I think there's also:
3. Traffic is at record low levels.
My city isn't at all bike friendly, but at the current traffic levels I'd feel safe enough to take a ride - the bikes themselves are just so absurdly marked up that I can't justify the expense, so I'm running instead.
>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.
People also don't notice all the single-occupant cars that make up the bulk of road congestion. Drivers should want more people to ride bikes, because each represents approximately one single-occupant car removed from the road.
Only part of my answer was about people coming in from afar. The other, about there being nowhere to store bikes, as well as questionable quality of the biking infrastructure is about the city itself.
Edit: I'm actually saying this as someone who enjoys and actually does bike. When living in the city proper, I think there are very few routes for which the bike isn't the quickest method of transportation. For my commute, which is pretty much a best-case scenario (modern metro with few to no issues, goes in a fairly straight line, don't have to change lines, stations close to both home and the office) the bike is much faster: 20 instead of 30 minutes.
I think the frustrating part is that if less people were driving there would be less traffic. Bike lanes won't change the equation as heavily but mass transit sure would.
Of course there are limited means to get around, over, and under, those very large sources and attractors of car traffic; in a notably limited space. So attempting coexistence between those and bicyclists is a challenge. That was my only (apparently) poorly expressed point.
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.
that's because you get to use bike infrastructure and play by bicycle rules but not ride a bicycle. As soon as a large enough group of people did the same everyone on a bike-style coveyance would be stuck in traffic with no place to park.
It is very likely because the connecting bike infrastructure is either not very good or completely lacking.
You can't make good bike infrastructure by simply painting a few bike lanes here and there that "hug the road for a few KMs". You need to look at a bigger picture and make bike-friendly connections between popular hotspots.
On top of this, there's apparently still a perception in the US that bikes are either for kids or purely for exercise, they're not really thought of as everyday transportation. Everyone with an interest in improving city traffic should come visit Amsterdam or Copenhagen. See how infrastructure with a primary focus on bicycles and public transit works, and which design decisions have helped shape city traffic.
An issue further compounding this is the insistence that bikes are completely the same as cars, and should follow the exact same rules. This leads to extremely dangerous lane changes and left turns, because cyclists are expected to use the car's left turn lanes. This danger can be easily mitigated by requiring cyclists to make hook turns[¤] instead. We do this in most European countries, and it's significantly safer for everyone involved.
I mean, no for two reasons. Traffic lights grouping people as you say, but also the bottle neck causing so people commuting on bikes to use this road wouldn't have existed if the other roads in the area were also designed to accommodate bikes.
On the flip side, this isn't a city where a large percentage of people commuted by bike. If you turned all the people commuting by car and public transits into cyclists it wouldn't surprise me to find out there were still areas with congestion.
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