I live in Norway now (ex US)
(BTW: One of the world's biggest producers of oil and natural gas (fossile fuels))
It is a country with winters filled with slippery ice at least in the south,
and lots of steep hills up and down up and down.
The ER stats for broken hip bones and other injuries during the winter is high.
The ice is a much bigger factor than cold or snow when evaluating walking or biking
It is possible to bike all year round.
But very few people do it.
and I think for good reason.
I did it for 2 years and I am never doing it again.
Yes you can get studded bike tires and they help but no.
Politicians here keep talking about Norway as if we are Spain.
(With enough global warming from the fossile fuels produced perhaps?)
Let us be good for the environment and walk and bike everywhere.
Like they do in Amsterdam.
Meanwhile public transit in Oslo is good, and well used.
But the buses and trains are stuffed like sardins in a can.
during rush hours.
I wish they would stop spending major money on constructing bike paths
and allocating more and more of the road to bikes, and instead invest heavily
in improving and expanding public transit.
Since it is useful for nearly all of the population all year around.
Since Norway is investing heavily in EV busses, the trains are electric
as are the trams, increasing the number of busses, allowing people to breathe
in rush hour would not have any noticeable impact on emissions.
I would rather see many more lanes for public transit only than the same
space being built for bikes only.
With a population of 700.000, the capital Oslo,
seems at most 3.000 brave bikers during the winter.
(less than 0.5%)
This is easy to calculate since the city have signs
that measure the number of bikers that pass them
24h a day.
There is a Finish town that the newspapers like to
cover in how people ride their bikes there all year
around. Joensuu.
""Meet the bike-loving Finnish city that keeps pedaling even in the snow""
It is blessed by being flat, by having a youngish
population, and a consistently below freezing winter.
(Which means much less of an ice problem).
Even there only 7% ride their bikes in the winter.
Since Oslo will remain outstandingly non flat, and
be covered in ice during good parts of the winter,
I dont see the advantage of spending on bike
infrastructure over public transit.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2021/01/22/meet-the-bike-...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2020/feb/0...