Absolutely, although it does depend. The Netherlands had and still has today very small cities where residential, commercial, office and other (local school, sports centre, park) areas are close together and easily reachable by foot, bicycle or short distance public transportation (tram, bus, subway). Building cycling infrastructure immediately pays off because you're building transportation lanes that have 10 miles per hour speeds, in cities where citizens mostly make many 1-4 mile trips.
And this is a pretty common European feature really, virtually all our cities are built in the age of transport by foot or horse and are structured much differently, coupled with higher rates of population density in the Europe (vs say the US, or worse, Australia).
That wouldn't work as much in say Australian cities, some of which are known for their terrible urban sprawl. The notion of building transportation lanes that average 10 miles per hour when typical citizens work, shop or go to school say 10 miles or more away from home, doesn't make as much sense. Australia after all has seen the majority of its cities founded in the past 150 years and saw 2/3rd of its population growth in the past 50 years or so in the era of ubiquitous cars.
Now of course existing Dutch cities today are expanded with minimizing any urban sprawl in mind, and cycling is both an instrument to solve issues as well as drive city design to prevent issues. And new cities are entirely built with this in mind. But in terms of reinventing existing cities, it was much easier to do in the Netherlands than it'd be in say the US.
So while I'm Dutch and yes, 40 years ago we were heavily motorised, and had lots of traffic deaths, and had poor cycling infrastructure, and were able to reinvent ourselves, and while yes this can apply to all cities worldwide to a large extent, it's also fair to point out that some cities would really need radical changes to decrease travel distance and create more density. e.g. by creating many small city centres where residents can do everything (most of their shopping, work, entertainment and education within miles of their home). Such radical changes require very significant leadership and an effort that dwarfs what the Dutch had to do to get where they are today.
That having been said I've also visited lots of American cities where cycling infrastructure would seem like a perfect fit. You mentioned Honolulu, I totally agree, it's a no-brainer to build cycling infrastructure there, requiring nothing more than what the Dutch did.
Lastly another difference isn't technical, economical or social or relating to geography or anything like that, but purely political. The Netherlands has always had an automotive industry but it's always been relatively small. Virtually all cars are imported. Of the top 10 brands, 3 are German, 3 are French, 1 American/Swedish/Korean/Japanese. It's pretty well known that the car industry helped dismantle public transportation in the US, such forces haven't been as big a factor in the Netherlands (despite the fact Dutch Royal Shell's oil industry was the largest company by revenue of any company worldwide in 2013, 2nd in 2014 and 3rd in 2015, revenues equivalent to about 85% of the country's GDP (!), but it's pretty much entirely focused outside of the Dutch market anyway).
Although I do recall very recently Shell funding helmets for kids which I thought was pretty funny. In 2010 only 2 kids died in traffic in the Netherlands, and it's pretty well known that cycling is reduced when cyclists are forced to wear helmets here and that cycling's popularity has done a lot for safety. You could take that as a clever anti-cycling measure wrapped in 'safe the kids' rhetoric from Shell, but perhaps that's paranoid.
Fun fact, Dutch support for Israel in the 70s may have helped the cycling culture get a tiny boost. OPEC boycotted oil sales to the Netherlands for its arms sales to Israel who was embroiled in the 73 war with various OPEC members. Dutch PM responded with car-free sundays due to oil scarcity. Of course soon after OPEC expanded the list of countries beyond the Netherlands, we started getting oil from South America and Africa instead and it didn't last very long either (ironically there was even a bit of an oil glut in Dutch harbours because one of the biggest refineries in the world was in Rotterdam so whenever it supplied e.g. France or Germany it could circumvent the boycott), and driving less on sunday led to driving more on saturday, so it wasn't extremely significant but I thought it probably helped a tiny bit :)
I'm really coming around to the idea of car-free Sundays. Even from something like 5-11 am I think a lot of places would really benefit from that.
This Sunday I participated in marathon/half marathon and it was great to see the streets empty except for runners, occasional cyclists taking advantage of the closed streets and lots of pedestrians watching the crowd but also filling the cafes everywhere.
You specifically mentioned Australia - while Melbourne is flat and cool, both Sydney and Brisbane are hilly and hot for half the year. The country also has insane helmet laws, so that even the bike-sharing programs are essentially unused simply because you have to wear a helmet or face a fine. So the bikes sit in the sun and rain and virtually never get used.
Removing the helmet laws for adults would go a long way to higher adoption in the dutch model. But 'safety' laws are hard to ratchet back, given all the effort that went into telling people they couldn't be trusted with their own judgement in the first place.
The interesting part is cities where traffic is bad like Honolulu and Boston are doing massive changes to their infrastructure. It's just the changes are primarily to try to squeeze more cars in. Boston's Big Dig was a non-minor, twenty year, 22 billion dollar project.
Essentially, many places are spending massive amounts of money and looking to do big changes already. It's just these projects almost universally are focused on being an continuation of the existing car-based infrastructure – just with more lanes to fit more cars.
Urban sprawl with existing infrastructure can be a tough one to solve. I hope to see more communities make more innovative choices in the future.
Try telling your logic to all the idiots who want cycling infrastructure here in Australia. You need the right population density for it to be effective
And this is a pretty common European feature really, virtually all our cities are built in the age of transport by foot or horse and are structured much differently, coupled with higher rates of population density in the Europe (vs say the US, or worse, Australia).
That wouldn't work as much in say Australian cities, some of which are known for their terrible urban sprawl. The notion of building transportation lanes that average 10 miles per hour when typical citizens work, shop or go to school say 10 miles or more away from home, doesn't make as much sense. Australia after all has seen the majority of its cities founded in the past 150 years and saw 2/3rd of its population growth in the past 50 years or so in the era of ubiquitous cars.
Now of course existing Dutch cities today are expanded with minimizing any urban sprawl in mind, and cycling is both an instrument to solve issues as well as drive city design to prevent issues. And new cities are entirely built with this in mind. But in terms of reinventing existing cities, it was much easier to do in the Netherlands than it'd be in say the US.
So while I'm Dutch and yes, 40 years ago we were heavily motorised, and had lots of traffic deaths, and had poor cycling infrastructure, and were able to reinvent ourselves, and while yes this can apply to all cities worldwide to a large extent, it's also fair to point out that some cities would really need radical changes to decrease travel distance and create more density. e.g. by creating many small city centres where residents can do everything (most of their shopping, work, entertainment and education within miles of their home). Such radical changes require very significant leadership and an effort that dwarfs what the Dutch had to do to get where they are today.
That having been said I've also visited lots of American cities where cycling infrastructure would seem like a perfect fit. You mentioned Honolulu, I totally agree, it's a no-brainer to build cycling infrastructure there, requiring nothing more than what the Dutch did.
Lastly another difference isn't technical, economical or social or relating to geography or anything like that, but purely political. The Netherlands has always had an automotive industry but it's always been relatively small. Virtually all cars are imported. Of the top 10 brands, 3 are German, 3 are French, 1 American/Swedish/Korean/Japanese. It's pretty well known that the car industry helped dismantle public transportation in the US, such forces haven't been as big a factor in the Netherlands (despite the fact Dutch Royal Shell's oil industry was the largest company by revenue of any company worldwide in 2013, 2nd in 2014 and 3rd in 2015, revenues equivalent to about 85% of the country's GDP (!), but it's pretty much entirely focused outside of the Dutch market anyway).
Although I do recall very recently Shell funding helmets for kids which I thought was pretty funny. In 2010 only 2 kids died in traffic in the Netherlands, and it's pretty well known that cycling is reduced when cyclists are forced to wear helmets here and that cycling's popularity has done a lot for safety. You could take that as a clever anti-cycling measure wrapped in 'safe the kids' rhetoric from Shell, but perhaps that's paranoid.
Fun fact, Dutch support for Israel in the 70s may have helped the cycling culture get a tiny boost. OPEC boycotted oil sales to the Netherlands for its arms sales to Israel who was embroiled in the 73 war with various OPEC members. Dutch PM responded with car-free sundays due to oil scarcity. Of course soon after OPEC expanded the list of countries beyond the Netherlands, we started getting oil from South America and Africa instead and it didn't last very long either (ironically there was even a bit of an oil glut in Dutch harbours because one of the biggest refineries in the world was in Rotterdam so whenever it supplied e.g. France or Germany it could circumvent the boycott), and driving less on sunday led to driving more on saturday, so it wasn't extremely significant but I thought it probably helped a tiny bit :)