[twblalock]

The point is that bicycling is not realistic outside of very, very dense cities. Most places that reasonable people call "cities" would not qualify. Even in Europe and Japan, which have world-class public transit, only a handful of cities have useful subways or usable bicycle infrastructure. Everywhere else, people drive cars.

People who are advocating for bicycles as a primary form of transit are using a hyper-narrow definition of "urban," in which most cities would not be considered urban, and that is deceptive and wrong.

[conjecTech]

The word dense is in the second sentence of the wikipedia article on cities. It is inherent to discussion of urban transportation. You seem to be using the word city loosely, but it's a rather specific term.

Even though I agree the policies here apply to a small fraction of the world's area, it affects a sizable fraction of the population.

[herbstein]

> The point is that bicycling is not realistic outside of very, very dense cities

Bullshit. I grew up in a small village -- 300 people or so live there. It's a couple of kilometers from two other villages in the 2000-500 range. There's one school for the area shared between the villages. The daycare I went to was located in one of the other villages. I biked (alongside my parents) for 5 kilometers on non-separated roads to get to daycare at the age of 4. I biked first 2 kilometers to school every single day until 7th grade where I then had to bike 12 kilometers each way. It sounds tough if you don't bike. If you've done it your life whole it's just a mode of transport. Taking 30-40 minutes on the bike was faster than taking the bus too.