| there's not a single city in the US that has a real bicycle network despite all the improvements even cities like NYC still doesn't have this imagine a city that's made up of a neighborhoods with high quality roads inside them but unconnected and separated by patches of sand dunes or dirt fields with between them would you look at that and conclude "nobody drives here, these people must hate cars, we shouldn't invest in roads then, roads and cars are a useless technology, hiking on foot or riding a camel or donkey is superior!" of course you wouldn't but that's exactly what it's like being on a bike in ALL cities in the US - islands of a few (mostly unsafe) bikeways here and there, but not a complete, safe network to connect them in a meaningful way, so it's little wonder they're not as used as they could be (although despite that, esp in nyc, bikeways ARE heavily used) if you wouldn't ride in them, they're not safe if you wouldn't let your kids or nephew johnny ride in them, they're not safe meanwhile in the Netherlands, Valencia, Seville, Barcelona, Paris and a bunch of other places in the world, they HAVE started to build meaningful, safe bikeway networks, and what do you know, then, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of people (including families and kids) end up using them daily taking cars off the road and freeing up space for ardent motorists who always complain about traffic it's a win win but most motorists are too blind to see it |