Originally Posted by mnemia

Thanks for the correction. I should have double-checked.



Right, I agree that people would "discover" the bike again if there wasn't so much focus on cars. And I agree that inadequate bike infrastructure is part of that. However, it's not like we had protected bike lanes in this country back when we did have a real bike culture. The big difference was that there weren't cars speeding around everywhere at high speeds. So if we can change that, we wouldn't need a massively expensive and impractical separate road system for bikes. I think the way to do that is to make a clear distinction between highways and human-centered neighborhoods. It should be possible to get from point A to point B without getting funneled onto a high speed arterial where the fancy bike lanes are necessary. In the neighborhood zones, speed limits should be low and heavily enforced.

I agree that infrastructure is part of the problem and the solution, but not the whole problem or the whole solution. Culture has to change, development patterns have to change, attitudes have to change, and people need to look beyond their dashboards. There are many more differences between countries that have high bike use and low bike use than just infrastructure. One big one is that almost all of them tax gasoline much more heavily than we do, which drove many other changes in their societies. Until the US is ready to do that, I suspect the car centric attitudes will remain.