>it's lack of protected bike lanes (or other "safe" routes), and lack of cultural acceptance of biking.
In my opinion, it's because most people live too far away from the places they need to go in order to bike there. I wouldn't want to ride a bike 20 miles a day, regardless of bike lanes or bike parking.
It also doesn't help that most cities and towns in North America aren't designed with high standards of bike safety. I live in one of the biggest cities on the continent and our council has taken DECADES to implement bike lanes downtown despite the rise in population and car usage.
It's because there are dangerous drug addicts roaming the streets. That is the answer. It's not SUVs, or sidewalks, or because there aren't enough bike lanes, or whatever.
It's the violent, dangerous drug addicts who have occupied every single park within walking distance to my house, who steal things from my house, and who scream things while they wander in front of my house every day.
THAT is why my kids don't get to have the same childhood that my friends and I had. There were even fewer bike lanes back then and we spent a lot more time on our bikes, and a lot more time playing outside with each other.
> Most suburban neighborhoods have low traffic and plenty of places to ride your bike
Until you actually try to go anywhere and find that you cant't without riding through an arterial road with heavy dangerous traffic. The quiet suburban roads don't form a network that allows you to go to actual destinations.
Here in Toronto they are trying to address that by building (a few) cycle tracks running parallel to these horrible arterial roads, but it's still an awful experience. There are a few quiet greenways without any motor traffic, but they don't help you reach any destination.
Neighborhoods that were built before the advent of the car are more amenable to cycling.
My problem is the lack of infrastructure. We have a few streets in the entire city with decent bike lanes. Mostly you're on the road with cars going 90km/hr right beside you with no barrier or even road markings. I'm not going to do that in anything but perfect weather and even then not very often.
I live 2 miles away and it is still not feasible for me to cycle due to no cycle friendliness. Neither are there dedicated bike lanes nor are the motorists conditioned to drive being mindful of bikes.
Sounds like a problem with cars, but also lack of facilities for cyclists. Places that care about cycling infrastructure often do things like provide cycle tracks that don't share space with cars.
Planners often cite the lack of cyclists as an excuse not to create bicycle infrastructure, and fail the acknowledge the reason is due to the danger, rather than the desire to bike.
Part of the reason maybe that many of these cycle lanes are not fit for purpose. There are places in the UK where cycling became popular for the simple reason that the layout was already bike friendly.
This craze of adding a bike lane, regardless of local conditions has, indeed, been a total failure.
> It also doesn't look like a comfortable place for bikes. In fact, where are bikes even supposed to go on this street?
Another issue for cyclists is the permanent danger of getting your wheels in the rails, which means you are likely to either come to a sudden stop or, worse, come off your bike. There were experiments with "self-sealing" tram tracks that would lessen these risks, but no real solution exists quite yet, as far as I am aware.
It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem for me. I'd love to bike, but I don't because there isn't enough adoption of biking, and therefore widespread respect of bikers(as difficult as they can make that sometimes). Even in DC where I live it's like this, which says a lot considering DC is one of the more bike-friendly cities in the country.
Even if they do tolerate it, the biggest impediment to adoption of bikes in the US, is its vast suburbia. This itself makes it so unbearable. Cycling just isn't fun when you're not able to see other cyclists, humans, stores and actually socialize with your society.
Easily the biggest problem in the US with biking is that the infrastructure is, nearly without exception, absolutely atrocious.
Nobody would accept having only 'painted walk lanes' on busy streets to get around, much less having them appear and disappear from the road seemingly at random, and yet that's the default state of bike lanes in nearly all US cities.
If biking had as much infrastructure as even walking -- meaning, physically protected lanes on most streets -- Americans would bike in enormous numbers.
Biking is a weird thing. You're not a car but you're not a pedestrian. It's really not safe for you to be where pedestrians are (and sometimes it is illegal) but cars want you out of their way. Additionally as a biker if you try and be courteous to cars it is almost always at the expense of your personal safety.
> I would rather the government focuses on infrastructure to solve for these problems than the manufacturers. Everybody wins then.
I agree 100% and liked what another user said - we have to imagine the city we want to live in and build backwards.
Because your friends can easily be 10-30 miles away and only accessible via shared roadways with 55mph road traffic. There are no cross country bike routes here.
Building around roads results in everything being pushed farther away and that includes other people’s homes too.
In my opinion, it's because most people live too far away from the places they need to go in order to bike there. I wouldn't want to ride a bike 20 miles a day, regardless of bike lanes or bike parking.
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