I’ve been lucky enough in the past few years to have ridden my bike in a bunch of cities all over the world. Looking back, here are lessons about urban cycling I learned from 12 different ones.
This is a channel about urban cycling, bike commuting and the ways we get around our cities, hosted by Tom Babin.
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I’ve been riding Priority bikes for a number of years. I love their low-maintenance, belt-drive design, and they offer good quality at a decent price. They signed on as a sponsor for my YouTube channel several years after I started riding them.
My daily summertime bike is the zippy and fun Priority Eight: https://alnk.to/1XWoxFO
With its fenders, hub dynamo lights and durable Enviolo internal hub gearing system, I’ve happily ridden the Priority Continuum Onyx through many Canadian winters: https://alnk.to/gKS5Jlw
My book Frostbike: The Joy, Pain and Numbness of Winter Cycling: https://amzn.to/42EBzO6
Here is some of the gear I’m currently using. Some of these are affiliate links.
Bike Lights: I love dynamo lights that are built into a bike and powered by your pedalling or the wheel’s movement, but if you need aftermarket lights, Lumos offers a number of great options. Their Firefly lights are simple and bright: https://collabs.shop/3uodbz
Helmet: If I’m riding for sports, such as mountain biking or road bike, I like Lumos helmets because they are comfortable and well-built, and you can also easily attach lights to stay as visible as possible on roads: https://collabs.shop/prkigy
Bell: I love the sound and quality of the Japanese-made Crane Bells: https://www.cranebellusa.com/
Saddle: Yes, they can be pricey, but I’ve joined the ranks of people who think the extra cost for the quality of a Brooks Saddle is worth it, in both durability and comfort: https://www.brooksengland.com/
Panniers: My everyday workhorse pannier is Two Wheel Gear’s Pannier Backpack Convertible 2.0: https://twowheelgear.com/collections/pannier-backpacks?srsltid=AfmBOop6XPOZUjmjf4-Nr1MVwSivDO7igNWhL6Y3PzWOzkqtraTAS-D5
Pedals: I’ve not experienced high-performance pedals adding much extra value to my daily riding experience, but these light-up pedals from Redshift are bright, keep me visible at night and grab lots of attention: https://redshiftsports.com?aff=40
Phone mount: I use Peak Design’s mobile system, including the Universal Bar Mount on my handlebars every day, which I also bring it with me when I travel for bike rentals and bike-share bicycles: https://peak-design.pxf.io/c/5749368/1664050/18669
Buff: Keeps your face, neck and head warm in the winter, and keeps the sun off in the summer: https://peak-design.pxf.io/c/5749368/1664050/18669
Sunglasses: If you’re going to wear sunglasses, why not use a pair that has built-in mirrors so you can see behind you while you ride?: https://collabs.shop/f9hvof
Don’t forget to register your bike with an online database.
My favourite is 529 Garage https://project529.com/garage
Bike Index is also good: https://bikeindex.org/
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#cycling #bike #commuting
0:00 Introduction
0:06 Montreal
2:07 Paris
3:48 New York
5:29 London
6:44 Edmonton
8:05 Seattle
9:41 Oulu
10:35 Ottawa & Washington, DC
12:33 Victoria
14:21 Berlin & Hamburg
15:36 Calgary
47 Comments
Great session, Tom. Those were very helpful in caring forward to other cities. Keep up the good work!
Oulu is the city that, of all cities around, approaches most the completeness of the bike networks in the Netherlands . Many bike paths, usually along a busy arterial road, with a solid 5m berm in between , and many fully separated bike paths in and between residential neighbourhoods. Many underpasses that avoid conflict with parkway traffic. And remarkable that it is in a city with an almost North American sprawl and yet in summer 33% of trips are made by bike
And most brilliant is the snow ploughing regime that enables in a 10% mode in the winter , in a city where in the whole month of decembre is only 8 hours (!) of sunshine !
There is little reason why North american cities could not develop networks like in Oulu .
Interesting to see cycling infrastructure in many different cities Tom. Here in Australia it's getting better but cycling is still mainly seen as a sport & the car is still the main focus of city planning..
Your rails-to-trails section reminded me that this style of infrastructure doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) in the north San Francisco bay area is building a trail along their rail alignment. It's intended to be used as part of a recreational trail as well as a last-mile connection to the train (which has lots of bike spaces). And they're seeing success with +34% more riders in 2025 than in 2024.
Medicine Hat AB is trying to get cycling infrastructure in with heavy pushback from motorists. Any tips I could present at Town Councils to sway mindsets?
I'm a cyclist from Belgrade, Serbia. It's similar to what you said for Germany, cycling is normal but cars are prioritized overall. Any kind of bicycle infrastructure improvements in the city is a real struggle, sometimes even keeping what we already had seems to be hanging on a thin thread.
Also Belgrade has a lot of hills so I often hear people say something like "it's easy for those people in Amsterdam to ride when it's all flat, who's going to cycle to work in Belgrade with so many hills". I live on a hill and have to go up and down that hill every day, personally I don't see an issue as long as you have the will to cycle.
Many North American cities, outside of the city centers, are a crazy mesh of cul-de-sacs (or cul-de-sac-like road layouts)
Building bike trails and separated bike lanes is good.
However, connecting all those cul-de-sacs with nothing but a simple bike/pedestrian-only paths would make a HUGE difference in the bikeabilty in the suburbs.
You would not need to get into car-choked road/streets to travel from one end of your city to another.
You could stay entirely within the quiet and safe secondary streets.
This, however, is easier said than done.
While constructing a 50-meter trail connecting one cul-de-sac with the next is cheap and easy, it's unlikely to get done.
Why?
Because the owners of the 2 houses on both sides of the proposed trail will fight like mad to prevent it.
In their eyes, it ranges from "freedom violation" to "cultural marxism" to "property confiscation.".
In this case, we have "a tragedy of the commons" in reverse. While the entire community/city would benefit from such a layout, the homeowners do not want to make that tiny sacrifice.
Damn, no love for Minneapolis 😥
Good stuff!
This sounds like a great video! I am excited to watch
Also Calgary’s winter this year has been so mild I have been biking in February 😅
i really agree with your views on germany, its like they do the bare minimum in the wrong way; they are ambitious in their wants but when the planning comes, the status quo remains
Like your videos, keep shifting
So cool to see how each of cities handles their cycling style
Cycling really does work.
Ann Arbor Michigan which is a big college town transformed their city streets to be bike friendly. They made one way streets with 2 lanes to one bike lane and green painted paths with separated bike lanes its wonderful
Check out the bike path network in Darwin, Australia, in the tropics. One of the quiet successes in long term, well established, highly integrated and useable bike path networks, with very high levels of community support, across the political spectrum.
I’m surprised no mention of Vancouver. I thought I had seen videos from you here.
I’d say this is a city that could be great, if we started taking bike infrastructure as primary rather than something to satisfy those yappy middle class people.
There are so many things here that are almost great. But I think the thing that reflects current political culture is when the mayor shutdown the redesign of Broadway (currently under major construction with a new Skytrain line) that would have seen pedestrian and bike infrastructure along side car lanes, rather than a 6 lane through fare. His justification was well, we already have a bike route 1 block south, that’s good enough. Said bike route is a shared street with modal filters. I would not take an 8 year old child on that route.
2:12 a person that might nerd out on cities, perchance while citing census data, perchance
Surprisingly, your description of German cities reminds me of Davis, California: it’s officially “bike friendly”*,but this is more about tolerance than it being a bike culture. Essentially K-12 and people university capital destination services have an approximate 30 to 60% cycling model share, but hardly anyone cycles for transportation unless they have no other choices. And it’s a relatively wealthy town with fare-free car parking mostly everywhere. There are many workplace and shopping centers where no bikes are parked. So the overall cycling share is about 10 to 15%.
* Davis has a Bike League “Platinum” rating, but things are slowly getting worse. And I’ve been told that the Bike league won’t reduce ratings, because it will feel bad.
You should come to China, the best place to ride a bike especially a ebike, which has no speed limited very cheap to own. BTW world's 90% bikes are made in China (Taiwan)
Cities make strategic plans and implement them, but a lot of decisions are made based on availability of funding from state, federal and other government entities. It’s a simple fact that the current federal administration has generally increased the challenges for cities all over the country, and at the same time – as one example – California shifted the E bike subsidy over to electric vehicles. Another challenge for cities, especially with a significant number of low income households with mobility challenges.
Federal guidance – often misunderstood as regulation – also tends to keep traffic engineers on a short conceptual lease… and not federal, but national organizations don’t always push the best guidance.
I live in one of the sprawling suburbs of Tucson, Arizona
Like most of the United States, it's a car-centric. Crazy mess.
Riding on the city streets is just taking a huge risk.
Car centric living is baked in to most cities, especially in the United States and it also appears from watching this video Canada as well.
Trying to improve bike infrastructure in this mess is putting a Band-Aid on a machete wound
Maybe the better solution is just a give in and drive a car
Or move to Amsterdam
Normalized but marginalized is fantastic. I lived in Leipzig for a while and I rode my bike most places but despite all the other cyclists I saw, it still felt hostile in most areas. I'm gonna remember that one.
I've lived in Calgary and agree that the network they built was initially for recreation.
And you nailed it for Ottawa. The NCC laid out the longer (and most beautiful) paths, quite some time ago. The city of Ottawa has been augmenting it since. It has taken a long time and then it became quite expensive to shoehorn into existing car-centric, car priority infrastructure later. But give them credit – they are doing it and putting priority to non-auto transport.
I currently live in Halifax NS and it's an abysmal, cycling hell-hole. The local governments say they are all-in for active transportation but their actions are anything but. The effort is pathetic. It's a regressive place. Sad.
Paris was the first place I've been where I was looking for bikes instead of cars when crossing streets! Always happy to see expanded biking of any sort. Like Paris, London is so cool for being transit accessible. All the trains and buses plus available bike rentals. Meanwhile in America, I am overly excited when I find a thin-ish signpost to which I can lock my bike while I visit a shop or restaurant. It only makes sense to keep expanding bike networks.
Hoping you visit tropical and subtropical cities soon. Your insights on urban cycling are wonderful.
It's a bit sad that only one of these cities was "family friendly". When I was a kid, most of the people riding were kids. Helmet laws killed that in my country, but general car-cenricity seems to have achieved the same in other countries. Without kids riding, there is no future for cycling!
Googled [cognitive bias].. and it brought me here.
I'm retired and take a commuter train to Washington DC to bicycle around the city every Wednesday. The bike lane that goes down the MIDDLE of Pennsylvania Ave. is magnificent. DC is covered with other bike lanes and trails, and taking a bike on the Metro rail system is super easy. A truly pleasant place to ride.
The City of Las Vegas is putting bike lanes in all over, and it's wonderfully flat there. I love riding in Sin City. In the summer you have to do it before 10 AM because of the heat.
How would you rate London in 2026 as a cycling city out of the collection mentioned?
All the bikeways you showed are flat; it’s harder to cycle where there’s hills, and I don’t feel that gets enough emphasis. Wind is also a bigger deal than gets much attention
Cycling is getting so good in Seattle the morning and evening rush hour bike traffic is now significant on the dedicated lanes.
A variant question: The 15 mph limit in New York City, is it having a positive or negative affect? Who is praising it and who is condemning it? And is it being enforced?
I've been riding the Burke Gillman for 30yrs.
Sweet ride from Montreal! ❤
If y’all haven’t read “Street Fight” by Janette S-Kahn pick up a copy at your library. It’s a book by the person most responsible for NYC’s bike and people space transformation during the Bloomberg administration.
Great shout out to my Canadian home city, Victoria. There has been an explosion of what you called family biking in the city. I love it here. Biking year around is a way of life for many.
I discovered the bike scene in Boulder, Colorado in 2013. It was my first experience with both bicycle stop lights, wide all access lanes, and a bicycle rush hour at around 4:30pm to 6 pm. Definitely a leader at the time in urban cycle paths and use. Worth a visit.
I've been riding in NYC for decades and it's not nearly as fun as it was when their were no rules. Maybe bike lanes are safer and make the city nicer, but for someone who used to love to just let loose and tear a–ss from A to B, it's lame now.
Another city worth exploring is Honolulu by “Biki” bike. While the city is very car centric for the most part we get around there by Bike Share and city bus. Great for Waikiki and all the way out to Ala Moana. And neighbourhoods in between like Makiki and all the way down to Kahala.
If and when the US gets nomalized, you should visit Orlando and suburbs for great dedicated bike trails that stretch for 30 to 60 kilometres. and interwoven, For example, you can bike from Sanford to Winter Garden a distance of 60 kms by using dedicated bike trails for 80 of the ride. West Orange Trail, Cady Trail, Seminole Trail and Wekiva Trail are some named examples. Also the newly C2C (Coast to Coast Trail) across Florida from Titusville to St. Petersburg. Most busy road have marked bike lanes. I am a Toronto Snowbird.
I am still waiting for a bike channel to cover up the lack of access for bikes in infamous city of Istanbul.
Love it. Although progress is slow, it feels like things are moving in the right direction and public opinion is shifting. I'm from Birmingham UK and although segregated cycle lanes are few and far between, there are concrete plans to build some extensive segregated lanes in the next couple of years.
Yes I totally agree with you. I'm from Hamburg. Cycling to work, to Sport or wherever you will ride is normal but cars are nearly always prioritized. Yes Hamburg builds more and more for bikes but there is always the thought of not disturbing cars. So sad and big cities have much more potential.
But Germany is clinging to its car manufacturer and its infrastructure even when it makes no sense like in big cities.
And public transportation is also affected. Cars first and maybe then bikes and public transportation.
10:44 Nice Thousand helmet….I have the same
It's a long way to go but you should come to Canberra, Australia. There's a huge bike network here which is expanding all the time.
Fin's are just hardcore.