Dutch falling over themselves to complain about untreated bike paths + video

These cold winters always make us Brits feel like Europe's wayward cousin, a badly organised shambles of slushy tailbacks and queues at airports whilst over the channel it's business as usual. It may feel like that, but it's not always the case. Our Dutch friends may get a much better bike infrastructure than we're ever likely to see, but come the big freeze everyone's being careful dishing out the salt, and even over in the enlightened low countries it seems to be bikes that lose out.

DutchNews.nl is reporting that with salt stocks on the verge of running out, there have been dozens of complaints from cyclists who have fallen foul of the icy conditions. In Amsterdam, they report, few cycle lanes have been gritted at all and with more snow on the way and temperatures set to plunge to the minus teens for the Christmas weekend it's getting rather sketchy out there.

How sketchy? Well, take a gander at this video from Lelystad, 40km or so East of Amsterdam. Luckily with a dedicated path there's no motor vehicles to end up under, but even so there's some pretty nasty falls. To be fair there's some pretty funny ones too, and some impressive recoveries; predictably the YouTube comments are split between schadenfreude and disbelief that someone could film for this long without getting the salt pot out of their kitchen and doing something about it...