Of course it helps if the city, and country in general, is completely flat. Cities in Norway or Nepal have mother nature against all form of manual locomotion.
I think Norway is more about being comfortable riding in the cold on spiked tires. The hills of Oslo don’t bother you after a couple months of riding them.
I'm in Wisconsin, and I just got the bike with spiked tires out today. Even if there's not a lot of snow, I prefer to sacrifice one bike to road salt than have to maintain my "nice" bike through the winter.
People act like I'm some kind of freak when I arrive at work on my bike in the middle of the winter. But I remind them that there are people who work all day outdoors in places like Alaska and Canada, and 20 minutes on a bike doesn't even come close.
This is how I feel about riding in the rain to work. Like yes you get wet but also are you unable to get wet? If you want, wear rain clothes so you stay dry. And if it’s really pouring just wait half an hour or take the bus if you can’t wait. Just plan to ride every day and be okay with the days when life won’t let you.
I think what happens is when people have a routine outdoor activity, they develop a sense of their local weather, that seems like a mystery if one isn't regularly immersed in it. Also, some subtle adaptations make it easier, such as wearing quick drying clothes or having an emergency change at work.
Now, I do have the luxury of flexible hours at my workplace, but (for instance) my daughter doesn't, and she manages just fine.
On my first visit to Amsterdam, my friend picked me up on a bike at Centraal Station, and I rode to his apartment in the traditional Dutch style sitting on the back rack.
On the way said "only three more mountains to go till we're home"! I asked "WTF?" and he explained that's what they call the bridges over the canals.
This is one of the intersections we went through right after one of the mountains, showing how much the local culture affects the traffic safety and bicycle friendliness as much as the geography:
For me personally charging and keeping e-bike batteries in the apartment is a source of stress. I do keep and charge my drone and FPV plane batteries at home, even DIY ones, but e-bike batteries are much bigger and harder to chuck out of the window in case something goes wrong. I actually got rid of my e-scooter because of that, I just didn’t trust it.
That is a very reasonable concern. My apartment has 8 sprinklers so I park my e-bike right beneath one. You can get a e-bike with a removable battery and store it in a fireproof box
In Copenhagen, the vast majority of people park their bikes on the street using only a cafe lock (frame mounted, immobilizes the rear wheel). The bikes are generally nothing special, old rusty junkers, with one or three gears. E-bikes flatten terrain but also you need an indoor place to store it and they become a magnet for theft. A cheap bike you can ride to the Metro and leave in the elements is versatile in a way e-bikes are not. (I say all this as a massive e-bike fan living in a very hilly US city who recently visited Copenhagen and adored its bike culture.)
We once rented bikes in Copenhagen, they all looked like they were fresh from the junk yard. We had to try several to find ones where at least one of the brakes was still working. It was a horrible experience, and we tried several different places. That was after we found out that the public bikes that were supposed to be available all over the city had all been stolen.
No, but I think it’s because e-bikes have only come into widespread use in the last decade. It takes decades to build high quality infrastructure and those countries are the ones that could make bikes work for the general population before e-bikes were available.
