> There are places where it's cold, where it rains and snows.
Like Amsterdam and Copenhagen?
> The good thing about the driverless cars is that they solve the parking problems in the cities.
They solve the search for parking by humans. But if you want to get the cars out of the city while they aren't used, you practically double the traffic and emissions.
No, not like Amsterdam. I love Amsterdam, but I'm so tired of it being used as an example of how we should all be on bikes. It has a very temperate climate. The weather in most of the US isn't as mild and cool as Amsterdam.
There are cites in the US with great weather, for example San Diego, Santa Barbara, all of Marine and Sonoma Counties in CA have great weather (sadly it is having wild fire problems right now). I agree that we could be biking in those places more.
The US as a whole has climate all over the place, from polar (N. Alaska) to tropical (S. Florida) to a desert. The coldest it has ever been in the Netherlands is -27 °C, but the continental US has gotten down to -57 °C (Alaska has reached -62 °C). The hottest it has ever been in Amsterdam is +41 °C while the US has reached +57 °C.
It's true that these are crazy extremes and we can't decide on public policy based solely on rare events, but there are big cities all over the US where it is too cold to bike. Consider:
City (population) 38 °C
------------------- -----
Amsterdam (821 K) none
Phoenix (1626 K) 107
Las Vegas (642 K) 70
Riverside (328 K) 24
Dallas (1341 K) 17
Austin (951 K) 16
Sacramento (502 K) 11
Oklahoma City (644 K) 11
San Antonio (1493 K) 8
Salt Lake City (201 K) 5
Houston (2313 K) 4
Kansas City (489 K) 3
Some very hardy people do bike in the cold. See [1], the worlds longest winter ultra-marathon (running, biking or skiing 1000km, the last 500 miles without support!!!) It might be the hardest race in the world. (There are not very many other races where contestants have had to be evacuated by helicopter because they were being stalked by a pack of wolves.)
Minneapolis has some of the highest percentage of Bike Commuters in the US at around 3.5% only falling after Portland at ~6% and San Francisco which is a nudge closer to 4%.
The entire west coast has weather at least as favorable to bike commuting as Amsterdam, yet the percentages of people commuting that way are still far lower than Amsterdam simply because the infrastructure isn't there.
People who think nothing of skiing or snowboarding in winter conditions are convinced that biking is impossible in those same conditions. It makes no sense.
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.
I'm not saying it never gets cold, just that the climate is much warmer than, say, Wisconsin.
I grew up in Southwestern Ontario and we had days were school was cancelled due to cold, not snow. They were worried about frostbite on any exposed skin.
Like Amsterdam and Copenhagen?
> The good thing about the driverless cars is that they solve the parking problems in the cities.
They solve the search for parking by humans. But if you want to get the cars out of the city while they aren't used, you practically double the traffic and emissions.