Most Americans would probably not feel safe biking for their commute. Our bike infrastructure is patchy and insufficient to provide sufficient separation and protection from massive speeding tons of steel.
I lived for over thirty years in the United States, but mostly stopped biking there. Now I bike everywhere.
I agree with everything you say but you're missing a key point - the active hostility that a significant number of drivers have for bikes.
I biked in Canada for ten years, and drivers there (at the time) were mostly indifferent to bikes.
(And yet I say this, and then I remember that one of Canada's rising bike stars at the time was permanently paralyzed by a driver who had repeated tried to force him off the road before (in his small community) and who had been reported to the police many times for it, and yet suffered no penalty other than a temporary license suspension. This was in the early 80s, and I haven't thought about it in 30 years, but I still feel a rush of rage.)
Now I live in the Netherlands, and cars are actively solicitous of bikes. Let me tell you that the center of Amsterdam has a lot of cobblestone streets with no separation between bikes and cars, not even a line on the street, but (nearly all) the cars treat cyclists as if they are delicate and breakable, which is actually the case.
I mean, that could trivially be changed by waving a magic "this section of the road is for bikes" wand. We feel unsafe on bikes because there are too many streets designed for cars and too few for bikes. Switch out 10% of streets effectively for bikes only and you'll suddenly see people biking.
It's literally happening in SF, Minneapolis, Portland, and NYC. Caring about the Overton window is a concern for people who don't actually want to change anything ever.
The amount of lane-miles dedicated to bikes in NYC is <1%. At the rate bike lanes are currently built in NYC it would take centuries to reach anywhere in the 10% neighborhood.
Cyclists keep getting promised the world around the country. I’ll believe it when I see it.
I didn't find the distinction in the Wikipedia article, but in the US "public transit" is commonly used to refer to local transit options and "trains" usually refer to intercity travel.
Right, while in the uk with much higher density of towns and train stations, people also use them for local travel to get into town or one town over. The extreme case is something like a million people use trains to commute into London every day, with another million or so on each of bus and Tube (subway).
The problem is that as a passenger/consumer, with a car, it's very easy to decide how much to pay for my own personal level of ride quality.
I can spend $2k on an old Camry, or I can spend $200k on a Bentley, but either way, I have almost total control (potholes notwithstanding).
It's really not possible to have that kind of personal control when you're looking at public transit.