Cathrin Schaer in Berlin

As summer starts and cyclists mount up, it can be painful.

At this time of year, you hear a lot of people in Germany complaining about a mysterious ailment: “Osterknie [Easter knee],” they explain, as they hobble away, several weeks after Easter. Did they eat so much chocolate their knees gave way? Was the Easter-egg hunt particularly brutal?

Actually, it is none of the above. Most locals put their bikes away during winter and they don’t get back in the saddle until spring. But if you spent the winter watching Netflix and eating potato-based treats, your knees might not be quite ready to join in.

And “Easter knee” is a surprisingly common affliction, possibly because 82% of Germans cycle regularly. Getting on a bike and riding in a warm breeze through the graffiti-covered cityscape is one of the joys of summer in Berlin. It’s a peculiarly urban kind of freedom.

In fact, it is so free that when you first arrive here, it can be quite shocking to see how some cyclists behave. With nary a helmet or fluorescent vest in sight, they speed through red lights, cross intersections at will and cruise mindlessly on the wrong side of the road. Seriously, if cyclists behaved like that in New Zealand, they’d all be road kill.

At the same time, a roughand-ready and not particularly robust comparison between the two countries suggests that New Zealand may have about four times as many biking deaths per bike-owning household as Germany. Why? The answer is political, legal and, perhaps most importantly, cultural.

After even a few days biking in Berlin, you figure out who has precedence and who gives way: pedestrians go first, cyclists come second, cars and vans wait. In New Zealand, the culture is different. Cars rule.

In 2017, researchers at the University of Auckland found that cycling is in fact safer than playing rugby or going skiing. But people are scared to ride because car culture dominates. That leads to “greater fearfulness and increased resistance to road changes in favour of bikes”, they argued. “[It] sends a powerful message.”

Not so in Germany, where you’ll often see a furious cyclist gesticulating at a car for some real or imagined slight. The German cycling lobby has been fairly militant since the 1970s, and there are plenty of angry bikers around here not afraid to show their rage. In Auckland, it seems rage is more common among motorists.

Germany also has a presumed-liability law: in an accident involving a cyclist and a vehicle, the driver is presumed to have caused the problem unless he or she can prove otherwise.

It’s not all sweetness and light, though. There are also a few places in Berlin that can raise your cycling anxiety to levels more commonly found in New Zealand. Most Germans are on bikes long before they can drive. But neighbourhoods where you get a lot of people who never rode a bike – for example, Turkish locals here say that in their culture, a bike is a sign of poverty and a car is a status symbol – are also the ones where drivers are more likely to honk, harass you or open car doors without checking whether a cyclist is approaching from behind.

Sometimes car drivers’ criticisms of loose behaviour on two wheels are justified.

But other times, they appear to have no understanding of how much damage a car can do. It’s downright adversarial: they’re annoyed just because the bike is there. So, here’s my proposed solution for both Berlin and New Zealand: before anyone gets their driver licence, they shall be forced to appreciate both the joys and terrors of riding a bike in the city – but not, of course, with the dreaded Easter knee.

In an accident between a cycle and a vehicle, the driver is presumed to have been at fault.