths be damned?
My manager uses a rental bike to commute and he always has his helmet on when phoning in during a break in his commute because he has three kids and no intention of orphaning them.
I see it as a question of priorities. I'm against car-oriented infrastructure because I believe some people(20% at least) really shouldn't drive and I care about safety. Bicycles don't seem to deliver on that front either - at least until we figure out what's causing this increase and why the heck aren't all these seniors using public transport?
It's worth noting that risk compensation [0], where certain safety measures lead to people taking more serious risks, is a thing. In your skiing accident, is it possible you would have made different decisions in the lead-up that decreased your risk? It's entirely possible the same is true of cycling (I know that I catch myself taking more risks when riding with a helmet than without one).
It's also not at all clear that the spike we're discussing is due to helmetless bicycle riders (notice that deaths for car occupants tick up in similar proportion).
To your prioritization point, there's a lot of evidence that increasing the number of cyclists on the road makes interactions with cars safer for all cyclists (because drivers are habituated to looking for them), so any intervention that decreased the number of cyclists to make them "safer" could have inverse consequences.
